Who saw that coming?
* * *
NObody saw it, especially Obama.

Nobody (or very, very few) saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Nobody (or very, very few) saw the candidacy of Barack Obama, and then his election, until after the first primaries.
Nobody (or very, very few) saw the election of Donald Trump.
Nobody saw the destruction of Soleimani and the top tier of Iran’s militia commanders.

That’s what makes following the news so addictive.

…plus this “golden oldie” (from the summer of 2015), which stands up pretty well—from Lee Smith (who continues to be indispensable):
https://www.hudson.org/research/11436-obama-strikes-a-deal-with-qassem-suleimani

As for Jarrett, well let’s just say there’s a lot to cover up.

Who saw that coming?

Obama’s masterstroke was that the US would shower Iran with benefits, cement them as the hegemon of the Middle East, and in return Iran would become a wonderful country of some sort.

Hence, the Iran Treaty which was never a treaty. Plus the pallets’o’cash in unmarked bills flown to Iran in the dead of night without oversight.

Thanks Obama!

(I always wondered how much Valerie Jarrett, who was born in Iran and lived there until she was five years old, had to do with that.)

Thanks. Fixed the typo.

Expressing fears for the future is always a bit OK, but should be balanced with fears from action AND fears from inaction.

The CIA (and NSA??) assured Bush that there were, in fact, WMDs, and all the 16 prior UN Sec. Council resolutions had failed to make Saddam “behave”. Funny-sad how those who talk about the UN fail to mention the worse-than-useless UNSC anti-Saddam resolutions from the end of his ’91 aggressive war on Kuwait (Desert Storm) thru 2003. (Already a longer time from then to now than from ’92 to 2003).

Bush had a plan – go in, put in Gen. Gardner, withdraw and leave and let the Iraqis “sort it out”. Then the plan changed to the far more noble “Nation Building”. Which America doesn’t know how to do, and I can’t even think of places where it has been done well.

A bad guy attacks America or some (innocent? until proven guilty) Americans. So the US marines and air power are sent in to kill the bad guy. And America leaves. That should be the model America uses, and it seems Trump is moving towards that.

Funny sad that Libya, destabilized by Obama & Clinton in helping rebels against Ghadaffy, remains a mess, but few Dems are claiming “the US broke it, so we have to fix it”. The USA can NOT fix all the problems in the world.

Killing a few international bad guys is pretty good, tho, especially in response to them killing some Americans. Most Americans DO value the life of an American higher, or much much higher, than the lives of others.

Most critics of American policy are hypocritical about criticizing America on this, because the bad guys America fights, like Saddam and now Gen. S. from Iran, these bad guys are doing worse than what America does. And the critics usually fail to criticize the bad guys’ worse actions.

The unfair critiques of US policy outrages me.

Tucker Carlson has long been against most wars, and has often highlighted how Trump is trying to pull back from war. If he thinks Trump is being too provocative, that’s a plausible intellectual opinion – but one I disagree with, strongly.

Nobody seems to be mentioning what body counts, of Americans or overall, would be needed to provide evidence that their position is right. I’d say if twice as many Americans are killed in the Mid East in each of the next 2 years without a regime change in Iran, then the fears of “escalation” were borne out. If less Americans are killed (than the avg of the last two years, or the two year sum), then Trump’s strategy is a big success. If between those two, as seems about 40% likely, Trump’s strategy will have avoided “huge escalation”, but not proven to be decisive.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/04/qassem-soleimani-told-militias-to-step-up-attacks-on-us-targets-in-iraq/

General Qassem Soleimani instructed Iraqi militia leaders, including his top ally in the country, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, to step up attacks on US targets in the country during a meeting in October at a villa across the Tigris River from the US embassy complex in Baghdad.

The attacks would deploy sophisticated new weapons provided by Iran, including Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down helicopters, Reuters reported.

The strategy session took place as mass protests against Iran’s growing influence in Iraq were gaining momentum. Soleimani’s plan to attack US forces was designed to provoke a military response that would redirect that anger toward America, Reuters said.

Soleimani, 62, the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, ordered a new militia group formed to carry out rocket attacks on Americans housed at Iraqi military bases. Muhandis’ Kataib Hezbollah force was to direct the operations, because the militia had the capability to use drones to scout targets for rocket attacks. Soleimani’s forces supplied its Iraqi militia allies with a drone Iran had developed that could elude radar systems last fall, according to Reuters.

By late December, attacks by Iranian-backed groups on bases hosting US forces in Iraq were increasing to include firing more than 30 rockets at an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk that killed a US civilian contractor. US airstrikes followed, which set off two days of violent protests at the US embassy in Baghdad.

