Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

By Frank Yacenda | January 3, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

The piece below first ran four years ago tomorrow, January 4, 2020. Four years ago today, January 3, 2020, Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to take out the mastermind of Iranian terrorism in the Middle East, Maj. Gen. Qadam Soleimani. The dire predictions of the naysayers at the time never came to pass, and in recent decades the world has never been more secure than it was on January 4, 2020.

Compare the world on the day after Soleimani’s assassination with the world today. Afghanistan was not run by the Taliban terrorists. Putin’s Russia had not launched its murderous invasion of Ukraine. Hamas had not conducted its vile rape and slaughter of innocent Israelis, and Israel had not been forced to root out the Hamas terrorist leadership through a brutal war in Gaza. The Houti rebels in Yemen, inexplicably removed by Biden from the terrorist list, were not attacking civilian shipping or U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea. The Abraham Accords were in process to bring peace to the Middle East. China was not openly talking about invading Taiwan. North Korea was talking more and flexing its threatening muscles less. And a villainous Iran was largely contained.

In the three years that the feckless Joe Biden has been in office, all that has been undone, and the world is arguably in a more perilous state than it has been since at least the end of the Cold War. Extending the weakness of the Obama years, with the same misguided so-called “security” team pushing Biden’s buttons, the U.S. has lost its hard-won position as the ornery bear the bad actors of the world were afraid to poke.

The bombings in Iran today that killed more than 100 and injured more than 200 of those going to pay their respects to the deceased Soleimani have all the marks of a terrorist attack. Ex-CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, in an interview earlier today with radio and TV personality Brian Kilmeade, expressed the view that it was probably either al Qaeda or ISIS, both Sunni terrorist groups, providing pay back to Shiite Iran. The internecine tit-for-tats go on as a subset of the bigger world conflicts. It’s not just the U.S. or the West that have legitimate scores to settle with Iran.

It’s more than sad, but extraordinarily tragic and costly in lives and peace, that the lessons of the Soleimani assassination have been forgotten or, more to the point, never learned by the appeasers of this administration. Sensible people can draw comparisons between what works and what doesn’t. But blinded by their ideology and a misguided world view, these people never learn.

Here is my piece from January 4, 2020:

Ding-Dong! The Wizard is Dead

In the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East is killed when Dorothy’s house, spirited off to Oz from Kansas by a cyclone, lands on her. In 2020 real life, the Wicked Wizard of the East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, was killed when he came into the crosshairs of an American drone flying over Baghdad’s international airport in Iraq. Ding-dong! The wizard is dead.

As the Munchkin Coroner states in the 1939 film, “As Coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

Ditto for Soleimani.

Just as the Munchkins rejoiced at seeing the wicked witch’s stockinged feet protruding from under Dorothy’s transplanted house, there is grounds to celebrate the demise of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s deadly Quds Force. Unfortunately, the figurative kingdom is rife with naysayers and handwringers, and political divisiveness seems ever-ready in contemporary America to overcome any shared sense of victory.

While it is Pollyannish to expect that there won’t be some consequences in the targeting of Soleimani, regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran’s arcane political structure, it is just as Pollyannish to think that there wouldn’t be consequences were he still alive and having breakfast this morning on Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.

The havoc and death wreaked by Soleimani stretches back four decades to when, in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the Iranian revolution and, beginning in the Iraq-Iran War of the early 1980s, he rapidly advanced within the hierarchy. In 1998 he took over command of the Quds Force, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Sometimes called “the world’s number one bad guy,” consider these feats of Soleimani and the Quds Force he headed:

Assisting Syria’s Assad regime repress its own people, resulting in the deaths, injuries, and torture of hundreds of thousands of civilians – including tens of thousands of children – in that country’s ongoing civil war, now in its ninth year;
Helping foment the rebellion by Yemen’s Houthi Movement, involving the country in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran and driving the already impoverished country further into chaos and destruction and leading to the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians;
Targeting Iranian dissidents overseas, including 3,000 taking shelter in Albania, and across Europe, killing Iraqi demonstrators protesting Iranian influence in their country, and reinforcing the repression of the Iranian population over decades;
Attempting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and orchestrating terrorist attacks in a number of countries, including Georgia, India, Thailand, and Kenya;
Killing at least 603 American troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, one-in-six of U.S. casualties in Iraq, and wounding many more, according to State and Defense department estimates, mostly through use of an extraordinarily destructive type of IED called an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) capable of penetrating armored vehicles; this was in addition to thousands of Iraqi casualties caused by IRGC proxies.

