It was barely a year ago that the U.S. outmaneuvered Qassem Soleimani to install Adil Abdul-Mahdi as Iraq’s prime minister. But with Soleimani dead in a U.S. drone strike, the U.S. is treating the Iraqi government that U.S. forces created during the 2003-2011 occupation as little more than an adjunct of Iranian strategy. As the Iranians vow that revenge for Soleimani will include the eviction of the U.S. from the Middle East (Tehran’s longtime goal), the administration is refusing even to talk with the Iraqis about leaving, dismissing out of hand the very vocal insistence of Abdul-Mahdi and the Iraqi legislature that the Americans get out. While it’s not as if the U.S. typically respects Iraqi sovereignty, the Trump administration’s hostility toward Baghdad shows the U.S. doesn’t need Iranian interference to undermine its position in a country it once considered a cornerstone of its presence in the region. On Friday, Mahdi reiterated that he wants to discuss getting the U.S. out. But the State Department, in a statement about a “continued partnership,” ruled out any such discussion. “At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership—not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East,” read Friday’s statement, attributed to department spokeswoman Morgan Ortegus. The U.S. military command in Iraq did not respond to a request for comment.The State Department response struck some observers as an escalation–not against Iran but against Iraq, though one that would redound to Iran’s benefit. “This will likely be seen by Iraqi officials as a refusal to discuss withdrawal, which in turn will solidify their demands for withdrawal,” said Douglas Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who was White House coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Ending the U.S. presence and partnership in Iraq is the strategic goal most important to Iran. [It] will take the long strategic view, not obstructed by tactics, even tactics like the killing of Soleimani.” “We are disappointed that the State Department does not seem interested in working with the Iraqi government on a plan to safely withdraw American forces from Iraq,” said Dan Caldwell of Concerned Veterans for America. “The State Department is treating the preferences of a sovereign country and current strategic partner as if they are irrelevant,” added William Ruger of the Charles Koch Institute. “This violates the original war aims of Operation Iraqi Freedom of creating a free and democratic Iraq. Instead, it treats Iraq as merely a means for its imprudent maximum pressure campaign against Iran that promises greater hostilities when we should be finding a diplomatic resolution of our differences and the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria.”“The State Department is treating the preferences of a sovereign country and current strategic partner as if they are irrelevant...”Ever since the Iraqi parliament voted to kick the U.S. out, the administration has tacitly insisted that the vote wasn’t legitimate. President Donald Trump threatened to sanction an allied country that in 2014 invited its former occupier back to fight the so-called Islamic State. Ortegus’ statement conspicuously said that the U.S. seeks “a conversation between the U.S. and Iraqi governments not just regarding security, but about our financial, economic, and diplomatic partnership.”Earlier this week, after a confusing letter from a one-star general seemed to accept the untenability of the U.S. military presence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper insisted, flatly, that the U.S. would not leave. A parliamentary vote to expel the U.S. just “shows the support of the–of most Iraqis for our presence in the country,” in Esper’s telling. He reasoned that most Sunni and Kurdish parliamentarians didn’t vote. “Those Shias who did vote, many of them voted at the threat of a–of their own lives by Shia militia groups,” Esper asserted. But Ilan Goldenberg, who dealt with Mideast issues for the Pentagon and State Department in the Obama administration and who advises Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, said that Esper undermined his own point by dismissing an official act of a sovereign government. “Iraq’s biggest nightmare is to end up as the chessboard on which Iran and the U.S. duke it out, and with killing Soleimani, we pretty much fulfilled all their worst fears,” said Goldenberg.In the days since the strike, Trump has complained to those close to him that various advisers keep telling him that he would look “weak” and risk a harsh backlash from some GOP lawmakers if he were to actually pull out of Iraq, according to three sources familiar with the conversations. He’s told various people that he still wants out of Iraq and other countries, however, while still heeding for the moment the advice of his hawkish officials.“Iraq’s biggest nightmare is to end up as the chessboard on which Iran and the U.S. duke it out...”For the past week, senior administration officials have been in conversations with their Iraqi counterparts about the vote in parliament, according to both Iraqi and U.S. officials. As the Iran story unfolded in Washington, Iraqi officials in Baghdad consulted among themselves about how to handle whatever the U.S. was planning to do with its troops. Should the parliament continue to demand their ouster? Officials in the prime minister’s office and in parliament convened to discuss options for continued U.S.