The hypocritical sympathy of American and European libertarians and leftists for a notorious Iranian mastermind of murder and mayhem is a sick farce and betrayal of peace principles. The target of a drone strike outside Baghdad airport, Qassam Soleimani well knew that he deserved a violent death not as a "martyr" for social justice but due to his personal responsibility for mass murders of vast numbers of foes, the unnecessary sacrifice of his own commandos and cold-blooded killings of the Iranian boys he dispatched on suicide missions, along with untold numbers of car bombings and collateral damage to innocent civilians in a dozen countries of the Middle East and Africa.
Major General Soleimani was a ruthless killer whose fanatic bravado was faked for propaganda purposes, for instance, his supposed refusal to wear a bullet-proof vest to test "God's will". That morbid posturing disclosed a subliminal wish to end the nightmare of his own hellish reign of terror. Save your grief for the families of thousands of his victims, including American servicemen in Afghanistan and Muslim boys strapped with suicide vests on hopeless missions.
At another level, in the rarefied air of world leadership, what is the judgment on Soleimani? Hero or villain, angel or demon? That question is all important for an international community now facing the imminent prospect of a World War III caused by the imperial ambitions of the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing Axis, hastily preparing for their restoration as great empires with a first strike by hypersonic missiles against the USA and its few allies willing to stand in defense of humane values. The neoliberal Chamberlains of Wall Street and socialist Daladiers of the EU are groveling once again, this time to the brute force looming against opiated, digital-saturated and media-deranged citizens of their own crumbling western alliance.
There's no doubt in the minds of the corrupt and cynical ruling families of those three resurgent empires that the leader of the Quds strike force of the Revolutionary Guards is a hero of their band of fascism against a faltering decadent democracy. Meanwhile, behind the brave front, there's secret celebration in Tehran among the elitist families of the Ayatollahs that their sins of treachery, corruption and treason will be buried along with the conveniently eliminated "martyr" Soleimani, who was disgusted by their cowardice, selfish greed and indolence.
Whatever his religious posturing, Soleimani was a murderer, thriving and advancing through spiraling violence. If anyone is responsible for dragging out the Afghan war, Yemen bloodshed, Gaza horrors, Iraq's civil conflicts and the Syrian crisis, it was Qassem Soleimani. arguably the most morally twisted character in the present world drama. Don't shed tears for the chief of Al Quds clandestine operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards when allied retribution by airstrike was long overdue and far less than equal measure to what he had been dealing out mercilessly to thousands of innocents on all sides of conflicts across the Near East and Central Asia.
Soleimani the Great, he certainly was not, being just the first barbarian lord to appear at the start of this Dark Age as countless more arrive over the horizon. The historians at Harvard and Oxford have been saying: "Oh, conditions weren't so bad after the fall of Rome." So why not try to enjoy your new diet of peas and flat bread, and servitude under the whip, you lowly serfs! The intellectuals who misguide foreign policy can say what nonsense they will, so long as defense at the gates is assigned to the brave few men and women who comprehend the importance of passing on civilized values.
In this case of terminating terrorist-in-chief, the Pentagon hit the nail on its head. Bravo! As a longtime critic of unjust wars, I can in a real crisis muster the sensibility to recognize that military action is necessary to stop a reign of terror from spreading to every doorway. Before going into detail about his executioner's role in the Ayatollahs' phony "holy war", which is less about Islamic heritage issues and more about confiscating the petroleum assets of Iraq and Bahrain, let's here ponder the global implications of the Soleimani affair.
The Axis of Evil at last coalesces
George W. Bush was nearly right about the "axis of evil" being Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Saddam Hussein, however, proved to be not in the same league, being a Rumsfeld asset who failed to put up minimal resistance to the U.S.-led invasion and then getting caught in a hole and hanged from the gallows by the Iranian puppet regime in Baghdad. Now at last, the Second Axis is arising for real in the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran strategic nexus, to fill the boots of the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome pact that launched World War II, the bloodiest conflict in history. Incapable of finding peaceful solutions for their domestic economic problems, these three rising powers are seeking to dominate and exploit lesser nations coerced and bribed to succumb to their control. Expansion is deeply etched in the national consciousness of these former imperial powers. The upstart leaders of a few minor contenders are seeking to emulate these rising powers in order to avoid subjugation under them, including North Korea, Turkey and Venezuela.
The militarist build-up and oligarchic social-economic stratification of these neo-Axis powers block any development of popular grassroots values and peacetime economic growth (unless fueled by external investment from the traitorous fools with Wall Street and Silicon Valley). The result is parasitic demands for financial rewards and technology theft from the West, backed by threats of force and property confiscation, a situation far worse and more unfair than normative capitalist exploitation.
