"We're Going To War, Bro": Elite 82nd Airborne In Largest 'Fast Deployment' In A Decade
Please keep the 82nd Airborne in your prayers as they are deployed to the Middle East. https://t.co/QddZ9Msppe
— Lt. Gov. Dan Forest (@LtGovDanForest) January 1, 2020
Comments
Once again I place some comments (unedited) from the Hedge. These are really good and could be articles in their own right.
First Comment:
Blowback From The Soleimani Assassination Increases As Iraq Reveals How Trump Tried To Steal Its Oil
The blowback from Trump's assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani and PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis is increasing. A scandal is developing as one consequence of Trump's evil deed after Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi revealed the gangster methods U.S. President Trump used in his attempts to steal Iraq's oil. Below we follow today's development.
The mourning for the assassinated Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani unfortunately caused even more suffering:
A stampede broke out Tuesday at a funeral for a top Iranian general killed in a U.S. airstrike, and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession, Iranian news reports said.
The stampede took place in Kerman, the hometown of Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as the procession began, said the semi-official Fars and ISNA news agencies, citing Pirhossein Koulivand, head of Iran’s emergency medical services.
Helicopter video had earlier shown that the street of Kerman were densely crowded with mourners. The actual funeral has now been postponed.
A U.S. paid anti-Iranian propagandist has turned out to claim that Qassem Soleimani was not really popular in Iran. It is easy to debunk such nonsense by pointing to the University of Maryland which does regular polls in Iran. In October 2019 it found:
General Soleimani remains the most popular Iranian public figure among those tested, with eight in ten viewing him favorably. Second is Foreign Minister Zarif, viewed favorably by two thirds. ...
Also this from Professor Abukhalil:
This is the most stunning aspect of the rise of Iranian nationalism due to Trump’s decision to kill Suleimani. This would have been most unimaginable for many decades. The law of unintended consequences. https://t.co/nuxrZ1WzMi
— asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) January 6, 2020
In addition to his well known military/strategic prowess & achievements, it was also scenes such as this from 2017 - when Soleimani consoled the daughter of a slain comrade at his funeral - that made him so widely respected and revered in Iran. pic.twitter.com/Pnkk8iHiUB
— Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) January 5, 2020
This video from 2017 shows Soleimani consoling the daughter of a slain comrade at his funeral. Such scenes explain why Soleimani was so beloved.
The U.S. has denied Iran's Foreign Minister Jahvad Zarif a visa for a long planned visit to the UN in New York. Zarif responded by saying that he can talk to the U.S. people from Tehran. Today he proved that by giving a CNN interview:
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called US President Donald Trump's decision to order the drone strike that killed the country's top military commander an act of "state terrorism" in an interview with CNN Tuesday.
...
"This is an act of aggression against Iran and amounts to an armed attack against Iran, and we will respond. But we will respond proportionally not disproportionally," he said. "We will respond lawfully, we are not lawless people like President Trump."
...
The interview came as Iran's parliament voted unanimously for a motion declaring all US forces as "terrorists" on Tuesday, according to Iran's state-news agency IRNA. The vote took place during the country's parliamentary session Tuesday, IRNA reported. After the plan was approved, delegates chanted, "Death to America."
More death will come:
According to a report on Tuesday by the semi-official Tasnim news agency, Iran has worked up 13 sets of plans for revenge for Soleimani’s killing. The report quoted Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as saying that even the weakest among them would be a “historic nightmare” for the U.S. He declined to elaborate,
“If the U.S. troops do not leave our region voluntarily and upright, we will do something to carry their bodies horizontally out,” Shamkhani said.
The Quds force, the external action arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, received an additional budget of 200 million Euros. It will put that money to good use.
There are some 60 to 70.000 U.S. soldiers designated foreign terrorists on some 19 bases near Iran and on ships in nearby waters. That are a quite a number of fish in just a few barrels.
Their commander in chief should ask himself if it is wise to keep them there.
