2020 - Too late for the Liberals

The shameless ass-covering leaks suggest that US military-intelligence deliberately goaded Trump into whacking Suleimani to settle old scores, and now they want us to pin all the blame on Trump and absolve themselves from the coming shitstorm.

Keep telling yourself Trump is some kind of aberration. Empire is violence and it rewards the cruelest & rottenest among us

1984 - Chapter 3 wrote:Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs.

1984 - Chapter 3 wrote:The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms.

You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him.

It was not the US decision to fire missiles against the IRGC commander Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani that killed the Iranian officer and his companions in Baghdad. Yes, of course, the order that was given to launch missiles from the two drones (which destroyed the two cars carrying Sardar Soleimani and his companion the Iraqi commander in al-Hashd al-Shaabi Jamal Jaafar Al-Tamimi aka Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes and burned their bodies in the vehicle) came from US command and control. However, the reason President Donald Trump made this decision derives from the weakness of the “axis of resistance”, which has completely retreated from the level of performance that Iran believed it was capable of after decades of work to strengthen this “axis”.

In Iraq, Major General Soleimani was very patient and never lost his temper. He was trying to reconcile the Iraqis, both his allies and those who had chosen the US camp and disagreed with him. He used to hug those who shouted at him to lower tensions and continue dialogue to avoid spoiling the meeting. Anyone who raised his voice during discussions soon found that it was Soleimani who calmed everyone down."]

Soleimani, although he was the leader of the “Axis of the Resistance”, was sometimes called “the king” in some circles because his name evokes Solomon. According to sources within the “Axis of the Resistance”, he “never dictated his own policy but left a margin of movement and decision to all leaders of the axis without exception. Therefore, he was considered the link between this axis and the supreme leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Soleimani was able to contact Sayyed Khamenei at any time and directly without mediation. The Leader of the revolution considered Soleimani as his son.  

According to sources, in Syria, Soleimani “never hesitated to jump inside a truck, ride an ordinary car, take the first helicopter, or travel on a transport or cargo plane as needed. He did not take any security precautions but used his phone (which he called a companion spy) freely because he believed that when the decision came to assassinate him, he would follow his destiny.  He looked forward to becoming a martyr because he had already lived long.”

General Soleimani died in the wake of his greatest failure and misjudgement. But the manner of his killing may convince many Shia Iraqis that the threat to Iraqi independence from the US is greater than that from Iran. The next few days will tell if the protest movement, which has endured the violence used against it with much bravery, will be deflated by the killings at Baghdad airport.

Wars are reputedly won by generals who make the fewest mistakes. General Soleimani made a bad mistake over the last three months by turning a modest protest into something close to a mass uprising. Trump may have made an even worse mistake by killing General Soleimani and making Iraq, a place where Iran has far more going for it than the US, the arena in which the rivalry between these two powers will be fought out.

It was the Western media profiles of Suleimani that made him really famous among ordinary people. They were frequently translated and published in Iran, both online and in the papers, beginning with Dexter Filkins’s New Yorker profile of Suleimani in 2013. With the threat of the Islamic State looming in Syria, Suleimani was seen as a protective figure by the public, which was terrified of the brutally anti-Shiite Islamic State. The Iranian media rapidly picked up on his popularity, as did the government, resulting in more information on him being leaked.

At the same time as Iranians were fearfully consuming graphic Islamic State videos of beheadings, Iranian media reports quoting security officials or Western media about how Suleimani was striving to bring down the empire of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were highly popular. Videos showing Suleimani on the front lines of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria went viral. A previously largely unknown commander became a symbol of courage and nationalism and a heroic figure who had put his neck on the line to protect the country. His popularity surged drastically, placing him in 2015 and 2016 on a par with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, also extremely popular, who reached a nuclear deal with the West.

Amid all these calls, he called himself a “soldier of the revolution,” rejecting conservative plans to run him as a candidate. He was certainly highly electable. According to a 2019 University of Maryland survey, 82 percent of Iranians held a positive view of Suleimani and 59 percent a highly positive view—far exceeding any other Iranian figure. But that popularity continued, in part, exactly because he avoided entering domestic politics and abusing his reputation.

