The assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani has brought us, again, to the brink of war, knocked Trump’s impeachment problems to the back burner, and left us all watching our backs and pondering where the retaliatory shoe will drop — and on who.
And now it seems there was a bit of a “phony war” in that the Iranians seemed to have altered the U.S., or let them be alerted to their missile strike on U.S. bases in Iraq. Yet the world truly wobbled on the edge of war with the apparently accidental downing of an Iranian airliner that same night — and it is just that type of unforeseeable event that can trigger unintended catastrophe.
Yet as America always seems want to do, it (we? him?) solved nothing, stopped nothing, yet actually set back, as we so often do, another people’s struggle for freedom, honest government and peace. To say nothing of our own national interests.
When George W. Bush and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq — with the support of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — it was they (us?) who handed the Islamic Republic of Iran its greatest strategic ambition — the one thing Iran could never, ever do itself: topple Saddam Hussein and add Shiite Iraq as Iran’s newest province.
Then as we so often do, we buggered off and left that poor nation to suffer its own miserable fate: corrupt government, a rotting infrastructure and the ravages of ISIS, which was largely defeated in Iraq by Soleimani and the Iranians.
Yet a dozen years later, Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets — Sunni and Shiites together — to demand the one thing the U.S. wanted, but could never achieve on its own: an end to Iran’s influence. (And so too the corrupt puppets who have ruled Iraq since the U.S. installed them.) Which is to say that we (yes, me, you, Bush, all of us!) destroyed the government, state and society of Iraq, and abandoned it to crawl back to life on its own. The U.S. then assassinated Soleimani in Baghdad and brought it all to a crashing halt.
Yes, the Iraqi people were on the verge of freeing themselves from Iranian influence and Trump has forced Iraq back into Iran’s influence for years to come.
We should protest the assassination, yes. (Even if we did not when Obama launched over 500 drone strikes that killed over 300 civilians.) But not so much mourn Soleimani. He was one of the shadow characters that Iraqis wanted to oust, and while there has been talk of the “hundreds” of American soldiers’ deaths, he also was a major force behind the Shiite/Sunni civil war. Ask those tens of thousands of orphans and widows whose sons and husbands died with a power drill driven into their skulls how much they mourn him.
Instead, Iran gets a second lease on life in Iraq, and it is now the Americans who have been invited to leave. And those brave protestors demanding their rights? The missile strike crushed them far more completely than any repression Soleimani could have brought. Indeed, his death has brought him a level of success in Iraq he could not have otherwise achieved.
And can you feel the déjà vu? Funky intelligence, murky reasons, an embattled president uses tomahawk missiles to change the story. Bill Clinton did it in Somalia during his impeachment tribulations; GW Bush has been practically rehabilitated for being not-Trump; and those 300 innocents on Obama’s watch? But he was so cool and eloquent and elegant!
So, what is to be done? We protested in our dozens or hundreds, but we cannot stop a coming war with Iran, as we could not stop the war with Iraq (nor even the Vietnam war.) We — meaning the resistance, the left, the woke whoever — we are quick to mobilize our opposition, focus our rage, but often only for a brief period of mobilizing.
Remember the protests against the Iraq war? Millions here and around the world took the streets and we accomplished pretty much zilch, at least from an Iraqi point of view.
The answer in 2003, even 1968, and 2020 is politics. We all know this. It is not street protests, or at least those are only where we can begin. Mobilization must lead to organization and some clearheaded thinking of the part of those who can still turn our country around — the left.
But are we able to take the country back? To date, if you study the polls, our entire future has naught to do with anything except Trump’s possible path to re-election — again — through the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Strict retail politics, not as sexy as stopping war.
But what if that is all the world most needs of us? Not our outrage and solidarity, but our ability to negotiate retail politics, make the personal and political compromises necessary to dump Trump by denying him victories in three or four key swing states?
Hopefully, we truly care enough about the world to get that done.
Joe Gannon, novelist and teacher, lives in Easthampton.