US Erection 12 *AND* 16 *AND* 20 *AND* 22 *AND* 24

[Per]

30 dead and still counting at the funeral.

I thought this shit only happened at Who concerts.

“To Middle Eastern Shi’ites, he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one.”

[ukcanuck]

30 dead and still counting at the funeral.

I thought this shit only happened at Who concerts.

“To Middle Eastern Shi’ites, he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one.”

We are not going to rely on trumpite’s ability to gauge the size of a crowd are we?

Speaking of funerals...
Seems a dead terrorist draws more than the flies trump did on his Inauguration Day

[rats19]

Attend or be shot........at

[Cousin Strawberry]

30 dead and still counting at the funeral.

I thought this shit only happened at Who concerts.

“To Middle Eastern Shi’ites, he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one.”

We are not going to rely on trumpite’s ability to gauge the size of a crowd are we?

Speaking of funerals...
Seems a dead terrorist draws more than the flies trump did on his Inauguration Day

I wonder if the crowds will be bigger for his 2nd term parade....me thinks they will be.

Its will be way entertaining to watch the wrist slitting when that comes to pass

[Per]

Attend or be shot........at

No, really. In Iran he was a national hero. Poor farm boy, who during the war between Iran and Iraq became assigned to the special forces, fought behind enemy lines and gradually rose in rank to general. In a region dominated by Sunni he has been the champion for Shiites everywhere. He lead the fight against ISIS, and is by many seen as having had a pivotal role in turning the tables and preventing the Assad regimes imminent defeat.

Now, as you know, I don’t like Assad, nor am I a fan of the Iranian theocracy. But it makes total sense to me that a people that has been persecuted and harassed through the ages appreciate a war hero that actually manages to land some crushing blows to the enemy.

Most of the Iranian leaders are loathed or at least disliked, but this was the one guy within the regime that had popular support. That’s why they were considering launching him as their next presidential candidate, and most Middle East experts believe he would have won. In part because of his war hero status, but also because he had a reputation of staying away from corruption in a country where almost all leaders are corrupt.

Where once he kept to the shadows, Soleimani has in recent years become an unlikely celebrity in Iran — replete with a huge following on Instagram.

His profile rose suddenly when he was pushed forward as the public face of Iran's intervention in the Syrian conflict from 2013, appearing in battlefield photos, documentaries — and even being featured in a music video and animated film.
In a rare interview aired on Iranian state television in October, he said he was in Lebanon during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war to oversee the conflict.

To his fans and enemies alike, Soleimani was the key architect of Iran's regional influence, leading the fight against jihadist forces and extending Iran's diplomatic heft in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

“To Middle Eastern Shiites, he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one,” wrote former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack in a profile for Time's 100 most influential people in 2017.

His firm but quiet presence play perfectly to the Iranian penchant for humility.

“He sits over there on the other side of room, by himself, in a very quiet way. Doesn't speak, doesn't comment, just sits and listens. And so of course everyone is thinking only about him,” a senior Iraqi official told the New Yorker for a long profile of Soleimani.

A survey published in 2018 by IranPoll and the University of Maryland — one of the few considered reliable by analysts — found Soleimani had a popularity rating of 83%, beating President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Western leaders saw him as central to Iran's ties with militia groups including Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas.

Part of his appeal was the suggestion he might bridge Iran's bitter social divides on issues such as its strict “hijab” clothing rules.
“If we constantly use terms such as 'bad hijab' and 'good hijab', reformist or conservative... then who is left?” Soleimani said in a speech to mark World Mosque Day in 2017. “They are all people. Are all your children religious? Is everybody the same? No, but the father attracts all of them.”

https://www.thehindu.com/news/internati ... 467687.ece

[Per]

This is a good exercise!
The whole article is a good read, but I think the part quoted below specifically poignant.

Imagine how everything would sound if the other side said it.

If you’re going to understand the world clearly, you have to kill your nationalistic emotions. An excellent way to do this is to try to imagine if all the facts were reversed. If Iraq had invaded the United States, and U.S. militias violently resisted, would it constitute “aggression” for those militias to kill Iraqi soldiers? If Britain funded those U.S. militias, and Iraq killed the head of the British military with a drone strike, would this constitute “stopping a terrorist”? Of course, in that situation, the Iraqi government would certainly spin it that way, because governments call everyone who opposes them terrorists. But rationality requires us not just to examine whether violence has been committed (e.g., whether Suleimani ordered attacks) but what the full historical context of that violence is, and who truly deserves the “terrorist” label.

