Wagging the Dog: Trump does it this time
By Habib Siddiqui
In 2011 and 2012, years before he began his own presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of seeking war with Iran to help win the 2012 presidential election. He tweeted:
In 2011 and 2012, years before he began his own presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of seeking war with Iran to help win the 2012 presidential election. He tweeted:
“Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin – watch for
him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (Oct. 9,
2012)
“Don't
let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get
elected--be careful Republicans!” (Oct 22, 2012)
On Thursday, January 2, 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian
military commander who was one of the most powerful men in the Middle East.
General Soleimani, the head of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, was killed by a drone attack on
his convoy at an airport in Baghdad. Among those killed was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy
commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization
Forces (PMF), and five others.
The strike came just a few days after supporters of
the Iran-backed Iraqi militia, Kataib Hezbollah, mobbed the U.S. embassy
in Baghdad. The breach at the embassy followed U.S. airstrikes on Sunday (December
29, 2019) that killed 25 fighters of the Kataib Hezbollah. The U.S. military
said the strikes were in retaliation for last week’s killing of an American
contractor in a Dec. 27th rocket attack on an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk that
the U.S. blamed on the militia.
The Defense Department said Thursday that Soleimani had
"orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several
months - including the attack on December 27th - culminating in the death and
wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel.
The assassination of General Soleimani came
with Trump's approval rating languishing
at 42.4%, according a model by FiveThirtyEight, and he is the first US president to face an
impeachment trial while running for reelection.
Interestingly, Trump is not the only POTUS
bombing or killing someone of high value when domestic politics shows a high a
disapproval rating at home. The trend has repeated many times since at least
the time of Bill Clinton (1993-2000).
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998
and 1999, President Bill Clinton initiated bombing campaigns in Sudan and in
Iraq, and critics claimed he was trying to divert attention.
The Al Shifa factory in Khartoum was the largest manufacturer of
medicines in all of Sudan, producing over half of the country’s pharmaceutical
products and specializing in anti-malaria drugs. It was “pulverized,” reduced
to nothing but “broken concrete and iron bars,” leaving “thousands of brown
bottles of veterinary and other medicines” littered across the sand on the direct orders of Bill Clinton on August 20, 1998. The strike was in retaliation for Osama bin
Laden’s recent bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
When it was pointed out to the Clinton administration that
they had just eliminated one of Sudan’s major medical suppliers, spokespeople
“claimed the plant was actually a disguised chemical weapons factory.” They insisted that “soil samples taken
outside the plant had shown the presence of a substance known as Empta, whose
only function was to make the nerve gas VX.” The plant, they said, “was heavily
guarded . . . and it showed a suspicious lack of ordinary commercial
activities.” All of this turned out to be false.
Back in December 1998, Clinton authorized airstrikes against
Iraq, then controlled by Saddam Hussein, only a day after the House of
Representatives accused him of "high crimes and misdemeanors" in
relation to his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
The following
day, Dec. 17, 1998, The New York Times had the headline “Impeachment Vote in House Delayed as
Clinton Launches Iraq Air Strike, Citing Military Need to Move Swiftly”.
“Iraq has abused its final chance,” Clinton declared in an
address to the nation Wednesday night as televised scenes from Baghdad
reverberated with flashes of explosions and anti-aircraft fire.
Even as he spoke, House Republican leaders, yielding to the eruption
in the Iraq crisis, postponed their plans to bring the impeachment debate
today.
“We’re going to defer,” said Speaker-designate Bob Livingston,
in careful comments emphasizing support for the troops involved in the
exercise.
Is Trump, like Clinton, attempting to “wag the dog,” a
colloquialism that means “to distract
attention away from a political scandal (in this case impeachment in the Senate,
and probable removal from office), often through military action”?
As we all know now, Clinton’s strategy
to “wag the dog” by launching an airstrike on Iraq during impeachment
proceedings against him ultimately didn’t work. Clinton was impeached
just two days after the strike.