On Thursday — the day before the attack that killed Soleimani and Muhandis — US Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that the United States might have to take preemptive action to protect American lives from expected attacks by Iran-backed militias.

The attack they provoked did not have the vector they anticipated.

I don’t think anyone’s voices should be banned from anywhere, but I can’t seriously entertain the fiction that it was the GOP doing the “banning” at any time. Kerry and Clinton were both for the war before they were against it, and the NYT & WaPo are part of the same camp.
Does the firing of Bolton make no difference on your calculus of which war-mongering elites are running Trump’s cabinet now?
* * *

The French are complaining that Trump is completely unpredictable, but I interpret that as meaning “we can’t depend on him to do the same things we would do so we don’t know what he will do.” I think it’s legitimate to say we can’t predict details of Trump’s actions, but I also think VDH gets the bigger picture.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iranian-analytics/

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

I totally agree with this; the provocations where Trump “backed down” would not have given him the same bang for the buck – a vicious and essentially unwarranted attack (militarily speaking) on our Embassy that was clearly motivated and controlled by Iranian government forces, did.

Apparently, from several reports, Soleimani made no real secret of his wheareabouts in the last few years, and our military had “plans on the shelf” — as I suggested at the beginning. The tightly compressed time frame made that clear.
Bunker is not really the appropriate word; were the negative associations deliberately invoked? I’m not always sure with NYP & especially Reuters.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/04/decision-to-kill-qassem-soleimani-was-made-in-secret-mar-a-lago-bunker-report/

President Trump met secretly at his Mar-a-Lago resort with his top foreign policy advisers on Sunday to discuss whether it was finally time to kill Iranian general Qassem Soleimani — a question that had haunted American leaders for two decades.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Army General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, crowded into a windowless basement room in the opulent seaside mansion, specially built as a secure area for the nation’s most sensitive conversations, Reuters reported.

The hastily arranged meeting came two days after a missile attack on an Iraqi military base killed an American contractor — and 48 hours before Iran-backed militias stormed the US Embassy compound in Baghdad.

That offensive was the last straw, prompting Trump to give the final order to “take the target packet off the shelf,” a US official said.

The US military had tracked the “brazen” Soleimani’s travels throughout the Middle East for years, a former American official said.

“He gave us an excuse to take a shot,” the former official said.

You write: “Not to be a dick, Neo, but what you want doesn’t matter.”

Gee whiz, and here I thought my preferences dictated foreign policy as well as the choice of pundits and prognosticators in the MSM. I feel so crushed by what you’ve told me!

Your point is poorly taken. Obviously, since this is a blog – my blog, in fact – I express my opinions and preferences rather frequently without imagining they have any effect on the world at all.

Now that we’ve gotten that cleared up, I’ll add that I think there are plenty of non-warmongering voices in the foreign policy establishment, and I include Trump as a non-warmongering voice. Each situation is different, and there is no way to cocoon oneself and never use force. All use of force carries the risk of war.

The present day MSM seems to follow the rule that wars and force, or appeasement and timidity, are all good if a Democratic president does them and bad if a Republican one does. That’s pretty much it, and it’s a worse than worthless way to report on things.

As for your last statement – it “is vital we never again have a situation like 2002/2003 where anti-war voices are essentially banned from the mainstream media” – we’re certainly not going to have such a situation these days when a Republican president is setting foreign policy. Nor did we actually have it in 2002/2003. See this (originally written in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the war):

at least one-third of the top newspapers in this country came out against President Bush taking us to war at that time. Many of the papers may have fumbled the WMD coverage, and only timidly raised questions about the need for war, but when push came to shove five years ago they wanted to wait longer to move against Saddam, or not move at all.

“For apparently the first time in modern history, the U.S. government seems poised to go to war not only lacking the support of many of its key allies abroad but also without the enthusiastic backing of the majority of major newspapers at home,” Ari Berman and I [“I” is Greg Mitchell] wrote at Editor & Publisher on March 19, 2003. Berman had just completed his fifth and (presumably) final prewar survey of the top 50 newspapers’ editorial positions…

Following Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on March 17, newspapers took their last opportunity to sound off before the war started. Of the 44 papers publishing editorials about the war, roughly one-third reiterated strong support for the White House, one-third repeated their abiding opposition to it, and the rest — with further debate now useless — took a more philosophical approach.

But, in the end, the majority agreed that the Bush administration had badly mishandled the crisis. Most papers sharply criticized Washington’s diplomatic efforts, putting the nation on the eve of a pre-emptive war without U.N. Security Council support — and expressed fears for the future despite an inevitable victory.

That’s the way I remember it, too, although revisionist history says otherwise.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/01/petraeus-on-soleimani.php