#Nisour Square massacre

[ptseti]

ERIK PRINCE: ‘U.S. SHOULD COLONISE AFRICA’… AGAIN? 🤡

Imperialists’ audacity can amount to clownery. But their intentions have dangerous consequences.

For example, private US-based mercenary firm Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007 in what came to be known as the Nisour Square massacre.

Erik Prince, the speaker in this video, is Blackwater’s founder, who once served as CEO and later as chairman. Some might see him as an extension of US foreign policy. Blackwater has won billion-dollar US-government security contracts to patrol throughout West Asia. He now thinks ‘underdeveloped’ Africans need the US to help govern the continent.

Africa certainly has leadership issues, but hasn’t Africa had genuine leaders who worked for the good of their people? And what became of them? France, a NATO member, assassinated Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara. The US, UK and Belgium killed the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. The US-backed South African apartheid government allegedly took out Mozambique’s Samora Machel. The CIA ousted Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, as well as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In every case, the West’s fingerprints are on the crime scene. Why are these facts glaringly absent from Prince’s rationale?

In many ways, the US already colonises Africa. Most African countries’ economies are at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund’s loan terms. These countries are reeling in debt on Washington’s conditions. The impacts can range from cuts to healthcare and subsidies, labour market deregulation, and privatisation of state assets and services. Plus, while numbers are not easy to pin down, of Africa’s 54 countries, 15 reportedly host 29 AFRICOM military bases. And 53 African states have varying military partnerships with the United States.

The point is, has Africa ever been free?

[blairelythere]

re: teleporting, asking for a friend, who should get merc'd first

It's always going to be a rotating pick for my number one guillotine spot (because there are just too many living sacks of human shit out there), but I think today I'll pick:

The warmongering, earth-reaping, living ass-pustule Erik Prince, founder of one of the most notorious private military companies, called Blackwater.

Leaving aside his involvement with Betsy DeVos, his sister and former head of Trump's Department of Education, the tally of war crimes, genocides, and treasons that his Blackwater is responsible for rivals the worst terrorist groups of modern warfare.

Because Blackwater is thoroughly a fascist terrorist group.

They were a major proponent and fire-fueler for the Iraq War, continually using their government contracted money to fund insurgent groups, spread anti-muslim rhetoric, and continue the lie that Iraq possessed nuclear capabilities.

The worst of it though?

The Nisour Square Massacre.

I recommend reading about this on the Human Rights Watch website. It's too fucking vile for me to type out.

Yeah, that motherfucker should get the worst of the worst done to him. I really, truly hope hell exists, just because this traitor murderer belongs in the hottest, spikiest of all the lowest pits.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.16 (After 1970)

1970 – King Hussein of Jordan declares war against the Palestine Liberation Organization, the conflict came to be known as Black September. 1975 – Papua New Guinea gains independence from Australia. 1975 – Cape Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe join the United Nations. 1975 – The first prototype of the Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor makes its maiden flight. 1976 – Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir. 1978 – The 7.4 Mw  Tabas earthquake affects the city of Tabas, Iran with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). At least 15,000 people are killed. 1979 – Eight people escape from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon. 1982 – Lebanon War: The Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon takes place. 1987 – The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion. 1990 – The railroad between the People's Republic of China and Kazakhstan is completed at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge. 1992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega ends in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. 1992 – Black Wednesday: The British pound is forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by currency speculators and is forced to devalue against the German mark. 1994 – The British government lifts the broadcasting ban imposed against members of Sinn Féin and Irish paramilitary groups in 1988. 1996 – Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on STS-79 to dock to the Russian space station Mir. 2004 – Hurricane Ivan makes landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 3 hurricane. 2005 – The Camorra organized crime boss Paolo Di Lauro is arrested in Naples, Italy. 2007 – One-Two-Go Airlines Flight 269 carrying 130 crew and passengers crashes in Thailand, killing 90 people. 2007 – Security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide shoot and kill 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square, Baghdad. 2013 – A gunman kills twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. 2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant launches its Kobani offensive against Syrian–Kurdish forces. 2015 – A 8.3 Mw  earthquake strikes the Chilean city of Illapel, killing 15 people, injuring at least 34, leaving at least six missing, and causing extensive damage. One person also dies in Argentina. 2019 – Five months before the COVID-19 stock market crash, an overnight spike in lending rates in the United States prompts the Federal Reserve to conduct operations in the repo market. 2021 – A 6.0 Mw  earthquake strikes Lu County, Sichuan, China, killing three and injuring more than 88. 2022 – During the Let Yet Kone massacre, the Burmese military kills 13 villagers, including eight children, after attacking a school in Sagaing Region, Myanmar. 2022 – The death of Mahsa Amini occurred, which sparked worldwide protests.

[elmacheteillustrated]

Blackwater Pardoned

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Heather Cox Richardson - December 22, 2020 (Tuesday)

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson

Tonight, Trump pardoned 15 people, including four military contractors convicted of opening fire on a crowd and killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. The men sparked an international outcry about the use of private military contractors in war zones when they fired machine guns and grenade launchers in what came to be known as the Nisour Square massacre. One had been sentenced to life in prison; the other three to 30 years each. When the massacre occurred, the four worked for the Blackwater Worldwide security company, founded by Erik Prince, a key Trump loyalist. Prince is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother. 

Trump also pardoned three Republican lawmakers, two of whom were early supporters of his: California Representative Duncan Hunter, convicted of stealing campaign funds, and New York Representative Chris Collins, convicted of insider trading and lying to the FBI. Trump also pardoned two more of the men swept up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election: campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about a conversation he had about Russia’s possession of “dirt” on 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who was associated with Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort. Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to making a false statement to investigators. Papadopoulos and van der Zwaan make up two of the now four people involved in the Russia investigation that Trump has pardoned or whose sentence he has commuted. The other two are his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and his adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying under oath, withholding documents, and threatening a witness.

Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice. He has done so.

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: after a weekend of doing precisely nothing and vaguely enjoying it, I’m back writing today. I’ve been waiting a solid five months for a news hook to allow me to share the above quotation and Donald Trump’s attempts to dog-whistle his support for the Crusader conquest of the Middle East finally presented one in the lead up to Memorial Day, but I ended up too busy to get to it until now. Buckle up; we’re headed back to 2007 folks.

---

A Brief Look at Blackwater by J. Scahill

Today’s quotation comes from one of the most important books to come out of U.S. Iraq War and Occupation journalism, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army” - written by journalist Jeremy Scahill, who is now a founding editor at The Intercept; a publication I reference often in my work.

On the surface it may seem a curious decision to reach back in time to review a book originally published in 2007 and about a company (Blackwater) that in theory (and only in theory) no longer exists. That surface appearance however is precisely why it’s a shameful tragedy that Scahill’s excellent work has largely fallen down the memory hole in America - because Blackwater isn’t really gone, the U.S. still makes extensive use of largely unaccountable private mercenary corporations to enforce the interests of Western elite capital abroad, and governments throughout the Pig Empire continue to subsidize these private mercenary corporations with public money. Although the prosecution of a select few Blackwater war criminals remained something of a political football during the early portions of the Obama presidency and Erik Prince’s recent attempts to privatize the forever war in Afghanistan created a moderate amount of controversy in the mainstream media, the once impassioned resistance to accepting government-employed mercenaries as a consequence of empire has largely dissipated in “the West.”