President Ronald Reagan
invaded Granada and attacked Libya that boosted his popularity at home. Citing the threat posed to American nationals on the
Caribbean nation of Grenada by that nation’s pro-Marxist regime, on Oct. 25 in
1983 President Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invade the island and to secure
their safety. In little more than a week, Grenada’s government was overthrown.
The
operation was code-named
Operation Urgent Fury, but it was neither urgent nor furious. It was carried
out mainly to serve perceived political needs inside the United States.
Geostrategic reasons were secondary. Most political observers noted
that the invasion had taken place days after an explosion in a U.S. military
installation in Lebanon had killed more than 240 U.S. troops, which was a
serious embarrassment for tough-talking Reagan. Nevertheless, the Reagan
administration cited the invasion as the first successful rollback of communist
influence since the beginning of the Cold War.
In public, Reagan and
his aides justified their invasion with three arguments. First, they depicted
Grenada's regime as murderous, anti-American and supported by Cuba. This was
true, but it did not make Grenada a threat to the United States. Second, they said
they needed to protect the lives of American students, although the students
did not appear to be in danger. Third, they produced a letter signed by the
governor general of Grenada, Paul Scoon, asking for intervention. It later
turned out that the letter had been written in Washington, backdated and
delivered to Scoon to sign after the invasion began. The real reason for the
operation was Reagan's belief that the U.S. needed a victory — any victory,
anywhere.
The Reagan
administration never made any attempt to negotiate with Grenada's leaders or to
evacuate American students peacefully. Its goal was not to resolve a tense
situation but to destroy a regime that Reagan said was planning to "export
terror and undermine democracy." The same approach would be used six years
later in Panama, during Bush Sr.’s presidency, where the United States rejected
a plan by the National Guard to depose the strongman, Manuel Antonio Noriega,
because it wished not only to remove a leadership group but also to wipe out an
entire governing system that it considered hostile.
Inside
the Reagan administration, Granada invasion was seen as a triumph. It gave
senior officials a sense of momentum, which propelled them to intensify U.S.
support for pro-U.S. regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and for Contra rebels
fighting the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
After the United
Nations passed a resolution condemning the Granada invasion as a "flagrant
violation of international law," Reagan brushed it off by saying that the
resolution "didn't upset my breakfast at all." Several members of
Congress visited Grenada to bask in the glory, among them Rep. Dick Cheney of
Wyoming, who said the invasion proved that the United States was once again
"steady and reliable." Cheney, as we know, was later to become the
architect behind the Iraq War in 2003.
Reagan
authorized the use of force against Libya. In the late evening of April 15,
1986, the United States launched a series of airstrikes on
ground targets in Libya that killed many civilians including Libyan leader’s
adopted daughter. Many observers noted that it was timed to divert attention
from the Iran-Contra scandal that had bogued the Reagan administration.
The International Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction to
decide the case was disputed by the United States, ruled that the United States
had violated international law and breached treaties in Nicaragua in various
ways.
Reagan's popularity declined from 67% to 46% in less than a
week, the most significant and quickest decline ever for a president. The
scandal resulted in eleven convictions and fourteen indictments within Reagan's
staff.
In 1988, near the end of the Iran–Iraq War, the U.S. Navy
guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655 killing 290 civilian passengers. The incident further
worsened already tense Iran–United States relations.
When
Reagan left office in 1989, he held an approval rating of 68%. This figure
equaled the approval rating of Franklin D. Roosevelt (and was
later matched by Bill Clinton), as the
highest rating for a departing president in the modern era.
Within a year of George
H.W. Bush’s oath of office, the USA invaded Panama. The operation was codenamed Operation Just Cause, which lasted
over a month between mid-December 1989 and late January 1990. During the
invasion, de facto Panamanian
leader, general, and dictator Manuel
Noriega, who for a long time worked with the Central Intelligence
Agency, was deposed citing racketeering and drug trafficking.