That’s why millions of people have poured onto the streets of Tehran to commemorate him, including many who oppose the Islamic Republic in other circumstances. This was not just limited to the public; notable figures including the 2009 opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi, who has been under house arrest for a decade; the great Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dowlatabadi; the former political prisoner Abdollah Momeni; the actor Navid Mohammadzadeh; and the prominent London-based journalist Masoud Behnoud expressed their sympathies over the death of Suleimani. Most of them have been seriously critical of the political system over many issues, including the deaths of hundreds of people in recent protests across Iran, but they differentiate between Suleimani and others.

Some Americans have recognized this. In the BBC documentary Shadow Commander: Iran’s Military Mastermind, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the special operations chief during George W. Bush’s presidency, says, “I don’t think we should view him as an evil person. I think we should view him just like I believe in my country. I think Qassem Suleimani believes in his country.”

Suleimani’s heroic image makes his death much more costly for the United States. If a high-ranking military commander whom nobody liked had been killed, things would have been different. Instead, an Iranian government weakened by recent protests has been revived following the assassination of Suleimani. A formerly divided people is now standing firmly behind a government it was fiercely protesting weeks ago.

MY RESOURCES

Judd Legum @JuddLegum wrote:The Sunday talk shows on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN featured SEVEN guests who voted for or publicly supported the Iraq War 2003 and NONE who publicly opposed it.

Trump Administration Blocks Iran’s Top Diplomat From Addressing the U.N. Security Council

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had sought to give a speech condemning the U.S. assassination of Qassem Suleimani- violating the terms of a 1947 headquarters agreement requiring Washington to permit foreign officials into the country to conduct U.N. business, according to three diplomatic sources.

Marc Owen Jones @marcowenjones wrote:
Some strange, but unsurprising things about the incredibly voluminous hashtag "Iranians Detest Soleimani" (via @maasalan ), I sampled around 60,000 tweets from around 9753 account using the hashtag. The most common noun among biographies was "Make America Great Again" & "Trump"

But even before the current crisis, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in recent months had sought to restrict the ability of Zarif—a skilled debater who has studied in the United States and has extensive contacts with American journalists—to make his case to the American public

Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called US President Donald Trump's decision to order the drone strike that killed the country's top military commander an act of "state terrorism" in an interview with CNN Tuesday..."This is an act of aggression against Iran and amounts to an armed attack against Iran, and we will respond. But we will respond proportionally not disproportionally," he said. "We will respond lawfully, we are not lawless people like President Trump."

Reza Marashi Verified account @rezamarashi wrote:"So many of Trump's top advisors on Iran are military vets who served multiple tours of duty in our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They believe to their core that Iran is the reason why they lost those wars, and they're dead set on payback - no matter what it takes."

Background

2020 Assassination

Pat Lang wrote:Someone sent me the news tape linked below from Aleppo in NW Syria.  I have watched it a number of times.  You need some ability in Arabic to understand it.  The tape was filmed in several Christian churches in Aleppo where these two men (Soleimani and al-Muhandis) are described from the pulpit and in the street as "heroic martyr victims of criminal American state terrorism."  
Pompeo likes to describe Soleimani as the instigator of "massacre" and "genocide" in Syria.  Strangely (irony) the Syriac, Armenian Uniate and Presbyterian ministers of the Gospel in this tape do not see him that way.  They see them as men who helped to defend Aleppo and its minority populations from the wrath of Sunni jihadists like ISIS and the AQ affiliates in Syria.  They see them and Lebanese Hizbullah as having helped save these Christians by fighting alongside the Syrian Army, Russia and other allies like the Druze and Christian militias.

It should be remembered that the US was intent on and may still be intent on replacing the multi-confessional government of Syria with the forces of medieval tyranny.  Everyone who really knows anything about the Syrian Civil War knows that the essential character of the New Syrian Army, so beloved by McCain, Graham and the other Ziocons was always jihadi and it was always fully supported by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a project in establishing Sunni triumphalism.  They and the self proclaimed jihadis of HTS (AQ) are still supported in both Idlib and western Aleppo provinces by the Saudis and the present Islamist and neo-Ottoman government of Turkey.

Well pilgrims, there are Christmas trees in the newly re-built Christian churches of Aleppo and these brothers and sisters in Christ remember who stood by them in "the last ditch."

"Currently there are at least 600 churches and 500,000–1,000,000 Christians in Iran." There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, not a single one and Christianity is a banned religion.  These are our allies?
Mr. Jefferson wrote that "he feared for his country when he remembered that God is just."  He meant Virginia but I fear in the same way for the United States.  

