January 3, 2020
The context for Suzanne Lummis’s presentation of “TWEETS FROM HELL” at Beyond Baroque tonight has radically shifted. Without any consultation with Congress whatsoever, President Trump ordered at some very recent point in time the execution of Major General Qassim Suleimani; a missile attack by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone is reported to have taken place yesterday at the Baghdad International Airport that utterly obliterated a pair of cars leaving the airport with Suleimani and his entourage.
All commentary on the political stature, in Iraq, of Suleimani would indicate that he was regarded in Iran as a combination of figures that would require an action-hero conflation for the American public to grasp the gravity of this presidential decision. Imagine someone who is a combination of Henry Kissinger, William J. Casey, and Oliver North, and you can begin to comprehend that this is not just another day’s work at the Drone Strike Radar Center, which is no doubt located somewhere in the 100 acre American embassy compound in Baghdad, Iraq. The comparison of the trio of K-C-N to Suleimani is not meant, of course, to indicate that I have any admiration for them. I equally disdain all of them and their belief in war as a justifiable hunting license on behalf of patriarchal pathologies.
“The question is this — as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?” — Senator Christopher S. Murphy (D-Connecticut)
Note: “100 acre American embassy” — that is not a typo. 100 acres is five times the size of my high school campus, which included a baseball field and a football field, in addition to a gymnasium and enough classrooms for several hundred students. I wonder what the total budget was for the construction of this embassy, not to mention its continued operation. If you wondering why climate change continues unimpeded under Trump’s reign, remember that the paramount concern of foreign AND domestic policy is “our interests wherever they are around the world,” according to Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper. Translation: “our CORPORATIONS’ interests wherever they are around the world.”
« L’Amérique – et le monde – ne peuvent pas se permettre une escalade des tensions qui atteigne un point de non-retour. » — Nancy Pelosi, quoted in LE MONDE
Look in your rear-view mirror, folks. You can still see the faint glow of a billboard-sized message: “un point de non-retour.”
Welcome to Hell…. aka “our interests around the world….” Front and center.
P.S. No doubt JARED KUSHNER knew about the strike before anyone in Congress did.
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