In 1970, Noriega, a
rising figure in the Panamanian military, was recruited by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assist in the U.S. struggle against the spread of
communism in Central America. Noriega became involved in drug trafficking and
in 1977 was removed from the CIA payroll. After the Marxist Sandinista
government came to power in 1979, Noriega was brought back into the CIA fold.
In 1983, he become military dictator of Panama. On January 3, 1990 Noriega was
arrested by U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agents and brought to the USA.
In 1992, Noriega was found guilty on eight counts of drug
trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering, marking the first time in
history that a U.S. jury convicted a foreign leader of criminal charges. He was
sentenced to 40 years in federal prison, but after extradition to and
incarceration in Panama, died in a Panama City hospital on May 29, 2017.
The official U.S. justification for the invasion was
articulated by President George H. W. Bush on the morning of 20 December 1989,
a few hours after the start of the operation. Bush listed four reasons for the
invasion: (1) Safeguarding the lives of U.S. citizens in Panama; (2) Defending
democracy and human rights in Panama; (3) Combatting drug trafficking. Panama had become a center for drug money laundering and a transit point for drug trafficking to the U.S. and
Europe; (4) Protecting the integrity of the Torrijos–Carter
Treaties.
One
contemporary study, however, suggests that Bush decided to invade for domestic
political reasons, citing scarce strategic reasoning for the U.S. to invade and
immediately withdraw without establishing the structure to enforce the
interests that Bush used to justify the invasion. [Cramer,
Jane Kellett (2006). ""Just
Cause" or Just Politics?: U.S. Panama Invasion and Standardizing
Qualitative Tests for Diversionary War". Armed Forces & Society.
32 (2): 178–201.]
Trump’s military strike
came at the very moment that defending his actions around the Ukraine scandal
got much more difficult to do. E-mails from officials at the Defense Department
and the Office of Management and Budget were published this week (ending on
Jan. 3, 2020), showing that the decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine
until it opened an investigation into political rival Joe Biden came directly
from the President, and that his decision came in spite of warnings from
Defense Department staff that the hold violated U.S. law.
As noted by Lawrence
Martin of the Globe and
Mail
(Jan. 3, 2020) with so much damning evidence to support the impeachment
articles of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, “the prospect of a Senate trial becomes all the more dreaded for Mr.
Trump. There is speculation that Senate Leader Mitch McConnell will avoid a
trial by holding a snap vote with his Senate majority to acquit the President,
but that would make a mockery of the process.”
Although
Trump has already been impeached by the Congress, the airstrike occurred the
day before the U.S. Senate reconvened to begin discussing his impeachment
trial.
As
expected, to justify President Trump’s
assassination of a foreign dignitary in a third country — Vice
President Pence claimed
on Twitter that Soleimani helped "10 of the 12" Sept. 11
attackers travel to Afghanistan. He lied.
According to The New
York Times,
"That does not match established historical accounts of General Soleimani
or public United States intelligence about the hijackers."
Soleimani
is not mentioned whatsoever in the "9/11 Commission Report."
The report concludes there is no evidence that either Iran or Hezbollah were
aware of the 9/11 attacks. Soleimani focused on undermining Saudi Arabia, and
is said to have helped facilitate the capture of Al Qaeda militants on behalf
of the U.S., the Times writes.
Pence
also mentioned 12 attackers, but there were 19, according to the US official
count.
Published reports suggest that General Soleimani – credited for raising
the Shi’ite militia that overthrew the Daesh (ISIS) from Iraq and Syria – was a
potential target for killing by the USA for a long time – dating back to prior
presidential administrations – and it appears the Trump administration may have
laid the legal groundwork for the strike as early as April when the State
Department designated the Revolutionary Guard as a foreign ‘terrorist’
organization. The U.S. intelligence had been
tracking Soleimani's movements throughout the region and the strike
depended on his appearance at the airport. Otherwise, it would have been
called off.
While
defending President Trump's decision, the
Department of Defense released a statement saying that Trump ordered the attack
as “General Soleimani was actively
developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and
throughout the region.” But it may be worth noting that Trump has repeatedly
argued that starting a war with
Iran was one way to beef up political support before an election, something
that he himself accused President Obama. Is he now wagging the dog? After all,
with his back against the wall, the timing for the attack could not have been
any better for him!