Conclusion

http://thesaker.is/america-escalates-its-democratic-oil-war-in-the-near-east/ wrote:What makes America’s oil war in the Near East “democratic” is that this is the only kind of war a democracy can fight – an air war, followed by a vicious terrorist army (ISIS) that makes up for the fact that no democracy can field its own army in today’s world. The corollary is that, terrorism has become the “democratic” mode of warfare.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45556290 wrote:Russia has said Syria shot down one of its military planes - but laid the blame for the deaths of the 15 personnel on board with Israel.

The defence ministry said Israeli jets put the Il-20 plane into the path of Syrian air defence systems on Monday after failing to give Moscow enough warning of a strike on Syrian targets.

The Il-20 disappeared off the radar at about 23:00 local time (20:00 GMT).

The Israel Defence Force (IDF) has expressed "sorrow" over the deaths.

Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 - Destroyed in 1976 - 73 killed

A DC-8 carrying teenage members of Cuba’s junior Olympic fencing team, took off from Barbados bound for Jamaica. The plane made a brief stop in Trinidad and Tobago, where two anti-Fidel Castro terrorists planted a pair of bombs, cleverly hidden inside a camera and a tube of toothpaste, aboard the plane.Shortly after the attack, one of the terrorists, Hernán Ricardo, phoned Orlando Bosch, a CIA-backed, Miami-based Cuban exile militant who, along with fellow anti-Castro terrorist and longtime CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, planned the bombing. "A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff," Ricardo told Bosch. "All got killed."

The CIA, under its new director at the time – none other than George H. W. Bush – knew as early as June 1976 that Cuban exiles were plotting to blow up a Cubana airliner, but did not warn Havana. Ricardo and his accomplice Freddy Lugo were arrested in Trinidad and Tobago. They confessed to the bombing and fingered Bosch and Posada Carriles as the masterminds of the attack. The four men were jailed in Venezuela but Bosch and Posada Carriles escaped. They eventually made their way back to Florida, where they were welcomed as heroes – the city of Miami even declared an official Orlando Bosch Day – and protected by Bush, who was now president. This, despite the Justice Department calling Posada Carriles, the hemisphere’s most wanted terrorist, "an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks."

Itavia Flight 870 - Destroyed in 1980 - 81 killed

Major sources in the Italian media have alleged that the aircraft was shot down during a dogfight involving Libyan, United States, French and Italian Air Force fighters in an assassination attempt by NATO members on an important Libyan politician, perhaps even Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was flying in the same airspace that evening.[13] This version was supported in 1999 by investigative magistrate Rosario Priore,[14] who said in his concluding report that his investigation had been deliberately obstructed by the Italian military and members of the secret service, in compliance with NATO requests.[14]

According to the Italian media, documents from the archives of the Libyan secret service passed on to Human Rights Watch after the fall of Tripoli show that Flight 870 and a Libyan MiG were attacked by two French jets.[15]

On 18 July 1980, 21 days after the Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 incident, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG-23, along with its dead pilot, was found in the Sila Mountains in Castelsilano, Calabria, southern Italy, according to official reports

Iran Air Flight 655 - Destroyed in 1988 - 274 killed

Shot down by ship-launched missile fired by US navy. According to the United States government, the crew of USS Vincennes had incorrectly identified the Airbus as an attacking F-14 Tomcat, a U.S.-made jet fighter that had been part of the Iranian Air Force inventory since the 1970s. According to the Iranian government, the cruiser negligently shot down the aircraft, which was transmitting IFF squawks in Mode III, a signal that identified it as a civilian aircraft, and not Mode II as used by Iranian military aircraft.Some analysts blamed the captain of Vincennes, William C. Rogers III, for overly aggressive behavior in a tense and dangerous environment. The event generated a great deal of criticism of the United States.  

George Bush Sr. on the Iranian plane tragedy: “I will never apologize for the United States of America. Never. I don’t care what the facts are.”

Pan Am Flight 103 - Destroyed in 1998 - 259 killed

In 2003, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.[2] Acceptance of responsibility was part of a series of requirements laid out by a UN resolution in order for sanctions against Libya to be lifted. [Gaddafi has not commented further because in 2011, he was murdered by ISIS jihadists advancing under the cover of NATO jets and directed by NATO special forces, since then all the Libyan gold stockpiles have gone missing...]