Taking out Soleimani wasn’t just a random act. It followed an attack by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, in which the attackers had penetrated the entrance to the compound and burned a reception area. While no one was kllled in the attack, the U.S. responded by sending in 100 Marines to secure the compound, given the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its internationally mandated requirement to protect diplomatic facilities.

There was more involved than the embassy attack, though. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that reliable intelligence indicated that a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks against U.S. assets in the region was being planned and was imminent. And, of course, Soleiman was brazen enough to show up at Baghdad’s international airport, exposing himself to the drone attack that killed him and also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN. “The risk of doing nothing was enormous. Intelligence community made that assessment and President Trump acted decisively last night.”

Pompeo said hundreds of American lives had been at risk. He later told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the attack also had saved European lives, though he hadn’t gotten the kind of support he expected from European allies.

“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well,” he said.

Milley said the U.S. had intelligence that was “clear, unambiguous” that Soleiman was planning a campaign of violence against the U.S., leading to the decision to attack him. Targets included American military outposts in Syria and diplomatic and financial targets in Lebanon.

“By the way, it still might happen,” Milley said.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasem Soleiman — Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, deputy head of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, right, both killed in the U.S. strike.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Ismail Qaani to replace Soleiman as head of the Quds Force and, predictably, pledged revenge. Qaani said the Quds agenda would remain unchanged.

As predictable as Khamenei’s reaction was, so was the response in Congress, which broke down along party lines. The anti-Trump Dems, for whom the President can do nothing right, were quick to criticize the action, going so far in some cases to say the strike on Soleimani was illegal, though reportedly legal departments at both State and Defense, as well as at Justice, approved the strike.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that Congress hadn’t been consulted on the planned attack on Soleimani – no surprise there, given the tendency of Congress to leak like a rusty old sieve – and she had the temerity to call the killing of the man who had murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, “provocative and disproportionate.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the killing of Soleimani an “assassination” and introduced legislation to block funding of any military action in the region. Most of the other candidates in the race piled on with criticism of the attack.

There was some push back, though, even within the parties. Another Dem candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quick to strike back at Sanders, calling his “assassination” claim “outrageous.”

“If he was talking about killing the general . . . this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”

While prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio, expressed strong words of support for the attack, another Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his libertarian view on foreign affairs, said the Trump administration should not embark on a war in the Middle East without Congressional approval.

As the naysaying and handwringing goes on, and will in the days and weeks and more to come, if there is one prediction that will always be correct it is forecasting violence in the Middle East. If that’s anyone’s prediction, they’d be right, with or without Soleimani. In anticipation of Iran’s reaction, the U.S. is sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region. Soleimani may be really, most sincerely dead, but the seething animosities of the region most certainly aren’t, and there are no ruby slippers, like the ones that passed to Dorothy from the deceased Wicked Witch of the East, to magically bring them to a close. So stand by. Film at 11.

Disclosure: The author was an intelligence analyst with the State Department covering the Middle East.

Featured image: Gargoyle, Donovan Reeves, Unsplash, used with permission.

Al-Muhandis and Soleimani images, AFP via Getty, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.

Lessons unlearned

By Frank Yacenda | October 12, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

By now the world knows what happened on October 7 in Israel. The gruesome details and the jarring, terrible images have been broadcast on television and across the Internet worldwide. It is not my purpose to repeat those here. Rather, my intent is to focus on the human toll and to look at what brought us to this catastrophic place.