This is unfortunate because at its heart Scahill’s “Blackwater” is more than an investigation into founder and now “former” owner Erik Prince’s infamous private mercenary army and its role in the Iraq war. The book is also about the terrifying and then-rapidly expanding (now, fully entrenched) role of private mercenaries in the Pig Empire’s permanent war economy.– mercenaries employed in volatile combat, assassination and security roles, both abroad and domestically in America. From deployment as a modern “Praetorian Guard” serving high level American officials in Iraq, to acting as an ad hoc private army for the wealthy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and including ongoing training and even war zone contracts with various Western governments, Scahill lays out a virtually unassailable argument that private mercenary forces are simply unregulated thugs in the service of the American imperial project - an argument that now appears to be largely mainstream, if still rarely articulated thinking.

In terms of writing style, Scahill has the instincts of a war correspondent and the meticulous attention to detail of a prosecutor; useful traits for documenting what amount to war crimes, massive levels of bribery and direct protection for Blackwater employees provided by the Bush administration. This has led some commentators to critique Scahill’s writing in Blackwater as lacking an overall “narrative” flow, but personally I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Sure, you can argue that Blackwater lacks the casual storytelling of say Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" but by that same measure, Scahill’s book is vastly more consequential. Frankly if you can read (Scahill’s friend and colleague) Seymour Hersh, you should have no problem following along with and enjoying Blackwater’s supposed “bombardment” of facts. Blackwater is, and remains both a rewarding and a monumentally important book in terms of exposing the inner workings of Pig Empire conquest and colonialism.

Mercenaries, Erik Prince and the Swine Emperor

All of which brings us to Downmarket Mussolini’s recent musings about possibly pardoning a number of accused American war criminals as a way of honoring veterans for Memorial Day; an objectively insane and monstrous idea Trump apparently decided not to go through with, at least for the moment. While much of the mainstream media coverage has (rightfully) focused on Herr Donald’s politically motivated potential pardon of depraved and murderous ex-Navy Seal Edward Gallagher, there was another curious name Trump was ruminating over - former Blackwater mercenary Nicholas Slatten.

For those unfamiliar with the exploits of Mr. Slatten, he’s the soldier of fortune the Department of Justice has successfully argued fired the first shot at a busy Baghdad intersection on September 16, 2007, triggering the depraved American war crime that would come to be known as the “Nisour Square massacre” or “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday” - a morally repugnant and utterly unjustifiable mass murder that lasted for up to fifteen minutes and resulted in the deaths of at least fourteen (and likely more) innocent Iraqis during the later stages of the Bush Administration. While the crypto-Crusader right wing media protests his innocence and Slatten himself declares that he‘s a “POW in his own country” the simple truth is that there is very little reason to doubt Slatten’s guilt - as noted by former assistant U.S. attorney Glenn Kirschner:

“Please bear with me for a moment while I relate some basic public facts about the Blackwater case. The defendants were US civilians (veterans) who were being paid to perform security services in Iraq. Multiple Blackwater employees opened fire on innocent Iraqis in what was a massacre in broad daylight. They killed 14 unarmed Iraqi citizens and injured 17 others in front of dozens of witnesses

"Some of the testifying witnesses were the defendants own Blackwater teammates," Kirschner said. "Many of the fellow Blackwater members testified about how the defendants were in the wrong - they did not even attempt to defend their teammates, rather they described their teammates’ use of deadly force as being wholly unjustified and without provocation. Evidence at trial included how one defendant, Nicholas Slatten, called Iraqis 'animals' and 'less then human.' According to Slatten, Iraqi lives were worth 'nothing.'”

On a related note, the 2008 paperback edition of Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater” opens with a detailed expose of the Nisour Square massacre. While Scahill doesn’t mention Nicholas Slatten by name, the updated introduction does offer a devastating account of Slatten and Blackwater’s wanton slaughter and violence; an account delivered by numerous Iraqi witnesses, including doctors, police officers and heartbroken relatives of the slain - many of whom were women and children. In light of the fact that all of this evidence has existed in the public sphere since at least 2008, I think it’s fair to say that justice has been a very long time coming for Nicholas Slatten; while justice for then-chief Blackwater corpse-farming scumbag Erik Prince, remains deferred.

This of course brings up the puzzling question of why Trump would even consider pardoning an almost certainly guilty piece of dogshit like Nick Slatten. Is the Swine Emperor indeed merely courting Fox News nation? Is he dog-whistling to a fanatically pro-Crusader, anti-Muslim reactionary right that worships at the altar of the Pig Empire “troop?”

Perhaps, but I also think it’s important at this juncture to consider Trump’s disturbingly close relationship with Erik Prince, their shared network of wealthy far right patrons and the political ramifications of a potential pardon. Prince donated at least $250,000 (and possibly more through other channels) to Trump’s election campaign, his (nearly as infamous) sister, Betsy DeVos serves as Herr Donald’s secretary of education and it certainly appears like Prince lied under oath to cover up a  August 3rd, 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Iran policy involving himself, Donald Trump Jr, advisor Stephen Miller, “George Nader, an emissary for the Saudi and Emirati crown princes; and Joel Zamel, the Israeli head of the rather dodgy private intelligence company Psy-Group.” 

More importantly however Prince has clearly demonstrated that he has privileged access to President Trump for the purposes of pitching potential lucrative mercenary contracts - including the aforementioned proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, a plan to deploy a US-backed private mercenary army to Venezuela and even the creation of an “off the books” private spy network to fight Trump’s political enemies at home and abroad.

Although intense public pressure has prevented the Swine Emperor from accepting any of Prince’s offers thus far, the “Dark Prince’s” continued presence in Trump’s inner circle seems to suggest that the President certainly wants to indulge the former Blackwater founder. Unfortunately for both men, while Nicholas Slatten is no longer “a troop”, he was serving as a private military contractor employed by Blackwater at the time he opened fire and touched off the mass murder of at least 14 Iraqi civilians. Since Prince is synonymous with Blackwater, and Slatten’s endless and exceptionally high profile series of trials has made Blackwater synonymous with “war crimes” - the would-be mercenary king has found it rather difficult to convince the American people he should be entrusted with multi-billion dollar government contracts.

While a pardon for Slatten won’t make all of that bad press go away, it would provide the necessary veneer of respectability for Prince’s ongoing attempts to worm his way back into the Pig Empire’s good graces; either now, or in the future. And if there’s one thing that anyone who has watched the rise, fall and rebirth of Erik Prince can say about that twisted son of a bitch, it’s that he knows how to grease the right wheels and he’s more than happy to play the long game.

- Nina Illingworth.

