By Capt Joseph R. John, January 7, 2020, Op Ed #462

For over 40 years Iran has been at war with the United States, and the Terrorist Master, Soleimani, who planned and coordinated Iran’s violent attacks against all US forces, killing and maiming thousands of members of the US Armed Forces in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  

Most recently, Soleimani led the effort of Iran’s shoot down of a 20 million dollar drone flying over the Persian Gulf; the US did not respond.

Iran next attacked on Saudi ARAMCO’s crude oil refining center in eastern Saudi Arabia, one of America’s allies, with rockets and cruise missiles; the US did not respond.

Iran then attacked two large crude oil takers on the high seas in the Persian Gulf threatening freedom of navigation; the US did not respond.

The US had been showing enormous restraint, as it had during Iran’s targeting and killing of 600 US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of the Terror Master, Soleimani, which also maimed  hundreds of thousands of other US military personnel for life.

When Iran perpetrated their next violent attack on US military personnel at a military base in Iraq, killing one American and wounding four other Americans, the US finally responded and struck and killed the 25 attackers.

Iran mobilized its terrorists to storm and occupy the US Embassy in Baghdad which is actually an attack on US soil.  The US had enough, and responded with a surgical military strike that took out the perpetrator of all the previous attacks, and many more attacks on the US over the last 40 years, the Terrorist Master, Soleimani. 

Today, Iran is firing multiple short range tactical ballistic and cruise, surface to surface missiles, from multiple location of Iranian territory, targeting every US facilities in Iraq.  The military attack is a severe escalation of military aggression by one country against another; the US Armed Forces will retaliate on the multiple sources of those military attacks.  

Please review the below listed article on the Terrorist Master, Soleimani, and his murderous history of attacking US military forces.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John.  All Rights Reserved.  The material can only be posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author.  It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.   
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From Jeff Jacoby

Monday, January 6, 2020

Soleimani had it coming 

“Politics stops at the water’s edge,” Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously declared in 1947, in the early years of the Cold War. The Michigan Republican, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that presidents shouldn’t be undermined by domestic politics as they dealt with foreign policy crises abroad. He urged bipartisan support for several of President Harry Truman’s signature policies, including the Marshall Plan, the formation of NATO, and the Truman Doctrine.

Neither party has been especially rigorous about adhering to Vandenberg’s principle over the years. The Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars, to mention the most obvious examples, all became fodder for intense partisan skirmishes. And in the wake of foreign disasters and blunders — think of the Bay of Pigs, American hostages in Tehran, the mass murders of 9/11, or the 2012 Benghazi attack — the party that controls the White House has generally taken plenty of flak from the opposition.

But with Friday’s US drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani — the leader of Iran’s murderous Quds Force, a monster with the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands — came something new: vehement partisan denunciation of a president for a successful military action.

In the past, the killing of major terror chieftains has called forth bipartisan applause.

When SEAL Team Six, carrying out President Obama’s orders, killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, Americans across the spectrum rejoiced, conservatives and Obama critics (such as yours truly) very much included. A few years earlier, when the US Air Force targeted and killed the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a New York Times editorial cheered: “It is good news for Washington, and even better news for Iraq, that the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was finally killed on Wednesday by an American air strike.”

The operation last October that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State terror organization, was welcomed by both Republicans and Democrats; pretty much the only thing about that operation that evoked criticism was President Trump’s bombastic mockery as he announced Baghdadi’s death (“He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.”)

But the death of Soleimani — a more deadly enemy than Bin Laden, Zarqawi, or Baghdadi — set off a paroxysm of recrimination and outragefrom many on the left. Some claimed that Trump exceeded his authority in ordering a drone strike without first clearing it through Congress. Others accused him of violating the US policy against assassinations.

“But that long-time ban has never applied to terrorists, which Soleimani clearly was,” the Wall Street Journal noted on Saturday.
He ran Iran’s Quds Force, which the Bush Administration designated as a terror group in 2007. He was also a general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Trump designated as a terror group last year. If Trump’s drone strike was illegal, then so were Barack Obama’s raid on Osama bin Laden and his hundreds of drone strikes over eight years as president.

Actually, it was thousands of drone strikes over Obama’s eight years as president.  In April 2015, the Washington Times reported that “US forces have now surpassed 2,800 strikes against targets in Iraq and Syria under President Obama’s war against the Islamic State, all as part of a conflict Congress has yet to specifically authorize.” Feeling pressure from Congress, the Times story added, the Obama White House had “finally submitted a draft authorization for the use of military force against the Islamic State,” but it languished on Capitol Hill, neither approved nor rejected by Congress. Meanwhile, the Times reported,

The US military has been conducting strikes in Iraq for 10 months, and began striking directly at targets in Syria last September as part of Obama’s announced campaign to degrade the capabilities of the Islamic State.

This past weekend’s attacks brought the total to 1,458 strikes in Iraq and 1,343 in Syria by US forces. Coalition forces allied with the US have conducted another 655 attacks on Iraqi targets and 95 in Syria.

Obama has justified the attacks under his commander-in-chief powers and under the 2001 resolution authorizing force against al Qaeda, and the 2002 resolution authorizing the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

There is a serious argument to be made that presidents should have to get congressional approval before embarking on any new military campaign, but the Islamic Republic of Iran has been a military enemy of the United States for 40 years. The Quds Force, through the military organizations it controls, has attacked and killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of American allies in Iraq.

Soleimani was a combatant in uniform; he commanded enemy attackers who regularly carried out violent assaults on US troops and civilians. As recently as last Tuesday, Soleimani-directed militiamen in Baghdad stormed the US embassy, smashing windows and setting fires. A couple days earlier, the Iranian-directed Kataib Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at the K-1 air base in Kirkuk, killing a US contractor and wounding four US personnel. Other attacks by Iranian proxies in recent months included the destruction of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the shooting down of a US drone flying in international airspace.

Thus — as Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary in the Obama administration, told Meet the Press on Sunday — Soleimani “was a lawful military objective, and the president, under his constitutional authority as commander in chief, had ample domestic legal authority to take him out.”

The killing of Soleimani was also an act of justice on behalf of the enormous numbers of non-American men, women, and children whose lives he destroyed or shattered. “Soleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hezbollah model in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how,” wrote the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran in the New York Times over the weekend.

In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million. In Iraq, as we have seen in recent days, Suleimani’s militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions.

Add to that tally the victims of Quds Force-organized violence in Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dissidents and protesters within Iran. Soleimani was responsible for “countless atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere,” editorialized the Washington Post , which explains why “his death in a drone strike was being cheered Friday by US allies and progressive forces across the region, from Israelis and Saudis to the pro-reform demonstrators of Beirut and Baghdad.” Journalist Kim Ghattas, writing in The Atlantic, noted that people in Syria were “passing trays of baklava to celebrate Soleimani’s death.”

Before last week, US presidents several times considered killing Soleimani, and always rejected the option. That didn’t make the Middle East safer, it didn’t appease Tehran into halting its terror operations, and it degraded American deterrence.  Now Soleimani is dead. Whatever comes next, the world today is a less evil place.