I wasn’t going to write about this. I don’t
know enough about it to offer anything close to a properly informed opinion.
But after wading through the umpteenth piece excoriating U.S. President Donald
Trump for eliminating Quassem Soileimani - the murderous Iranian general who
was second-in command to dictator Ayatollah Ali Khameini - I can’t suppress my
irritation.
There aren’t enough armchairs on the planet
to accommodate all the Monday morning quarterbacks that sprang up in the
aftermath of Soilemani’s death - all of them “experts” on the political,
sectarian quagmire of the Middle East, a region almost impossible to decipher.
Rarely have so many people claimed to know so
much about something they can’t possibly know anything about.
The loudest voices, predictably, screamed
incessantly from the left.
“This doesn’t make America safer!” Elizabeth
Warren, Democratic pretender to the Oval Office, declaimed shrilly from her
perch on The View
two days ago. (If that woman becomes President of the United States, God
help America.)
Democratic congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasia-Cortez tweeted with her usual empty-headed hyperbole: “The President
engaged in what is widely being recognized as an act of war against Iran, one
that now risks the lives of millions of innocent people.”
Political activist Rania Khalek, the national
director of CodePink, also took to Twitter, equating Soleimani’s erasure with
“Iran taking out Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Captain America all in
one.”
Economist Paul Krugman weighed in with a New York Times opinion
piece: “Trump’s latest attempt to bully another country has backfired – just
like all his previous attempts… We don’t accept the right of foreign
governments to kill our officials. Why imagine that other countries are
different?”
Former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, once an
actual quarterback but now consigned to an armchair along with everyone else:
“There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown
people for the expansion of American imperialism.”
John Ibbotson of the Globe and Mail described
Trump as a “rogue president” guilty of “rash actions against Iran” in a
desperate attempt “to distract attention from his impending impeachment trial
in the Senate.”
Anand Khan pronounced glumly and grandly in Maclean’s: “Thus begins
the inexorable slide into chaos and war.”
The critiques of those last two journos, both
of them writing for Canadian publications, are particularly rich, considering
that Canada won’t even live up to its measly financial obligations to NATO,
perfectly content for most of its existence to allow America to play global cop
on Canada’s behalf.
The reason, plainly, for the widespread
second guessing and condemnation of Soleimani’s execution is because the strike
was authorized by Donald Trump, whose crass and unorthodox method of governing
has earned him the deep-seated contempt of “progressives” around the globe and
the incandescent hatred of the Democratic Party. The fires of hatred for
the President burn so brightly that his enemies are blinded to the possibility
that he may actually gotten this right.
General Soeimani, it is generally agreed, was
a very bad dude, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers
and the mastermind behind untold numbers of terrorist crimes.
Faisal Abbas, writing in Arab News:
“In Syria, when Bashar Assad required
assistance in butchering his own people, where did he turn? To Soleimani, of
course, to his Quds Force, and to his trained Hezbollah thugs next door in
Lebanon. The result is that Soleimani has the blood of half-a-million
Syrians on his hands, not to mention the plight of millions who do not know if
they will ever see their homes or families again.”
Those “brown” Syrians don’t fit into Colin
Kaepernick’s “American imperialism” calculus, apparently.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, by contrast
to the current President suave, articulate, and diplomatic, invested heavily in
appeasing the Iranians. Obama infamously drew a “red line” for Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad, warning him of dire consequences if he continued to
use chemical weapons against his people. That red line was
“apparently written in disappearing ink”, as the late John McCain put it, given
that al-Assad crossed it with impunity: desperate to close a nuclear deal with
Iran, Obama wouldn’t stand up to Iran’s closest Arab ally.
Appeasement, as any student of history knows,
inevitably ends badly. As Winston Churchill observed, “An appeaser is one
who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Canadian columnist Terry Glavin offered a
rare voice of reason amidst all the hand-wringing over Soleimani’s execution:
“There is another more pertinent and useful question that might be put to the
Americans. What the hell took you so long?”
Imagine, for a moment, if Franklin D.
Roosevelt, given the opportunity, had taken out Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s
right-hand man and the architect of Auschwitz, Dachau and the rest.
Historians would be applauding loudly to this day.
It’s hard to predict the fallout from
President Trump's move.
As opening payback, the Iranians hurled more
than a dozen ballistic missiles at American military bases in Iraq yesterday,
taking out a bunch of sand but not much else. (One dearly hopes that Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, which crashed after it
took off from Tehran, killing all 176 on board, wasn’t caught by a stray
missile – it now appears however, this was indeed the case)
Soleimani got what he deserved. But I
don’t pretend to know whether killing him was the right move at this
juncture. That would require knowledge and insight I don’t possess.
I have the barest comprehension of the labyrinthine geopolitical forces at play
in the Middle East. Nor am I privy to the classified intel used by
American military brass to make the tough decision to take him out.
For me to offer an opinion on this would be
like someone with zero knowledge of chess critiquing the wisdom of a
grandmaster taking out an opponent’s rook. It’s hard, with a surname like
mine, to get that big for my britches.
The same goes for the vast majority of you,
regardless of your last name - even (especially)
if it’s Warren or Krugman or Ocasia-Cortez.
Better to sit down, shut up, and occupy your
armchairs in silence.
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