{"id":50477,"date":"2020-01-07T21:45:08","date_gmt":"2020-01-08T02:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50477"},"modified":"2020-01-07T21:45:13","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T02:45:13","slug":"another-stupid-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50477","title":{"rendered":"Another Stupid War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Another Stupid War<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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All I wanted to do this week was work on part 2 of my localism series, but circumstances quickly got the best of me. The assassination of Iran\u2019s top general Qassem Soleimani was an event of such historical significance, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts on what it means and how things unfold from here, especially given how much of a role geopolitics and questions of empire have played in my writings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First off, we need to understand the U.S. is now at war with Iran.<\/strong> It\u2019s an undeclared, insane and unconstitutional war, but it is war nonetheless. There is no world in which one government intentionally assassinates the top general of another government and that not be warfare. You can argue the U.S. and Iran were already engaged in low-level proxy wars, and that\u2019s a fair assessment, but you can\u2019t say we aren\u2019t currently in a far more serious a state of war. We are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soleimani was not only a powerful general, he was a popular figure<\/a>within Iran. Unlike other blows the U.S. and Iran have inflicted upon one another, this cannot be walked back. There\u2019s no deescalation from here, only escalation. Even if you want to pretend this didn\u2019t happen and turn back the clock, it\u2019s impossible. This is a major event of historical proportions and should be seen as such. Everything has been turned up a notch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before discussing what happens next and the big picture implications, it\u2019s worth pointing out the incredible number of blatant lies and overall clownishness that emerged from U.S. officials in the assassination\u2019s aftermath. It started with\u00a0claims from Trump<\/a>\u00a0that Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on Americans and was caught in the act. Mass media did its job and uncritically parroted this line, which was quickly exposed as a complete falsehood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another Stupid War All I wanted to do this week was work on part 2 of my localism series, but circumstances quickly got the best of me. The assassination of Iran\u2019s top general Qassem Soleimani was an event of such historical significance, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts on what it means and how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6174,827,862],"class_list":["post-50477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-michael-krieger","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50478,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50477\/revisions\/50478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}