Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans
This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three, who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?
Today, the Department of Justice (so- called) dropped its prosecution of General Michael Flynn. This followed a ferocious defense by Sidney Powell, an attorney and author of the excellent book, “Licensed to Lie” which explained the federal misbehavior in the Enron cases, one of which resulted in a unanimous decision by the US Supreme Court that reversed the conviction of Arthur Anderson Accounting Corporation in a miscarriage of justice by Andrew Weissmann who should be disbarred for the Mueller investigation which he ran with Mueller as a senile figurehead.
The only other Republican candidate to repudiate the “Bush Freedom Agenda” was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That is why the 2016 Republican primary became a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. The whole of the American Establishment had signed on to a utopian crusade to impose the liberal world order on the Muslim world. After nine years of frustration in Iraq, it saw in the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrations of 2011 a second chance to bring its agenda to fruition. The result of this was the near-collapse of Egypt and an eight-year civil war in Syria that killed half a million people and displaced 10 million refugees.
Flynn called attention to this massive intelligence failure and had to be destroyed. It’s a shame that Cruz did not endorse Trump at the end on become part of a unity campaign.
After Flynn was driven out of his post at DIA, things got even more threatening to the intelligence officials, as he became a prime advisor to candidate Trump and, early in the campaign, other Republicans. After the 2016 elections, the IC officials went all-out to keep him out of the White House, sometimes resorting to spreading ridiculous stories. President Obama warned Trump not to appoint Flynn as national security advisor, and Susan Rice actually warned the president-elect that Flynn might be in violation of the Logan Act, for which nobody has ever been prosecuted, and hence blackmailable by the Russians. Meanwhile, the Bureau had opened a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn’s activities. His digital communications were monitored, “unmasked” at the request of Obama officials, and leaked to friendly journalists.
Goldman’s version is a little different.
As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.
The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.
That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief. America’s noble or perhaps narcissistic intentions did more damage than Trump’s indifference.
In retrospect, I think I agree even more with Goldman on this. I supported the Iraq War at first but it was botched beyond redemption.
CIA must be disestablished. Its functions should be returned to the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury. FBI must be restricted to law enforcement. At home, the Agencies are partisan institutions illegitimately focused on setting national policy. Abroad, Agencies untied to specific operational concerns are inherently dangerous and low-value.
Intelligence must return to its natural place as servant, not master, of government. Congress should amend the 1947 National Security Act. The President should broaden intelligence perspectives, including briefs from State, Defense, and Treasury, and abolish CIA’s “covert action.” State should be made responsible for political influence and the armed services for military and paramilitary affairs.
This is an obvious fact. Our intelligence capability has been destroyed in China and Iran by CIA incompetence in its secure communication systems.
(I started this post last weekend – but real life and a new book project intervened. Consider this a footnote to Trent T.’s post, here.)
Well, it certainly came a’calling for Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani last week, Middle Eastern time. Nothing left but bits of scrap metal and meat, and a bruised hand with a large ring on it. Kind of fitting for the guy who perfected the fine art of IEDs, and brought so much business to the developers of artificial limbs for those survivors of that deadly art. As the satirist Tom Leher noted, so many decades ago, and in a slightly different context,
“Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.”
On Friday night Jan 3, 2020, President Trump directed a successful strike killing IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman at the Baghdad International Airport. Four AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper turned Soleiman’s SUV and his accompanying security SUV into funeral pyres. [1]
IRGC Commander Gen. Qassem Soleiman meets three AGM-114N Metal Augmented Charge (MAC) Thermobaric Hellfire missiles launched from an MQ-9 Reaper Drone. Graphic Source: UK Daily Mail
Some in the media have compared this strike to Operation Vengeance, the American military operation to kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy on April 18, 1943.