Following the Lockerbie verdict in 2001 and the appeal in 2002, attempts have been made to re-open the case amid allegations that Libya was framed. One theory suggests the bomb on the plane was detonated by radio. Another theory suggests the CIA prevented the suitcase containing the bomb from being searched. Iran's involvement is alleged, either in association with a Palestine militant group, or in loading the bomb while the plane was at Heathrow. The US Defense Intelligence Agency alleges that Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur (Ayatollah Mohtashemi), a member of the Iranian government, paid US$10 million for the bombing.

One of the British victim's relatives, Martin Cadman, alleges that a member of President Bush's staff told him: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they are never going to tell."

Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 - Destroyed in 2001 - 78 killed

A commercial flight shot down by the Ukrainian Air Force over the Black Sea on 4 October 2001, en route from Tel Aviv. The accident took place at the time of the combat missile launches during the joint Ukrainian-Russian military air defense exercises. The exercises were held at the 31st Russian Black Sea Fleet Research center near Crimea. Ukraine eventually admitted that it might have caused the crash, probably by an errant S-200 missile fired by its armed forces and paid $15 million to surviving family members of the 78 victims ($200,000 per victim).

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 - Destroyed in 2014 - 289 killed

Destroyed by a surface-to-air missile fired during the 'War in Donbass', the still simmering conflict that began with the openly CIA-supported 'colour revolution' in the Ukraine earlier that year.

Here is the Malaysian Prime Minister's (Dr. Mahathir Mohamad) statement on the: “They never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning.  This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?"

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 - Destroyed in 2014 - 239 (presumed) killed

Wikipedia calls it "one of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time" and it is still unsolved - through evidence points towards someone using a cyber-attack to take remote control of the aircraft.

Russian Surveillance Place Il-20 - Destroyed in 2018 - 15 Russian soldiers killed

Syrian anti-aircraft missile defenses are tricked into destroying a Russian military plane.

Russia said Israel's "irresponsible actions" were to blame, saying it was given less than a minute's warning ahead of the strikes, which was not enough time to get the military surveillance plane out of the way. "The Israeli planes deliberately created a dangerous situation for surface ships and aircraft in the area," a defence ministry spokesman said.

The spokesman accused Israeli pilots of "using the Russian airplane as a cover", putting it "in the line of fire coming from Syrian air defence systems". The plane, the spokesman continued, was shot down by a Syrian missile. "As a result of the irresponsible actions by the Israeli military, 15 Russian servicemen have died," the spokesman said.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/30/the-shadow-commander wrote:Ryan Crocker, the American Ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009, got a similar feeling. During the Iraq War, Crocker sometimes dealt with Suleimani indirectly, through Iraqi leaders who shuttled in and out of Tehran. Once, he asked one of the Iraqis if Suleimani was especially religious. The answer was “Not really,” Crocker told me. “He attends mosque periodically. Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-strike-kills-qassem-soleimani-irans-most-important-military-commander wrote:The Iranian-American author and commentator Hooman Majd expected violent retaliation, as he said Soleimani is perceived within Iran as a nationalist figure who has fought in Iran’s wars since the 1980s. “It’s an incredibly dangerous escalation, not thought through, and certainly the chances of retaliation in places where Iran has the ability to retaliate, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf states, would lead one to believe American government officials or soldiers are potentially in danger,” Majd said.

Amerikka wrote:

“Alexa, play ‘Another One Bites the Dust,’” tweeted Trump 2020 rapid-response staffer Abigail Marone. The post was retweeted by Team Trump’s principal deputy comms director Erin Perrine. “THIS is what strong foreign policy looks like.”

“This is the thing with Freddie Mercury: I think he operated in at least four closets in his life,” said Jason King, an Associate Professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Music.
King notes that two of those closets — which revolve around his sexuality and, later, his AIDS diagnosis — have been widely written about. Lesser known are the closets that contained his race and nationality.

Mercury’ came from the Indian Parsi community, who first came to India from Iran in the eighth century to escape religious persecution as Islam replaced Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion in the region. He wasn’t particularly devout later in life, but when he died, almost all his belongings were burned in accordance with Zoroastrian teaching. One factor as to why Mercury did not open up more about his identity could have been the political situation in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. “His life in London was basically in exile from his life in Zanzibar,” said King. “I’m sure he was happy to be in London because it’s an exciting place to be in the mid-1960s, but it was also a place of incredible migrant hostility.” Mercury faced racist abuse while working as a baggage handler at Heathrow and from audience members at early gigs.