The leader of a number of Iraqi Popular Militia Forces will meet in the next 48 hours to plan for the eviction of U.S. forces from Iraq should they not leave voluntarily. For security reasons the meeting was moved from Baghdad to Tehran.
North-Yemen held a quite large public mourning for Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. A Houthi minister held a speech during which he said:
"Soleimani's blood .. will turn into intercontinental missiles .. to destroy US warships and end US regional presence"
U.S. war ships will certainly have to avoid Yemen's coast.
The removal of U.S. troops from the region was also the theme of Sunday's speech by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon. It seems clear that the Resistance Axis will work on the project in a coordinated manner.
Trump said he would ask Iraq to pay for the bases the U.S. has built should the U.S. troops be kicked out of Iraq. The U.S. already has binding legal agreements with Iraq which stipulate that the bases, and all fixed installations the U.S. has built there, are the property of Iraq.
Trump had already asked Iraqi Prime Ministers -twice- if the U.S. could get Iraq's oil as reward for invading and destroying their country. The requests were rejected. Now we learn that Trump also uses gangster methods (ar) to get the oil of Iraq. The talk by the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi happened during the recent parliament session in Iraq (machine translation):
Al-Halbousi, Speaker of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, blocked the speech of Mr. Abdul Mahdi in the scheduled session to discuss the decision to remove American forces from Iraq.
At the beginning of the session, Al-Halbousi left the presidential seat and sat next to Mr. Abdul-Mahdi, after his request to cut off the live broadcast of the session, a public conversation took place between the two parties. The voice of Adel Abdul Mahdi was raised.
Mr. Abdul Mahdi spoke with an angry tone, saying:
"The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They are those who refuse to complete building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for giving up 50% of Iraqi oil imports, so I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an important and strategic agreement with it, and today Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement."
The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators and the security men:
Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed, the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."
The reliable Based Cat in Iraq seems to confirm the timeline:
Yes a 50-person delegation visited China in 2019 and then the protests started on October 1st until the Arbaeen dates, then picked up again on Oct 25th. I'm skeptical about the 3rd party but the timing itself was interesting. The flames were fanned by Gulf media and Al-Hurra. https://t.co/1dSiuH8ez5
— TØM CΛT (@TomtheBasedCat) January 7, 2020
Al-Hurra is a U.S. government financed Arab language TV outlet.
Southfront has a similar report, seemingly from a different source, with some additional context.
While this talk has not yet been confirmed it does sounds highly plausible.
The chicken-hawks of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who have all lobbied the U.S. for war on Iran, now fear the consequences:
Gulf Arab states, potential targets for retaliation after the U.S. assassinated Iran’s top general, are working on multiple tracks to try to keep tensions between Tehran and Washington from building into a military confrontation.
Earlier today Russia's President Vladimir Putin arrived in Damascus for talks with the Syria's President Assad. Could there also be a meeting between Putin and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah? Putin will next go to Turkey to inaugurate the gas pipeline between Russia and Turkey.
Second Comment:
Tell Me Who Your Friends Are...
And if Mike Pompeo, allegedly a top US "diplomat", is in your administration--that pretty much sums up who you are. Make no mistake, currently, the United States has zero diplomats of scale and skill required to handle a clusterfuck which US foreign policy is, but Mike Pompeo is something special--a devout Ruprutist, an Israeli-firster and, in general, is an Exhibit A of a collection of different delusions and disorders preventing such ilk from having any relation with the reality. He is also a BSer of a note when trying to state that:
Evidently this is not quite "true". I, of course, am not talking about the "the buck stops with me" guy in the White House who simultaneously declared war on Iran (and now on Iraq); in the end he is ultimately responsible for being unfit to run this country (but who is?) and making disastrous decisions. If to believe WaPo (I know, I know) it was US Secretary of the State who for months was pushing for assassination of Soleimani (the article at WaPo is behind the paywall), including feverish, several times a day, sessions with DJT precisely on this issue. Well, he, certainly, succeeded. Now he, together with Trump, are both personally responsible for what follows because Iran will respond. Some moves are already in progress, with Chief of the Iranian General Staff already having consultations with Shoigu (in Russian). Obviously, officially those consultations are defined as aimed "to not allow further escalation", which in military lingo means a review of options. Meanwhile, Pompeo makes rounds trying to convince everyone that assassination of a very senior government official of the sovereign nation was "necessary". As I say, yet again, he lied, some Americans already died.