These powers of the Second Axis decades ago abandoned their propaganda of "liberation of the masses" and have since been adopting Big Tech surveillance, censorship and media blackout to quell their own populations. Their "spy on your children and neighbors" system is aimed at public obedience and social conformity far more extensive than the informer networks of the Gestapo, the Kempeitai (the Imperial Japanese military police) and Mussolini's OVRA, the Organization of Vigilance and Repression of Anti-fascism.
Phony patriotism is whipped to the extent of brainwashing their populations to accept the notion of a first strike against the United States and other targeted countries with genocidal hypersonic weapons, electromagnetic warfare and a deluge of computer hacking. Tsar Vladimir Putin's televised boasts about nuclear-armed cruise missiles are the blathering of a madman, and his neo-Axis pals and lackeys are thrilled to hear his insane rambling about exterminating Americans. It's not merely bluffing or idle talk, but a mindset that must be comprehended in cold, clear terms that these illegitimate rulers are shaping up as potential mass murderers who make Stalin and Hitler seems like schoolboys. Given the improbability of these homicidal maniacs being overthrown by their own peoples, Americans, Europeans and Japanese must face their duty to remove these offensive lunatics by "cutting the venomous heads off the snakes". Regime change is the polite term for something that will be far costlier in human lives.
The immediate reaction from both the politically correct left and the idealist libertarian right along with Steve Bannon's fringe homegrown pro-Kremlin movement, is to jump and shout: "How's that any different than what's happening here?" On the surface, the comparison may not seem like a lot, but you can still sue the federal government in a court of law and Supreme Court does have to base judgments on a piece of paper called the U.S. Constitution. That's makes all the difference between a neo-fascist dictatorship and a democratic republic. Try protesting within the boundaries of those heroic peace-loving foes of American hegemony, and you will soon be trying to slip messages for help into Alibaba packages and Amazon gifts destined for consumers in the West.
Unless Beijing reverses course quickly as the only member of the troika with an iota of rationality, then another world war will become inevitable and therefore to lessen the damage to all sides the USA will have to strike focused hammer blows as soon as possible to eliminate the oligarchs and their general staffs. There is no longer any space left for negotiation or compromise. Action speaks louder than words, that is the message of the "tragic death" of superhero Qassam.
My intent is not belligerence but to prevent the loss of billions of lives in another global war, like the one that my father fought in all the way from Sicily to Munich and his uncles on the other side with the Axis inside China and the Philippines across vast terrains of death, mutilation, rape and starvation. Peace-making does not mean feeding your newborn child to appease the hunger of a wolf. The refusal of anti-Western elites to recognize the real dangers that they are bringing on to their own populations has forced the White House to send a message that aggression will not be tolerated.
General Soleimani was the point-man for the New Axis and now a martyr for their misguided campaign to crush the West and kill all the Westerners. His "heroism" is being used to promote self-sacrifice by their young people to further the delusions of grandeur for their elderly bosses. Now let's get into his bloody record, most of that under wraps in Tehran's secret archives.
War of Deception
Qassam Soleimani was the embodiment of deception, a creative genius at the art of warfare, operating on the Shiite maxim that lying to a non-believer is not a sin but a virtue in defense of umma, the community of faith. As a champion of asymmetric warfare, he was a master deceiver, but then again so is the Shiite Antichrist known as the Dajjal. At minimum, there's moral ambiguity in his career record, rather than the stark black-and-white portrait of duty and self-sacrifice being promoted to his fanboys in the Revolutionary Guard.
The official biography presents this hardened murderer as a brilliant young officer in the 1980s Iraq-Iran War, specifically along the western front when Iraqi jets were spraying Iranian defenders with nerve gas secretly provided by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. That indeed might have seemed proof enough that the USA was a Satanic power, even though Rummie's secret authorization was in blatant violation of American law and congressional oversight. Despite a deficit in air power, Soleimani designed a counterattack based on maneuvers through the Kurdish highlands, outflanking the Iraqi ground force on the plains.
The official biography omits the fact that Iran's brightest and best officer achieved his regular army troops' deep penetration maneuver by pinning down the Iraqi armored offensive with suicide bombings by Iranian teenagers. The mullahs promises these naive lads a reward of 24 virgins in the afterlife for blowing up the prized target. With that pleasant dream implanted in their tiny skulls, the Iranian boys crawled at night toward the Iraqi Republican Guard battle tanks and would jump aboard before pulling the cord to the detonator, that is, if they got past the automatic weapons fire. For a grown man to coerce a naive youth from some rural village with a cynical lie about a harem in the afterlife is an unforgivable sin, heaping shame on the war criminals who claim to be theologians. If this is "God's will", then what's left for the Devil?