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter and Facebook.

[sixth-light]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, w/r/t the Old Guard fandom and what it means that they’re “mercenaries for hire” in 2019/2020. A massively underplayed facet of American and Western imperialism is that it is not limited to official militaries: it includes large numbers of “private military contractors” (a.k.a. mercenaries but they hate that name because they don’t KILL people they just (checks notes) go to other countries with guns which is totally different. obvs.). This was particularly true in the Iraq War, where it resulted in mercenaries massacring Iraqi civilians, and it is true in lots of places where the US claims to not have “boots on the ground”. Boots belonging to US soldiers? No. Boots belonging to contractors employed by the US military...yes. 

It is worth noting that many many private contractors are former US military because the pay and conditions are much better. Warfare has been significantly privatised over the last two decades; it is also not a coincidence that the founder of the most notorious PMC, Blackwater (now called Academi) is the brother of Betsy DeVos, who is frantically trying to privatise American education. It worked for them once already! 

This means two things for the Old Guard characters:

1) they are private military contractors in canon (canonically, they have worked for the CIA) and this is a very very shady space to operate in. As much as we might like to imagine them only doing warm fuzzy missions “fighting for what [they] think is right”...there are likely to be a lot of recent shades of grey there. They will be mistrusted by a lot of people because of this and fairly so. They are not operating separately from Western imperialism. 

2) if you are writing an AU where they are not immortal warriors but still military/security contractors...again, shady as fuck, and a profession that would not reflect creditably upon them as people (and arguably doesn’t even in canon). It’s not a neutral choice and it’s particularly not-neutral for Joe, a Maghrebi Muslim. I’m not saying “don’t write this”; I’m saying, consider what it implies about who they would be and why they would choose to do this, absent their canonical history.

If you’ve read all this and gone “but doesn’t everybody know this? I certainly do” then we’re cool, this post isn’t for you, it’s for the many people who are literally too young to remember the Nisour Square Massacre as a headline event.                    

[watchingalotofmovies]

The Gray Man

The Gray Man    [trailer]

When the CIA's most skilled operative - whose true identity is known to none - accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins.

Oh goodie, normalising torture, and using the cheapest of action movie tropes, putting a young kid in peril. And it looked like Erik Prince worked as a consultant for the Prague mayhem shootout, inspired by what are probably his fond memories of the Nisour Square massacre.

Yeah, I know, it's just a movie. But sometimes it's just too much.

On the plus side, there's some good banter between Ana de Armas and Gosling. And it made me look up that castle in Croatia where people seem to speak French. It's partially real, it's based on the Château de Chantilly.

Has there yet been a review that doesn't mention the moustaches?

[nowthisnews]

On December 21, Trump issued a new round of presidential pardons and sentence commutations, including ones for former campaign officials, Republican allies from Congress, and four Blackwater security contractors convicted in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, including two children. Former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and lawyer Alex van der Zwaan received pardons after making false statements to federal investigators during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the connection between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Sources close to the president suggest that this may foreshadow other Russia investigation-related pardons to come. Three former GOP members of Congress received pardons or sentence commutations for various criminal activities. Former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) was sentenced to serve 11 months in prison after misusing $200k in campaign funds for personal use; former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) was in the midst of serving a 26-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud and giving false statements; and former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) had been serving a 10-year sentence after being convicted of almost two dozen white-collar felonies, including fraud and money laundering. Hunter & Collins were two of the earliest lawmakers to publicly support Trump during his 2016 campaign. Trump also pardoned four Blackwater security contractors who were found guilty in the deaths of 17 Iraqis in a 2007 incident that's become known as the Nisour Square massacre. At least 20 others were also injured in this event. Three of the private security contractors were convicted of manslaughter and one other, Nicholas Slatten, was convicted of first-degree murder and serving a life sentence without parole. Witnesses said the four men fired on a crowd of Iraqi civilians in a public square without being provoked or attacked. Their pardon specifically was encouraged by Fox News host and Trump confidant Pete Hegseth. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, is the brother of Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos. Other pardons included two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who were convicted of shooting an immigrant at the Mexican border in 2006 and a dentist who pleaded guilty to health care fraud. Trump also commuted the sentences two women convicted of non-violent drug crimes at the urging of Alice Johnson, whose own sentence was commuted by the president in 2018 with the help of Kim Kardashian West. Trump has pardoned other allies in the past, including Roger Stone and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, and has been alleged to have discussed preemptive pardons for his three eldest children—Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric—as well as for son-in-law Jared Kushner and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

[meowmaids]

With the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 hours, away much of the focus will be centered around the loss of some American lives just as it has been for the last nineteen years. But we also can never forget:

We can never forget how Muslims and Sikhs experience physical violence and still twenty years later.

We never can forget the murder of Balbir Singh Sodh

We can never forget the murder of Vasudev Patel

We can never forget the shooting of Rais Bhuiyan

We can never forget the murders of the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting

We can never forget the attacks on Sikhs and Muslims worshipping

We can never forget the Mosques and Temples burned down and vandalized

We can never forget the invasion of Iraq

We can never forget white phosphorus used against women and children in Al-Fallujah. Nor depleted uranium was used in Afghanistan Iraq.

We can never forget the torture at Abu Ghraib and Ali al-Qaisi. And that torturers were given light sentences or no punishment

We can never forget Blackwater contractors killing civilians in the Nisour Square massacre.

We can never forget the nearly 200,000 civilians killed during the war in Iraq

We can never forget the nearly 50,000 civilians killed during the war in Afghanistan

We mourn today so many kind and innocent people. May our actions today and every day forward be committed to preserving truth when discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Listening to survivors, and supporting them as they see fit. And never allow this to happen again.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.16 (after 1960)

1961 – The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury. 1961 – Typhoon Nancy, with possibly the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, makes landfall in Osaka, Japan, killing 173 people. 1961 – Pakistan establishes its Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission with Abdus Salam as its head. 1963 – Malaysia is formed from the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawak. However, Singapore is soon expelled from this new country. 1966 – The Metropolitan Opera House opens at Lincoln Center in New York City with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra. 1970 – King Hussein of Jordan declares war against the Palestine Liberation Organization, the conflict came to be known as Black September. 1975 – Papua New Guinea gains independence from Australia. 1975 – Cape Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe join the United Nations. 1975 – The first prototype of the Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor makes its maiden flight. 1976 – Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir. 1978 – The 7.4 Mw  Tabas earthquake affects the city of Tabas, Iran with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). At least 15,000 people are killed. 1979 – Eight people escape from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon. 1982 – Lebanon War: The Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon takes place. 1987 – The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion. 1990 – The railroad between the People's Republic of China and Kazakhstan is completed at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge. 1992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega ends in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. 1992 – Black Wednesday: The British pound is forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by currency speculators and is forced to devalue against the German mark. 1994 – The British government lifts the broadcasting ban imposed against members of Sinn Féin and Irish paramilitary groups in 1988. 2004 – Hurricane Ivan makes landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 3 hurricane. 2005 – The Camorra organized crime boss Paolo Di Lauro is arrested in Naples, Italy. 2007 – One-Two-GO Airlines Flight 269 carrying 130 crew and passengers crashes in Thailand, killing 90 people. 2007 – Security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide shoot and kill 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square, Baghdad. 2013 – A gunman kills twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard. 2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant launches its Kobani offensive against Syrian–Kurdish forces. 2015 – A 8.3 Mw  earthquake strikes the Chilean city of Illapel, killing 15 people, injuring at least 34, leaving at least six missing, and causing extensive damage. One person also dies in Argentina. 2019 – Five months before the COVID-19 stock market crash, an overnight spike in lending rates in the United States prompts the Federal Reserve to conduct operations in the repo market. 2021 – A 6.0 Mw  earthquake strikes Lu County, Sichuan, China, killing three and injuring more than 88. 2022 – During the Let Yet Kone massacre, the Burmese military kills 13 villagers, including 8 children, after attacking a school in Sagaing Region, Myanmar.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

“Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said Jelena Aparac, chair of the U.N. working group on the use of mercenaries, said in a statement.

The Geneva Conventions oblige states to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes, even when they act as private security contractors, the U.N. experts said.

“These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level.”

[feelingbluepolitics]

Highest recommendation.

"Should [t]rump go through with the Blackwater pardon, it would be a stunning denouement to a wrenching episode in which Iraqis watched ten men, two women and two pre-teen boys die violently despite being unarmed commuters. Ever since, U.S. diplomats have counseled the Iraqis to trust in the American justice system–which turned Nisour Square into a prolonged legal fiasco. And any clemency for Slatten would happen in the aftermath of angry Iraqis storming the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which has raised questions about the Iraqi government’s willingness to continue the U.S. military presence."

It should also be noted that trump could be showing solidarity with his private mercenary and back-channel emissary, former Blackwater Erik Prince, who has skated various indictments so far but is under multiple investigations, including the newest revelations that Prince violated sanctions to conduct shadow contacts in Venezuela.

[quakerjoe]

In recent weeks, the president has asked close advisers what they think of additional clemency, according to a source close to the president and a senior administration official. “He’s said he wants to do more,” said the administration official, who discussed this case, as well as others, with the president. “There are more warriors out there who he believes have been treated unfairly and whose [cases] need another look.”

Not all of those “warriors” are U.S. servicemembers, however.

The Daily Beast has learned that Trump is still quietly weighing pardoning at least one employee of the private army Blackwater, Nicholas Slatten. Convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Slatten, a former U.S. Army sniper, took part in the contractor’s infamous 2007 massacre at the Nisour Square traffic circle in Baghdad. Blackwater was founded by Trump ally Erik Prince, who has insisted for over a decade that the company was railroaded after Nisour Square by an American left gone insane.

The White House declined comment on this story on Thursday afternoon.

[bountyofbeads]

'The War Machine Is Run on Contracts'

America's wars wouldn’t be possible without contractors, but presidents usually ignore the thousands who have died.

By KATHY GILSINAN | Published January 17, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted January 17, 2020 |

Mike Jabbar never met his replacement. But when Nawres Hamid died in a rocket attack on a military base in Iraq after Christmas, Jabbar saw photos of the wreckage and recognized the American flag he himself had helped paint on the door of a room now mangled. That was his old room, on his old base. It could have been him.

“Imagine something like that happens, knowing that you were supposed to be there and you weren’t there, and the person that replaced you is gone,” Jabbar, who like Hamid served as a translator for the U.S. military, told me in an interview. “It absolutely feels horrible.”

Jabbar was one of the lucky ones. He left his home country of Iraq last fall, at age 23, for the United States, where he’s now a permanent resident living with a friend in North Carolina.

The U.S. has relied on thousands of contractors like him and Hamid to help conduct its wars, in roles handling translation, logistics, security, and even laundry. America cannot go to war without its contractors, but presidents usually ignore the thousands who have died, including U.S. citizens. They are ubiquitous but largely unseen by the American public, obscuring the real size, and the real cost, of America’s wars. This also means that a president can selectively seize on one contractor’s death in the service of other goals.

Senior U.S. officials invoked Hamid, an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen, repeatedly to explain why they brought America to the brink of an all-out conflict with Iran—days before the public knew his name. Donald Trump, who has vowed to end wars in the Middle East, was willing to risk a new one to avenge an American contractor’s death—including by killing the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a step previous presidents worried could unleash a violent backlash. Yet when a terrorist attack killed two more American contractors and one U.S. soldier in Kenya about a week later, Trump barely reacted. “We lost a good person, just a great person,” he said of the soldier. He didn’t mention the contractors.

As America's interventions abroad have become more complex and open-ended, the country has relied on contractors more and more for essential jobs like guarding diplomats and feeding the troops. Even as the U.S. tries to end those wars and bring more troops home, contractors can stay behind in large numbers to manage the aftermath—especially since many of them are local hires in the first place.

The government has no data on exactly how many American contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars; in fact, it’s hard to get a full picture of how many contractors have been involved in those wars at all. The Defense Department publishes quarterly reports on how many it employs in the Middle East—close to 50,000 in the region as of last October, with about 30,000 spread through Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Americans make up less than half the total, in a region where U.S. troop numbers fluctuate between 60,000 and 80,000. The contractor numbers fluctuate too, and the military’s data don’t include contractors working for other agencies, such as the CIA or the State Department.

The death toll is murkier still, though Brown University’s Costs of War Project gives a figure close to 8,000, counting Americans and non-Americans. “They are,” in the words of Ori Swed and Thomas Crosbie, researchers who have studied contractor deaths, “the corporate war dead.”

Jabbar told me he was happy to take on that risk. Like Hamid, he was born in Iraq; from his middle-school years, he said, he wanted to become an American, and taught himself English in part by listening to Eminem and watching Prison Break. He dropped out of college at 19 to serve as a translator in the U.S. fight against the Islamic State, and wound up alongside U.S. troops as they pushed toward the group’s Iraqi capital of Mosul in 2016. Instead of studying English and earning an information-technology degree, he was in the middle of a fight to wrest back territory from insurgents, translating battlefield instructions for the Americans’ Iraqi partners.  

He later ended up with a Navy SEAL unit in Kirkuk, near where he grew up, and became all but officially part of the team; he lived with them, ate with them, patrolled with them, went to the front lines with them. Jabbar even once got beaten up and arrested while getting groceries for them—a case, he said, of mistaken identity, resolved only after he’d spent the night in jail.

“It is hard for me [to] emphasize enough how critical these dedicated people were to our military mission,” Joseph Votel, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who retired last March after three years helping direct the anti-ISIS fight, wrote to me in an email. Interpreters on contract with the U.S. military were more than just language translators. “They helped with our understanding; they provided cultural context to the events playing out on the ground; and, they came to us with networks of their own that [were] always very useful in navigating complex situations … They did all this at their own personal risk.”

