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Yesterday I joined with around 200 other people in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis to rally and march against U.S. military intervention in Iraq and the growing danger of a U.S. war on Iran.
The event was sponsored by the
Minnesota Peace Action Coalition,
Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and the
Anti-War Committee.
Yesterday's action was
one of many held around the country and the world in response to the Trump administration's use of a drone strike to kill Iranian commander
Qasem Soleimani (also transliterated as Qassem Suleimani) while he was in Iraq leading the fight against
ISIS, according to Iranian officials. In response to the assassination of Soleimani, the Iranian government has vowed retaliation against the U.S. Many fear that this cycle of violence will lead to a full-scale war between Iran and the United States.
Following are more images from yesterday's march and rally. They are accompanied by a compilation of excerpts from recent op-eds and commentaries on the growing tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
The real issue underlying Trump’s assassination of Qassem Suleimani is not whether the Iranian general posed a danger to the United States. He almost certainly did. America faces many dangers.
The underlying issue is that Donald Trump cannot be trusted to lead America into another war. Trump is unaccountable to America. He is lawless.
Trump’s killing of Qassem Suleimani brings America to the brink of a war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress' war making authority under the Constitution. Other presidents have started wars in reckless disregard of the Constitution, too, but Trump’s lawlessness is ubiquitous. It characterizes his entire presidency.
Qassem Suleimani's murder perpetuates an American trend of regime change in the Middle East that has characterized U.S. foreign policy far too long. The military industrial complex is the main victor in this scheme – directly profiting from global destabilization.
We must build more than peace. Our times demand we construct a renewed society, where the violent exploitation of war is no longer required to placate the human yearning for power, prestige, and privilege.
It is time to definitively stand in solidarity with oppressed people throughout the world, especially Black and Brown people crushed by the boot of American imperialism. We are called to conscientiously oppose further policing on a global scale, even if the U.S. government wages war. The fate of one is the fate of all.
We cannot as responsible citizens look away from what’s happening with Iran right now.
When Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, Iraq and Iran spent years at war with each other. In a strange way it was helpful to the United States that Iran had its hands full dealing with Iraq. One of the unfortunate consequences of our deeply irresponsible invasion of Iraq was that it emboldened Iran.
Iran has been a very active player in Middle Eastern politics, and not in ways that are helpful to the United States. The withdrawal of the U.S. from the Iran Nuclear Deal strengthened the hand of the hardliners there, making their activities in the region more dangerous. Recently the United States led attacks against Iran’s network in Iraq in response to the death of a US contractor at the hands of Iranian-backed militias, which in turn led to an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In response to that, President Trump ordered the assassination of one of Iran’s highest military commanders, Qassem Soleimani.
The killing of Soleimani is extremely serious, and will almost certainly cause a significant reaction from Iran. It’s not that Soleimani was a good man; he was not. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about the wise versus unwise, responsible versus irresponsible use of military power.
Now the president has called for deploying 3,000 more troops to the Middle East. Make no mistake about it, this is an extremely dangerous moment for our country and for our world.
Every American must realize that war with Iran would be catastrophic. When anybody tells you that we’re going to go over there and handle the bad guys, whoever they are and wherever they are, remind them of Vietnam and remind them of Iraq. The cowboy-like imagery employed by warmongers in both cases is dangerous and insane. War in Vietnam was irresponsible and tragic; war in Iraq was irresponsible and tragic; war with Iran would be irresponsible, tragic, and possibly cataclysmic.
How did we get to this? We certainly can’t blame it on our Founders. According to the Constitution, the president must seek congressional approval before declaring war. Yet after 9/11, Congress passed – and continually authorizes – the National Defense Authorization Act, giving the president broad powers to do whatever he thinks necessary to “fight terrorism.” The NDAA is an absurd abdication of congressional authority, and the sweetest gift possible to the military-industrial-complex.
Today the administration is going into overdrive trying to justify Soleimani’s assassination. One argument is that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq; remember that our invasion was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq. They’re also claiming that there were imminent attacks being planned against the United States. . . . [W]e should thwart any such attacks, of course! But killing Soleimani will only ensure more of them. American military and civilian personnel were already at risk in the region, and now they are only more so.
