Spinning and Twisting Through Time

WE (THE USA) HAVE ELIMINATED a terrorist, and have therefore made America safer. So goes the Trump propaganda machine. Our heroic warrior, a flying robot, has bravely, patriotically sacrificed itself for the noble cause of making America great, so the fatuous nonsense says, great as it once was, when the white patriarchy was intact, unquestioned. And now, after three years of chaotic racist conservative anger and violence, America is great again, say those who in fact are destroying it. The Iranian general, like the rest of us, is replaceable, was expendable, and all that he was trying to do, whatever it was, will continue, undeterred, by his replacement. To target and kill a foreign military officer without a formal declaration of war is, according to American scholars of international law, illegal, according to international law established by the United States. The general, we can now see, was an icon, and all human achievement, including revenge, is motivated by emotion. That our act of international terror has successfully stoked. The Iranian foreign minister quite correctly points out that not only is the murder of a military officer on foreign soil in time of peace is a violation of universally agreed upon law, and that, for decades, the United States has used its military forces to kill a great number of both Iraqi and Iranian people, including civilians. There is no longer any disagreement among scholars of geo-political reality and historians of the Middle East that U.S. foreign policy in the middle east has been disastrous, notwithstanding unvarying American claims to the contrary. The solution would be to turn back time, and refrain from deliberately luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait in 1991. Better yet, turn back time to 1953, when Great Britain and the United States, having decided that the Iranian government must not be allowed to own and control its own oil reserves, replaced Iran's chosen government with one more acceptable to western corporate interests, their client, the Shah. Or maybe turn it back all the way to 1588, when England, flush with pride after the sinking of the Spanish Armada by a hurricane, decided to become an imperial global power. If nothing else, turn back time to when the United States of America was a simple plutocratic republic, before deciding to become an empire, for lack of anything better to do.