America’s reliance on private contractors in war didn’t start with 9/11, but it exploded in the wars that followed those attacks. The political imperative to keep troop numbers limited, and the need to rebuild amid conflict, meant that contractors filled gaps where there weren’t enough troops or the right skills in the military to do the job. They could often work more cheaply than U.S. troops. They might get limited compensation for death or injury, compared with a lifetime of Veterans Affairs benefits; they could deploy to places where the U.S. didn’t want to or couldn’t legally send the military, Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University, told me.

Even before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Leslie Wayne documented the rise of contractors in The New York Times, noting their roles in training U.S. troops in Kuwait and guarding Hamid Karzai, then Afghanistan’s president. “The Pentagon cannot go to war without them,” she wrote. “During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10.” In Afghanistan, according to the latest U.S. military figures from last fall, the ratio of American contractors to U.S. troops is almost 1 to 1; including local and third-country contractors, it’s about 2 to 1.

Iraq contributed further to the trend. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, expectations, foolish as they may have been in retrospect, were that this would be a pretty easy thing,” Deborah Avant, a professor at the University of Denver who has researched the industry, told me. But as the situation deteriorated, it would have been difficult to mobilize tens of thousands of additional troops to provide security. So contractors filled the gap—and not just for the Defense Department. “If ABC News was there, they needed to have security,” Avant said.

They weren’t just providing security, though, and they weren’t just American. They came from a range of countries in addition to the U.S. and did a range of jobs that in prior years the military had handled. “When I went into the Army … everybody was trained as a soldier, and then after you were qualified as a soldier, you might have trained to be a cook, or a laundry specialist, or a postal specialist, or a transportation specialist,” Schooner said. “Today, we train trigger-pullers, and we’ve outsourced all support services.” Because many U.S. missions overseas now involve reconstruction, contractors can also provide thousands of local jobs in struggling economies.   

With contractor support, Schooner said, “We can send innumerable troops anywhere in the world, any distance, any weather, any geography, and we have them taken care of better than any army has ever cared for its people, for as long as you need.”

But the biggest benefit of all may be political. “Americans really don’t care what war costs,” Schooner said. “All they really care about is win or lose, and how many of our boys and girls come home in bags and boxes. So if you can, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly, artificially deflate the number of body bags or boxes, you’re winning.”

This doesn’t always work, however—and Iraq in particular has shown how contractor deaths or missteps can have severe political consequences, or even escalate conflict. Contractors have committed crimes that have hurt U.S. prestige and destroyed lives in Iraq—including the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, and the 2007 massacre of 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. In 2004, four armed contractors were ambushed in Fallujah, their burned and mutilated bodies hung from a bridge. An “angry and emotional” President George W. Bush then directed the Marines to seize the city, the historian Bing West told a BBC reporter. The result was a vicious urban battle that left 27 American troops dead, along with roughly 200 insurgents and 600 civilians.

In Hamid’s case, Jabbar thinks Trump got some justice in having Soleimani killed. “[Hamid’s] gone now,” Jabbar said, “but if he knows somehow that all this happened because of him, he would be so happy. And I’m so glad that at this point interpreters are being looked at as very valuable.” Jabbar himself left Kirkuk as soon as he could, because he said he was facing threats. He received a rare visa to come to the U.S. through a program for interpreters that the Trump administration had slashed. He believes that the visa saved his life, and he wants to serve again—this time in the Air Force.

As for Soleimani, Jabbar is glad he’s dead. “He’s the guy who orders others to go and kill ‘traitors’ and interpreters.”

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Donald Trump Stumbles Into a Foreign-Policy Triumph

The president, however inadvertently, may be reminding the world of the reality of international relations.

By TOM MCTAGUE | Published January 17, 2020 1:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted January 17, 2020 |

A year and a half into Donald Trump’s presidency, Henry Kissinger set out a theory. “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences,” he told the Financial Times. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

A term has been coined to describe this notion: Ryan Evans of War on the Rocks calls them “Trumportunities.” It is the idea that, whether by accident or design, Trump creates chances to solve long-running international problems that a conventional leader would not. His bellicose isolationist agenda, for instance, might already be forcing Europe to confront its geopolitical weakness; China, its need for a lasting economic settlement with the U.S.; and countries throughout the Middle East, the limits of their power.

The president’s erratic behavior might be doing something else as well, something even more fundamental. Through a combination of instinct, temperament, and capriciousness, Trump may be reminding the world of the reality of international relations: Raw military and economic power still matter more than anything else—so long as those who hold them are prepared to use them. The air strike that killed Qassem Soleimani was a reminder that the U.S. remains the one indispensable global superpower. Iran, or indeed anyone else, simply cannot respond in kind.

While it is clearly too early to judge the long-term ramifications of the president’s decision to order the killing (my colleague Uri Friedman has set out the dangers of accidental escalation), the initial assessment among many in the foreign-policy establishment here in London is not quite what you might expect. The attack—in the view of analysts and British officials I spoke with (the latter of whom requested anonymity to discuss government discussions)—has, at a stroke, reasserted American military dominance and revealed the constraints of Iranian power.

Although Trump’s foreign-policy strategy (if one even accepts that there is such a thing) has many limits, his unpredictability and, most critically, his willingness to escalate a crisis using the United States’ military and economic strength has turned the tables on Iran in a way few thought possible. What is more, the strike has exposed the gaping irrelevance of Europe’s leading powers—Britain, France, and Germany—in this whole crisis. The “E3,” which have long sought to keep the Iranian nuclear deal alive by undermining the U.S. policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, have so far failed to do so. This week, they were finally forced to admit the apparently terminal collapse of the Obama-era nuclear deal, releasing a joint statement to announce that they were triggering its “dispute resolution” clause because of Tehran’s failure to abide by the terms of the agreement. The reality of the situation is startling: Europe’s attempts to keep the deal alive have achieved little in Tehran because of the Continent’s powerlessness. And European opposition to Trump’s Iran policy has achieved even less in Washington. In an interview, Boris Johnson all but admitted defeat in keeping the nuclear deal alive, calling instead for a new “Trump deal.”

To some extent, one British diplomat told me, the air strike that killed Soleimani was an extreme snapback to the hyperrealist, Kissingerian principles that largely guided American foreign policy after the Second World War. In this view, Barack Obama and his cautious multilateralism were the break with the norm, not Trump.

While Obama showed the possibilities of this approach—the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal being prime examples (both of which have since been dumped by Trump)—he failed to adequately address its weaknesses, those who spoke with me said. Principal among them, according to a British government official, was that under Obama, the West had forgotten the power of escalatory dominance. In other words, he who carries the biggest stick retains his dominance, so long as he is prepared to use it.

The argument for escalation is simple: If the response to any aggressive act by a foreign adversary is always to de-escalate in order to avoid a spiral of violence, then the advantage borne by military and economic dominance is lost, creating more chaos, not less. A logic has been allowed to develop among countries such as Iran and Russia, the British diplomat said, that the West will not escalate a crisis and will remain boxed into its cautious, multilateralist view. Trump has changed this.