. . . There are reasonable people in the American defense establishment surely now trying hard to reign in the more reckless impulses of our president. My hope is that they will prevail.
When I voted against the war in Iraq in 2002, I feared it would lead to greater destabilization of the country and the region. Today, 17 years later, that fear has unfortunately turned out to be true.
The United States has lost approximately 4,500 brave troops, tens of thousands have been wounded, and we’ve spent trillions on this war.
Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars.
Trump promised to end endless wars, but this action puts us on the path to another one.
Donald Trump drastically escalated the United States' ongoing conflict with Iran on Thursday night by ordering the assassination of Iran's General Qassem Soleimani with an airstrike on the Baghdad International Airport. It takes what was arguably already a war (with an economic blockade and regular skirmishes with Iranian proxy forces) to a straight-up shooting war.
Events like this bring out the absolute worst in the American foreign policy community. Many conservative writers and thinkers, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the Hudson Institute's Michael Doran, and Commentary's Noah Rothman, openly cheered this Putin-style cold-blooded murder of a foreign statesman. Other more supposedly nonpartisan commentators uncritically parroted Trump administration assertions that Iran was planning something bad. Every top Democratic presidential candidate except Bernie Sanders was careful to foreground that Soleimani was a bad guy before condemning the assassination in their initial comments.
The truth is that Soleimani was not all that different from any of about five dozen current and former American politicians and bureaucrats — if anything, he was considerably more restrained about the use of force. Yes, he was involved in a lot of bloody wars — but so was every American president since 2000, and besides half the wars he fought in were started or fueled by the United States. It's just another instance of America's gigantic hypocrisy when it comes to war.
As writer Derek Davison explains, Soleimani was no ordinary general. He was more like a cross between the American vice president and the secretary of state — one of the two or three most famous and powerful people in Iran behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soleimani commanded the Quds Force, a Special Forces-type operation supporting Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and many other countries. American hardliners hate him mainly for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and for arming insurgents who fought the American occupation of Iraq.
. . . So yes, Soleimani has fueled a lot of nasty conflicts and killed a lot of people, directly or indirectly, many of them American soldiers — though it's worth noting also that much of his recent effort has been dedicated to fighting ISIS (with great effectiveness, by all accounts) in a tacit uneasy alliance with U.S. forces.
Yet even the worst of Soleimani's record pales in comparison with the most blood-drenched American warmongers. If Soleimani deserves condemnation for arming Iraqi insurgents, then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve 10 times as much for starting the war in the first place. It was a pointless, illegal war of aggression sold on lies that obliterated Iraqi society and killed perhaps half a million people, almost all of them innocent civilians. (Our own Soleimani, General David Petraeus, was connected to the operation of Iraqi torture dungeons and paramilitary death squads during the fight against the insurgency.)
If Soleimani deserves blame for helping Bashar al-Assad brutally defeat Syrian rebels, Henry Kissinger deserves 10 times as much for orchestrating the bombing slaughter of perhaps a quarter million Cambodians and paving the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide that killed 1.7 million people.
If any accused war criminal at an airport is fair game, then there are a lot of people in D.C. and Northern Virginia who better start traveling by train or ship.
Indeed, the Quds Force itself was originally created during the Iran-Iraq War, which was started by a heavily U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein in 1980. A million Iranians died in the grueling eight-year conflict. And the reason the Islamic Republic exists in the first place is because the United States and Britain toppled Iran's fledgling democracy in 1953 and installed a brutal dictator.
It is not exactly hard to understand why Iran – like about every other country in the Middle East – keeps some brutal, hard people like Soleimani around. It's a violent, unstable neighborhood, and war is an unavoidable reality. And no country is more responsible for that fact than the United States.
While both the U.S. and Iran are both escalating the crisis in the Middle East through confrontations on multiple fronts, there is no question that the origins of this crisis are in the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran and then escalate economic and military pressure on Iran.
But the responsibility for this tragedy doesn’t just lie with President Trump. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution states that only Congress has the power to declare war, not the president. Congress has had multiple opportunities to assert this responsibility. But in December 2019, Congress struck language from a military policy bill that would have explicitly denied authorization for a war with Iran and would have repealed the outdated Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (AUMF), which the administration may be using to provide legal cover for this assassination. That same bill authorized $738 billion for war.
