In the Middle East, and wherever there are protracted conflicts, nations have a way to address this problem. They use violence as a form of communication. A nation trying to maintain order will assassinate a terrorism leader or destroy a terrorism facility. The attack says: “Hey, we know we’re in a long-term conflict, but let’s not let it get out of hand. That’s not in either of our interests.
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Opinion | Trump Has Made Us All Stupid - The New York Times - 0 views
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These sorts of operations have risks and rewards. A risk is that it won’t cease the escalation, just accelerate it. The radicals on the other side will get enraged and take to the streets. Their leaders will have to appease that rage.
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A reward is that maybe you do halt the escalation. The other side implicitly says: “Message received. We’ll do some face-saving things to appease the streets, but we don’t want this to get out of hand, either.” Another reward is that you’ve managed to eliminate an effective terrorist like Soleimani. Talent doesn’t grow on trees.
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Most of this week’s argument about the Middle East wasn’t really about the Middle East. It was all narcissistically about ourselves! Democrats defend terrorists! Republicans are warmongers
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Actual Iranians are just bit players in our imperialistic soap opera, the passive recipients of our greatness or perfidy.
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For all the Sturm und Drang that surrounds Trump, populist Republicans and Democrats are gravitating toward the same foreign policy: We’re in the middle of a clash of civilizations; the Middle East is so screwed up, we should just get out; we’re too stupid/ineffective/racist/imperialistic to do any good there anyway.
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underneath, a populist left-right curtain is descending around America, separating us from the Mideast, China, even Europe. The real high-risk move is the one both parties are making together: that if we ignore the world it will ignore us. (It won’t.)
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Iran nuclear deal: Dead or just dying? - BBC News - 0 views
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In invoking the dispute mechanism for the Iran nuclear agreement or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - in other words, in deciding to hold Tehran to account for its breaches of the deal - the UK, France and Germany insist that they are still firmly behind the deal.
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In invoking the dispute mechanism for the Iran nuclear agreement or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - in other words, in deciding to hold Tehran to account for its breaches of the deal - the UK, France and Germany insist that they are still firmly behind the deal.
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One major party - the US - has already abandoned it. President Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed crippling economic sanctions against Tehran. Then after a year or so's delay, Tehran took a series of steps to breach the deal's constraints, the most recent earlier this month.
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President Trump says he wants a more restrictive agreement with Tehran, but one of his recent tweets suggests that actually he is not much interested in negotiating with the Iranians at all.
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The whole context within which this nuclear dispute is unfolding has changed dramatically since US drones killed Iranian Quds Force commander Gen Qasem Soleimani, and the Iranians' modest retaliation, and then the tragic downing of a passenger airliner by Iran's air defences that followed.
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This is a dangerous moment. The Europeans are under huge pressure from the US to abandon the agreement, which they are doing their best to resist. But their efforts to find ways of relieving the economic pressure on Tehran have largely failed, and now Iran's own behaviour is making the fate of the agreement ever more precarious.
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Trump Orders Strike Killing Top Iranian General Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad - The New Y... - 0 views
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President Trump ordered the killing of the powerful commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in a drone strike on the Baghdad International Airport early Friday, American officials said.
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“This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the statement added. “The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”
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The United States said that Kataib Hezbollah fired 31 rockets into a base in Kirkuk Province, last week, killing an American contractor and wounding several American and Iraqi servicemen.
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The killing of General Suleimani was a major blow for Iran and a major escalation of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which began with economic sanctions but has steadily moved into the military arena.
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The Americans responded by bombing three sites of the Khataib Hezbollah militia near Qaim in western Iraq and two sites in Syria. Khataib Hezbollah denied involvement in the attack in Kirkuk.
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Pro-Iranian militia members then marched on the American Embassy on Tuesday, effectively imprisoning its diplomats inside for more than 24 hours while thousands of militia members thronged outside. They burned the embassy’s reception area, planted militia flags on its roof and scrawled graffiti on its walls.
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President Trump said on Tuesday that Iran would “be held fully responsible” for the attack on the embassy, in which protesters set fire to a reception building on the embassy compound, which covers more than 100 acres. He also blamed Tehran for directing the unrest.