Is there anything Suleimani did that hasn’t also been done by the CIA? Remember that we actually engineered the overthrow of the Iranian government, within living people’s lifetimes. Would an Iranian have been justified in assassinating the head of the CIA? I doubt there are many Americans who think they would. I think most Americans would consider this terrorism. But this is because terrorism is a word that, by definition, cannot apply to things we do, and only applies to the things others do. When you start to actually reverse the situations in your mind, and see how things look from the other side, you start to fully grasp just how crude and irrational so much propaganda is.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/ ... L0RsNHOV1I

[Strangelove]

.
QUESTION: How can you tell Per is back to work?

ANSWER: He's posting up a storm.

Happy Epiphany everyone!
The twelve days of xmas are over.
Tomorrow it’s back to work again.

How much did the Swedish government pay you for all that posting Per?

[Per]

.
QUESTION: How can you tell Per is back to work?

ANSWER: He's posting up a storm.

Happy Epiphany everyone!
The twelve days of xmas are over.
Tomorrow it’s back to work again.

How much did the Swedish government pay you for all that posting Per?

Lol! I came home more than four hours ago, and those posts during work were mostly copy and paste (except the first one).

But sure, the first day of work after the holidays was pretty slow.
No meetings, nothing in the mailbox and I had cleared my desk before the vacations.
Just a couple of documents I needed to read to prepare for meetings late this week.
And they were rather boring, so I needed a few breaks.

I’m sure it will pick up.

[Per]

The Soleimani Strike Defied the U.S. Constitution

Any significant military action requires legal authority under both domestic and international law. Normally, domestic law would require the president to seek the approval of Congress, usually through a law authorizing the use of military force (after all, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to “declare war”). International law would also require him to seek the approval of the United Nations Security Council before resorting to force, unless the host state consents (which it did not) or the action qualifies for the express, but narrow, self-defense exception. Trump did not seek approval in either forum.

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told reporters that the killing was justified under the 2002 law Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, which was passed to permit the president to act to address threats posed by Iraq. Relying on the law would require a conclusion that the threat from Soleimani, an Iranian government official, was posed by Iraq. In other words, relying on the law is as good as admitting there is no legal basis. Vice President Mike Pence also asserted a false connection between Soleimani and the 9/11 attacks, perhaps in an effort to suggest that the strike could fall under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. Those claims have been widely discredited, and several members of the Senate earlier expressed skepticism that the 2001 law authorized action against Iran.

Without any more solid legal authority to cite, the Trump administration seems to have turned to the claim that it was acting in self-defense. Though the administration has yet to provide any clear explanation for the legality of the strikes, it has offered various clues that the central justification is the president’s right to engage in self-defense on behalf of the United States. The Department of Defense issued a short statement suggesting that the attack was justified as an act of defense “aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later more forcefully claimed that the strike was aimed at disrupting an “imminent attack.”

This claim—were it true—could solve the administration’s domestic and international legal problems at once. Both the U.S. Constitution and the UN charter include an exception for self-defense. Under Article II of the Constitution, the president may act to respond to imminent threats to the nation. The original idea was that there may be times when it is impractical or impossible to convene Congress—something that was especially true when communication and travel could take weeks. In such cases, the president would not be prevented from taking necessary action to defend the nation until Congress could be convened. The UN charter, which prohibits a state from unilaterally resorting to the use of force against another state, also allows for an exception in cases where the state has been the subject of an armed attack or, most experts agree, will imminently be subject to such an attack. In both cases, the exception is narrow: The threat must be so extreme and imminent that it would be unreasonable to seek the necessary approvals before taking action to defend the country.

New reporting from The New York Times, however, concludes that “the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is ‘razor thin.’” A U.S. government official reportedly described the claim that Soleimani was planning an attack “that could kill hundreds” as “an illogical leap.” In short, it does not seem there was any imminent threat justifying unilateral action by the president.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... aw/604417/

[Strangelove]

I’m sure it will pick up.

[Topper]

https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-u-s ... crossfire/

Obama’s policy effectively gave the Quds Force licence to consolidate and expand its operations—directing Bashar Assad’s bloody war in Syria, funding and arming Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Houthi militias in Yemen, paramilitary Shia militias in Iraq, and so on. After Trump walked away from the deal two years ago, the Quds Force began to turn Iraq into an open proxy-war battleground, pitting its affiliated paramilitaries against the Americans.