. . . [M]any Democratic members of Congress are criticizing Trump’s actions. Yet now is the time to go further and right the wrongs that Congress has permitted to happen. Beyond condemnation of Trump’s march to war, Congress needs to reassert constitutional war authority and support the full-scale international diplomacy needed to prevent war with Iran. Congress must pass legislation explicitly prohibiting an unauthorized war of choice with Iran.
Democratic leadership in the House should immediately bring the Khanna-Gaetz NDAA amendment, which would prohibit unauthorized funding for a war with Iran, to the floor as a standalone bill. Additionally, the House of Representatives should introduce an Iraq War Powers Resolution to stop further U.S. military participation in these escalating events and vote to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF.
While the media focus for three years of the Trump presidency has centered around “Russia collusion” and impeachment, the most dangerous collusion of all was happening right out in the open — the Trump/Saudi/Israel/UAE drive to war with Iran.
On August 3, 2016 — just three months before Donald Trump would win the Electoral College vote and ascend to power — Blackwater founder Erik Prince arranged a meeting at Trump Tower. For decades, Prince had been agitating for a war with Iran and, as early as 2010, had developed a fantastical proposal for using mercenaries to wage it.
At this meeting was George Nader, an American citizen who had a long history of being a quiet emissary for the United States in the Middle East. Nader, who had also worked for Blackwater and Prince, was a convicted pedophile in the Czech Republic and is facing similar allegations in the United States. Nader worked as an adviser for the Emirati royals and has close ties to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.
There was also an Israeli at the Trump Tower meeting: Joel Zamel. He was there supposedly pitching a multimillion-dollar social media manipulation campaign to the Trump team. Zamel’s company, Psy-Group, boasts of employing former Israeli intelligence operatives. Nader and Zamel were joined by Donald Trump Jr. According to the New York Times, the purpose of the meeting was “primarily to offer help to the Trump team, and it forged relationships between the men and Trump insiders that would develop over the coming months, past the election and well into President Trump’s first year in office.”
One major common goal ran through the agendas of all the participants in this Trump Tower meeting: regime change in Iran. Trump campaigned on belligerence toward Iran and trashing the Obama-led Iran nuclear deal, and he has followed through on those threats, filling his administration with the most vile, hawkish figures in the U.S. national security establishment. After appointing notorious warmonger John Bolton as national security adviser, Trump fired him last September. But despite reports that Trump had soured on Bolton because of his interventionist posture toward Iran, Bolton’s firing merely opened the door for the equally belligerent Mike Pompeo to take over the administration’s Iran policy at the State Department. Now Pompeo is the public face of the Suleimani assassination.
The Iran stuff is big, but I'm trying to wrap my mind around the news that the FBI has documents showing that state-owned Russian Bank (VTB) is the guarantor on Deutsche Bank's loans to Donald Trump.
This President, who claims to be a billionaire, may in fact be broke and indebted, literally, to Vladimir Putin.
And for how much? Hundreds of millions of dollars? Billions?
At once it is so obvious, and yet also too obvious. It is a plot point that would be rejected if floated in a writer's room in Hollywood. Particularly when someone says, "Yeah! And if he gets caught, he could just start a war! You know! It would be like Wag the Dog crossed with Rocky IV!”
And yet, somehow, that's where we are today.
Just, wow.
– Michael Hussein Tallon
via Facebook
January 3, 2020
You can cheer the end of Sulaimani and still be anti-war. You can condemn the way Sulaimani was executed but still be relieved that he is no longer around to terrorize people. You can be anti-US imperialism and anti-Iranian dictatorship and brutality. Being anti-US imperialism, being anti-Trump’s reckless disregard for humanity does not mean that you should make Sulaimani a symbol of freedom, or Leftist ideology. Sulamani was a butcher. Trump is a dangerous megalomaniac. The Ayatollahs are just as guilty, dripping with the blood of millions across the region funding terrorist groups and proxy wars. Let Sulaimani die the butcher he was, with a fitting illegal end- the same he dished out to thousands-, without turning him into an anti-imperialist hero of the people- and by extension justifying the Iranian regime. The only loyalty you should have should be for the ordinary people of Iran, Iraq, and the region. It is 2020, and it is about time we started viewing such issues in all their complexities, realizing that multiple truths can co-exist and that a simplistic analysis serves no one but those hungering for war.
