Trump Activates the Iranian Bomb

To assume, as have Donald Trump and Pentagon hawks, that the major threat against the United States is Iran or its Syrian protégé, Bashar Assad, is to underestimate the havoc terrorists of the Islamic State and al-Qaida could wreak in the world. They were the central targets of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard, killed on orders of the gringo president. They were Soleimani’s main target, but not his only one: he was also a powerful adversary of the imperial appetites of Saudi tyranny and the politics of Israeli extremists who wanted Iran — as he wanted the Jewish state — erased from the map.

Soleimani was not just any commander of the elite forces of his country, but the commander who was influential in containing those who attacked the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington and terrorized Madrid, London, Paris and other European cities. Thanks to him, the cities of Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Mosul are free of extremists. His greatest feat was to curb the advance of the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, as well as to maintain an area of influence in Lebanon (with the extremist group Hezbollah, to harass Israel).

As much as the Iranian government represents the majority of the Shiite population (more fanatical in its Islamism than the Sunnis of Iraq or Saudi Arabia), no longer is it the fanatical government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in place at the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which urged the memorable “student” kidnapping of 52 Americans (held more than 13 months) in an assault on their embassy.

In addition, against all odds, the moderate Iranian regime agreed to suspend the development of its nuclear bomb; because of Trump’s responsibility for the murder of Soleimani, that is now uncertain.

The United States has a very aggressive history toward Iran: the most notable event occurred in July of 1988, when the USS Vincennes cruiser launched the missile that shot down the commercial aircraft of Iran Air Flight 655 (over Iranian airspace) on its flight to Dubai, killing its 290 occupants.

Richard Black, a [state] senator in Virginia and co-religionist of Trump who deplored the murder of the Iranian general, is the subject of ridicule by his Senate colleagues for having congratulated Bashar Assad and “the Syrian Arab Army for its heroic rescue of Christians in the Qalamoun Mountain Range” and for “treating with respect all Christians and the small community of Jews in Damascus,” an accomplishment that received major support from the troops of Soleimani.

The Islamic State group included Soleimani in its list of enemies, calling him the American Crusader, because he had said, “One thing is clear: If Damascus falls, the feared black and white flag of ISIS will fly over Damascus, and then Jordan and Libya will fall. It will be the beginning of an epoch in history that takes Islam to Europe. I believe, in the end, that Europe will be conquered.”

With Iranians and Iraqis at the boiling point against the United States, there will be fewer senators who engage in ridiculing Black.