“His life in London was basically in exile from his life in Zanzibar,” said King. “I’m sure he was happy to be in London because it’s an exciting place to be in the mid-1960s, but it was also a place of incredible migrant hostility.” “He like so many postcolonial subjects who displace themselves, became highly English,” said King, pointing things like Mercury’s wearing the Union Jack during concerts and the name he chose for the band itself. Mercury said, “I’m not going to be an Eva Perón. I don’t want to go down in history worried about, ‘My god, I hope they realise that, after I’m dead, I’ve created something or I was something.’ I’ve been having fun.”

His boarding-school teachers and classmates gave him the nickname Freddie, which his parents then also adopted. The mythical Mercury the world came to know began to take shape in 1970. Queen bandmate Brian May has said that it’s tied to the lyrics of their song “My Fairy King,” which mentions a “Mother Mercury” in the final moments. “He said, ‘I am going to become Mercury, as the mother in this song is my mother,’” May said, according to Lesley-Ann Jones’ book “Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury.” “And we were like, ‘Are you mad?’”

Queen’s greatest song of all – the astonishing Don’t Stop Me Now – was a direct product of his hedonism and promiscuity: an unrepentant, joyous, utterly irresistible paean to gay pleasure-seeking. You find yourself wondering if its title might not have been aimed at his censorious bandmates. The standard line is that Queen scuppered their own career in the US by dressing in drag for the video of 1984’s I Want to Break Free, but four years earlier on the tour that followed the release of The Game, fans threw razors on stage in an apparent attempt to get Mercury to shave off the moustache, to look less gay.  In Rolling Stone magazine, bassist John Deacon as good as admitted that Mercury’s appearance was alienating a US audience that was traditionally prickly about homosexuality.  In his final months dying from AIDS he faced an aggressive reaction to his illness lead by the brutally rightwing British tabloid media.

In his autobiography Head On, Julian Cope recounts the experience of supporting Queen at Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982, as part of the Teardrop Explodes, and being showered with homophobic abuse by their fans. “[They] shouted, ‘Fuck off, you queer!’ at me,” recalled an incredulous Cope. “Wow, they dig Monsieur Freddie and they call me queer. So much for the workings of the average mind.”

On January 3, major media all over the world reported that Iranian IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani had been killed in Baghdad by a U.S. drone strike. But Soleimani, according to the Washington Post, wasn’t the only Iranian official U.S. forces targeted that day: another was Abdul Reza Shahlai, an Iranian military commander who, like Soleimani, was a member of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Shahlai was targeted in war-torn Yemen. But unlike Soleimani, he escaped with his life, the Post reports.

“The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration’s killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated,” John Hudson, Missy Ryan and Josh Dawsey report in the Post.

A senior U.S. official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that President Donald Trump’s administration has been quiet about the operation in Yemen because it didn’t go well. The official asserted, “If we had killed him, we’d be bragging about it that same night.”

[https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-administration-targeted-another-senior-iranian-official-when-suleimani-was-killed-but-that-mission-failed/]

Click here to open info on China/US conflict in Iraq:

Don Trump (Speech on January 8, 2020) wrote:For far too long — all the way back to 1979, to be exact — nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond.  Those days are over.  Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism, and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world.  We will never let that happen.

The civilized world must send a clear and unified message to the Iranian regime: Your campaign of terror, murder, mayhem will not be tolerated any longer.  It will not be allowed to go forward.

Today, I am going to ask NATO to become much more involved in the Middle East process.

Maj. Danny Sjursen, US Army (ret.) wrote: Back in 1941, though Tehran declared neutrality in the world war, Russia and Britain jointly invaded and occupied the country to secure control of its oil reserves. Then, in 1953, when a democratically elected prime minister – Mohammad Mossadegh – dared nationalize Iranian oil (which had been largely under Western corporate control) the CIA coordinated a coup with MI6 to overthrow the government. The dictatorial Shah was promptly put in power and ruled with an iron fist for the next 26 years. America had armed, funded, and backed this brutal regime for two and a half decades.

And that, folks, an aggressive, illegal, intervention to overthrow an elected government – one of the most intrusive sins in foreign affairs – amounts to checkmate in the blame-game: Uncle Sam started it! You know something else? That still matters…

This is not to say Iran hasn’t played a nefarious part of its own, or that there was zero blood on Soleimani’s hands, or that there aren’t human rights violations within the Islamic State. My narrow – but profoundly consequential – assertion is simply this: between the two adversaries, it was the United States that "started" this war.