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General Suleimani led the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. He once described himself to a senior Iraqi intelligence official as the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” the official later told American officials in Baghdad.In his speech denouncing Mr. Trump, he was even less discreet — and openly mocking.“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”
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Does Trump Have a Strategy for Confronting Iran? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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There is no such thing as a Platonic ideal of strategy. There is, rather, only strategy as can be executed by a particular group of people at any time.
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Any war—and if you are in the business of blowing people up, you are at war—involves improvisation and reaction. As Winston Churchill somberly observed, “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”
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above them all is a mercurial, impulsive, and ignorant president who has no desire to be pulled into a Middle Eastern war in an election year, and who wants to look tough without being prepared to follow through. This is a recipe for strategic ineptitude, and possibly failure
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As the United States has learned to its cost, good decision making requires a forceful brake, or at least a counterpoise, to a tempting decision like the one to eliminate Soleimani
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There seems to have been no one playing that role, and thereby ensuring that second- and third-order considerations had been identified and explored.
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The novelist James Gould Cozzens observed higher headquarters at close range during World War II. He drew on that for his masterly World War II novel, Guard of Honor.
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In one passage, his protagonist admits to himself that some of his seniors “were not complete fools.” However, he noted, it was the habit of all of them to look straight, and not very far, ahead. They saw their immediate duties and did those, not vaguely or stupidly, but in an experienced firm way. Then they waited until whatever was going to happen, happened. Then they sized this up, noted whatever new duties there were, and did those. Their position was that of a chess player who had in his head no moves beyond the one it was now his turn to make. He would be dumbfounded when, after he had made four or five such moves (each sensible enough in itself) sudden catastrophe, from an unexpected direction by an unexpected means, fell on him, and he was mated.
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Trump shows that impeachment will not moderate him - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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President Donald Trump is not waiting to be acquitted of impeachable crimes to show that no one can stop him doing what he wants to do.
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On a day that was an apt leitmotif for his administration, Trump was formally accused of abusing power and obstructing Congress when Democrats finally transmitted articles of impeachment to the Senate. Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, publicly implicated the President in the Ukraine scandal and, disputing previous administration claims that the effort was to root out corruption, told CNN's Anderson Cooper the aim was "all about 2020."Trump, however, is simply pressing on with the kind of unfettered conduct and violation of governing conventions that that got him in trouble in the first place, showing that for him, impeachment might be a stain, but it won't be a lesson.
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Trump's defiance of attempts to examine and restrain his conduct and concept of almost endless presidential authority encompasses the power duels in Washington and his bombastic actions abroad.
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Trump's approach to the Iran crisis reveals similar characteristics to the alleged pressure campaign in Ukraine that caused his impeachment.In both cases he wielded power largely unilaterally, unrestrained by experienced foreign policy officials who were purged from his circle for trying to control his wilder impulses. In the case of Ukraine, Trump appears to have used presidential authority for personal political ends. Many opponents believe that his motivation in eliminating Soleimani was also motivated by politics -- a recurring theme throughout his foreign policy.
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The way that Trump leads in times of crisis is not just the symptom of an unruly personality. It may also illustrate a shrewd political judgment.The one thing no one can say about Trump is that he went native in Washington. He has been true to the disruptive, glass-shattering persona that wrecked the most promising field of conservative Republican White House hopefuls in a generation and built an impregnable political base.
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Impeachment only happened because voters who apparently favored more presidential restraint handed Democrats the House in midterm elections. They will get their chance to weigh in again on Trump's unconstrained vision of politics again in less than 10 months.
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The crisis between the US and Iran is far from over - CNN - 0 views
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This new decade's consequential first weeks began with the United States openly targeting and killing a foreign military leader for the first time since World War II. They ended with the tragic, unintended cost of conflict -- Iran admitting it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing all 176 people on board.
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Ukraine is demanding a full investigation and compensation for the victims -- mostly Iranian, Canadian and Ukrainian -- who died when the airliner was shot out of the sky, hours after Iran launched a number of missiles at two bases housing US troops in Iraq.
