MCViewPoint

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/01/the-long-planned-us-assassinations-in-iraq-will-increase-the-political-chaos.html#more

…Without presenting any evidence the U.S. accused Katib Hizbullah, an Iraqi Popular Militia Unit, of having launched the missiles. It launched airstrikes against a number of Katib Hizbullah positions near the Syrian border, hundreds of miles away from Kirkuk, and killed over 30 Iraqi security forces.

This led to demonstrations in Baghdad during which a crowd breached the outer wall of the U.S. embassy but soon retreated. Trump, who had attacked Hillary Clinton over the raid on the consulate/CIA station in Benghazi, did not want to get embarrassed with a full embassy breach.

The media claim that it was the embassy breach that the led to the activation of an operation that had already been planned for a year before Trump signed off on it seven months ago. As the New York Times describes it:

For the past 18 months, officials said, there had been discussions about whether to target General Suleimani. Figuring that it would be too difficult to hit him in Iran, officials contemplated going after him during one of his frequent visits to Syria or Iraq and focused on developing agents in seven different entities to report on his movements — the Syrian Army, the Quds Force in Damascus, Hezbollah in Damascus, the Damascus and Baghdad airports and the Kataib Hezbollah and Popular Mobilization forces in Iraq.

It was the embassy breach and a war-industry lobbyist who convinced Trump to finally pull the symbolical trigger:

Defense Secretary Mark Esper presented a series of response options to the president two weeks ago, including killing Soleimani. Esper presented the pros and cons of such an operation but made it clear that he was in favor of taking out Soleimani, officials said.

Trump signed off and it further developed from there.

There was no intelligence of any ‘imminent threat’ or anything like that…

The Barzani family, which governs the Kurdish part of Iraq, has sold out to the Zionists and the United States a long time ago. It will certainly not support the resistance effort. But Nasrallah’s request is highly embarrassing to the clan and to Masoud Barzani personally.

So far I only found this rather confusing response from him:

Nihad N. Arafat @NihadArafat – 7:44 UTC · Jan 13, 2020The Kurdistan Regional Government’s response to the immoral speech uttered by Hassan Nasrallah through the anti-terror apparatus is a clear message from the regional government to those terrorists that the response to the terrorists must be through the anti-terror apparatus.

As military leader both Soleimani and Muhandis are certainly replaceable. The militia groups they created and led will continue to function.

But both men also played important political roles in Iraq and it will take some time to find adequate people to replace them in that. That makes it likely that the already simmering political situation in Iraq will soon boil over as the Shia factions will start to fight each other over the selection of a new Prime Minister and government.

The U.S. will welcome that as it will try do install a candidate that will reject the Iraqi parliament decision to remove the foreign forces from Iraqi territory.

Be seeing you

Mendacity