-Iraq partnership on training and other anti-ISIS military operations with a roadmap for total American withdrawal. But for the most part, Iraqi officials waited on Washington to get back to them with a plan for staying, or leaving, or something in between.As the week rolled on, and senior U.S. officials tried to answer Congress’ questions about the strike, Baghdad waited. Then, on Friday, it officially asked the administration what its plan for Iraq is–before the State Department issued its statement. For years, U.S. officials have lamented Iran’s ability to outplay the U.S. in Iraqi politics–something that during the 2003-2011 war and afterward drove U.S. officials to dismiss inconvenient Iraqi political decisions. Many on the right who opposed leaving Iraq in 2011, particularly the late Sen. John McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, ignored the lack of parliamentary support for a post-2011 basing agreement and treated withdrawal as a unilateral wish of the Obama administration. On Friday in Baghdad, Iraqis continued their months-long protests against both Iranian and American domination. One of the consistent features of the post-9/11 era is for American adversaries not to respond to the U.S. in ways that play to American strengths, but rather to ensnare the U.S. in protracted conflicts, political as well as military, that display U.S. weaknesses. Another is for the U.S. to declare victory at the outset of escalation, as Trump is doing after the Soleimani killing, before the full consequences of its actions manifest. A third is for the U.S. to learn the hard way that launching missile strikes can undermine the political outcomes it says it seeks, and empower the adversaries it launched those strikes against. All that leads some to conclude that while the U.S. focuses on Iranian military responses to Soleimani, Iran can advance its interests in a more durable manner, particularly while the U.S. muscles its supposed friends.“This is a delicate moment where some deft diplomacy can prevent us from being unceremoniously kicked out of Iraq,” said Goldenberg, now with the Center for a New American Security. “But the administration has decided to pursue sledgehammer diplomacy instead, precisely what does not work.”

A measure in the National Defense Authorization Act meant to keep white nationalists out of the U.S. military no longer mentions “white nationalists” after Congress quietly altered the text after it initially passed the House. The change, which has not been previously reported, could water down a House-passed amendment meant to address the threat of white nationalists in the military. The House language was specifically drafted to encourage screening for white nationalist beliefs in military enlistees. But after the Republican-controlled Senate passed its own version of the massive military spending bill and the two chambers’ bills were reconciled, the final NDAA instead requires the Department of Defense to study ways to screen military enlistees for “extremist and gang-related activity.” While it may seem like a minor tweak, the removal of the term “white nationalists” from the amendment text was concerning to Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who introduced the amendment in July after alarming reports about white nationalists in the U.S. military. Earlier this year, federal authorities arrested a Coast Guard lieutenant for allegedly stockpiling weapons in preparation for a terror attack. A series of HuffPost investigations also exposed 11 U.S. service members who had ties to Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group best known for helping organize the deadly 2017 “Unite The Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stripping the specific mention of “white nationalists” from the legislation could leave the door open for more white nationalists to join the military and could leave the U.S. military off the hook for what many critics say are lackluster efforts to screen enlistees for white nationalist beliefs. We cannot turn a blind eye to this growing problem which puts our national security and the safety of the brave men and women serving our country in jeopardy. It’s disappointing that Senate Republicans disagree. Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) It’s not clear who approved the language change or why. Senators on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, including Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment on the language. After the House and Senate each passed their own versions of the NDAA, lawmakers from both chambers met to reconcile differences between the two. The final NDAA was then approved by both chambers. Aguilar said the fact that the final NDAA does not mention “white nationalism” indicates the Senate may not be taking white nationalism seriously. In a statement to HuffPost, he noted that white nationalists have “successfully enlisted in our military in order to gain access to combat training and weaponry.” To prevent more white nationalist violence, Aguilar said, “we cannot turn a blind eye to this growing problem which puts our national security and the safety of the brave men and women serving our country in jeopardy.” “It’s disappointing that Senate Republicans disagree,” he added. LUKE MONTAVON via Getty Images Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) speaking at a press conference in July 2019. Academics and law enforcement officials have long warned of the specific threat posed by white nationalists who join the military, where they receive combat training they can use to inflict violence on civilians. White supremacists have long been attracted to the U.S. military, and often for good reason. In the 1970s, for example, a Department of Defense directive allowed service members to join the Ku Klux Klan. Although military rules prohibit service members from committing acts of discrimination or engaging in extremist activity, an unnerving 2017 Military Times poll found that nearly 25% of American service members reported encountering white nationalists within their ranks. Just this week, an ESPN article revealed the Army football team’s motto had origins in the neo-Nazi gang the Aryan Brotherhood; two cadets flashed the “OK” hand sign, often a white power symbol, on live television during the Army-Navy football game; and Army units memorialized World War II’s Battle of the Bulge on social media by posting a photo of a Nazi war criminal. Last month, Vice News confirmed that three members of the U.S. military were registered users of the online neo-Nazi forum Iron March. And in 2018, a series of investigative reports by ProPublica and “Frontline” found multiple members of violent neo-Nazi groups in the armed services. Aguilar’s amendment to the NDAA this year sought to address this long-standing problem by requiring the Secretary of Defense to “study the feasibility” of screening for “individuals with ties to white nationalist organizations” during initial background investigations of enlistees. The amendment also requires the Department of Defense to study whether two FBI resources — the Tattoo and Graffiti Identification Program and The National Gang Intelligence Center — could aid the military in this effort. CLARIFICATION: This piece has been updated to add further information on the NDAA passage process. Download Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter Join HuffPost

Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq, the Pentagon said late Tuesday, in attacks Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said were retribution for the U.S. killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.The strikes on two bases—Erbil in northern Iraq and the large Al Asad base in western Iraq—began about 5:30 p.m. Eastern time, U.S. officials said. An...

Iran was planning attacks on four US embassies when its top general was killed, President Donald Trump says.When asked what threat led to last Friday's US drone strike, he told Fox News: "I can reveal that I believe it probably would've been four embassies." The killing of Gen Qasem Soleimani, a national hero, came after days of protests at the US embassy in Baghdad.But Democrats given intelligence briefings on the fatal strike say they have seen no evidence of embassy plots.Mr Trump first made the embassy claim at the White House on Thursday and repeated it that night at a rally in Ohio.He was also backed up by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo."We had specific information on an imminent threat and those included attacks on US embassies. Period, full stop," said Mr Pompeo as he announced new sanctions against Iran. Islamic State welcomes killing of Soleimani Who was Iran's Qasem Soleimani? Soleimani, 62, was the mastermind of Iran's activities in the Middle East, as an architect of the Syrian government's war against rebels and the rise of pro-Iranian paramilitaries in Iraq.Mr Trump and Mr Pompeo have said he was responsible for the deaths of thousands.American forces also targeted Abdul Reza Shahlai on 3 January, a key Iranian commander and financier living in Yemen, US media reported on Friday.They quote unnamed US officials as saying that the secret mission did not result in the commander's death.Washington has so far made no public comment on the reported US raid in Yemen.His first comments on the matter were at an environmental event at the White House on Thursday, telling reporters he authorised the attack because Iran was "looking to blow up our embassy".He also called it "obvious" that the protesters that attacked the US embassy in Baghdad days before Soleimani's death were organised by Iran. "And you know who organised it. That man right now is not around any longer. Okay? And he had more than that particular embassy in mind."In Ohio later, Mr Trump told a packed arena that "Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad". What does international law say about the assassination? Voices from Iran: 'Soleimani did not deserve such a fate' Qasem Soleimani: Who was Iran's 'rock star' general? He also mocked Democrats who complained that the White House did not provide proper notification to lawmakers, saying that Democrats would have leaked the US military plans to the media.Mr Trump referred to the US embassy protests as evidence of an imminent Iranian plot. However, those protests had ended by the time the US launched a drone attack on Soleimani's motorcade at the Baghdad airport.House Armed Services committee chairman Adam Smith, a Democrat, said there was "no evidence" of a future Iranian bombing attack on a US embassy presented during a classified White House briefing given to lawmakers on Wednesday."Nobody that I've talked to in any setting, and I've talked to quite a few people in the White House, has said that," he told Politico."It has been communicated to me that there weren't specific targets, that the intel that we had did not cite specific targets, just more of a broad thing," he said. "So if the president had evidence of the specific target, that has not been communicated to us."Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a frontrunner to take on Mr Trump in November's election, said Mr Trump could not be trusted."The difficulty that we have, and I don't mean to be rude here, is that we have a president who is a pathological liar," he told NBC News."So could it be true? I guess it could be. Is it likely to be true? Probably not," he added.Democrats are not the only ones who have appeared to grow frustrated by the lack of details from the White House regarding why Soleimani's death was urgently required.Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee slammed the White House briefing as "insulting" and "completely unacceptable".He called the briefing a "drive-by notification or after-the-fact, lame briefing", adding that officials "struggled to identify" any reason that the White House would ever co-ordinate with Congress on military actions.On Thursday, the US House of Representatives voted to limit Mr Trump's ability to wage war on Iran.On Friday, the White House authorised new sanctions against Iran that were designed to "stop the Iranian regime's global terrorist activities", US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said.He said the penalties would affect Iran's construction, manufacturing and mining industries. Mr Pompeo said the targets were Iran's "inner security apparatus".In a statement, Mr Trump called Iran the "world's leading sponsor of terrorism" and vowed to counter Iranian threats "until the Iranian regime changes its behaviour".