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In the meantime, the latest USA Today poll since these hostilities started, say Americans do not feel safer since Iran's top general was killed.The poll found that 55% of Americans say the killing of Soleimani makes the US less safe, while 57% oppose the threat of US airstrikes on Iran's cultural sites and 53% support Congress limiting Trump's ability to order military strikes. Elsewhere, anti-Americanism has soared around the world since Trump took office, according to new Pew research published Wednesday.
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President Donald Trump has announced a new raft of sanctions against Iran. He said in his address Wednesday that, "the US will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions ... these powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behavior. In recent months alone, Iran has seized ships in international waters, fired an unprovoked strike on Saudi Arabia and shot down two American drones."
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What message does that send to America's Gulf allies, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia who depend on the US's military umbrella? As a precaution, they are dialing down their hostility and dialing up their diplomatic overtures to Iran.
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While America's allies -- and even its adversaries -- caution against starting another war in the Middle East, it is difficult to see where the opening for discussion, negotiation and a diplomatic solution is right now.
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Whatever the administration's goal, the millions pouring onto the streets of Iran for four straight days of national mourning this week in the wake of Soleimani's killing, have demonstrated what Iranian Vice President for Women and Family Affairs Massoumeh Ebtekar told me: "This is a very clear indication of the response of the Iranian nation and the fact that the presence of the people, the huge crowds are staggering."And even for us -- we've been taking part in many of these marches and demonstrations from the beginning of the revolution -- this is something else. From one city to another city, it is a resurrection," she said."It's a revival of the Islamic Revolution," she added. "It's a revival of the Iranian nation."
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Trump claims Suleimani was 'saying bad things' about US before deadly strike | US news ... - 0 views
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Addressing Republican donors at his Florida resort on Friday night, Donald Trump said Qassem Suleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the US president authorised the drone strike which killed the Iranian general and pitched the Middle East to the brink of war.
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The speech was not open to reporters but CNN obtained a recording of Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago, which it said undermined official explanations for the decision to kill Suleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January.
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Congress was not informed of the strike in advance, its eventual notification was heavily classified and a congressional briefing prompted bipartisan protest. Democrats have proposed legislation to rein the president in.
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Iran has also admitted shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet in error, killing 176 people. Amid anti-regime protests in Tehran, the threat of a US-Iran war has receded.
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“They’re together sir,” Trump said he was told. “Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds. No emotion. ‘Two minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armoured vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. Thirty seconds. Ten, nine, eight ...’
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According to CNN, Trump told his audience in Florida the death of al-Muhandis meant the US took out “two for the price of one”. He also repeated an erroneous claim that the Iraqi was “the head of Hezbollah”. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militant group based in Lebanon.
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CNN said the audio of Friday’s speech also included a complaint that Conan, a Belgian Malinois dog wounded in the Baghdadi raid, “became very famous” and “got more credit than I did”.
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Iran's Supreme Leader leads Friday prayers for first time in 8 years - CNN - 0 views
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Iran's military then shot down a Ukrainian commercial flight in Tehran, killing all 176 people onboard, including 82 Iranians, prompting days of protests and finger-pointing between rival factions of the government.
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In a defiant sermon Friday, Khamenei described the "martyrdom" of Soleimani and Tehran's retaliation against the US as "acts of God, not man," and boasted that Iran had delivered a slap in the face to the United States.
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Khamenei also railed against US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have said on social media that they stand with Iranian protesters.He said "American clowns" lie to the public when they say the US is with the people of Iran. "If you stand in close proximity to Iran, it is with the intention of driving a knife into the chest of the people," he said.
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Huge crowds were present to witness the rare sermon, with President Hassan Rouhani in the front row alongside parliament speaker Ali Larijani. The last time Khamenei presided over Friday prayers was in 2012 to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
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They come at a pivotal time for Iran, after vigils to mourn those who died in the Ukraine International Airlines crash quickly turned into mass anti-government demonstrations, with calls for Khamenei to step down and for those responsible for downing the plane to be prosecuted.
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Iran's military initially denied shooting down the plane before admitting to it several days later, saying the plane was "accidentally hit by human error." Khamenei expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, but said foreign press had tried to deceive Iranians over the crash.
