The Trump administration's assassination of Qassim Soleimani

            The Trump administration’s assassination, public murder (perhaps more accurately described as reckless international terrorism) of a high-ranking member of a foreign state, Qassim Soleimani, a major general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the commander of its Al-Quds Force, perhaps the second most powerful figure in Iran and one of the regions most significant Shia commanders, is a cowardly and unlawful incitement that will likely further exacerbate conflict within a region of the world that the United States has razed.   

            That the Iranian response has taken the form of firing some twenty missiles at two Iraqi bases that house U.S. and Iraqi forces after first forewarning Iraqi officials, resulting in zero American or Iraqi casualties, indicates that the Iranian response is a symbolic demonstration of potential military force and a fairly remarkable restraint upon further escalation given the gravity of the Trump administration’s provocative assassination.  
 

            The timing and transparently fallacious reasoning offered for the assassination by the Trump administration strongly suggests that Trump is absolutely desperate to distract away from the immediate domestic political reality that is his long overdue impeachment proceedings.   

            Within the context of the middle east and the fight against the Islamic State which is itself the product of the illegal war of aggression that is the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq, the assassination of Soleimani is perfectly self-defeating.  The IRGC, the Al-Quds Force and the region’s various Shia militias are among the dominant forces fighting the Islamic State and have largely composed the ground forces fighting the Islamic State (Daesh) with the United States involvement in the fighting consisting in air strikes.  

            Vice President Mike Pence’s vulgar lies about Soleimani assisting 10 of the 12 9-11 hijackers definitively illustrates the absolute ignorance, incompetence and deceit of the Trump administration as there were infamously 19 hijackers, not 12, and al-Qaida is an extremist, militant Sunni group that has been enemies of Shia Iranian forces, just as Iran has been enemies of the Taliban and the Islamic State.  Mike Pompeo's egregious lies about Soleimani being an imminent threat to the United States are not only absolutely ludicrous, but actually laughable as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002-5 Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has observed.  

            Further self-defeating and disruptive is the assassination that it has been revealed that Soleimani was visiting Iraq by Iraqi caretaker PM Adel Abdul-Mahdi to discuss with him the Iranian response to the Saudi proposal for defusing the region’s tension between, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Iran, that Iraq had sent to Iran from Saudi Arabia.  

            If the utterly reckless and toxic elements within the Trump administration that are promoting war with Iran either by accident or design are allowed to continue on down this heinously dangerous course, the catastrophe in the middle east initiated by the United States' invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 will be exacerbated such that a conflict with Iran will make the Iraq war look like a cake walk.    

            While Trump's impeachment proceedings continue and as the Congress has the power to declare acts of war, not the executive, and as Trump didn't even bother to inform Congress of the assassination of Soleimani as he's Constitutionally required to do, his unlawful act of war/terrorism in assassinating Soleimani ought to be yet another article of impeachment.

            The military industrial complex and the assortment of neocons and ultra-right-wing extremists within the Trump administration pushing for an incredibly dangerous war with Iran must be opposed at all costs.