The Trump Administration drone strike was in fact far more consequential than Operation Vengeance. If only because of how much more of the IRGC Quds force senior chain of command were eliminated compared to the Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto strike. And how much more important Gen. Qassem Soleiman was to Iran than Yamamoto was to Imperial Japan.
Also killed in the strike were Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also known as Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Ä€l Ebrahim, the commander of the Iraqi Shia Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and mastermind behind the December 1983 bomb attacks on U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait.
In additional to Soleiman and al-Muhandis/Ä€l Ebrahim, also killed were IRGC Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia, Major-General Hadi Taremi, LTC. Shahroud Mozaffari Nia and Captain Waheed Zamanian. Nor does the list end there as senior pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia PMF militia leaders Heydar Ali, Muhammed Reza al-Jaberi and Hassan Abdul Hadi, were in the second SUV struck by one of four AGM-114N Hellfire guided missiles fired by the MQ-9 Reaper.
In many ways Gen. Qassem Soleiman ran Iran’s foreign policy and strategy as principal adviser to the theocratic leadership. Soleiman made his bones in the 1990’s suppressing Iranian student riots in the style of Belisarius and the Nika riots. Post 9/11/2001, he has been orchestrating the killings of US service personnel, is the architect Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yeman and ran covert ops forces world wide.
In fact, Gen. Qassem Soleiman was Iran’s “Red Napoleon.”
The idea of “The Red Napoleon” came from the 1929 novel of that name by Floyd Gibbons predicting a Soviet conquest of Europe and invasion of America by The Red Napoleon’s massive multi-racial army. Written as a screed against white racial supremacy, the concept in the Western Left of a 3rd World military leader who could routinely defeat the West over and over again the same way that General and later French Emperor Bonaparte Napoleon did to the leaders of Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century has hung on in the Left’s Noosphere [2] in the decades since.
If anyone was a “Red Napoleon” in the 21st century, Gen. Qassem Soleiman was that man.
On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. The subsequent release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S.%E2%80%93Iran_naval_incident
Gen. Qassem Soleiman was a man from the 3rd World. One who had created and lead a team in the form of the Quds Force that had killed American servicemen in their hundreds, for decades, got a pair of US Navy riverine command boat crews to surrender in humiliation to support Pres. Obama’s “Opening to Iran” and executed both the Benghazi, Libya and Baghdad, Iraq embassy assaults.
IRGC Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. He was the Iranian government’s “Red Napoleon” and was killed by a thermobaric Hellfire missile launched from a MQ-9 Reaper at the orders of President Trump on 3 Jan 2020.
It’s become something of a regular occurrence for the American mainstream media to blow a foreign policy story because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yet they seem to have greatly sunk to new lows in missing the real importance of events leading to the 19 June 2019 Iranian shoot down of an American drone.
RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator)
President Trump has ended the 1980 Carter Doctrine!
The free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf is no longer a “Vital Interest,” thanks to frac’ing, for a near energy independent USA.
BACKGROUND
CENTCOM confirmed Last Wednesday night of 19 June 2019, in international air space over the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian surface to air missile (SAM) battery shot down a US Navy RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) Global Hawk. The ~$120 million drone in question was a navalised version of the USAF Global Hawk, used as proof of concept for the production MQ-4C Triton. It was essentially an unarmed, jet powered, sail plane with the wing span of a 737 jet liner and several tons of sensors. The drone fills the mission of the U-2, at similar altitudes, without the risks of a human pilot in the event of a shoot down.
Pentagon RQ-4N Shoot Down Map with Drone and SAM launch battery location.
Iran has claimed it used it’s ‘Third of Khordad‘ domestically built SAM system, operated by the IRGC, to shoot down the drone. This SAM system is described as a copy or derivative of the Russian Buk M3 / SA-17 GRIZZLY that incorporates the Bavar 373 missile that, in turn, appears to be a derivative/copy of the Soviet 5V55/SA-10B with additional controls. If you think of it as a late model Raytheon MIM-23 Hawk medium-range surface-to-air missile battery firing an early version of the MIM-104 Patriot PAC 1 missile, you would not be far wrong.