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Iraq calls U.S. blacklisting of militia leader 'unacceptable' | Reuters - 0 views
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Iraq denounced on Saturday as “unacceptable” a U.S. decision to blacklist the leader of a state umbrella group for mainly Iran-backed Shi’ite militia.Washington imposed sanctions on Friday on Faleh al-Fayyad, head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF).
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leading militia that killed hundreds of protesters with live ammunition during a crackdown on anti-government demonstrations in 2019
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Iraq is a close military ally of both the United States and Iran, which have battled for influence there since a U.S.-led invasion in 2003 toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
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The United States killed Fayyad’s predecessor as PMF leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a year ago in a drone strike at Baghdad airport, along with Qassem Soleimani, the top Iranian general leading operations among Tehran’s allies in the region.
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he had joined “the honourable ones whom the U.S. administration regards as enemies”. He was also praised by the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.
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US officials quiet on Iranian assassination amid fears of dangerous escalation - CNNPol... - 0 views
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US officials told CNN they are closely monitoring fallout from the alleged assassination Friday of one of Iran's top nuclear scientists, which Iran blamed on Israel, but they are hesitant about speaking publicly about the issue to avoid further inflaming an already tense situation.
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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, viewed as one of the masterminds of Iran's controversial nuclear program, was assassinated by gunfire and explosives while riding in a vehicle east of Tehran.
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The attack comes weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the top nuclear watchdog, said that Iran now has 12 times the amount of enriched uranium that is permitted under the 2015 nuclear accord.
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President-elect Joe Biden has said he will renew efforts to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program when he takes office and any escalation following Fakhrizadeh's death would only complicate an already tough task.
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Experts tell CNN that the episode underscores shifting dynamics in the Middle East as Trump leaves office and countries fearful of Iranian aggression ally together in solidarity against Iran.
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Pompeo spoke of the danger emanating from Iran and elsewhere during an interview broadcast on Fox News Thursday referencing the aftermath of the January strike by the United States that killed Soleimani.
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Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, tweeted that the attack was "an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It's time for this ceaseless escalation to stop."
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In a 2018 speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the Iranian government of going out of its way to protect, hide and preserve him because he was so critical to their nuclear program.
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The US military view right now is that unless there is a direct provocation against the United States by Iran, there is no justification for a US strike.
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The US has currently just more than 50,000 troops in the region, which is not enough to carry out a sustained military campaign against Iran.
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"I think it goes without question that Israel did it," said Simon Henderson, Baker fellow at The Washington Institute and a specialist on Iran's nuclear program. "If you are Israel, you want to set the program back months if not years."
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CNN reported earlier this month that President Trump floated the idea of a military strike on Iran during the remaining days of his term but was dissuaded by senior officials. It's not clear if the administration would considering sabotage, cyber action or other clandestine alternatives were Trump to order up some sort of action.
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To Deter Iranian Attacks on U.S. Troops, Pentagon Orders B-52 Flights to Middle East - ... - 0 views
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Two American B-52 bombers flew a show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Thursday that military officials said was intended to deter Iran and its proxies from carrying out attacks against United States troops in the Middle East amid rising tensions between the two countries.
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The multinational mission, which included aircraft from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, was routed well outside Iranian air space.
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The flight on Thursday comes on the heels of the assassination last month of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, an attack Iran has blamed on Israel with possible American complicity. The bomber missions also come just weeks before the anniversary of the American drone strike in January that killed a senior Iranian commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in Iraq.
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“We do not seek conflict,” General McKenzie said, “but we must remain postured and committed to respond to any contingency.”
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on Thursday, a senior military official said American intelligence analysts had detected “planning going on” — including preparations for possible rocket strikes or worse — by Iran and Shia militias in Iraq that it supports.
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“In short, Iran is using Iraq as its proxy battleground against the United States, with Iran’s ultimate objective being to eject the United States and our forces from Iraq and the broader Middle East,” General McKenzie said
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The senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe operations and intelligence assessments, did not cite any specific evidence of a larger, imminent attack against American personnel. But the official said military analysts assessed that the likelihood of Iran or its proxies miscalculating the risks of such a strike were higher than usual.