Trump has tried to justify
the assassination of General Soleimani by saying that it was "to stop
a war,
not to start one".
Facts are quite different.
From the very first day in the White House, Trump had been the ‘trigger man’
and the best benefactor of Netanyahu and his apartheid regime in Israel, which has always wanted the USA to do its proxy-war
in the Muslim world, esp. attack and destroy Iran since 1979 when the popular
revolution replaced the Shah of Iran with a regime that it considered hostile. Trump
set the stage for the rising U.S.-Iran tensions by fulfilling a campaign
promise to abandon former President Obama’s landmark nuclear deal with Tehran
in May 2018. He re-imposed sanctions against Iran and its trade partners,
further isolating the U.S. from European allies who were signatories to the
accord and setting in motion ripple effects that led to deeper regional
tensions across the Middle East.
What followed was a series
of provocations, which included Trump sending an aircraft carrier strike group
and B-52 bombers to the region last year.
In a sign of American ‘exceptionalism’
and Pharaonic arrogance to act as the plaintiff, jury, judge and executioner,
Trump designated the IRGC and Hezbollah as terrorist groups. Thus, the
execution of Soleimani came easy for him. This latest assassination of a very
high-ranking government officials of Iran by the Trump administration, however,
marks a major
escalation in tensions between the two governments. Never before has a government
minister or general of a foreign nation been killed by the US forces without declaring
a state of war against that country. US officials said 3,000 additional troops
would be sent to the Middle East as a precaution.
Predictably,
Netanyahu has praised Trump for killing Soleimani while Prime Minister Adel
Abdul Mahdi of Iraq has labelled the missile strike as a "brazen violation
of Iraq's sovereignty and a blatant attack on the nation's dignity".
Iran’s ambassador to the
United Nations has warned the US “has started a military war by an act of
terror”. He declared Iran “has to act, and we will act”.
Meanwhile, Iraqi
state television said there had been another air strike in the
country, 24 hours after the killing of Soleimani. An Iraqi army source told the
Reuters news agency that six people were killed in the new strike, which hit a medical
convoy of Iraqi militia in the early hours of Saturday (January 4, 2020) morning
local time. Iraq's parliament announced that it would hold an emergency
meeting on Sunday. The US State Department warned Americans in Iraq to leave
"immediately".
There is little doubt that
the assassination of Soleimani is one of the diversionary tactics, the likes of
which we have seen many times from the mass murderers in the White House.
"So what if Trump
wants war, knows this leads to war and needs the distraction? Real question is,
will those with congressional authority step in and stop him?"
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., posted to Twitter on Friday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the strike was
carried out “without the consultation of Congress.” In June of 2019, Pelosi had
said that action against Iran “must not be initiated” without congressional
approval, after Trump had approved and then reversed a decision to strike Iran
over the downing of a US drone.
In a sign of Iraq's mounting anger over a U.S. drone
attack that killed Iran's top general, Qasem
Soleimani, as well as an Iraqi leader of Tehran-backed
militias, Iraq's parliament on Sunday voted to
expel U.S. military forces from the country.
Iraq's Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told lawmakers that
a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops, including U.S. ones, was
required "for the sake of our national sovereignty." About 5,000
American troops are in various parts of Iraq.
Mahdi described the strike authorized by President Donald Trump
as a "political assassination" and said it was "time for
American troops to leave."
The resolution was supported by a majority of about 180
lawmakers present in Parliament, according to Iraqi media.
The UN secretary
general Antonio
Guterres
joined global calls for de-escalation as he cautioned the “world cannot afford”
another Gulf
War.
He is right. The last Gulf War was built on lies, something that Trump himself
has often complained about. Will he be now the culprit starting the new one to
‘wag the dog’?
History repeats! Only
the wise ones take the lessons from it while the fools and arrogant ones only repeat
the blunders.
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