closeVideoSen. Chris Coons urges President Trump to present Congress with a clear strategy for responding to IranThe Pentagon confirms that Iran launched ballistic missiles at U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq; Delaware Senator Chris Coons, Democratic member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joins Martha MacCallum on 'The Story.'Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., appeared on "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Tuesday and reacted to reports that Iran had launched "more than a dozen ballistic missiles" targeting U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq."My concern, Martha, frankly, is that Iran may well take this one action tonight and then lay low for months and then surprise us in another theater around the world or here at home," Coons said. "We're gonna have to have a clear strategy for how to engage our allies, how to put pressure on Iran and how to deter future attacks."MEGHAN MCCAIN CONFRONTS WARREN ON SOLEIMANI: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CALL HIM A TERRORIST?The missiles targeted military bases in Al-Assad and Erbil, the Pentagon added. A U.S. government source told Fox News that the missiles appeared to have little impact and there were no reports of American casualties.Coons added that the most important thing following the Iranian escalation was for the Trump administration and Congress to work together and "come up with a stronger and clearer strategy for the region."The senator made it clear he did not mourn the passing of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general whose death sparked Iran's missile launch, but he did criticize the president's choice to order the airstrike."He was a person responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American servicemen over the years. But this was a dramatically escalatory step," Coons said. "And now I think we need to make sure there is a coherent strategy for how we're going to move forward."Coons called the response from Iran "predictable.""I hope that there has been a thorough plan put together about what the next steps will be because a strong, forceful Iranian response throughout the region was, I think, entirely predictable," Coons said.Fox News' Frank Miles contributed to this report.

PARIS -- French rail workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers and others joined a fourth day of nationwide protests and strikes Thursday to denounce President Emmanuel Macron's plans to overhaul the pension system. Street protests were staged in Paris and other French cities as the government and labor unions pushed on with negotiations aimed at ending railway strikes over the proposed changes that started on Dec. 5. The Paris march started from the Republique square in the city center and was accompanied by a large police presence. The Elysee presidential palace was barricaded as protesters were due to head toward the area. Unions said the protest in the capital attracted 370,000 demonstrators, while French consulting firm Occurrence estimated a crowd of 44,000. By the time the demonstration winded down, 20 demonstrators and 16 police officers had been injured, according to the Paris police department. Officers made two dozens arrests amid occasional flares of violence, Paris police said. The Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors as employees joined the protest. Paris Metro traffic was severely disrupted, except for one automated line running normally. The national rail company, SNCF, said about one-third of its workers were on strike Thursday, the 36th day of the strike by railway workers. Three high-speed trains out of five were in operation. Regional trains were also affected. and many schools were closed. Unions have also called on workers to block road access to major ports, including in the southern city of Marseille. Philippe Martinez, head of hard-left CGT union, said "there are many people on strike” yet the government doesn't appear “willing to discuss and take into account the opinion of unions.” Talks between the government and labor unions resumed Tuesday but no compromise has been found. A new round of negotiations focusing on the financing of the new pension system is scheduled for Friday. Macron has asked his government to find a quick compromise with reform-minded unions. So far, the government is sticking to its plan to raise the full retirement age from 62 to 64, the most criticized part of the proposals. The changes aim to unify France’s 42 different pension schemes into a single one. Under specific pension schemes, some people, like railway worker, are allowed to take early retirement. Others, like lawyers and doctors, pay less tax. Unions fear people will have to work longer for lower pensions, and polls suggest at least half of French people still support the strikes.