Anti-Terror Hero Soleimani a "Terrorist"?... US "False-Life Syndrome" Normal Since 2003
Back in 2003 the words "quagmire" and "end game" were on everyone's lips - 17 years later the world has been forcefully reminded that the Western war on Iraq has still not ended.
The globally condemned assassination of Iran's Qassem Soleimani is not part of a "new" war on Iran - it is crucial history in the "old" war on Iraq.
However, fomenting "new war" hysteria with Iran permits the United States to avoid reckoning with the Iraqi proofs of their illegal negligence, hypocrisy and brutality. Looking for a new war with Iran is essentially the lamentable historical continuation of Washington's multi-century policy of, "On to the next tribe of Indian nomads".
But it goes even deeper than that:
No American would deny that the Vietnam War changed the very nature of American democracy. Certainly, the slaying of Soleimani is the most shocking military action in many years, and thus it fundamentally alters and magnifies how the Iraq War is changing the very nature of American democracy, still.
If World War II was a sober affair, with many Americans genuinely believing in the war's ideals of anti-fascism, Vietnam certainly was not. The widespread rejection of this fanatically ideological war - the "domino theory" of the spreading of "sinister" socialism - ultimately only produced a "pop cultural revolution". There was no civic and political revolution because there was no reform of institutions which had proven to lack a democratic mandate.
However, if Vietnam resulted in the average American's open and persistent refusal to believe their government - which was an important historical first for the US - the Iraq War will prove to have been when the average American retained this same correct skepticism but became unable to publicly admit their disbelief.
The Iraq War ushered in a new culture of lying for America, where Americans knew they were peddling total falsehoods, and knew that their listeners knew their claims were falsehoods, but there was a collective agreement to keep spreading these falsehoods anyway.
This is how we get to the point where somebody like Soleimani - who had bravely and unequivocally been an anti-terrorist hero - is publicly accused of being a "terrorist" by American leadership.
Because Washington's goals are so imperialist, so rabidly capitalist and so fueled by feudal realpolitik, instead of acknowledging how Soleimani's leading of the fight against ISIL saved many innocent European and American lives (and even the lives of the mercenary "contractors" from these nations), US Vice-President Mike Pence now absurdly says Soleimani was a part of 9/11. Trump says he is justified to plan bombings of "cultural sites", even though everyone knows he means mosques. Secretary of State Pompeo says the mob hit was "protecting American interests", even though the only Americans truly pleased are also Israeli Zionists.
In the Vietnam era Americans said en masse that they don't believe nonsense like this, but the Iraq War has changed American democracy - now many Americans feel compelled to say they believe it" but they actually don't.
To believe that Americans truly believe the endless lies of their post-2003 governments is to assume that Americans are either deluded or mentally disabled, and neither are true: Americans know they are poorly governed but now feel powerless to resist the injustice of their own leaders.
Therefore, just as they were marched to war in 2003 even though it was clearly based on the lie of WMDs, the Pentagon and US Deep State are hoping they can start a war with Iran based on more preposterous lies, such as the murder of anti-terror hero Soleimani being justified because he was a "terrorist".
They have a lot of help: Republicans, right-wing pundits and liberal "objective" American journalists all dutifully report the fantastic lies of the Bush II, Obama and Trump administrations as though they are - maybe - true. The US claims to have a free press but for 17 years they have rarely dared to question their leaders with the same rigour as in the era of Vietnam. However, all these people are paid with either money or power to say these things - please do not believe that the average American, 44% of whom qualify as low-wage workers, has any incentive to believe in or continue a system which punishes them ever-more mercilessly since the start of the Great Recession.
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