[rad-green] Trump, Troll-in-Chief, Wags the Impeachment Dog By Going to War With Iran

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/03/trump-troll-chief-wags-impeachment-dog-going-war-iran
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/03/trump-troll-chief-wags-impeachment-dog-going-war-iran>Informed
Comment          January 3, 2020*





*Trump, Troll-in-Chief, Wags the Impeachment Dog By Going to War With
IranIt is extremely suspicious that Trump has abruptly begun trafficking in
the sanguinary merchandise of all-out war just at this moment when his
throne is on the brink of toppling.by Juan Cole*

[image: By murdering Qasem Soleimani (2nd R), the head of the Jerusalem
(Qods) Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Trump has brought
the United States to the brink of war with Iran. (Photo by IRANIAN SUPREME
LEADER PRESS OFFICE / HANDOUT/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)]

*By murdering Qasem Soleimani (2nd R), the head of the Jerusalem (Qods)
Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Trump has brought the
United States to the brink of war with Iran. (Photo by IRANIAN SUPREME
LEADER PRESS OFFICE / HANDOUT/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)*

The madman in the White House has been sulking and raging for weeks about
his impeachment proceedings, tweeting manically on some days more than 100
times. With the release by  JustSecurity.org
<https://www.justsecurity.org/67863/exclusive-unredacted-ukraine-documents-reveal-extent-of-pentagons-legal-concerns/>of
unredacted emails on the Ukraine scandal showing that Trump personally (and
illegally) withheld congressionally mandated military aid to an ally, the
Republican defense of the president is collapsing. Some GOP senators such
as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski seem to be weakening on calling
witnesses and subpoenaing records for the Senate trial, and the Democrats
only need four Republican senators to ensure a proper proceeding, which
would certainly put Trump’s presidency in peril.

It is extremely suspicious that Trump has abruptly begun trafficking in the
sanguinary merchandise of all-out war just at this moment when his throne
is on the brink of toppling.

My title is a reference to the 1997 Barry Levinson film, “Wag the Dog,”
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/> starring Anne Heche, Dustin
Hoffman, and Robert De Niro. Its story line at IMDB is, “After being caught
in a scandalous situation days before the election, the president does not
seem to have much of a chance of being re-elected. One of his advisers
contacts a top Hollywood producer in order to manufacture a war in Albania
that the president can heroically end, all through mass media.” Only, Iran
is not Albania.

Trump has from the beginning of his presidential campaign appealed to the
worst and most fascistic elements in American political life. At a time
when the US has no credible peer military rival, he added hundreds of
billions of dollars to the Pentagon budget, and the pudgy old chicken hawk
lionized war criminals. Up until now, however, Trump shrewdly calculated
that his base was tired of wasting blood and treasure on fruitless Middle
Eastern wars, and he avoided taking more than symbolic steps. He dropped a
big missile on Afghanistan once, and fired some Tomahawk Cruise missiles at
Syria. But he drew back from the brink of more extensive military
engagements.

Now, by murdering Qasem Soleimani
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-commander>, the
head of the Jerusalem (Qods) Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
Corps, Trump has brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran.
Mind you, Iran’s leadership is too shrewd to rush to the battlements at
this moment, and will be prepared to play the long game. My guess is that
they will encourage their allies among Iraqi Shiites to get up a massive
protest at the US embassy and at bases housing US troops.

They will be aided in this task of mobilizing Iraqis by the simultaneous US
assassination of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis
<https://diyaruna.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_di/features/2019/05/20/feature-01>,
the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces. Al-Muhandis is a senior
military figure in the Iraqi armed forces, not just a civilian militia
figure. Moreover, the Kata’ib Hizbullah that he headed is part of a
*strong* political
bloc, al-Fath, which has 48 members in parliament and forms a key coalition
partner for the current, caretaker prime minister, Adil Abdulmahdi.
Parliament won’t easily be able to let this outrage pass.

The US officer corps is confident that the American troops at the embassy
and elsewhere in Baghdad are sufficient to fight off any militia invasion.
I’m not sure they have taken into account the possibility of tens of
thousands of *civilian* protesters invading the embassy, who can’t simply
be taken out and shot.

Trump may be counting on the unpopularity among the youth protesters in
downtown Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriya and other cities of Soleimani and of
al-Muhandis to blunt the Iraqi reaction to the murders. The thousands of
youth protesters cheered on hearing the news of their deaths, since they
were accused of plotting a violent repression of the rallies demanding an
end to corruption.

Iraq, however, is a big, complex society, and there are enormous numbers of
Iraqi Shiites who support the Popular Mobilization Forces and who view them
as the forces that saved Iraq from the peril of the ISIL (ISIS) terrorist
organization. The Shiite hard liners would not need all Iraqis to back them
in confronting the American presence, only a few hundred thousand for
direct crowd action.

You also have to wonder whether Trump and his coterie aren’t planning a
coup in Iraq. In the absence of a coup, the Iraqi parliament will almost
certainly be forced, after this violation of Iraqi national sovereignty, to
vote to expel American troops. This is foreseeable. So either the
assassination was a drive-by on the way out, or Trump’s war cabinet doesn’t
plan on having to leave Iraq.

Although Trump justified the murder of Soleimani by calling him a
terrorist, that is nonsense in the terms of international law. The Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps is the equivalent of the Iranian National Guard.
What Trump did is the equivalent of some foreign country declaring the US
military a terrorist organization (some have) and then assassinating
General Joseph L. Lengyel, the 28th Chief of the National Guard Bureau (God
forbid and may he have a long healthy life).

UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Executions Agnes Callamard tweeted,

 https://twitter.com/AgnesCallamard/status/1212939646549856267

What American corporate media won’t report is that Trump has put Iran under
an almost complete economic blockade after breaching the 2015 nuclear
accord that the US had signed. That accord removed economic sanctions on
Iran in return for it mothballing 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment
program. That agreement could have formed the basis for reintegrating Iran
into the world system and greatly reduced the tensions in the region for a
generation.

Although Iran was certified by UN inspectors as abiding by the accord as
long as it was in effect, Trump abruptly trashed the agreement. He then not
only put the severest economic sanctions on Iran that have ever been
applied to any country in peacetime, he went around the world twisting the
arms of South Korea, Japan, India, and even China, pressuring them not to
buy Iranian oil. There is no UN Security Council resolution imposing
economic sanctions on Iran, so this is a rogue unilateral blockade imposed
by Trump alone. It has strangled the Iranian economy, and people can’t
afford key medicines for loved ones. A naval blockade is considered an act
of war in international law, and Trump’s trade embargo is analogous in
every way to such a blockade.

I predicted when Trump started doing these things that it would lead to
conflict between Iran and the United States in ways that Trump himself
could not foresee (people like Trump with narcissism personality disorder
cannot empathize with the pain of other people, so Iran is invisible to
him). The economic strangulation of Iran was bound to lead to pushback, as
with encouraging Iraqi Shiite militias to target Americans, and to an
escalation between the two countries.

If the Middle East now spins out of control, it is on Trump and his
desperation to undo every good thing Barack Obama ever accomplished.

Juan Cole <http://www.commondreams.org/author/juan-cole> teaches Middle
Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book,
 *The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1451690398/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>*(Simon
and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author
of *Engaging the Muslim World
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230102751?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>*
and *Napoleon's
Egypt: Invading the Middle East
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1403964319?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>* (both
Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on
op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular
column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has
authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle
East is Informed
Comment <http://www.juancole.com/>.

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