{"id":200260,"date":"2020-01-04T07:32:08","date_gmt":"2020-01-04T07:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=200260"},"modified":"2020-01-06T07:28:42","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T07:28:42","slug":"trump-is-starting-a-war-with-iran-whether-it-is-by-accident-or-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=200260","title":{"rendered":"Trump is starting a war with Iran \u2013 whether it is by accident or design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk \u2013 The Independent Jan 3, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

A burning vehicle at Baghdad International Airport shotly after the US drone strike. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Is this war by accident or war by design? We\u2019ve all said that a major war in the Middle East could start by accident. But no one thought Donald Trump<\/a> would go for the jugular quite like this. To kill General\u00a0Qassem Soleimani<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0is a sword at the heart of Iran<\/a>, without doubt. And on whose behalf?<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump boasts of his relationship with the Saudi king who has talked of \u201ccutting off the head of the Iranian snake\u201d\u00a0and whose oil facilities were attacked with drone-fired missiles \u2013 which the US blamed on Iran \u2013\u00a0last year. Or Israel? Or is this just another decision with incalculable results, taken by a crackpot president in the US?<\/span><\/p>\n

Just imagine what would happen if a leading American general \u2013 or two, since Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was a leading pro-Iranian figure in Iraq \u2013 was blown up on a tour of the Middle East. There would be airstrikes, attacks on Iran\u2019s nuclear centres, threats by Washington to close down all traffic between Iran and the outside world. The death of an American in Baghdad on Friday and the riots outside the US embassy, while sad, scarcely justify American attacks on this scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Qassem Soleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, although the Revolutionary Guards al-Quds forces he commanded is not quite the elite army which Iran likes\u00a0to pretend. Soleimani, according to his fellow commanders, would take risks at the various al-Quds front lines in Syria and his men admired him for his courage under fire. So he regularly expected to die. But Baghdad International Airport is the last place you would expect to see an American drone put him and al-Muhandis to death.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Americans have long grown used to staging attacks on pro-Iranian militia bases in Iraq and Syria. Over recent months, these strikes have become normal, regular \u2013 like Israel\u2019s frequent raids into Syria and Lebanon. But it was a US military operation which also killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, a Sunni Muslim who was an enemy of Tehran and whom the Iranians would have been happy to liquidate<\/span><\/p>\n

The Americans have been used to this sort of assassination \u2013 or \u201ctargeted killings\u201d as the Israelis call them \u2013 wiping out their enemies when they choose. Osama bin Laden was the first,\u00a0Baghdadi the second, Suleimani the third. Such rocket-based killings are regularly undertaken by Israel in Gaza, where Hamas leaders are often assassinated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s easy to take these men as important \u2013 as they think they are. Iran\u2019s forces in Syria, for example, are often grossly exaggerated by the US. Claims of the presence of 10,000 Revolutionary Guards Quds members in Syria were wildly inaccurate. Two thousand may be more accurate at any one time. True, Iranian intelligence men are scattered around the Middle East. But so are American agents.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of Tehran\u2019s most senior intelligence men was Ghadanfar Rokon Abadi who was Iran\u2019s man in Beirut, and later its ambassador there. He probably knew more about Hezbollah and Syria than anyone else and returned to Tehran in 2014. This was not long after Sunni Islamists, reportedly with Saudi support, staged a suicide attack against his embassy, killing 23 embassy employees, Hezbollah guards and civilians. Rokon Abadi was spared. His top security man was killed. But in 2016, he made the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca where 2,300 people \u2013 464 of them Iranians \u2013 were crushed to death in panic and riots for which Iran blamed the Saudi monarchy. Rokon Abadi was among them. It was months before his remains were returned to Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the Middle East, intelligence agents are always in danger. It was a Hezbollah satellite group called Islamic Jihad which killed CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley, and Imad Mougnieh, his reported murderer \u2013 or the man who gave the order \u2013 was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008. In 1983, a suicide bomber blew up his truck bomb at the front of the US embassy in Beirut, killing 32 people and wiping out most of the CIA agents who were holding a meeting inside.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh yes, and one more thing. Isn\u2019t there a US election coming up this year? And doesn\u2019t Trump want to win \u2013 and Soleimani as a target in Baghdad will play pretty well with Republicans. Iran has always responded to insults or attacks by waiting and delaying its own retaliation. Remember two oil tankers called the Adrian Darya<\/em> and the Stena Impero<\/em>? But now it\u2019s getting personal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tehran will likely take time to consider its options, with few having expected the US president to go for the jugular like this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Iran","category-Iraq"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200260"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200263,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200260\/revisions\/200263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}