Of course, that cynical deceiver of children Soleiman never intended those youths to stop the Iraqi charm offensive. Their suicidal efforts, most of them being cut down by machine-gun fire, was a mere distraction, shifting away astounded enemy attention while the Iranian Army was infiltrating across the Kurdistan mountains deep into Iraq. The life-wasting ploy was awarded with career advancement. The deposed Shah, for all his crimes against political prisoners, never did anything comparable to that depraved level.
Sectarian bloodshed in Iraq
Countering aggression is one thing, but encouraging the adversary to mass murder one's own followers is quite something else. Soleimani organized clandestine weapons shipments across the Euphrates-Tigris delta to Iraqi Shiites civilians living in the southeastern swamps. Predictably, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein countered arms smuggling with harsh repression against the swamp dwellers, those operations marking the start of the Shiite uprising that ended in his execution during George W. Bush's occupation of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was not entirely to blame for the massacre of southern Iraqis, whose hopeless rebellion was due to Soleimani's weapons smuggling and the Iranian clerics' fatwa in support of civil war in Iraq.
Soleimani posed as a patriot and sectarian fighter, but hero? Actually, none of those, for he was primarily a propagandist. As a black-ops commander, he encouraged a higher-than-necessary casualty rate in his many campaigns, which disclosed that his underlying purpose was to encourage martyrdom in service to Iran's imperial interests across the Middle East. The absurdly ineffective missile barrages by Hamas in Gaza, prompting Israeli payback airstrikes and phosphorous barrages, increased the number of civilian casualties as propaganda against Tel Aviv. The Palestinians were used as cannon fodder. The same sort of sinister high-casualty tactics were encouraged among the Hezbollah in South Lebanon and in the Kurdish resistance to Turkish intrusions in Syria, and even more so among the Houthi population in Yemen, with the high death rate for newborns and mothers. Starving infants make for convincing online images. It's cruel and it works. Since the overthrow of the Shah, and early-on hopes for democratic rights and economic reform, the Ayatollahs' Islamic Revolution has gone off the rails, killing or maiming all the train passengers.
Persian Imperialism
The civilian casualties sustained in Soleimani's covert wars had the intended effect of killing off indigenous local leaders, creating a political vacuum for installing Iranian "advisers". The ruthlessness of his tactics of imperial domination raises a disturbing question. Did in fact Soleimani run clandestine car-bombings of public markets in Iraqi Shiite and shrines across Iraq, with the convenient fall-guys among the defeated Sunni forces in order to sway Iraqi Shiites toward dependency on Tehran via CIA go-between Ahmed Chalabi and his corrupt corps of puppet politicians. It's clear that Tehran wanted to edge out the indigenous Iraq-based Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who opposed the American occupation of Iraq and whose father heroically resisted British colonialism.
For the Ayatollahs and mullahs, gaining control of their founders' tombs in Iraq's Najaf and Karbala, second in importance only to eventual takeover of Mecca and Medina. Everywhere that Iran exerts influence, the pattern is similar, degrading local forces to promote Iranian mentorship followed by political subjugation under a reemerging Persian Empire. Dozens of front groups across the Mideast created by Soleimani have been played like piano keys to hammer out a Persian tune, as seen in the the Lebanese Hezbollah's frontline role in the Syrian civil war.
Iranian Sabotage in the Afghan War
President Donald Trump's terse recent statement about Soleimani being responsible for "thousands of American casualties" confirms my early-on journalistic findings from interviews of the Taliban, right before and after the 911 attacks and subsequently. Trump has not gone into detail about the Iranian role in sabotaging the American peacekeeping forces and undermining negotiations with the Taliban. (The CIA role in this sabotage explains much of the curious dirty talk between the Comey FBI's Iranian assets Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and other conduits to Tehran.)
At the start of the Afghan War after the 911 false-flag attacks, Qassam Soleimani's home province of Kerman was on the eastern frontline against Iran's public enemy Osama bin Laden and also any Afghan faction hostile to Tehran or Shiite interests. One point to comprehend is that Dari, an older variant of the Persian spoken word, is the common language in Afghanistan, which tends to reinforce there also Iranian interests in dominating its Dari-speaking neighbors. Therefore, the Iranian secret services have provided rear bases, financial aid, weapons and supplies to Ismail Khan, the warlord based in the city of Herat, which controls the road from Iran's port of Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf.
