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The Grammar of the Soleimani Assassination

by | Jan 14, 2020 | ,

By now we've heard enough official explanations of Trump's assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and others to realize they are all nonsense. (And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now admits it.) Trump killed Soleimani because, egged on by his unsavory friends Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has it in for Iran. So when the opportunity to pull off the murder-by-drone came along, he took it. It's not as though he thought he needed a special justification. It's good to be the king -- er, president. Most official explanations have...

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TGIF: Trump’s Escalation Imperils Innocents

TGIF: Trump’s Escalation Imperils Innocents

by | Jan 10, 2020 | , ,

While an eerie, surreal calm has fallen over US-Iranian relations, I wouldn’t assume we’re out of the woods yet. Trump had no reason to be confident that Iran’s response to his most recent escalation of violence would be little more than symbolic. Although he’s accepted that response more or less passively for now, with Trump, things can turn on a dime. Who can tell what determines his mood at any given time? Contemplating Trump’s January 3 escalation of the previously relatively low-level conflict with Iran, one might be struck by how casually the US government (and others of course) treat...

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About that Air Base in Iraq

by | Jan 7, 2020 | ,

After the Iraqi parliament (sans Sunni and Kurdish members) voted to oust US troops from Iraq, Trump said, "We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before, ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame. We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” Trump threatens economic warfare as casually as other people announce their intention to go shopping. We couldn't count the number of times he's done so. At any rate, it seems like a strange way to treat a presumed...

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Will Iran Choose 1,953 Sites?

by | Jan 7, 2020 | ,

Trump tweets that he has selected 52 sites in Iran, including cultural sites, for bombing if the Iranian regime retaliates for Trump's assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. Why 52? That "represent[s] the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago," Trump noted. I wonder if that will prompt Iran to select 1,953 American targets for its own retaliation. After all, 1953 was the year that the CIA carried out a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically elected prime minister and reinstalling the brutal monarch (shah) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his feared Israeli-trained...

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Was Soleimani Lured into a Trap?

by | Jan 6, 2020 |

Donald Trump says he had to have Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani assassinated on friendly Iraqi soil because of an "imminent" threat to Americans. (Suddenly he believes the intel agencies?) But that seems unlikely since an imminent threat would not have been prevented merely by killing Soleimani. But now we learn that, according to acting Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, Soleimani was had gone to Baghdad to deliver a response to a de-escalation proposal initiated by Iran-rival Saudi Arabia. The Daily Mail reports: Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, told his...

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TGIF: But Mr. Trump, Is Israel Lovable?

TGIF: But Mr. Trump, Is Israel Lovable?

by | Dec 13, 2019 | ,

Speaking before Sheldon Adelson's Israeli-American Council the other day, Trump took a shot at Jewish Americans who he says don't "love Israel enough." "We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more," Trump said. "We have to get them to love Israel more because you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people – they don’t love Israel enough. You know that." Typical of Trump, this is scatter-brained. He begins by talking about "the people of our country," which sounds like everyone, but ends up focusing on Jews who "don't love Israel enough." In...

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Jewishness Is Not a Nationality

by | Dec 11, 2019 | , ,

On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order that implicity defines Jewishness as a racial or national catetory and not as just a religious category. The order further reinforces the Department of Education's power to sanction colleges that receive federal tax dollars if they permit Palestinian solidarity activities. The Obama administration took a similar approach, which raises the question why Trump signed the order at all. The New York Times first reported the story, but it was quickly criticized for misstating the nature of the order. However, the Times was correct in reporting...

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