Take Russia, for instance. The Western response to its incursion into Ukrainian territory was always proportionate and almost entirely economic. While there were very good reasons for this, that response meant that Moscow could escalate the crisis by moving more assets into territory it sought to control, safe in the knowledge that, having tested Western resolve, it would not be challenged militarily. In effect, the United States’ failure to enforce red lines empowered its adversaries.

With Iran, according to analysts at the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s leading military think tank, Trump’s seemingly disproportionate response to Tehran’s aggression has left the Iranian regime shocked and unsure how to respond. At a briefing in London on Monday, I asked a panel of RUSI staffers whether, given that assessment, they considered the air strike a triumph for the president. No one on the panel demurred. Michael Stephens, a former British diplomat who is now a research fellow at RUSI, told me later that it was clear how badly the Iranians had been hurt, both in practical military terms and in pure national pride. “This has fundamentally changed the game and opens up the space for de-escalation,” he said. “It was a sucker punch which has scrambled their understanding of how the Americans might react in future. In the short term, it’s a triumph for Trump.”

Every option available to Iran now comes with huge risks, and the lack of serious response—so far—has damaged the Iranian regime’s reputation. The recent accidental downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752 has also hit it hard, revealing a frightening incompetence as well as a limited retaliatory power.

But while the air strike itself might be a limited foreign-policy success for Trump now, the geopolitical gains he has won through escalatory tactics might yet dissipate if the killing turns out to be little more than an isolated incident, signalling nothing but the president’s capacity for shock. He has history in this area, after all. In 2017, Trump dropped the “mother of all bombs,” the largest conventional bomb the U.S. has ever deployed, to kill more than 90 militants in eastern Afghanistan, and the following year, he authorized, alongside France and Britain, air strikes on Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. On neither occasion was the action followed up in any long-term fashion.

The lessons of the Soleimani killing also do not fit neatly into Trump’s worldview, suggesting the need for clear and consistent red lines, as well as the willingness to commit U.S. military resources to enforce them. It’s America back as global policeman.

At the moment, in the assessment of the British diplomat I spoke with, the only clear strength of Trump’s foreign policy is his unpredictability, which has the power to unsettle the United States’ adversaries. The diplomat said that Trump appears to understand American strength more instinctively than Obama but, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t seem to have anything close to a strategy to go alongside this insight.

So while there are “Trumportunities,” there are also “Trumptastrophes.” The president, accidentally or otherwise, has identified real problems, including Iran’s ability to act with relative impunity and China’s disrespect for the rules of global trade. With regard to Iran, Trump appears to have stumbled upon an effective mechanism to advance U.S. interests. But he has yet to show himself to be any better than his forerunners at solving the long-term problems he has identified—and may yet make them worse.

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We Can’t Afford to Ignore Lev Parnas’s Explosive Claims

We can’t afford to accept them at face value either.

By David A. Graham | Published January 16, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 17, 2020 |

Irony is thriving in the Trump administration. Consider this: The president spent months, and was ultimately impeached for, badgering the Ukrainian government to announce a probe into the natural-gas company Burisma. Yet all it took was the release of some text messages by Lev Parnas, an accused criminal with a checkered past, for Ukraine to quickly announce it is investigating alleged illegal surveillance of former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

The supposed surveillance, which is described in documents that Parnas turned over to the House Intelligence Committee, is one of several explosive claims to emerge this week. In the messages, Robert Hyde—who had contacts with the Trump family and is a Republican candidate for the U.S. House—described surveillance of Yovanovitch in Ukraine. She was abruptly fired in May 2019 after a pressure campaign directed by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer. (Parnas, for the record, told Rachel Maddow on Wednesday that he believed Hyde was telling tall tales.)

Parnas turned over notes that again suggest—as House testimony from Ambassador Gordon Sondland previously attested—that Trump and Giuliani were only interested in the announcement of a probe, not the fact of one. This both undermines Trump’s claim to have been trying to fight corruption in Ukraine and indicates that the president’s goal was hurting Joe Biden and enhancing his own reelection chances.

[David A. Graham: Trump wanted an announcement—not an investigation]

Parnas also produced a May 2019 letter from Giuliani to Ukrainian President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky requesting a meeting with Trump. Giuliani began the letter, “I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump. Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.” This is the latest evidence to debunk Trump’s claim to have been acting in an official capacity when he pressured Ukraine.

In an interview with The New York Times, Parnas also explained how Giuliani came to represent him and his partner, Igor Fruman. In Parnas’s telling, he was worried about acting as go-betweens for Trump without an official capacity to ensure their safety and access. Parnas first proposed that Trump make the two men special envoys, but after speaking with Trump, Giuliani offered a new idea: He would represent Fruman and Parnas, as well as the president, thus making them all subject to shared attorney-client privilege.

The Parnas allegations go on and on. Parnas has said that Trump was kept apprised of all of his actions by Giuliani, although Parnas said he did not communicate directly with the president about them. (Though Trump has claimed not to know Parnas, there are many photos floating around of them together.) If true, this would also debunk any claim (already implausible) by Trump that he was unaware of Giuliani’s actions.

As the Senate prepares to hold a trial for Trump, with acquittal a foregone conclusion, impeachment remains a strange duck. For anyone who has seriously considered the evidence, it’s impossible to conclude that Trump’s behavior was appropriate (although it remains possible to conclude that impeachment, or removal, is still excessive.) Yet even though the House has finished impeaching Trump, and despite the appalling facts uncovered,  there is much that remains unknown  about the president’s actions with regard to Ukraine, thanks to both Trump’s obstruction and the haste of the Democratic House.

[David A. Graham: The arrests of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman]

This makes it impossible to ignore Parnas’s claims. If true, they make the case against Trump that much more damning. They help to fill in some of the missing information, they underscore the president’s abuse of office, and they come from someone with firsthand knowledge.

And yet it’s also impossible to take Parnas at face value. Parnas, you may recall, first became a household name in October, when he was arrested with Fruman while attempting to leave the country, and charged with violations of election-related laws. This is a man who started a company called “Fraud Guarantee,” reportedly so that he could bury Google results about his own previous shady actions. If he is telling the truth now, he was both involved in a dastardly and preposterous scheme, and lied about it in the past.

Some of Parnas’s claims here deserve particular scrutiny, especially those not backed by documentary evidence. Though he claims Trump was aware of what was going on, he does not claim direct knowledge that this was the case. The fact that Parnas’s account squares with others, including Sondland’s, lends it some credibility. He also told Maddow that “Attorney General Barr was basically on the team,” but offers no evidence for the allegation, and no other evidence has emerged so far to support it. (A Department of Justice statement called that claim “100 percent false.”)

The dilemma posed by Parnas’s claims recalls the one created by Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House last February. As Republicans eagerly noted then, Cohen was a convicted liar, preparing to go to prison on tax-fraud, campaign-finance, and other charges. His testimony was self-interested: He both had reasons to exact personal revenge on Trump, and hoped that his cooperation might induce authorities to lighten his sentence. All of this was true, but Cohen (like Parnas) brought documents to back up his claims, and his testimony has largely been substantiated since.

