President Bill Clinton is pictured on the left announcing the end of Operation Desert Fox on December 19, 1998 — the same say that the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against him. President Donald Trump is pictured on the right at the White House on December 19, 2019. Getty/Getty
- Social media users are pointing out the similarity between President Donald Trump’s impeachment, and that of former President Bill Clinton’s more than two decades ago.
- A New York Times front page from December 17, 1998 is getting attention on Twitter. It documents how Clinton launched Iraq airstrikes as his impeachment inquiry was heating up.
- Early Friday morning, US forces killed top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. Trump is currently awaiting a Senate trial in his impeachment case.
Comments
Here we are, playing balls again.
BridgIt A Sam-Bailey (Ms)
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Iraq is the one being bullied then?
Trump is going to send missiles into the Middle East, create refugees, increase terrorism and xenophobia will increase in the Whiter countries, creating home-grown sleeper cell terrorists, which creates more chaos.
I’ve posted several instances where anti-refugee sentiment has hit North America, that even Guyanese are being assumed to be refugees or Middle Eastern Arabians. One example is the Euro-Indo-Guyanese man being accosted by a racist white man who yells “Yamma Yamma Allahu Akbor” to his face and provoke a fight. The racist man assumed that he was a Syrian or Iraqi refugee.
Hate is just going to increase and get worse. Americans are being trained to hate on brown and black people in any case, because of Trump.
Conflict with Iran Could Be Inevitable After Killing General Soleimani
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted he does not want war with Iran. Now, with the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, that conflict could be inevitable. It is the price for instinctual foreign policy devoid of experts.
Commentary by Maximilian Popp | Der Spiegel International
He wanted to do everything differently, using deals instead of alliances, pressure instead of strategy. Even among Donald Trump’s critics, there were many who long thought it might be a bad way to approach foreign policy. After all, preceding U.S. presidents had all struggled for years to find solutions to the same set of apparently insoluble crises: AFGHANISTAN, IRAN, NORTH KOREA.
Donald Trump made a complete break with traditional U.S. foreign policy. He got rid of the experts in the State Department and discarded the tools of diplomacy — negotiations, trade-offs and the weighing of interests.
The guiding principle was “disruption”. Trump claimed that he could solve conflicts purely with his charisma and his imagination. After all, didn’t the tech companies in Silicon Valley likewise remodel the world with their innovations?
Now, though, the failure of Trump’s approach has become obvious to all. Disruption might be a model appropriate for Google and Facebook, but not for global politics.
On Tuesday, Shiite militiamen attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, likely at the behest of Iran, and the ambassador had to be evacuated along with embassy staff.
On Thursday night, the U.S. responded by killing the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, with a missile strike in Baghdad.
Soleimani was considered to be the second-most powerful man in Iran and his assassination is nothing short of a declaration of war. At almost the same time,
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un threatened to carry out new nuclear weapons tests. Two crises that Trump had promised to contain have now become more acute and threatening than they had been for some time.
The Epitome of Trump’s Capriciousness
The killing of Soleimani is the epitome of Trump’s capriciousness. The ploy of unexpectedly changing directions, of making threats and surprise attacks has not managed to extricate the U.S. from the Iraq-Iran-Syria quagmire. Washington has continued to be dragged into conflicts in the Middle East.
Ever since the U.S., under Trump’s leadership, backed out of the nuclear deal with Iran, Tehran has changed course. It has responded to the Trump administration’s strategy of “maximum pressure” with provocations, for example by attacking American facilities in the Middle East.
The Iranian regime had hoped the approach might force the Trump administration back to the negotiating table.
Now it looks as though the reciprocal attacks could lead to catastrophe. The U.S. killing of Tehran’s most important general, a man celebrated by the regime as a kind of folk hero and revolutionary freedom fighter, marks the continuation of this confrontation. It is a dramatic, shocking move that Tehran can hardly leave unanswered. Trump has said he isn’t interested in war, but his course of action is heading toward exactly that.
That is the greatest danger currently facing the world, but it isn’t THE ONLY potentially dangerous consequence of Trump’s instinctual foreign policy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un also remains unpredictable.
For a brief moment, it looked as though he might respond positively to Trump’s personal approaches and scale back his nuclear program in exchange for economic concessions.
Since Kim’s bellicose New Year’s address, however, in which he directly threatened America, it has become clearer than ever that the Bomb is more important to Kim than economic relations with the U.S.
Triggering a War by Accident
Trump’s failure holds a lesson both for the U.S. government and for the Europeans:
Namely that blatant pugnacity may be appropriate for political campaigns, but it has no place in diplomacy. Foreign policy is both arduous and dangerous. It requires endurance, humility and a willingness to compromise.
The nuclear deal with Iran assembled by former U.S. President Barack Obama didn’t prevent the regime in Tehran from fomenting strife in the region either — and Qassem Soleimani was Iran’s most important tool for doing so. Nevertheless, Obama’s attempt to break down the Iran problem into its component parts was the right approach. Large conflicts must be solved step-by-step rather than with a single, grandiose deal:
You cease working on the development of nuclear weapons and we’ll loosen sanctions. That’s how diplomacy works. Europe should continue taking this approach.
The North Korean example demonstrates just how important it is to involve political professionals. Trump, though, has no respect for experts. By getting rid of countless staff members, he has essentially sidelined the State Department, and in negotiations with Pyongyang, this ignorance made itself felt.
Trump relied heavily on the supposed friendship he thought he had with Kim, failing to understand — and there was apparently no one around to tell him — just how important nuclear weapons are for Kim’s own grip on power. That is the only explanation for why Trump was unable to secure at least a temporary stop to the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for the 2019 summit with Kim in Hanoi.
Diplomacy is a serious undertaking. There is nothing wrong with courageous, surprising foreign-policy initiatives. Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s rapprochement with the Soviet bloc made the world a safer place. But they have to be carefully prepared and carefully applied. Those who don’t approach it with the gravity it deserves risk triggering a war by accident.
It is absolutely critical that cooler heads prevail at this volatile moment in the Iran-U.S. conflict. All measures must be thoughtfully undertaken to deescalate tension. Humanity simply cannot afford to enter into another global war.
The consequences will be catastrophic, needless to say. In WW 1, 20 million lives were lost, including more than 10 million civilians. Additionally, 21 million more were wounded.
In WW 2, as estimated 70-85 million lives were lost (excluding the wounded) when the world’s population was 2.3 billion. Imagine what a WW 3 would be like. And that does not include psychological damage; and property and infrastructural losses.
Come to your senses, people. You don’t have an option!