George Galloway wrote: A recurring line [Trump] used and which has not yet been much discussed in the “Orientalised” West which struck me as worth dissecting.

Iran was in conflict with the “civilized world” he said, and more than once. That Trump first of all sees himself as “civilized” is surprising. It would be hard to name a single US president with a lower cultural level than the host of The Apprentice - but if he is the “civilised” one in this confrontation then who are the barbarians?

Iran was the centre of a vast civilisation stretching all the way to Greece millennia before the first settlers representing Trump’s civilisation even arrived in the “New World.” Did he mean China, a centre of the world for thousands of years? Or Russia, the land of Dostoyevsky, of Pushkin, of Mayakovsky?  Did he mean France and Germany which continue to struggle to rescue the Iran nuclear deal and which semi-publicly seethes over Trump’s brutish simian conduct?  

In fact, the only two countries actually supporting Trump’s actions on the Iran front (and one of them under duress) are Saudi Arabia, actually in a state of fear and alarm about where all this might lead, and Israel!

If Trump, Netanyahu, and the Saudi royal family really constitute the “civilized world” then humanity is in even more trouble than we thought.

In fact, one definition of a “civilized world” might usefully be those who are fighting the Black Hundreds of ISIS and Al Qaeda, the mediaeval obscurantists whose black banners so nearly flew over Damascus and Baghdad. But that definition would have had to include General Soleimani, who hammered ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Another definition of a civilized world might be those who are working to denuclearize the world, to make and stick to new treaties which gradually eliminate the existential threat of nuclear weapons - but that definition would have to exclude Trump.

Perhaps the safest definition of a “civilised world” would be a world in which states do not make aggressive war against other states, do not seek to destroy the governments of other states. States which eschew hegemony and the naming of centuries after themselves. A civilised world in which international law is obeyed and not trashed, a world in which no state occupies, oppresses, or exploits another. A “rules-based order” as the true barbarians currently describe themselves.

The hordes of Genghis Khan were way more civilised than them.

BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE ZIONIST ANGLO_AMERICAN EMPIRE

Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures wrote:
Bannon, 66, claimed that Trump's vision of foreign policy is at odds with establishment politicians in Washington, D.C.

"What President Trump did is go against the established order," remarked Bannon. "The permanent political class's foreign policy was to appease these dictators, to appease Beijing, and that's why saw the rise of China. To appease the mullahs in Iran, and that's why you saw this expansion of Iran with Hezbollah throughout the Middle East.

"Donald Trump said, 'This is not going to happen on my watch,'" Bannon continued. "He's taken a very Churchillian stand, like Churchill took in the 1930s. It's the permanent political class, and the John Kerrys, the Hillary Clintons, the foreign policy establishment, the Neville Chamberlains, they were the appeasers. He went to economic war."

Neoconservativism in a Nutshell - Jim Lobe (2016) wrote:I’ve been asked to give a kind of Neoconservatism 101 over the next 15 minutes or so, which is a big challenge for me. It took seven hours to get through the subject with the Institute for American Studies in Beijing 12 years ago when Chinese analysts were first trying to fathom why the U.S. had been so stupid as to invade Iraq.

So I’ll start by summing up.

If I were asked to boil down neoconservatism to its essential elements—that is, those that have remained consistent over the past nearly 50 years—I would cite the following:

* a Manichean view of a world in which good and evil are constantly at war and the United States has an obligation to lead forces for good around the globe.

* a belief in the moral exceptionalism of both the United States and Israel

* a conviction that, in order to keep evil at bay, the United States must have—and be willing to exercise—the military power necessary to defeat any and all challengers. There’s a corollary: force is the only language that evil understands.

* the 1930s—with Munich, appeasement, Chamberlain, Churchill—taught us everything we need to know about evil and how to fight it.

Jean Chretien wrote:Former prime minister Brian Mulroney, have called for Chretien to help massage the Canada-China relationship after the targeted kidnapping.

"Chretien knows all these fellows, as I do and as other prime ministers do, on a personal basis. And he gets their attention, as opposed to a delegation of parliamentarians or something who will deal with people at the range of assistant deputy ministers. You don't want that. This has to be dealt with on a high level," Mulroney said.

Chretien ruled it out, "I don't want to be the Monday morning quarterback for anybody."  

"It's a trap that was set to us by Trump, and then it was very unfair, because we paid the price for something that Trump wanted us to do," said Jean Chretien in an interview with CTV Power Play.