Parnas is like Cohen in another way: Each was once a part of the Trump circle, and the president and his defenders now dismiss him as a liar and scoundrel. And as with Cohen, the defense is troubling even if true. If Cohen and Parnas are such obvious villains, how is it that they came to be close to the president, putatively working as part of his legal teams? The same question applies to any number of other criminals, con men, and charlatans we’ve come to know over the past four years as Trump associates. The fact that he is surrounded by such people says a great deal about either his judgment or his probity. (Probably both.)

The investigations into Trump have often had to rely on questionable witnesses like Parnas because other, supposedly uncompromised people with direct knowledge have declined to speak. The Trump administration blocked testimony from Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, to name only a few, and Trump has declined to speak under oath. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton has conducted a bizarre public striptease, vacillating between hints he will and won’t testify, while saving his stories for a book; on the eve of the impeachment trial, he was spotted strolling around Qatar’s capital city.

In the absence of their testimony, the search for truth has had to depend on uncomfortable encounters with the likes of Lev Parnas. His claims can’t be believed at anything near face value. Yet they also cannot be dismissed out of hand, for the stakes are too high. As long as it’s Parnas’s story versus Trump’s, the question is which proven liar to trust.

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The Iran Plane Crash Is the Big Story

The accidental shoot-down of the Ukrainian passenger jet is a glaring example of how the conflict between the U.S. and Iran can spiral out of control even when neither party wants it to.

URI Friedman | Published January 14, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 17, 2020 |

The downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 and the deaths of all 176 people on board—newlyweds flying home from their wedding, graduate students charting ambitious careers, whole families returning from visiting relatives—have come to be portrayed as a tragic asterisk tacked onto the dramatic tale of how Donald Trump and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nearly went to war in the early days of 2020.

Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times published a comprehensive and vivid account of the week-long U.S.-Iran showdown. While the article ran more than 6,500 words, it included only one sentence on the plane crash. “In the confusion, a Ukrainian civilian passenger jet was destroyed by an Iranian missile,” the reporters wrote.

Trump, meanwhile, has claimed vindication for his handling of the crisis with Iran, but has barely mentioned the demise of Flight 752, other than to speculate about what caused the aircraft to explode. He has tweeted  often (including in Farsi) about the anti-government protests currently roiling Iran without referencing the impetus for them: the Iranian military accidentally shooting down the airplane, whose passengers were mostly Iranian nationals, and the country’s leaders then lying to their own people and the world about it for days.

But the shoot-down isn’t just some side event in the latest chapter of this story. It is the story, just as much as the U.S. and Iranian governments deciding to de-escalate hostilities is. The incident is a glaring example of how the months-long tit for tat between the two countries—which is far from over, even though their confrontation is for the moment less violent—can spiral out of control even when neither side wants it to. And it should serve as a counterweight to any notion that the parties have full command over the struggle they’ve been stepping up ever since the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

It’s revealing that the most recent round of hostilities between the countries was bookended by mistakes and misperceptions. The Times  reported that the triggering event—a rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia in late December that killed an American contractor at an Iraqi military base—was intended to exert pressure on the United States but not escalate the conflict, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. “The rockets landed in a place and at a time when American and Iraqi personnel normally were not there and it was only by unlucky chance that [the contractor] was killed,” the paper noted.

Whatever Iran’s intention, the attack did indeed leave an American dead. Which prompted the Trump administration to kill dozens of militia members in retaliatory strikes. Which led to supporters of that militia storming the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Which resulted in Trump ordering the targeted killing of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. Which moved Iran to fire missiles at Iraqi military bases hosting U.S. forces. Which caused the Iranians to brace for blowback from the United States, creating the conditions in which an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps missile operator apparently mistook Flight 752 for an American cruise missile and, with 10 seconds to act and his communication channels malfunctioning, blasted it out of the sky above Tehran.

Iran seemed to carefully calibrate its missile barrage on Iraqi bases—which damaged U.S. military airfields, blast walls, and various facilities but inflicted no casualties—to symbolically avenge Soleimani’s death without dramatically ramping up its fight with the United States. And the Trump administration chose to respond with similar restraint, asserting that the Iranians were “standing down” and that Washington effectively would as well, by limiting its retaliation to additional economic sanctions. The two foes even exchanged de-escalatory messages over encrypted fax via the Swiss embassy in Tehran. But if one needed an illustration of the difference between intentionally escalating hostilities during a crisis and unintentionally doing so, there’s no starker one than the Iranian military (more or less) precisely firing missiles at specific U.S. military targets and then, hours later, accidentally launching a missile that obliterated a plane with Iranian citizens on board.

The downing of Flight 752 “shows how even restrained retaliation could quickly turn into inadvertent escalation” and how actors in international crises are often less capable than their adversaries assume they are, especially when they’re in a defensive crouch, Jacquelyn Schneider, a national-security expert at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote on Twitter. (In this case, the incompetence of the Iranian military has been particularly noteworthy.) And while Iran and the United States are likely to proceed cautiously with their deliberate escalation—Iranian leaders know that they would lose a direct conventional war with the U.S., and Trump doesn’t want to get sucked into another protracted conflict in the Middle East—the biggest risk in ongoing tensions is inadvertent escalation, Schneider argued: “More mistakes will be made.”

Yes, the parties seem to have looked war in the face and recoiled, but they may simply be channeling their escalation in new directions rather than truly de-escalating. As the Trump administration heaps economic pressure on Iran and shines a spotlight on anti-government demonstrations there, and as Iran’s leaders grapple with this serious internal challenge to their rule and act out further by, say, launching cyber attacks, mobilizing proxy forces, or backing out of their commitments under the nuclear deal, the conflict could spin out of control again.

To confidently conclude that escalation is a manageable force would be reckless. Imagine, for instance, that those Iranian missiles had killed Americans, something Trump has deemed unacceptable and threatened to counter with overwhelming force. Troops at one of the Iraqi bases that came under assault told Reuters that a soldier came “very close to being blown up inside a shelter behind the blast walls.” And Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman, the U.S. Air Force officer who runs the airfield there, told The Wall Street Journal that she thought the Iranians “really wanted to target our [air] assets and if they so happened to kill Americans in the process, that was okay with them.” Or imagine if Americans had been on board Flight 752. How would the world look today? To channel Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in escalation, but sometimes escalation is interested in you. It’s a fallacy to presume that state actors can completely control a crisis. After all, who would have predicted that Iranians would be in the streets this week calling for the downfall of the supreme leader as Trump cheers them on?

“Most obviously, humility is in order,” Robert Jervis, an international-relations theorist at Columbia University,  wrote  recently, regarding the lessons of the U.S. standoff with Iran. “My guess is that neither President Donald Trump nor the Iranians know what they will do next (and what they think they will do may be different from what they will do when the time comes).” Next time—and there will be a next time—the Swiss and their encrypted fax machine may not be sufficient to avert a war no one wants.

