printLATEST ESSAY is “Remembering Qasem Soleimani, Revolutionary Guards General Whose 2020 Murder Joe Kent Praises.” Read it at The Unz Review, home to radical dissidents from day one.
‘In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS. ~National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent (2026)
If we accept U.S. state aggression based on erroneous prior-restraint reasoning—then aggress we can ad absurdum. ~ilana (2020)
EXCERPT:
… The debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn’t act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner, never over what’s right and what’s wrong.
Stateside, the only inquiry permissible is a cost-benefit calculus. Will the assassination of Soleimani, a military official of a sovereign state, and an avid and effective slayer of Islamic State terrorists—pay strategic dividends for America in the long run?
This is crass pragmatism bereft of principle. It’s on display everywhere, surfacing on BBC News, where a female analyst, an American, was deploying the childish “bad man” meme to outline America’s Disneyfied foreign policy.
This angels-and-demons production always starts with the prototypical evil dictator who was alleged to be messing with his noble people, until the avenging, angelic empire sent a drone to the rescue.
Again, even Tucker, whose antiwar credentials in recent years have been impeccable, had conceded that this Soleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice.
So, who’s right? Or, is blind patriotism predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world?
“Soleimani deserved to die,” an atavistic bit of jingoism made by Republicans and Democrats alike on Fox News and on CNN—it holds true only if you believe that the U.S. government is the keeper of the flame of an immutably just, universal code of law, which it is deputized to uphold, wherever it takes-up residence.
Such a chauvinistic impulse is true only if you believe that the U.S. government’s might gives it the right to be universal judge, jury and executioner, deciding who may live and who must die the world over. ….”
…THE REST: “Remembering Qasem Soleimani, Revolutionary Guards General Whose 2020 Murder Joe Kent Praises” is at The Unz Review
* Image screen pic credit: www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/youth-members-of-the-scouting-movement-walk-with-a-large-news-photo/1892454629?adppopup=true