Also the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was in exile at the time somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula (I was unable to pin down his Arab sponsor at the time, some sources claiming the Saudis and others implicating the Emir of Qatar, as related to the Chechnya attacks), reappeared at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and arrived in a VIP car caravan at Herat to rebirth his jihadist Haqqani Network of old-timers who had fought on Jimmy Carter's CIA payroll against the Soviet invasion in the early 1980s. There are few, in any, fixed everlasting loyalties in this tumultuous region. Haqqani was by then a player for Iran, which tended to confirm that he had been a guest of the Qatari royal house. Since then the Haqqani militia has inflicted huge numbers of casualties on the U.S. occupation forces, along with sponsoring the Pakistan "Taliban", especially during the Obama-Petraeus "surge".
The DIA ploy of creating a fake "Bin Laden" was in large part an attempt to lure Haqqani into a lethal trap. Soleimani must have chuckled at that absurd ploy and the "burial at sea" of a man who had died about eight years earlier. The Iranian front groups managed to inflict hundreds of American casualties during the "surge", the plans for which were completely blown and disclosed to Tehran by its agents in the CIA, then under its director Leon Panetta.
As for the falsehood of the dead Osama incident in 2011 (conveniently before the tenth anniversary of 911), the fact was that a 23-member family traveling party, which included Osama bin Laden, was flown to Sharjah UAE and then East Africa departed Afghanistan in December 2001 aboard a private jet belonging to Uzbek-born Bukharan Jew arms dealer and transporter Victor Bout. That was soon after the start of the USAF bombing runs against the tunnel complex at Tora Bora early in the war, when his aides deemed the situation too dangerous for the leader suffering a kidney affliction. (I was at the time the only journalist on the Pakistan-Afghanistan to report Obama's flight, although bed-ridden in the Khyber market of Peshawar on death's doorstep due to blood loss from a sand fly-borne leishmansis infection).
The upshot of that chaotic situation, which I duly reported for the Hong Kong press, Egyptian second-in-command of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri visited eastern Iran soon thereafter to meet with spymaster Soleimani, receiving Iranian military aid, money and training camps. The Iranians were relieved that their nemesis bin Laden was gone and that Zawahiri would be taking potshots at the Americans, who the Iranians suspected of planning to build huge military bases for a coming invasion of Iran. Of course, Soleimani was promoted and feted for exposing this dastardly ultimate plot by George W. Bush, who then confirmed the suspicions by invading Iraq. Soleimani was now fighting a two-front war, putting him on par with Cyrus the Great, and hopefully not a rerun of Darius III (this scenario inspiring Oliver Stone's movie "Alexander").
After the election of Barack Obama, the Iranian leadership suddenly woke up to the fact that the Americans were not coming to invade Iran and so exuberantly started to flex their muscles in and around the Persian Gulf against their age-old enemy, the Caliphate of Baghdad (which had been annihilated by the Mongols). Then out of nowhere, the new Caliphate of Iraq and the Levant suddenly emerged, thanks to the ."Obama-Brennan strategy to run an pipeline from Qatar and Saudi Arabia through Syria to the Mediterranean (to compete against the Russian "stream" lines to Europe. The defeat of ISIS in Syria emboldened Soleimani's Quds militia to establish military bases in Syria against Israel and the Arab states, as well as expand the forward-base strategy in Iraq and Yemen against Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. At the time of his death, Soleimani was preparing a two-pronged attack on America military positions in eastern Syria, likely supported by Iraqi Kurds.
World War III on the near horizon
That's sufficient background on Soleimani to establish that Americans and their real allies are facing an existential threat similar to the immediate prelude of Pearl Harbor. Taking a cue from the response of Japanese Americans in the winter of 1941-42, American citizens of Iranian, Russian and Chinese descent can expect to face a harsh choice of being among the first to volunteer in defense of the United States or be damned forever as traitors. There is no in-between, no neutrality, no having it both ways.
As for all citizens of Western democracies, World War III will be the most devastating clash of arms ever, meaning that only an early-on decisive win over despotism offers any possibility of global survival and eventual clemency for innocent enemy nationals after punishment is meted out to the war criminals like Putin's cronies and the Ayatollahs who are planning their coming victory. Be certain, this is not Vietnam redux, since that was a tiny nation being justly assaulted for insufficient cause. That's why there has been next to nothing in the way of antiwar dissent among Iranians, Russians and Chinese, meaning their populations bear the risk of a nuclear exchange and complete annihilation by the most powerful military force ever assembled in human experience.
Under these harsh circumstances of a new Axis rising, America is not at fault and therefore preaching peace in a season for defensive warfare represents unacceptable defeatism leading straight to self-destruction and slavery for the handful of survivors. Victory is the only option, however horrific the cost and the moral burden of a preemptive strike against the looming foes. Peace is possible only when stubborn barbaric fools give up all hope of surviving the impending contest. Patience has been wasted on suicidal imbeciles whose moral authority falls far short of the authoritarian instincts. The USA will not go the way of Rome, that much is certain, whether millions or billions die in the inferno.