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a missile attack late Tuesday against two Iraqi military bases housing U.S. troops. In a statement, the Defense Department said, “It is clear that these missiles were launched from Iran and targeted at least two Iraqi military bases hosting U.S. military and coalition personnel at Al-Assad and Irbil.” The Pentagon said it was still assessing damage from the strike. No American casualties have been reported, as yet.“So far, so good,” President Trump tweeted.Tasnim News, an Iranian news outlet closely linked to the IRGC, published a statement from the IRGC which claimed it fired “tens” of rockets at al Asad air base in Iraq in an operation dubbed “Operation Martyr Soleimani.” “We warn the Great Satan, the bloodthirsty and arrogant regime of the US, that any new wicked act or more moves and aggressions (against Iran) will bring about more painful and crushing responses,” the Guards wrote.“This is what we were afraid of. We were afraid we’d get pulled into this struggle between the U.S. and Iran. And now we are seeing it.”— Kurdish member of parliamentThe IRGC claimed the strike was the country’s “vengeance” for the assassination of former Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. The operation follows a U.S. drone strike earlier this week which killed Soleimani, a powerful commander in Iran’s military and the officer in charge of Tehran’s wars in Iraq and Syria. The operation has plunged the U.S. and Iran into conflict after a summer which saw what the Trump administration said were escalating Iranian covert attacks against the U.S. and its allies in the region. The Tuesday night strike represents a significant escalation of Iran’s own. Never before have the Iranians fired ballistic missiles, orders of magnitude more dangerous than rockets, at U.S. positions in Iraq—not during the 2003-2011 U.S. occupation, nor the return of U.S. forces to Iraq after 2014.An Iranian official, apparently taunting Trump, tweeted out a picture of the Iranian flag immediately after the attack, mimicking Trump’s own American flag tweet posted in the immediate aftermath of Soleimani's killing. The IRGC’s statement warned other countries housing U.S. military bases that they could become targets. In addition, the IRGC statement said: “By no means do we consider [Israel] separate in these crimes from the American criminal regime.”But Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, sounded a somewhat softer tone. “Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of UN Charter,” he tweeted. “We do not seek escalation or war.”The IRGC-linked Fars News agency also published a video of what it said were rockets launched at Ain al Asad air base in Iraq, which is home to a small number of U.S. forces. The video shows what appears to be a handful of rockets streaking through the night sky. The Pentagon said Iran’s attack included “more than a dozen ballistic missiles.” It’s unclear what kind of ballistic missile was used in the attacks but Iran’s missile arsenals include weapons which carry warheads weighing several hundred pounds in contrast to the smaller, unguided artillery rockets which the U.S. says Iranian proxy groups have used against American bases in Iraq over the past few months. Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, officials in both Baghdad and Erbil scrambled to get details of the rocket attacks in both cities. Senior leaders seemed to be unaware of exactly how many rockets had fallen and if there was significant damage to American infrastructure or whether anyone had been killed. Jennifer Carafella, the research director for the Institute for the Study of War, said that by targeting the base at Erbil as well as Al-Asad, the Iranians were sending a message to Iraq’s Kurds to dissuade them from permitting U.S. forces evicted by Baghdad to reposition north to Kurdistan.“Iran is signaling to the U.S. that nowhere in Iraq is safe,” Carafella said, “and to the KRG [Kurdistan Regional Government] that there’s a price for standing by the Americans.”“This is what we were afraid of,” said one Kurdish member of parliament. “We were afraid we’d get pulled into this struggle between the U.S. and Iran. And now we are seeing it.”“The Kurds want U.S. troops to stay. They’ve always wanted U.S. troops to stay. But in this environment the Kurds are going to be asking for a lot more backing and confirmation that the Trump White House is going to have their back,” said a former senior Obama administration official working on Iraq policy.“In a classified briefing to congressional staff last week, U.S. officials indicated that the precision of missile strikes could point to whether or not Iran was escalating hostilities.”Throughout the course of the U.S.