Iran’s al-Quds Force Chief Killed; U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment Hardest Hit
Article by Robert Spencer in "PJMedia":
Demonstrating that it learned
nothing from the backlash after it called ISIS top dog Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar,” the Washington Post called
Qasem Soleimani, who was killed today in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad,
Iran’s “most revered military leader.” If Soleimani, who as head of the
Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' Quds Force was responsible
for aiding numerous jihad terror activities worldwide, was revered at
all, it was more by the Obama foreign policy team that saw him and his
government as a valid partner for negotiations than by anyone in Iran.
And tonight, the Obama team and the entire U.S. foreign policy
establishment sees all of its core claims and principles proven false,
and its recommendations rightly disregarded.
Not
that they’ve noticed. They’re still asserting those principles as
valid, and as a rebuke to Trump’s action in ordering this strike.
Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes, who boasted
about how the Obama administration lied to sell the disastrous Iran
nuclear deal, was full of consternation and indignation after the news
broke of Soleimani’s death. He tweeted that “this is a really frightening moment. Iran will respond and likely in various places.”
Kelly
Magsamen, vice president for National Security and International Policy
at the hard-left Center for American Progress and former Obama Defense
Department official as well as a member of the National Security Council
(NSC) staff under Obama and Bush, tweeted:
“I worked the Iran account for years at the NSC under two Presidents.
I’m honestly terrified right now that we don’t have a functioning
national security process to evaluate options and prepare for
contingencies. God help us.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D, of course, CT) himself tweeted:
“The justification for the assasination [sic] is to ‘deter future
Iranian attacks’. One reason we don’t generally assasinate [sic] foreign
political officials is the belief that such action will get more, not
less, Americans killed. That should be our real, pressing and grave
worry tonight.”
Rhodes,
Magsamen, Murphy and those who are saying similar things are working
from the assumption that while Iran (and other countries) may strike at
the United States with impunity, the U.S. must never strike back, or do
so only in an extremely limited way, for fear of retaliation. If they
had been in the Franklin Roosevelt administration on December 7, 1941,
they would have advised FDR not to do anything about the Pearl Harbor
attack: Rhodes would have told him, “This is a really frightening
moment. Japan will respond.” Murphy would have told him that retaliating
“will get more, not less, Americans killed.” Once we did strike back at
the Japanese Empire, Magsamen would have added, “I’m honestly terrified
right now.”
This is the thinking of the foreign policy establishment in general. On Tuesday, I asked here at PJ Media, “Do
the Iranian Mullahs Think Donald Trump Will React Like Jimmy Carter?”
They would have been entirely justified in thinking that he would:
Carter’s hypercautious, passive, weak and inept response to the Iranian
hostage crisis represented the wisdom of the most revered foreign policy
“experts” of the time, but the Iranian mullahs correctly saw his
response as a manifestation of weakness and pusillanimity.
Over
the years since then, they have seen again and again that they could
present the United States with virtually any provocation and suffer no
consequences. The most egregious example of this came in January 2016,
just as the International Atomic Energy Agency was about to certify
Iran’s compliance with the Obama nuclear deal, paving the way for the
lifting of U.S. and European Union sanctions. Iran seized two U.S. Navy
boats and briefly held ten American sailors hostage, publishing photos
showing them being publicly humiliated. Instead of canceling the nuke
deal, Obama officials struggled to put the best possible spin on the
events. Obama White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the hostage-taking
illustrated why the nuclear deal was so urgently needed: “We continue
to be concerned about this situation. That precisely is why the
president made preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon a top
national security priority, and we’re making progress in actually
accomplishing that goal.”
How
the ayatollahs must have laughed. But they are unlikely to be laughing
now. They probably thought that engineering the storming of the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad would turn out much the way Benghazi did, with Trump
maybe talking a bit tougher than Obama and Hillary did, but not taking
any significant action. On Wednesday, the Ayatollah Khamenei even
taunted Trump about this, tweeting:
“You can’t do anything.” He probably felt secure in the knowledge that
the State Department is still full of “experts” of the Rhodes/Magsamen
type, who would warn Trump that he must not act – that to respond would
just “provoke” the Iranians.
The
next day, Khamenei found out otherwise. So did the State wonks with Ben
Rhodes’ picture on the walls of their cubicles. The mullahs have now
been put on notice. If their bloodthirsty regime for which Qasem
Soleimani ruined the lives of so many people finally falls as an end
result of Trump’s strong response, the Iranian people will be able to be
grateful that the multiply discredited U.S. foreign policy
establishment did not prevail.
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