Two weeks after the Iraqi uprising kicked off, Soleimani arrived in Baghdad to meet with Iraqi military officials, and with his loyalists among the paramilitaries, most notably Muhandis. The plan was cunning, cynical and straightforward. It wasn’t just about replicating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ barbarism in Iran, where internet connectivity had been shut down and protesters were being slaughtered in the streets en masse—perhaps 1,500 murdered, by the end of 2019. The plan involved radically ramping up attacks on American targets in Iraq.

The Quds Force would supply sophisticated weaponry—Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired missiles capable of bringing down helicopters. The whole show was to be run by Muhandis and his Kataib Hezbollah outfit. The attacks would provoke an American military response, and across the region, but especially in Iraq, people would abandon their hopes for democracy and governments freed of malign Khomeinist influences, and everybody would be enraged about the Americans instead.

[rats19]

Let's recap:

May 2019 - Iran attacks oil tankers in the Gulf

June 2019 - Iran shoots down U.S drone

July 2019 - Iran seizes British oil tanker

Sept 2019 - Iran attacks Saudi oil company

Dec 2019 - Iran storms U.S embassy in Baghdad

How is Donald Trump "starting a war"?

[Per]

Let's recap:

May 2019 - Iran attacks oil tankers in the Gulf

June 2019 - Iran shoots down U.S drone

July 2019 - Iran seizes British oil tanker

Sept 2019 - Iran attacks Saudi oil company

Dec 2019 - Iran storms U.S embassy in Baghdad

How is Donald Trump "starting a war"?

Yeah, well, you need to keep your eyes on both teams...

Let’s try again:

Jan 2016 - China, Russia, UK, France, USA, Germany, the EU and Iran implement the ”Iran nuclear deal”

May 2018 - USA unilaterally withdraws from the deal, all other signatories pledge to uphold it

Nov 2018 - USA reimposes sanctions against Iran, leading to food and medicin shortages, inflation and unrest in Iran. The Iranian government states they consider this an act of war.

April 2019 - the Trump administration declares Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation

April 2019 - Iran declares the US central command a terrorist organisation

May 2019 - Iran attacks oil tankers in the Gulf

June 2019 - US Cyber Command takes out crucial computers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in cyber attack

June 2019 - Iran shoots down U.S drone

June 2019 - UK seizes Iranian oil tanker

July 2019 - Iran seizes British oil tanker

July 2019 - US shoots down Iranian drones

Sept 2019 - Houthi rebels in Yemen attack Saudi oil company
(the rebels are armed by Iran and under attack from Saudi forces who regularly bomb them)

Dec 2019 - US air strikes against Iranian backed militia in Iraq and Syria kill at least 25 + 55 wounded

Dec 2019 - Iran storms U.S embassy in Baghdad

Jan 2020 - US assassinates an Iranian general at an Iraqi airport

Jan 2020 - Iran attacks US military bases in Iraq, first warning them so the US personnel could take cover

Jan 2020 - civilian airliner crashes in Tehran shortly after takeoff ??????????

[Per]

Jan 2020 - civilian airliner crashes in Tehran shortly after takeoff ??????????

Never mind, it was a Boeing 737, so no reason to suspect foul play.

[ukcanuck]

Just watched Trumps official (staged) announcement and the whole thing from the assassination to the retaliation to trumps announcement is really starting to stink like one big staged event to make trump look good going into the election.

I mean give me a break

Who is this mass murdering terrorist Iranian general no one has ever really heard of before? Is there a new deck of cards with pictures of all new baddies we haven’t seen yet?

Oh I’m sure Soleimani was a pain in the american backside and he’d been on the their radar before with two previous administrations but check out the timing just months before trumps reelection bid, all of a sudden the General is new osama bin laden. Architect of untold horror and meyhem .

Then a retaliation rocket attack that miraculously kills no one and apparently does little to no damage to two US airbases. Somehow everyone including the hapless Iraqi knew well before the “attack”

Then a manufactured retaliation threat against Dubai that apparently was the imagination of some schmuck Iranian “expert” that was picked up by the bbc which somehow the american expats I work with started getting “updates” from their embassy.

Then the crowning moment right out of The Apprentice when the double doors at the White House open and the silhouette of the ceo trump walks out of the door frame and says as long as I am president Iran will never be allowed to have nuclear weapons!

Omg it was beautiful!

The whole thing perfectly cooked up and presented on a silver platter for the toothless masses.

Trump The Cheeto Christ has saved us all !

All praise the Cheeto !