Pretext for war: Will Trump now stage a "terror" attack in the U.S.?

I had a wonderful Christmas vacation -- a vacation from writing, from the news, from Trump, from everything depressing. I'd have preferred to stay on vacation for a while longer (maybe forever). But as always, something came up -- a reminder that we all have to do what we can, however small, to fight the forces of villainy. Even a seemingly-pointless gesture of defiance carries more honor than silent acquiescence.

The killing of Soleimani could well be the pretext for a war that the neocons have demanded since the W administration. However, I do not agree with Jonathan Chait: I do not believe that Trump believes that war with Iran will insure re-election. In order to gain the power he seeks, Trump needs to do something far more audacious.

In my view, taking out the General was only step one of the plan.

Step two may include the staging of a terrorist event in the United States -- probably directed against one of Trump's properties. For reasons suggested in several previous posts, I have tentatively predicted an attack (possibly using a portable nuclear device) on Trump's troubled tower in Chicago.

A terrorist attack within the borders of this nation -- an attack attributed to Iran -- will allow Trump to declare emergency powers. God help us.

Are you now tempted to accuse me of being an Alex Jonesian conspiracy theorist? So be it. One of the advantages of being a "fringe" writer is that I can put my worst fears on the record -- and my worst fears have sometimes proven prescient. Fears similar to mine have no doubt popped into the minds of many "respectable" pundits, but they aren't allowed to say what I can say.

Pompeo has claimed that Soleimani did an unspecified something which posed an imminent threat to the lives of Americans -- probably American diplomats. (Wait. This administration now likes diplomats?) This absurd assertion deserves to be classified alongside Bush's big whopper about Saddam's WMDs.

Think about it. Why would Soleimani engage in a plot to "kill many more Americans," as Trump claimed on teevee a short while ago? Iran has nothing to gain and everything to lose from a provocation.

The Iranians know full well that the neocons have spent the last fifteen years trying to gin up an American invasion of their country. Why would the Iranians choose this historical moment to give their enemies the pretext they have long sought?

Iran spent years fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. More than any other single individual -- and certainly more than Trump -- Soleimani deserved to be called "The man who conquered ISIS." As a result of this struggle, Iran had finally gained everything it wanted in Syria: The withdrawal of the Americans, the abandonment of the Kurds, and end of the threat to Assad. Iran had become the de facto power within Iraq, where Soleimani basically called the shots.

Why on earth would Iran do something now to invite the Americans back into the region?

Simple logic forces us to doubt Trump's claim that Soleimani had planned an attack on American diplomats. Simple logic tells us that no such threat existed. It's another Big Lie from the biggest liar in the history of American politics.

I'm sure that the Trumpers will eventually backstop this Big Lie with just enough pseudo-evidence to intimidate the Democrats. We must pressure the Dems to treat this pseudo-evidence with the contempt it defers. Let's not repeat the mistakes of 2003.

If an "imminent threat" existed, we all would have heard specifics already.

If, as Trump has claimed, the government caught Soleimani "in the act," the public would already know what that act was.

More importantly, Congress should have heard the details in closed hearings.

The claim that there was not enough time to notify Congressional leaders is still another lie, easily proven as such. Trump managed to give a heads-up to Lindsey Graham, who is not one of the so-called "Gang of Eight" required by law to be notified. Lindsey received word of the coming strike on Soleimani while playing golf with Trump out at Mar-A-Lago -- a trip which lasted from December 21 to December 29.

If Trump had enough to time to blab everything to Lindsey, he had enough time to inform the Gang of Eight as the law dictates. All members of that group would have treated national secrets as secrets. They have always have in the past.

Most telling of all was a New Year's Eve tweet from Eric Trump, a towering intellectual who always knows when to play it subtle.

Lindsey Graham was in Florida from December 20-29th, and he was briefed on this operation then. So tell me again, why is @EricTrump's tweet, which took place on the 31st, definitely not about this? pic.twitter.com/5ADT5QLc9m

— Shrouded☠Sciuridae (@ShroudSciuridae) January 3, 2020

Eric offered nothing but gleeful, sniggering childishness. If he had learned about an imminent attack on Americans, his tweets would have taken a very different tone.

You may also want to take into consideration this tweet from Mark Ames:

Been hearing for awhile that Trump Admin seriously believes the DC think-tank brainslop that Iran is on the verge of a youth-led color revolution, just needs one last push to bring about a pro-NATO Maidan revolution in Tehran. We're ruled by dumb psychos. https://t.co/l3wIfnX0qK

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) January 3, 2020

Ames is hardly my favorite person. He's a YAFL (Yet Another Fucking Libertarian), and he's close to the vile Taibbi. But sometimes you have to chat with a demon if you want to learn the latest rumors from Hell.

In that light, you may want to check out this tweet:

Like clockwork, here come the troll and bot accounts with the @.word12345678 usernames that were created literally *today*, to spread propaganda defending the US war of aggression against Iran and call for regime change

This is so obviously a gov-backed disinformation operation pic.twitter.com/jokpd0yQj9

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 3, 2020

Follow-up tweets:

Tens of thousands of bot accounts spread mountains of propaganda to support the US-backed fascist coup in Bolivia

These fake accounts flooding social media with disinformation have become a standard feature of US hybrid warfare against independent nationshttps://t.co/4kTCwz5JJE

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 2, 2020

Finally, you really have to see the brief, boggling video embedded in the following tweet. Trump said these words during the Obama administration...

This Donald Trump video on Iran is going to rip a hole right through the space/time continuum. pic.twitter.com/0sUICmfbJV

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) January 3, 2020

Message to the Dems: Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq, coupled with the economic disaster of 2008, should have ended the GOP once and for all. But that didn't happen.

Why didn't it? Because the mightiest propaganda machine in history managed to convince millions of people that the Dems bore co-responsibility for Dubya's insanity: "Hillary voted for the authorization of force! Therefore, she made Bush invade Iraq! She made Colin Powell lie about WMDs!" That message was blasted all over the right and the left side of the web.

The dolts who now blame that evil war on the Dems are the same dolts who, throughout 2003, chanted thought-stopping cliches like "Freedom isn't free!"

Fact: In 2003, only lefties mounted large-scale anti-war protests. Yes, I know full well that not all liberals marched in, or approved of, those protests -- but nobody on the right did so, although there were a few ineffective anti-war murmurs on the libertarian and paleocon blogs. (They opposed the invasion for reasons of their own.) Rightwingers of that era manipulated the Dems mercilessly by screaming "TRAITOR!" at anyone who questioned Dubya's honesty and wisdom. In 2004, Ann Coulter wrote an entire book which pushed the idea that liberals were in the secret pay of Saddam Hussein.

Seventeen years later, the history of that period has received an Orwellian rewrite. Trump got away with portraying himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war, even though he was no such thing. The Republican party has suffered almost no consequences for engineering America's most disastrous conflict.

Such is the mind-warping, history-twisting power of the right-wing media.

If there is war with Iran, the situation will go south very quickly. Bank on it. When war happens, before it happens, the public must understand that the sole responsibility for this coming debacle lies with Trump and the Republican party. Elizabeth Warren's initial response is pretty good, but she must be more forceful. So must all of the other Dems.

The best way to prevent further wars is to de-fang the right.