American Murder
By Paul Edwards
January 10, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation
of politics by other means”, but American
Presidents have modified his apothegm. No
one knows when it was first judged--How to
put it? Not legal, no; not moral, no, surely
not. Conceiveable..?
Permissible..?--politically safe, for a
nation to assassinate a human being, a
foreign enemy. There is no record of that
meeting of our government’s most powerful
men--only such a group could plan so radical
an action--when one of them first dared to
say, “Suppose we kill him?”
Those souls shocked and wounded by our
latest murder, need to know that meeting was
not recent: didn’t happen under the
Suppurating Pustule that infects the White
House today, nor the charming Grand
Bullshitter who preceded him, nor the
aphasic buffoon before him. It was a century
ago. There’s no dating it to a particular
hit but it was certainly held before our
deviously arranged murder of Sandino in
Nicaragua in 1934.
For the last century the US government has
made it its regular business to execute, or
to buy the execution of, men it deemed
geopolitically damned. There isn’t space
here to review the long roster of America’s
secret victims, nor any need for that. The
uninformed need to take their own education
in hand or continue mooing meekly down the
chute toward who knows what end? Perhaps
even their own date with the stungun.
Skipping past our more notorious standard
issue deep cover CIA murders--Lumumba, Che,
Allende, Diem--and excepting killings during
phony “police actions” and “incursions”,
gets us to the phase of dedicated,
clandestine extermination outfits, to the
era of “terminating with extreme prejudice”
by quasi-military units like the Phoenix
Program that murdered thousands of Viet Cong
and NVA. It was a short step then to
creation of specialized military hit squads.
Navy SEALS with their Osama murder are
typical.
In this era of magical tech innovations--GPS
wizardry, HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT--America
vaunts the uncanny accuracy of drones that
slaughter wedding parties instead of jihadi
honchos, and Hellfire missiles that maim and
eviscerate more peasant children than
diabolized hajjis. Targeted assassination
has, in its current iteration, thrown over
the traces and expanded its lethal reach so
that nailing its purported target is now
irrelevant. Busloads of Yemeni kids will do.
It’s now a case, as a Marine buddy told me
in Khe Sanh, of “Kill ‘em all; let God sort
‘em out.”
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It
needs to be clear that none of this cowardly
murder was done in the heat of authorized
battle. None of it has come during legally
declared war. These assassinations are just
that: murders without acknowledgment, much
less official justification that, when
exposed, are flatly denied by implausible
baldfaced bullshit from our robotic,
faux-Christian Mandarins. Our government
always keeps, among its court jongleurs,
trained slugs whose unique sociopathic gift
consists in being able to look a clueless
public in the face and solemnly assure them
that dogshit is ice cream.
What is notable about this sordid history is
not that it happened, since this country has
foisted the dirtiest, most flagrant
deceptions on the world and its own people
as a matter of course for generations, but
this: that from the beginning of our state
murder program enormous effort has gone into
keeping the fact of it hidden or, at least,
deniable. It remained to Jabba, the
President, not only to end that charade, to
blow that cover in the Soleimani murder, but
also, with idiot vanity, to celebrate
himself as its author.
Quite apart from being astoundingly,
stupidly reckless, since The Empire’s
functionaries, military and other, become
immediate potential targets, it is an
offence against the laws of nations and of
war. America, the full rogue state, cares
nothing for such laws, of course, but some
quaint nations still do and it puts it in
seriously bad odor with the few suckup
lackeys it still may have despite Trump’s
relentless campaign to demean and alienate
them. Candidates for another “coalition of
the willing” to mask America’s brute
adventurism are going to be scarce as
birdshit in a cuckoo clock.
So much for side effects. This murder of
Soleimani was, to cop a line from Hamlet, a
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but
this most foul, strange, and unnatural”,
because of his history as a once critical
American ally. He, with forces loyal to him,
was key in defeating ISIS after our
multi-billion dollar, half-assed,
spit-and-baling wire Iraqi Army’s meltdown
and flight. America murdered no Takfiri
barbarian, no crazed, fanatic Jihadi in him,
but a temperate, judicious statesman, and a
hero to most Iranian people.
If the intent was crude, direct provocation
of war with Iran, that intent may now be
realized. With millions of Persians in the
streets mourning him and Khamenei vowing
stern vengeance, symbolic rockets are no
expression of that outrage. If retaliation
does come, as it may, the world will know
it.
At that point, Trump has to fish or cut
bait. If his authority is heeded then--
which is not certain--by a military that
much prefers no-risk bullying of weak
entities that generate big money for little
blood, and a Congress at once warmongering
and cowardly, the balloon could go up. If
so, speculation is useless beyond one
ineluctable reality: the US will be, at a
minimum, badly hurt and the world economy
will be shaken to pieces. Needless to say,
the results of Big Power war would be orders
of magnitude more catastrophic.
Very Serious People, men who make regular
appearances on the MSM-- the PR arm of the
Deep State--and their owners who don’t, are
betting that nothing so insane as Great
Power war could come about as a result of
this murder and they’re probably right. It
would take an interlocking set of wild
errors of judgment and calculation on the
part of the powerful men who control world
order, such as it is, for a major cataclysm
to be triggered.
That was the case in 1914, as Tuchman
detailed in The Guns Of August. Men of broad
experience and vaunted acumen, in charge of
armies, fleets, and nations, slow marched in
their egotism, arrogance, and wilful
rigidity, into the most devastating war in
history, mesmerized by their own folly.
A wag has said that history doesn’t repeat
itself but it rhymes.
Wisdom and sound judgment are not
unattainable by men who value them. They
forever elude the arrogant, the egoist, and
the sociopath. The men and women who now
lead us are such people, enlisted by, and
devoted to, our Capitalist rulers, and their
voracious quest for dominion of the world
and the acquisition of its wealth that is
their only purpose and goal. People of this
barren, soulless, biophobic creed are
incapable of rational, humane, and
life-affirming decisions. The impending
dangers of rape economics, climate change,
and world war do not appear to these
defectives as the horrifying, immanent
threats they are. We are hostage to their
inadequacy.
It is not impossible that the murder of
Soleimani could result in a disaster of
greater magnitude than did that of the
Archduke Ferdinand, and that we may, in the
days ahead, suffer our own 1914 and its
dreadful aftermath.
Paul Edwards is
a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can
be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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