“It’s hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, most people didn’t consider Iran an imminent threat. Iranian saboteurs were not committing acts of terror in our cities. Oh, but our leaders tell us they were about to any second and that’s why we struck first.”
West Virginia
House of Delegates
That was Tucker Carlson last night on Fox News talking about President Trump’s assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
“What’s so striking is how many people appear to accept this uncritically,” Carlson said. “Just the other day, you’ll remember, our intel agencies were considered politically tainted and suspect. Certainly, on this show, they are — were — and will be for quite some time.”
“Keep in mind, these are the people who invented excuses to spy on the Trump campaign purely because they didn’t like Donald Trump’s foreign policy views, and they’re the ones who pretended he was a Russian agent in order to keep him from governing.”
“Remember that? Russia-gate? Our friends at the intel community did that.”
“And by the way, these are the same people who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction way back in 2002, and by doing that, got us into an utterly pointless war that dramatically weakened our country. The people pushing conflict with Iran are the same people who did that.”
“It seems like about 20 minutes ago we were denouncing these very people as the ‘Deep State’ and pledging never to trust them again without verification. But now, for some reason, we do seem to trust them implicitly and completely.”
“In fact, we believe whatever they tell us, no matter how outlandish. Iran did 9/11, they are telling us. Oh, okay. I didn’t know that. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Sunni Saudi Arabia; none were from Shiite Iran.”
“But if you say so, Mr. Unnamed CIA Official, I’m happy to send my kid to the Middle East a week after Christmas, on the basis of your anonymous and unverified leak to the New York Times. You’ve earned my trust through years of lying to me.”
“That appears to be our position now. And maybe all of this will turn out fine in the end. We’re certainly praying for it. We love this country. But in the meantime, pardon the skepticism.”
“In 2016, Donald Trump ran on a promise of fewer foreign adventures considering the ones we’d embarked upon didn’t work very well,” Carlson said on Friday. “He vowed instead to focus on our problems here at home, which are growing. Against the odds he won that election, probably because of that promise, but ever since, Washington, including some around the President, have been committed to ignoring the results of that election and its implications. Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades. They’ve been working toward it. They may have finally gotten it.”
Carlson is expressing a rising strain of Republican revulsion against the neocon project of imperial war.
West Virginia House of Delegates Republican and Afghan war veteran Patrick McGeehan (R-Hancock) took to the radio waves this morning to denounce the neocon project of regime change.
“John Bolton, even though he’s no longer the National Security Advisor, he’s definitely cheering and (Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo and all their neoconservative friends in Washington are probably cheering right now and celebrating,” McGeehan told WRNR’s Eastern Panhandle Talk with Rob and Dave. “It’s funny how these guys even have jobs anymore. They’ve been wrong about everything. This has just emboldened the hardliners in Iran. And I think it’s just going to result in an escalation of hostilities.”
“For some reason these guys have had an obsession with regime change in Tehran for decades and that’s really their ultimate goal — make no mistake about it. Anyone who spent any time in the intelligence arena over in the Middle East likely knew who this guy was — Soleimani. He had much to do with Iranian foreign policy. He was a charismatic leader, not just a military leader but you know in many respects, a political one as well. He’s had a checkered past. He was very much involved with talking and coordinating with American diplomats in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He actually helped on a number of fronts in Afghanistan — he provided Intel and advice.”
“Soleimani was directly responsible for giving the nod basically to the Iraqi government in 2014, to allow the United States back into Iraq to establish air bases in the country. Iran felt they needed the aid of American airpower to defeat the radical Sunni fundamentalist ISIS out in western Iraq.”
“The assassination was a wrongheaded move. I’d like to know who actually presented the President with this option, because I think the President got bad advice. The top intelligence leaders from the various agencies who actually advise and brief the President, just filter what they want the President to hear.”
“Pompeo, who’s supposed to be the Secretary of State, the country’s chief diplomat, but he acts more like the Secretary of War for whatever reason. I think there was an article yesterday that Pompeo has been wanting to kill Soleimani for months. Any public official who does not go into these foreign policy situations like this with a very healthy dose of skepticism, especially in the post Iraq War era, they are either just a fool or a liar.”
“They’re the same people with same institutions who have routinely lied to the American public. For three years they told the American public that the President was basically some sort of Russian asset and spy who was nothing more than the Russian President’s puppet. And they lied about the Afghanistan war over and over again — you can read about that in the Afghanistan papers.”
“They lied about Assad in Syria gassing his own people. There’s all sorts of information out there now that says that, that never happened — it was staged or maybe the rebels did it, if it did go forward. They lied about Benghazi, I mean they lied about the NSA spying on American citizens. That was done by James Clapper under oath by the way.”
“So now they tell us without a shred of evidence mind you that there were imminent attacks that were about to take place against Americans in the region. And they had to assassinate Soleimani because he was the evil mastermind behind them? And we’re going to take that at face value?”
“Pompeo is the guy leading this narrative about these imminent attacks. And this is the same man who stood in front of a college hall full of college students at Texas A&M — I believe it was early last year, and told them that as the former director of the CIA he was an excellent liar and cheater. And his honor code that he took during his own college days there at West Point didn’t matter. So, yeah, let’s believe that guy, you know.”
McGeehan was asked — but wasn’t Soleimani an evil guy?
“Let’s just say this — the evil guy argument is dumb,” McGeehan said. “That’s the argument a grade schooler would make. Here’s why it’s such a poor argument that reflects the thinking of a child. If that’s the standard for the federal government to carry out hits killings and assassinations, then the federal government sure has a whole lot of work to do around the planet — killing evildoers. So I’m not going to be lectured to by politicians about who deserves to die because anyone that tries to imply that killing people is a simple thing is a fool or a liar. I’m just gonna put it out there because hardly anything in life is really that simple.”
“I believe Soleimani was not a good person. He did have American blood on his hands. He was anti American between 2004 and in the surge. But the individuals within the CIA and other American covert institutions also have blood on their hands through the many proxy wars they’ve carried out throughout the Middle East.”
“So in the end, you know, sometimes we have to sit down with our adversaries. I mean FDR sat down with Stalin for crying out loud. Kennedy sat down with Khrushchev. So to sit here and say well this guy was a bad person he was an evil person. Okay. You can make that argument but mind you this is ten years after the fact. And that was not the argument that’s being made, officially from the president’s cabinet and the administration. The argument is there were imminent attacks that this guy was plotting and we need to take him out.”
“This Iranian obsession is just foolish and dangerous. To make matters worse, Soleimani had been on diplomatic papers. The Iraqi Government invited him in to advise them constantly. So we essentially broke the most basic diplomatic protocols, because we also killed an Iraqi official who was responsible for leading and coordinating the official militia organizations in Iraq. And because Soleimani was on diplomatic protocols it’s very likely that’s the whole reason. They didn’t expect to be openly assassinated at the public airport. So these guys weren’t in the shadows. They were openly managing Iraqi militias trying to make sure that ISIS in the West was indeed ended.”
McGeehan has introduced legislation that would prohibit West Virginia’s governor from sending National Guard troops into action overseas when no federal declaration of war exists.
McGeehan says the best way to reduce high suicide rates among veterans is to “not send them into unconstitutional wars” in the first place.