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Iran’s Response to Soleimani’s Killing Is Coming

The killing of Qassem Soleimani was a monumental blow to the country’s regional ambitions. It could be about to go back to basics in its response.

By SAM DAGHER | Published January 14, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 17, 2020 |

BEIRUT—About two years ago, Qassem Soleimani delivered a speech at a ceremony in Tehran marking a decade since the death of Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah commander killed in a car-bomb explosion in the heart of Damascus, an attack carried out by the CIA with support from Israel. Standing in front of a huge portrait of Mughniyeh superimposed against a panorama of Jerusalem, Soleimani addressed an audience of senior Iranian officials, as well as representatives of Iran’s proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Yemen.

Soleimani hailed Mughniyeh as “the legend” responsible for practically all the achievements of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance, which according to the Iranian general included building Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas into formidable threats to Israel and killing 241 American service members in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. “The enemy knows that punishment for Imad’s blood is not firing a missile or a tit-for-tat assassination,” he told the crowd. “The punishment for Imad’s blood is the eradication of the Zionist entity.”

Following Soleimani’s killing in an American air strike this month, it is worth remembering the man’s own words. Soleimani, Mughniyeh, and the current Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, formed a trio of men who carried out Iran’s strategy across the Middle East under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And so it is hard to overstate the magnitude of the blow that Soleimani’s death has delivered. The focus in the days since his killing has been on the perceived impulsiveness of Donald Trump’s decision, Iran’s retaliation—limited thus far to the firing of 22 missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq, with no reported casualties—the public displays of grief for Soleimani in Iran, and the national- security implications. But as with Mughniyeh’s death, to paraphrase Soleimani himself, the response to the Iranian general’s killing will not be restricted to a lone missile attack or a tit-for-tat move—Iran is not yet done.

Take the case of Mughniyeh. In the summer of 2012, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists and a driver in an attack in a Bulgarian resort town. U.S. and Israeli officials  suspected that the bombing, which occurred four years after Mughniyeh’s death, was retaliation for the Hezbollah commander’s killing, as well as for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, which Tehran blamed on Israel. “I have received many messages from brothers in the resistance asking for permission to carry out martyrdom operations” to avenge Soleimani’s death, Nasrallah said during a speech aired at memorial services for Soleimani held throughout Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and the country’s south. Revenge, he continued, will be a “long” battle.

For now, in responding to Soleimani’s killing, self-preservation and maintaining staying power mandate restraint. The strike that killed him also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who commanded the largest of the seven main Iraqi proxy militias working for Iran, according to Hisham al-Hashimi, a Baghdad-based security analyst with the European Institute of Peace. Iran’s ability to retaliate is also complicated by the fact that it is loathed by most Iraqis, including its fellow Shiites, who recently attacked Iran’s missions in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. Iraqi Shiites blame Iran and the militias and parties affiliated with it for killing more than 500 protesters in Iraq since October, and they see these same actors as being behind much of the corruption and plundering of the country’s resources that has hobbled Iraq’s ability to deliver services and economic opportunities to its citizens. Mounting economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Iran and its allies in Iraq will also restrict their room to maneuver.

Read: The Soleimani assassination is America’s most consequential strike this century

Similar dynamics are at play in Lebanon, home to Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy force. Once beloved as a resistance movement that liberated southern Lebanon from Israeli occupation in 2000, Hezbollah is now regarded by many Lebanese as part and parcel of the corrupt, dysfunctional, and sectarian political class that has brought the country to the brink of economic collapse. Residents of predominantly Shiite cities in southern Lebanon such as Nabatieh and Tyr, which are seen as bastions of support for Hezbollah, have even joined their fellow Lebanese in protests that have been ongoing for months. “The prevailing mood now is ‘Give me money and I’ll come out on the streets and chant against America and endorse any of your illogical propositions. But you do not want to give me money and still want me to come out against America, no,’” Ali al-Amine, a journalist and politician who is among the most outspoken anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Shiites, told me.

Given these limits to Iran’s short-term capabilities, it will likely focus on assessing the impact of Soleimani’s killing, plugging holes and vulnerabilities in its intelligence and security apparatus, reevaluating its strategy and approach, and streamlining its operations throughout the region. Tehran will also seize opportunities for détente with its regional archnemesis, Saudi Arabia, and seek rapprochement with the region’s Sunni Arabs, whose animosity toward Iran worsened after it partnered with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to crush an uprising in Syria, primarily carried out by the country’s Sunnis, that began in 2011.

Over time, the United States, Israel, and their allies—and all those perceived as harming Iran’s regional strategy—will face retribution, though, most likely in the form of covert operations and actions that will be much harder to trace back to Tehran. It would, in a way, be back to basics: bombings, assassinations, and stealth tactics long attributed to Mughniyeh. Indeed, Soleimani himself touted such efforts both at the memorial service for Mughniyeh and in a rare TV interview he gave in October. As Soleimani put it, it is the technique of “appearing like a sword and disappearing like a ghost.” It’s as if he were instructing his soldiers on the path they would have to take after his demise.

During the memorial for Soleimani, Nasrallah vowed to avenge his comrade’s killing by driving U.S. troops from the region and returning them to America “in coffins,” echoing the vow Soleimani made in 2018 to avenge Mughniyeh by “eradicating” Israel. Hezbollah will not shy away from carrying out operations against the U.S. and its allies, and may even resort to the campaign of assassinations and bombings that it turned to in Lebanon starting in 2005, when it felt under siege and compelled to defend its existence.

Elsewhere, having reconciled with Hamas after the two sides fell out over Iran’s support for Assad, Tehran could turn to the group to ratchet up confrontation with Israel in Gaza. In Syria, both Iran and Hezbollah will seek to maintain their presence and influence—Assad, for one, knows his survival hinges on patronage from Iran and Russia; Tehran, meanwhile, sees Syria as the second-most-important country in its axis of resistance, after Iran itself. And in Iraq, Iran’s proxy militias “have the wherewithal and expertise to escalate the situation and deliver painful blows to the U.S.,” Hashimi told me. There, too, he said, the focus will be on mobilizing assassination squads and mounting other special operations, rather than on carrying out conventional attacks on American forces.

In his October TV interview, Soleimani fondly recounted how, in 2006, he traveled through back roads to get to Beirut from Damascus during the 33-day summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, and how he, Mughniyeh, and Nasrallah oversaw the conflict from a command center in the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs. He said that Israeli bombers were bringing down buildings all around them, and that they survived by moving around and dodging Israeli reconnaissance drones.

Soleimani hinted in the same interview that even if the trio were to all die, an entire generation had been groomed by them to continue the fight—in asymmetric warfare, he warned, there are no traditional fronts. “The enemy,” Soleimani said, “must contend with an expansive and smart field of land mines.”

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By SAM DAGHER, the only Western journalist based in Damascus at the start of the Syrian conflict, is the author of Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria.

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