To trace the roots of what led to the events of the 7th we need to look back to the Obama administration and its appeasement of Iran and the forces in the Middle East that are supported, trained, and funded by Iran. For anyone who has been tracking things over the years what is happening now is, at best, only mildly surprising.

It’s important to understand that the current crowd in the White House are, for the most part, Obama administration recycles. No one with even minimal powers of observation believes Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge or calling the shots. It is the ideological bent of the people on the President’s security team that leads them to believe that appeasement of Iran and downgrading of relations with Israel results in peace in the Middle East when, in fact, the exact opposite is the case. What is currently under way is visible proof of the error of this belief system, but their ideology and misguided understanding of Middle East dynamics prevents them from choosing another course. And now they’ve led us into the very mouth of the beast and how things will shake out, not ruling out a globally catastrophic result and one that almost certainly will come to do damage at home both in America and Europe, is very much unknown at this point.

I warned of the dangers of this approach of appeasement going back years before I started this blog. On Sept. 12, 2012, during Obama’s first term, I published The Trap Into Which We’ve Been Led. The dangers of appeasement were evident even then, in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, though they’re obvious to anyone who has studied or is conversant with the history of appeasement in world affairs. And then on Aug. 14, 2014, in the middle of Obama’s second term, I published Let Them Eat Hamburgers, describing the aloof and uncaring attitude Obama and his team displayed at that time in the face of the cruelty being inflicted on the Yazidis. Most of that piece could be written today, simply substituting Biden for Obama. In the face of the barbaric attack inflicted on Israel, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden waited Saturday until it already was late night and the end of a day of terror in Israel, to make a pathetic three-minute statement. And then Sunday he was silent, hosting a barbecue — at which they certainly ate hamburgers — on the White House lawn, and on Monday he took a holiday as the carnage continued both in Israel and in Gaza. It took him until Tuesday, three days after the barbarity had commenced and more than two hours later than scheduled, to stumble his way through a speech ostensibly supportive of Israel but without a single mention of the power behind Hamas’s attacks on Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I know most people don’t click on the links in my pieces, but I strongly urge you to click on those and the ones that follow and read the linked pieces. You will gain greater understanding of how all these things tie together.

Funding Iran’s Support of Terrorism

Much has been made, as it should be, of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that the Biden administration has unfrozen, part of a deal to exchange five Americans held by the Iranians for five Iranians in U.S. custody. Given that this is just the latest in a string of disproportionate concessions this administration made in exchange for Americans held by other countries, so much for the long-standing principle that we don’t pay ransoms to free people held hostage. The most predictable result, of course, is that such payments just encourage more hostage taking. But the other result, in this case, is that it frees up funds for Iran, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, to support more terrorism. Such as what is going on in Israel right now. Never mind the blather coming out of the administration that Iran isn’t allowed to use the funds for other than humanitarian purposes. It frees up $6 billion for the Tehran regime to spend on its extraterritorial adventurism.

Regardless the argument over the $6 billion, it’s chump change compared with the other funds this administration and the Obama administration handed to the Iranians, no strings attached. In my piece Dancing With the Devil posted in March of last year, I noted this as an adjunct to Biden taking America’s energy independence, as fostered by Donald Trump, to going hat-in-hand to some of the worst actors on earth to once more meet our energy needs after restraining domestic oil production:

“But, you see, the Biden administration already has been releasing billions to the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Faced with rising social discontent in Iran, which was at least one of the intended affects of U.S. sanctions, last summer the administration unfroze $29 billion in Iranian assets. With conclusion of a new nuclear deal with U.S. participation, another $100 billion in Iranian assets are likely to be unfrozen.

“All this is on top of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration — of which, let’s not forget, Joe Biden was part of — paid to the Iranians, all in cash to circumvent U.S. sanctions, in 2016. This included $400 million delivered by cargo plane direct to Tehran. Ostensibly these payments were in exchange for the release of four Americans being held prisoner by the Iranians, and Iran entering the nuclear deal. So much for the idea that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms. You see, it’s not just gangsters who pay protection money, and yet oddly we heard no calls to impeach Obama for a clear violation of properly imposed sanctions or long-standing U.S. policy.”