Evidently Pentagon knew what kind of **** Trump was getting United States into and what that meant for US bases in the Middle East. Larry C Johnson was straight to the point:
Too bad (for Pentagon) that Trump went for the most insane option. But, I guess, against the background of a precipitous intellectual decline of US political elites and dual loyalties (primarily to Israel and Saudi money) being a normal fact of US body politic expecting sound geopolitical decisions based on expertise is not a possibility anymore. And so, here we are. I may gather enough will and strength to review some military options but, frankly, it is a fool's errand since pretty much everyone is going to be writing about it. One such piece, well intended, but wrongly justified has already been written by former Marine helicopter pilot in which this was stated:
An admiral in the UK states that an invasion of Iran would require millions of American troops, akin to the occupation of Germany after World War II. But he’s off the mark: things have come a long way since 1945. In World War II, when we wanted to cripple a German ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt, we had to send 291 B-17 bombers, 77 of which never came home. This scale was due to the inaccuracy of the dumb bombs being used. Today, we have GPS and laser-guided bombs that can reliably land within a few meters of their targets. The accuracy of every weapon system, from tanks to planes to artillery, has jumped by many orders of magnitude, thus requiring fewer personnel and delivery systems to achieve the same destructive results. Iraq was defeated with about 225,000 coalition troops in 2003. Millions of soldiers would not be required to invade Iran.
You know by now my attitude to all those historical parallels, especially when drawn inaccurately. The author, obviously, forgot that Iran, unlike Iraq in 2003, does have modern EW systems, including ones capable of jamming GPS signal and Iran's army herself has enough of those very same laser-guided munitions which, considering Iran's nightmarish terrain, will make any armor warfare a living hell for any invader. Same goes for infantry. So, I wouldn't dismiss assessments by Royal Navy's Admiral when he states that the United States will need a number of troops around million or so if the United States wants to "occupy" Iran. And here is a conundrum for the US--once the real escalation starts, the US will NEED to win the war for which it doesn't have resources. Both Trump and Pompeo bear direct responsibility for putting the United States into this strategic trap which, as Phil Giraldi termed it is:
The Soleimani Assassination. The Long-Awaited Beginning of The End of America’s Imperial Ambitions
Difficult to disagree. In the end, Trump chose his cabinet and as the saying goes, tell me who your friends are....
Conclusion
Oh Dear.....better shut down the internet. You see it works both ways. It can spread lies but it can also spread the truth. This is the age of the citizen-journalist. So all your presstitutes and paid shills are done for. You can lock Assange up but are you going to lock us all up? (probably). We do not need a degree in journalism or history to discover the truth. People are waking up to your warmongering. You might be able to fool all the people some of the time but not all the people all of the time. Your time has come:
Well George.....you deserve this for your bad delivery (not because you killed thousands, ruined countries and let them get away with 9/11).
When kids are fighting in the playground and are separated by the teacher they always try to establish who started it. I was walking along minding my own business when he punched me in the face and took my lunch money. The teacher knows this is true because the kid has a bloody nose, is sobbing and has no lunch money. The other kid is looking at the ground and has his hands (and the lunch money) in his pocket. Our natural sense of justice demands that we discover "who started it".
This Wasn’t How Trump’s War on Iran Was Supposed to Go: The U.S. thought it was cleverly choking the regime, but now it's clear that 'maximum pressure' goes both ways.................. 
Only the Coalition of the Foolish Wants a War With Iran.If you want to identify the most reckless powers in our world today, look no further than Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America. 
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix by Caitlin Johnstone