This is not an article intended to praise Qassem Suleimani, the Commander of Iran’s military who was whacked by President Trump with several Hellfire Missiles fired from a US drone at his vehicle outside the Baghdad Airport.
What I do decry, however, is the almost universal characterization of Suleimani as “the baddest of the bad,” or as the NY Times labeled him in Sunday editorial condemning as stupid the president’s assassination order, “one of the [Middle East] region’s most blood-soaked military commanders.”
Really? Baddest of the bad? Most blood-soaked? How about General Stanley McChrystal, the guy who organized and paid off death squads in Iraq, and who, as head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) oversaw notoriously criminal and brutal interrogations in that country and later Afghanistan, and then moved his death squad proclivities to that latter country when he took over command of the Afghanistan War? How about Marine General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who earned his monicker for saying, “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.” Is it any wonder that we had so many Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan taking pot shots at young boys and “double tapping” injured Taliban fighters?
More broadly, anywhere from 182,000 to over a million civilians died in the war that the US launched against Iraq in 2003. Most of them, simply because of its far vaster fire-power, reliance on aerial bombardment, and demonstrated lack of concern about “collateral damage” in its combat rules, were killed by American forces under a string of American four-star generals. Whatever deaths were caused by the “bloodthirsty” Commander Suleimani pale in comparison to the American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as, more recently, in Syria and Yemen (where much of the killing by Saudi troops and planes is done with American-supplied arms and with the targeting guidance of American radars and satellites).
When it comes to being “blood-thirsty’ it’s hard to top the US, which of course was also responsible for the slaughter of millions of Indochinese in the American war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the ‘60s and ’70s.
How the editorialists at the NY Times can write such jingoistic crap with straight faces is beyond me, but they are not alone. The US media are awash in it.
And remember, the main indictment being leveled at Suleimani is that he was “responsible” for the deaths of “over 600 American soldiers” in Iraq and Syria. But hold on a minute, those weren’t civilians. They, and the contractor most recently killed by an allegedly pro-Iranian militant group in Iraq, were fighters or advisors in Iraq and Syria…
For the rest of this article by DAVID LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/its-our-own-leader-donald-trump-who-is-blood-thirsty-and-blood-soaked/