Saturday 4 January 2020

Is Trump Wagging The Dog?

For someone who doesn't want to start a war with Iran and is committed to de-escalation in the region, America is doing a bad job of it as they send 3000 troops to the Middle East after the assassination of the senior Iranian military commander, Qassem Soleimani, in Iraqi.
The questions being asked is was this an attempt by an under pressure Donald Trump to distract public attention from his ongoing impeachment trial.
He would not be the first leader to go for the rally round the flag play where public support increases for leaders during periods of international crisis or war, Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands exploited it famously and before Trump Bill Clinton, under the threat of impeachment over the Lewinsky affair, Clinton ordered a cruise-missile attack on a Sudan factory on the grounds it was producing nerve gas
for al-Qaeda on the eve of his trial although it turned out that the destroyed factory was actually a harmless pharmaceutical plant.
Scant evidence has been presented that Soleimani was plotting 'imminent and sinister attacks' to kill hundreds of Americans as has been claimed and unbelievably the Vice President has been promoting conspiracy theories that link September 11 terrorists to Iran which only confirms suspicions that the evidence for the assassination of Soleimani is scant at best.
Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said that as a legal justification for the attack in which 10 people were killed, the Pentagon’s claims were 'very vague'.
#WagTheDog2020, a reference to the 1997 film in which the President hires a Hollywood producer to fabricate a foreign war to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal is doing the rounds and the suspicion is that Trump, facing impeachment, has watched it recently.

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