Qassem Soleimani and World War III | Iran, Russia and China

My guess is that today’s video will get lots of comments along the lines of “You’re only realizing this now?” and “Obviously!”. For many observers of the Middle East over the past two decades it is transparently obvious that the United States has been the problem. Nobody else has been overthrowing governments and sowing chaos with the abandon that the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have. At least a million lives have been lost, and an entire region of the world has lost out on two decades of economic development because the US wanted to cover up for the fact that their client state, Saudi Arabia, had done 9-11. So yeah, we’re the bad guys. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.

Our bad guy status is not so obvious to the US public at large. And it’s certainly not so obvious to the US media. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile to mark the trajectory here. The US isn’t just a damaging actor, it’s been getting progressively worse. Many argue that Obama was better than Bush, and his attempt at an Iran Nuclear Deal really was a serious attempt at peace, but everything else he did was a continuation of the horrors of the Bush presidency. More than that, it was an intensification of them. Obama destroyed Libya and Syria without even pretending to rebuild them. His drone program led to fewer US casualties, but its scope and brutality put us into even more morally fraught territory that its initially smaller bodycount hid from us. And Trump, with his gleeful embrace of war crimes is obviously another big step down the path to heck. Things really are getting worse. That’s worth marking, which is one of the things I attempt to do with today’s video

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Video Transcript after the jump…


Hey there. Donald Trump’s assassination of Qasem Solemani, a high official of a country we are not at war with is the logical outgrowth of 20 sordid years of disgusting developments in US foreign policy. Bush’s illegal and idiotic invasion of Iraq was one step down the path. Another was Obama’s due process free murder from the air of anybody he designated as an enemy, even US citizens. Most importantly, the US congress’s cowardice in the face of these actions, and craven renunciation of their constitutional duty to protect us from war mad kings has brought us to this place.

I am honestly not sure what scares me more at this point. Iran’s reaction to this could be terrible, and we could be heading for out next multi-trillion dollar war. But Donald Trump could also get away with it. One of this channel’s most consistent messages is that the United States is much more powerful than our media and government pretends it is. This vast power is now wielded by a man who kills anybody he wants, thinks that the highest use of US power is stealing oil, and issues pardons to soldierw the US military has arrested for committing war crimes. If we fail to stop this man, there is no longer any denying it. We are the bad guys. That honestly scares me more than any Iranian retaliation.

But I will tell you something that doesn’t scare me in 2020: Russia and China. There has been a lot of loose talk about world war III bandied about this week. It’s even been trending on Twitter. This is an idea you see a lot in the YouTube comments, and in less responsible places, like the Washington DC think tank community. In the week before the assassination, respectable sources were panicking about joint naval exercises between Russia, Iran and China. On the day of the assassination I was even reading an article talking about an emerging Eurasian axis of power arising to confront the Unoted States. Strangely I can’t find that article anymore.

One silver lining to the Soleimani killing is the fact that the ridiculousness of all this talk has been exposed. You had to look pretty hard to find the Russian and Chinese reactions to the assassination. It’s mostly just weak calls for calm, and correct but toothless observations about the damage the US attack does to Iraqi and Iranian sovereignty. World War Three is not coming any time soon. China or Russia would have to be involved to make that happen and they have no interest. Iran stands alone, and it will continue to do so for the next few years. Despite all the Pentagon hype, Russia and China are powerless in the Middle East. Putin puts up a good show, but whenever he actually gets in the US’s way in Syria, Russians die in large numbers. That has already happened by the way. The US and Russia both worked hard to make sure you never heard about it.

I am not saying this out of some sick pride by the way. I am pointing this out because Washington DC’s lies need to be exposed. Trump, and a whole bunch of other people that are supposed to be more respectable than him rely on a myth of US weakness. That’s how they justify horrors like what we did to Libya and Iraq. It’s supposedly scary out there, and unless we do brutal, insane things like assassinate world leaders, nobody will respect US.

The truth is so much sadder. With each passing year of forever war it gets harder to deny that we are the bad guys. It’s the United States that is pissing away it’s authority with actions like last Friday’s assassination. Our power is slipping away, but it is doing so more slowly than the Defense industry and it’s pet institutions claim. Our power will diminish enough to make a third world war possible but that should take a couple decades. If we continue on the same evil trajectory we are on now, the world will breath a sigh of relief when our power is finally destroyed. Hopefully it will end with a whimper, like the Suez crisis rather than with the bang of another world war…

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