Last Minute Attempt: Will Cheetolini set the world on fire as he leaves?


I get the bad, bad feeling that’s the intent.

Cheetolini and Mike Pompeo, one of his remaining stooges, are beating war drums with fictions they hope the ignorant will swallow:

Al-Qaeda: Pompeo says Iran is jihadist network’s ‘new home base’

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has publicly accused Iran’s government of allowing the jihadist network al-Qaeda to establish a “new home base” there.
“Unlike in Afghanistan, when al-Qaeda was hiding in the mountains, al-Qaeda today is operating under the hard shell of the Iranian regime’s protection,” he told the National Press Club.

Mr Pompeo provided no concrete evidence to support his allegations.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called them “warmongering lies”.

That’s exactly what they are, warmongering lies, like the idiotic “conspiracy theory” claiming Osama bin Laden is still alive and Iran supplied a body double.  The US and Israel are manufacturing fictions about Al Qaeda leaders operating in Iran.

Iran is almost entirely shia muslims, and Al Qaeda are sunni muslims.  Iran and Al Qaeda hate each other.  WHY would they collaborate?  OBL believed in his own conspiracy theory, that Iran was putting microchips into his sons and using them to track him.  Maybe that’s where the US’s rightwingnuts got their idea from.

You’re probably asking, “How can Cheeto get away with it?”  By invoking a poorly written “law” written in 2001 as part of the “patriot act”.  It was the US that violated and broke the nuclear agreement with Iran, not Tehran, but Cheetolini would be perfectly willing to use that as an excuse to bomb civilians, and the corporate media would likely go along with it, repeating the fiction, “the US doesn’t commit war crimes”.

The Law That Makes It Easy to Go to War with Iran

It is difficult to fathom why the United States nearly went to war with Iran last week, beyond that hard-liners in both countries see political advantage in it. For decades, Iran has been expanding its regional influence by funding, training, and arming proxy forces in unstable countries, and then helping them develop into political movements that are opposed to U.S. interests. For just as long, U.S. officials have called this strategy “sponsoring terrorism.” But, in the past year, the Trump Administration and the mullahs in Tehran have goaded each other into a series of pointless escalations, treating war as a game of chicken that is now hurtling out of control.

Thirteen months ago, the United States pulled out of its own nuclear deal with Iran, not because the Iranians had violated it—there is no evidence to suggest that they had—but seemingly because it had been negotiated by President Trump’s predecessor. In April, the U.S. designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a powerful military and intelligence faction that has roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand troops, a “terrorist organization”; in response, Iran passed a law that designates every American soldier in the Middle East as a “terrorist.” On June 7th, Trump’s special envoy to Iran mocked the Iranian Air Force, saying that it has “Photoshopped antiquated aircraft and tried to pass them off as new stealth fighter jets.” Days later, the Revolutionary Guard shot down a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar U.S. surveillance drone, “in large part to prove they could do it,” the Times reported. Both governments practically celebrated the incident as a reason to ratchet up tensions.

On June 20th, Trump ordered a military strike, only to withdraw the order with ten minutes to spare, partly owing to a crisis of conscience—apparently the bombardment would have killed around a hundred and fifty people—and partly, according to the Times, because the Fox News host Tucker Carlson had told Trump that another casualty of the strike would be his hope of being reëlected.

[. . .]

Eighteen years later, it’s hard to conceive of a metric by which the United States’ response to 9/11 has been a success. The military has become much better at killing insurgents, but only because the war on terror, with all of its excesses and mistakes, has created so many of them. The Taliban currently controls more of Afghanistan than it has since the earliest months of the invasion. Al Qaeda has expanded from a group that had a few hundred adherents, mostly based in southern Afghanistan, into a global terror franchise, with branches in West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, the Sinai Peninsula, South Asia, and the Levant. The A.U.M.F. is also the basis for the U.S.’s prolonged campaign against the Islamic State, a group that didn’t exist when bin Laden attacked the United States, and which has been battling Al Qaeda for more than five years. Now American soldiers whose parents deployed after 9/11 are being sent to countries thousands of miles from Afghanistan, to kill jihadis unaffiliated with Al Qaeda and who were born after the attacks. “The biggest casualty in the struggle against the Islamic State so far has been the American Constitution,” Bruce Ackerman, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote, in 2015.

This is why the joint chiefs and EVERYONE in the military operating weapons needs to ignore Cheetolini’s commands and immediately take away his access to things like nuclear codes. I have a suspicion that Cheetolini is perfectly capable of ordering an unprovoked and purposeless strike against Iran, including a nuclear weapon.    Imagine if he did, and Biden has to waste two years or more dealing with the consequences and political (or nuclear) fallout instead of addressing problems.

Comments

  1. says

    I honestly don’t think the nuclear codes are a problem. Because I don’t think they actually work. Because there are too many good reasons why someone would want a nuclear launch to fail harmlessly, and not enough good ones to want it to work.

    If “the other side” has already fired, it is not really going to make any difference, from the perspective of anyone living in the USA, whether or not the USA fires back with its last gasp.

    If the other side has not already fired, and the launch succeeds, nobody else will ever have a nice word to say about the USA again.

    But if the USA attempts a first strike, the launch fails and “the other side” does not fire back, then everybody who could plausibly claim responsibility for the failure is now a hero for saving the world from nuclear annihilation.

    And it’s not as though the launch system could ever be tested thoroughly. That’s a matter of definition. If and when a drill is ever conducted, some important step will always be deliberately omitted. So even once you have done something to sabotage the nuclear launch, the probability of detection is tiny. It would be tiny even if the person who discovered the “improvement” wasn’t likely just to smile and think “great minds think alike”.

    In short, if you are in a position deliberately to mess up the ability of the USA to launch its nuclear missiles, there is a very tiny probability that you might be fêted as a hero and spend the rest of your life eating out in fancy restaurants and giving speeches — and an even tinier probability that you might get a bollocking for it.