Trump Is Starting a War with Iran – Whether It Is by Accident Or Design

• Trump Is Starting a War with Iran – Whether It Is by Accident Or Design
  by Robert Fisk @indyvoices, https://www.independent.co.uk/
  Tehran will likely take time to consider its options, with few having expected the US president to go for the jugular like this.
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  Is this war by accident or war by design? We’ve all said that a major war in the Middle East could start by accident. But no one thought Donald Trump would go for the jugular quite like this. To kill General Qassem Soleimani is a sword at the heart of Iran, without doubt. And on whose behalf?
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  Trump boasts of his relationship with the Saudi king who has talked of “cutting off the head of the Iranian snake” and whose oil facilities were attacked with drone-fired missiles – which the US blamed on Iran – last year. Or Israel? Or is this just another decision with incalculable results, taken by a crackpot president in the US?
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  Just imagine what would happen if a leading American general – or two, since Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was a leading pro-Iranian figure in Iraq – was blown up on a tour of the Middle East. There would be airstrikes, attacks on Iran’s nuclear centres, threats by Washington to close down all traffic between Iran and the outside world. The death of an American in Baghdad on Friday and the riots outside the US embassy scarcely justify American attacks on this scale.
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  Qassem Soleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, although the Revolutionary Guards al-Quds forces he commanded is not quite the elite army which Iran likes to pretend. Soleimani, according to his fellow commanders, would take risks at the various al-Quds front lines in Syria and his men admired him for his courage under fire. So he regularly expected to die. But Baghdad International Airport is the last place you would expect to see an American drone put him and al-Muhandis to death.
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  The Americans have long grown used to staging attacks on pro-Iranian militia bases in Iraq and Syria. Over recent months, these strikes have become normal, regular – like Israel’s frequent raids into Syria and Lebanon. But it was a US military operation which also killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, a Sunni Muslim who was an enemy of Tehran and whom the Iranians would have been happy to liquidate.
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