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More recently, a top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed east of Tehran, in a daytime strike widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli operatives
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Iran responded this month by enacting a law ordering an immediate ramping up of its enrichment of uranium to levels closer to weapons-grade fuel.
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“The Iranians don’t want to go to war with us,” Admiral McRaven continued. “We don’t want to go to war with Iran. So everybody needs to do the best they can to kind of lower the temperature and try not to get this into an escalation mode.”
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The U.S. and Iran Move Closer to a Nuclear Deal - The New York Times - 0 views
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On Saturday, Iran’s Parliament placed largely symbolic sanctions on 51 Americans, many of them prominent political and military officials, for “terrorism” and “human rights violations,” in retaliation for the U.S. assassination of Iran’s top commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, two years ago.
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Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, then warned that Iran would “face severe consequences” if it attacked any Americans, including any of the 51 people hit with the sanctions.
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Symbolic acts of sanctioning individuals and issuing sharply worded statements are nothing new in the long and troubled relationship between Tehran and Washington.
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The Biden administration needs a foreign policy success, particularly after the chaotic exit from Afghanistan, and has said it prefers a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear standoff over military confrontation.
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The Biden administration initially wanted to return to the original deal while following the Trump blueprint on missiles and foreign policies, but has now indicated it would accept a return to the 2015 accord without those strings attached.
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initially demanded the lifting of all sanctions imposed by Mr. Trump and guarantees that a future American president would not withdraw from the deal. But Tehran has softened those demands as the negotiations have progressed in Vienna.
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Former President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed tough economic sanctions cutting off most of Iran’s oil revenues and international financial transactions. Mr. Trump’s goal was to pressure Iran into a deal that reached beyond its nuclear program, restricting its ballistic missiles and regional political and military activities.
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“We will facilitate revenge on Americans in any place, even their own homes and by people close to them, even if we are not present,” he said in a video of the speech.
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The recent jousting between Tehran and Washington is linked to Iran’s commemoration on Jan. 3 of the two-year anniversary of the U.S. assassination of General Suleimani. In speech after speech during the ceremonies, Iranian officials threatened revenge against American officials — even though Iran had retaliated five days after the assassination with a ballistic missile strike on an American military facility in Iraq.
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Ebrahim Raisi, the newly elected hard-line Iranian president, said that former President Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, should stand trial in an impartial court and face “ghesas,” a term that in Islamic jurisprudence means an “eye for an eye.” Otherwise, he warned, people would take their own revenge.
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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signaled an indirect endorsement of talks with the U.S. in a speech on Monday when he said the Islamic Republic “holding talks and negotiating with the enemy at certain junctures does not mean surrendering.”
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Over a four-day period, they unleashed a series of rocket and drone attacks on a U.S. military base in western Iraq and on the living quarters of State Department employees at the Baghdad airport, according to the Iraqi military and an official with the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition based in Baghdad, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
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In northeastern Syria, artillery rounds were fired at a Syrian-Kurdish-led base with U.S. advisers, according to the U.S.-led coalition, which issued a statement blaming the attacks on “Iran-supported malign actors.”
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Tehran’s proxies were launching the attacks, Iranian officials were expressing a surprisingly optimistic view of the talks in Vienna, now in their eighth round, while the State Department was offering a more measured assessment.
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An adviser to Iran’s Foreign Ministry said he believed a deal could be reached before mid-February, which would coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
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made an important concession to get things rolling by agreeing to work from a draft agreement worked out with Mr. Rouhani’s team,
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Under that agreement, the U.S. would lift all sanctions related to the nuclear deal (while keeping those for human rights and other issues) and Iran would return to its technical commitments regarding its nuclear program under the old treaty.
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“I’m not going to put a time limit on it or give you the number of meters remaining on the runway, except to say, ‘Yes, it is getting very, very, very short,’”
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Iran may have softened its initial demand for the removal of all sanctions imposed after Mr. Trump exited the deal, including those related to human rights.
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Iran was pursuing “the removal of sanctions” related only to the original nuclear deal and looking to complete sanctions removal sometime in the future.
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Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But if the talks fail, he said, its efforts at enriching uranium since the U.S. exited the nuclear deal have put it in a position to move toward weaponization very quickly.
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