Press TV Tweet of Iranian SAM
It was this lack of a human pilot, either as a death or a prisoner of war, that saw President Trump jump off Iran’s scripted “escalation ladder.” Instead of destroying a SAM battery and converting 150 odd IRGC missile operators into another “Martyr blood sacrifice” for the Mullah regime to celebrate. Pres. Trump responded with cyber-attacks on Iranian missile control systems to remind the Mullah’s of the West’s technological “Black Magic” and additional economic sanctions that will cause further payroll cuts to both the IRGC and it’s over seas terror networks. (Truth be told, the new economic sanctions threaten the Mullah’s power far more than any set of tit for tat military strikes.)
And in a move treated as an afterthought, if the MSM mentioned it at all, President Trump ended an era in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy.
END OF AN ERA
It has been almost 39 & 1/2 years — 10 years before the Cold War ended — that President Carter pronounced access to Mid-East oil a “Vital Interest” that the United States would go to war to protect.
Our two wars in Iraq both have that date, and that policy, as their starting point.
Now that era is over.
Last week Pres. Trump forged a completely new Middle East Foreign policy for America. Specifically, Pres. Trump took the opportunity Iran’s military escalations leading to the shooting down of the RQ-4N to end the January 23, 1980 “Carter Doctrine” expressed as follows —
“…An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
This is how Vandana Hari at the Nikkei Asian Review put it:
“U.S. President Donald Trump says he might take military action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But he has indicated he won’t necessarily jump in to protect international oil supplies from the Middle East if they are under threat from the Islamic Republic.
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The position, articulated by Trump in an interview with Time magazine on June 17, should not come as a surprise, even if it appears to be at odds with the Pentagon beefing up aircraft carriers and troops in the Middle East in recent weeks, citing a threat from Iran.
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As Trump spelt out in the interview, the U.S. is no longer as dependent on oil from the Middle East as it was, thanks to burgeoning domestic production.
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Air Force General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized the message a day later, pointing out that China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea were heavily dependent on supplies moving through the Strait of Hormuz, and needed to protect their interests. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made similar comments.”
The pronouncement above was the full “Bell, Book and Candle” exorcism of American foreign policy — President, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State. And please carefully note that it happened two days beforethe RQ-4N was destroyed.
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While “freedom of navigation” on the high seas over all and the Persian Gulf in particular remains a “major interest” of the United State of America. It is no longer one which America will automatically go to war over.
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In ending the Carter Doctrine, President Trump has fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise of “No More Iraq’s.”
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By changing the cost benefit calculations of Middle-Eastern oil — no more free riding on American protection of Persian Gulf Sea lanes — the only way a nation can “win” internationally now is by “getting close” to the American hyperpower.
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If you are functionally anti-American. You get nothing but higher insurance rates included in your price of oil to cover the political risk premiumof lacking American protection. China is now paying -defacto- and additional American oil tariff via much higher insurance rate on the VLCC tankers moving Mid-East crude oil to the Far East.
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Japan and South Korea could get lower insurance rates if they send naval forces to the Gulf to work with the US Navy. Or they can replace Mid-Eastern oil with exported US oil.
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China, not so much.
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As a correspondent put it in an e-mail to me when I mentioned the above to the list he and I are in —
“You all need to defend YOUR oil shipments through those NASTY Straits of Hormuz. The U.S. don’t need that filthy Middle East blood-oil no more. In fact, if you don’t want to spend the money and lives pounding sand in Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, we have some FINE Texas frackin’ goodness to sell at a SPECIAL price, just for YOU, our friends and allies for SO many years!”
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Snicker, choke, GASP….”
The American Left has finally gotten what it always wanted…no more “Blood for Oil“ in the Middle East.
Somehow, I don’t think President Trump delivering that reality to them will make them very happy.