Related Off-site Links:
5 Things to Know About Iran – Tori Bateman (American Friends Service Committee, January 3, 2020).
Trump’s Illegal, Impeachable Act of War – Maj. Danny Sjursen (Truthdig, January 3, 2020).
Iran General’s Killing Triggers Global Alarm – John Leicester (Associated Press via PBS Newshour, January 3, 2020).
Pelosi Says Trump Launched Strike Killing Iranian General Without Authorization – Rachel Frazin (The Hill, January 3, 2020).
Trump Must Be Removed From Office and We Must Create a Pathway to Peace – Wim Laven (Common Dreams, January 3, 2020).
To Stop Trump’s War With Iran, We Must Also Confront the Democrats Who Laid the Groundwork – Sarah Lazare and Michael Arria (In These Times, January 3, 2020).
Sanders, Khanna Introduce Legislation to Block Funding for a War With Iran – Tal Axelrod (The Hill, January 3, 2020).
Thousands Take to Streets in More Than 70 Cities Across US to Protest Trump's “Reckless Acts of War” Against Iran – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, January 4, 2020).
Trump Repeatedly Claimed in 2011 and 2012 That Obama Would Start a War With Iran to Win Reelection – Andrew Kaczynski (CNN, January 4, 2020).
Trump Says 52 Targets Already Lined Up If Iran Retaliates – Douglass K. Daniel and Jonathan Lemire (Associated Press via Star Tribune, January 4, 2020).
Donald Trump Threatens to Attack Iran's Cultural Sites – teleSUR (January 4, 2020).
“A Nasty, Brutal Fight”: What a US-Iran War Would Look Like – Alex Ward (Vox, January 3, 2020).
Trump Unites Iran and Iraq ... Against the United States – Juan Cole (Common Dreams, January 4, 2020).
Soleimani's Assassination: The Mafia Would Have Been Proud – Eric Margolis (EricMargolis.com via Common Dreams, January 4, 2020).
“If You Are Wondering Who Benefits”: Weapons Makers See Stocks Surge as Trump Moves Closer to War With Iran – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, January 4, 2020).
UPDATES: Iraqi Parliament Votes to Expel All American Troops and Submit UN Complaint Against US for Violation of Sovereignty – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, January 5, 2020).
Stop the War. Stop U.S. Empire – Greg Shupak (Jacobin, January 5, 2020).
Iran Pulling Out of Nuclear Deal Commitment After U.S. Strike That Killed Soleimani – Max Burman (NBC News, January 5, 2020).
How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, January 5, 2020).
TV Pundits Praising Suleimani Assassination Neglect to Disclose Ties to Arms Industry – Lee Fang (The Intercept, January 6, 2020).
Meet the Corporate War Profiteers Making a Killing on Trump's Attacks on Iran – Sarah Anderson (Common Dreams, January 6, 2020).
After Pompeo Chides Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as “Propagandist of the First Order,” U.S. Anti-War Critic Retorts: “Takes One to Know One” – Jon Queally (Common Dreams, January 7, 2020).
There’s No Evidence Iran Is Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Americans – Stephen Zunes (The Progressive, January 7, 2020).
A War With Iran Would Be Much, Much Worse Than the War With Iraq – Ben Mathis-Lilley (Slate, January 7, 2020).
1/7/2010 BREAKING NEWS: Iran Strikes Back at U.S. with Missile Attack at Bases in Iraq – The Associated Press via NPR News, January 7, 2020).
UPDATES: 34 Troops Have Brain Injuries From Iranian Missile Strike, Pentagon Says – Helene Cooper (The New York Times, January 24, 2020
Aftermath: The Iran War After the Soleimani Assassination – Jim Kavanagh (CounterPunch, January 24, 2020).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The War Racket
• Quote of the Day – March 20, 2018
• Progressive Perspectives on U.S. Military Intervention in Syria
• Saying "No" to Endless U.S. Wars
• In the Wake of the Paris Attacks, Saying "No" to War, Racism and Islamophobia
• Vigiling Against Weaponized Drones
• The Tenth Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
• A Letter to "Dear Abby" re. Responding to 9/11
Images: Michael J. Bayly.