In the intervening time, the Biden administration’s decision to ignore the sanctions Trump imposed on Iran allowed the terrorist state to sell its oil to the Chinese and elsewhere, yielding at least another $60 billion to Tehran. The country’s foreign currency reserves, which the Trump sanctions had dropped to just $4 billion in 2020 from $122.5 billion in 2018, had recovered to $41 billion in 2022 and could be as high as $100 billion now. Good work, Joe.

Proving the Naysayers Wrong

While Biden and Obama courted the mullahs of Tehran in the misguided belief that they could be dissuaded in their quest for a nuclear bomb and somehow act as a responsible nation among nations, Trump understood the reality and pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He understood well how peace is achieved through strength, not shows of weakness, and when he took out Iran’s chief architect of terrorism, Qasam Soleimani, in January 2020, the naysayers and handwringers predicting dire consequences were definitively proven wrong. That was then and this is now, and Tehran, like the Russians and Chinese, sees the weakness in Washington, drawing a direct line from our shameful surrender from Afghanistan under Biden’s hand, and the three feel free to exert the bellicose power they had restrained during the Trump years, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or — holding our collective breath — Taiwan.

Commenting on what precipitated the carnage in Israel, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served under Trump during the Soleimani affair, succinctly stated the reality: “What has created war here is American weakness, American appeasement.” To prove Pompeo’s point, we now have a State Department that called for restraint on the part of Israel, whose citizens were being slaughtered on a scale, proportionately, mutliple times greater than 9-11, before being forced to retract the statement.

Instead of the clarity that came of projecting American strength in the interest of world peace and stability, we have an administration that, for all intents and purposes, has lost its mind. We have an open border policy that — by design — has allowed something like 7 million illegal immigrants into the country with little to no idea who they are. Agents so far, in the three years of the Biden debacle, have identified 264 individuals on the terrorist watch list — by far a new record — but have no idea how many terrorists were among the 1.5 million “gotaways” — the ones who just snuck across the border without apprehension. It would be beyond Pollyannish to believe hard-core terrorists were not among them, intent on setting up sleeper cells in the country, waiting for instructions to strike. Even with its tighter border controls, the same is true in Europe, and elsewhere. Terrorism doesn’t just exist in some far-off land, something we watch on television. It exists among us, too.

Hearing representatives of this administration one can be excused for thinking one is watching an episode of Saturday Night Live rather than the performance of serious public servants. Tracking the moronic statements of their boss, we have once honorable people like Admiral John Kirby, NSA spokesperson, saying with obvious seriousness that global warming and a 1.5-degree gain in global temperature would be a worse outcome for the human race than nuclear war, or that white supremacy is a greater danger to the country than terrorism. Baghdad Bob has metastasized across Washington and we all have to fear for our very survival in the face of such institutional delusion.

Before I entered the Foreign Service in 1988 I made an agreement with myself. I decided that I’d stay in the Service as long as it felt right. But if it stopped feeling right, or if I was asked to do something I had serious qualms of conscience about, I’d resign. I pretty much followed that compact with myself when, in 1999, I drafted my resignation letter to then SecState Madeleine Albright. One wonders how much their pay check or title means to people like Kirby to so debase themselves before the public they are charged with serving that they prattle such nonsense and not tender their resignation. Whatever their motivation, it is clear that no lessons have been learned by this administration and the future, not just of Israel or the Middle East, but America and, indeed, all the world, lies in serious jeopardy.

Featured Image: Women kidnapped by Hamas, Israel War Room via NDTV. Used under Fair Use.

Noa Argamani kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Avi Nathan, boyfriend of Noa Argamani, kidnapped by Hamas terrorists, screen shot of Hamas video captured by Reuters. Used under Fair Use.

Bodies of 260-some people murdered by Hamas terrorists at music festival, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.