the beginning of this impeachment<\/a>, Trump was just 17 votes in the Senate away from conviction. And failure on his part to respond to an attack on our troops now or our soil, the embassy in Baghdad, would have been enough to turn that many against him and install Mike Pence.<\/p>\nAt the end of the day we are held captive by a minority of power-mad Trotskyites without any capacity for forgiveness or humility. They believe in societal order through the whip and the sword.<\/p>\n
Truly Maoist in their thinking, the only political power that exists comes from the barrel of a gun. This is why there has been zero opportunities for diplomacy with Iran.<\/p>\n
Iran is to be destroyed. If not today, tomorrow. If not then then the day after. It will not end.<\/p>\n
And any potential diplomacy was sabotaged at every turn. Peace can only happen through subjugation. Demands placed on Iran after Trump\u2019s disastrous decision to exit the JCPOA were nothing short of regime change, arch neocon Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saw to that.<\/p>\n
A man like Solemaini would never submit to this. And yet, fighting a war against the Empire is always reduced to terrorism to sell it to the public.<\/p>\n
Like it or not Trump executed the man most responsible for the systemic destruction of ISIS and neutering of Al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. He\u2019s also a man, over the years, who has fought the U.S. to a standstill across the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Those were his pertinent crimes.<\/p>\n
The results of these fights were to empower Israel\u2019s enemies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Russia and China supported this in their own interests. Turkey came to realize it was being used.<\/p>\n
There was no way around that. It was a direct consequence of winning the battle to preserve Syria from becoming a failed state.<\/p>\n
And that is a goal any rational person should wish for.<\/p>\n
This is the most dangerous escalation of Trump\u2019s administration. Nothing he\u2019s done to this point compares with killing Solemaini and taking immediate credit for it.<\/p>\n
Nothing he\u2019s done is more tone deaf or disproportionate to whatever crimes were the proximate cause. And nothing he could have done would be more galvanizing of resistance to U.S. occupation of Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n
Trump, to his credit, held back the neocons at critical junctures over the past couple of years. After the Russian ELINT plane was shot down, Trump worked with Putin to negotiate a truce which would have seen Iranian forces in Syria pulled back from the Golan Heights as a start to changing the dynamic there.<\/p>\n
Benjamin Netanyahu said no, all Iranians out of Syria. The war between Israel and the Shia forces backed by Iran continued. The path to peace could have begun then if Trump had the moral courage to force that outcome.<\/p>\n
But the neocons at home had him under suspicion of treason. His National Security staff wouldn\u2019t allow that to happen. If he hadn\u2019t pulled out of the JCPOA and left room to negotiate we wouldn\u2019t be here today.<\/p>\n
But he did. And we are downstream of this bad decision. It\u2019s been one escalation after another and a series of increasingly dangerous confrontations. This doesn\u2019t end with Iran going meekly to bed, folks.<\/p>\n
They aren\u2019t disobedient children, but they aren\u2019t animals either.<\/p>\n
Killing Solemaini was presaged months ago with the U.S. designating the Quds Force a terrorist organization, which gives the U.S. unilateral legal cover to summary execution of anyone affiliated with them, especially if they are not on home soil.<\/p>\n
But, at the same time, Trump assassinated (note the difference) members of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces in the raid as well, since these are considered members of the Iraqi military and the attack occurred on Iraqi soil.<\/p>\n
So, in simplistic and, I believe, legal terms Trump committed an Act of War against Iraq. Iran obviously considers killing Solemaini, legal definitions aside, such as well.<\/p>\n
This is an act Trump cannot walk back. He can\u2019t ask Iran to come to the negotiating table now or ever. It\u2019s an act of overt war. Whether it leads directly to forces facing off in high level combat is debatable. It will certainly continue escalating from here.<\/p>\n
Israel has been itching for the U.S. to attack and destroy Iran\u2019s nuclear R&D facilities. The only way to achieve that was to get Trump to pull out of the JCPOA, forcing Iran back into enrichment and then using that as the\u00a0casus belli.<\/em><\/p>\nWelcome to 2020.<\/p>\n
And the sad truth is that it means more killing, more murder and more of everything bad. There is no Just War rationalization for this. While no one rational wants to see Iran with nuclear weapons the end result of the policy led us to that potential outcome.<\/p>\n
No rational person should want anyone with nuclear weapons and yet Netanyahu sits on hundreds of warheads.<\/p>\n
Beating people into submission doesn\u2019t work. The neocons told Trump to smack Iran in the mouth, that\u2019s the only lesson these animals understand.<\/p>\n
By the way, they say that about everyone.<\/p>\n
Solemaini may have been responsible for hundreds of American deaths, but Iran and the U.S. have been at war for forty years. At some point that has to be processed honestly.<\/p>\n
Americans supporting this refuse to comprehend that we\u2019re as much to blame as Iran is for the violence. We\u2019re not the good guys and they aren\u2019t the bad guys. Everyone sucks here. For every Iranian that shouts \u201cDeath to America\u201d there are Americans who sing \u201cBomb, Bomb, Bomb Bomb, Bomb Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump was elected to end this belligerence but he\u2019s incapable of separating strength from weakness. A mafiosi-type who uses violence indiscriminately, Trump is a weak man.<\/p>\n
This was indiscriminate in that Trump believes the political calculus is in his favor, so he can get away with it. He shores up his support in the Senate just long enough to beat the impeachment and can sail to re-election.<\/p>\n
But, who he is was written on the bombs he threw at the Al Shairat airbase and the MOAB he dropped in Afghanistan in April 2017 to prove a point to Putin and Xi he wasn\u2019t a wimp.<\/p>\n
But he is a wimp. And a coward. And neither man was impressed by this. He hasn\u2019t won a single negotiation of note in three years. Killing Solemaini was the result of having no capacity for diplomacy.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s won the trade war. Russia gets their pipelines. Syria will be returned to Syrians and Iraq will reject U.S. presence there. Venezuela won\u2019t fall and North Korea has nukes. Nothing has changed and yet everything has.<\/p>\n
A strong man admits his mistakes and makes concessions to those he\u2019s harmed. He doesn\u2019t hide behind how unfair it is the political machine is arrayed against him.<\/p>\n
And, now, he\u2019s a failed president no different than Obama who he despises.<\/p>\n
The only thing more pathetic than Trump right now is the gaggle of jackals running against him. Weep for the future.<\/p>\n
___
\nhttps:\/\/tomluongo.me\/2020\/01\/03\/trump-point-of-no-return\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Point of No Return<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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