-led war on ISIS, the al Asad base was home to both American troops and military equipment, including MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C armed drones. Unknown militants in Iraq attacked the base with smaller rockets in early December, shortly after Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the base for a visit.In the three days following the strike on Soleimani, Predata—a firm that provides public and private sector clients insights based on public internet traffic data-monitored levels of online attention to hundreds of potential retaliation targets. One of the small number of trends that stood out was notably high levels of Persian-language attention to the al Asad airbase, according to Joel Meyer, a vice president at Predata. The firm is known for correctly predicting the timing of multiple North Korean ballistic missile tests.In a classified briefing to congressional staff last week, U.S. officials indicated that the precision of missile strikes could point to whether or not Iran was escalating hostilities, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the comments. Iranian proxy forces have long harassed U.S. targets with rockets that miss their targets; using missiles with more sophisticated targeting systems would be an indicator of heightened aggression from the Islamic Republic. Rep. Michael Waltz appeared to allude to the same issue in a Fox News appearance after the strike on al Asad, saying a strike that didn’t result in casualties could be seen as de-escalatory. —Spencer Ackerman and Betsy Swan contributed reporting

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Tuesday railed against President Donald Trump’s killing of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, calling it the “death of diplomacy” and declaring that the U.S. was safer before the president pulled out of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal.The libertarian-leaning senator, who has long been opposed to military intervention abroad, was asked by Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer on Tuesday morning how he could be opposed to the airstrikes following National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien’s new claim that American diplomats were saved because of it.“I think you have to ask yourself the general question, are attacks more or less likely now that Soleimani is gone?” Paul responded. “The person who has replaced them has been his assistant general for 22 years, is a hard-liner, and now the whole country of Iran is consumed with revenge.”The Kentucky lawmaker went on to say that Soleimani’s assassination has “taken diplomacy off the table” and that the only possibility moving forward will be military escalation. Hemmer, meanwhile, wondered if there was much diplomacy with Iran to begin with.“There was with the Iran agreement,” Paul pushed back. “The Iran agreement wasn’t perfect, and I was a critic of the Iran agreement, however, I think it was a big mistake to pull out of the agreement. You should have tried to build upon the Iran agreement.”The Republican senator, who has become one of Trump’s biggest supporters on Capitol Hill, further criticized the administration for placing an embargo on Iran, saying an “act of an embargo is like an act of war.”“I think it is the death of diplomacy, and I see no way to get it back started again until, sort of, the revenge of the Iranian people is somehow sated,” Paul noted. “I hate this. I hate that this is where we are going.”“I have been someone who has been for engagement, but there was much less killing, there was much less violence after the Iran agreement," he continued. “In fact, there was a lull, a period in which I think we were headed towards a much more stable situation in Iran, and now I think that’s gone. And I think it may be gone for a lifetime.”Hemmer, meanwhile, pointed out that Trump recently told right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh that Soleimani “should have been taken out a long time ago,” asking Paul if he took exception to that.“Is Soleimani a bad guy? Yes. Is the guy who replaces him a bad guy? Yes,” the Kentucky senator replied, adding, “Saddam Hussein was a bad guy but taking him out destabilized the region. It is about the broader implications of killing someone, not whether they’re evil or not.”In a Monday interview with CNN, Paul said that one would have to be “brain dead” to think that Soleimani’s death will lead to diplomatic negotiations, calling the death of the Iranian military commander “the death of diplomacy.”

It took less than 48 hours for President Donald Trump’s euphoria over assassinating Iran’s premiere security official to become contempt at the Iranian refusal to accept defeat. Trump and his administration had insisted in the wake of killing Qassem Soleimani that they wanted an immediate “deescalation” of tensions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the administration’s premiere Iran hawk, has made that assurance to at least 10 foreign dignitaries, according to department call readouts. But watching Iran opt against submission, Trump threatened not only Iran, but Iranian civilization. “As a WARNING,” Trump tweeted on Saturday, he had compiled a list of “52 sites,” payback for each of the hostages Iran took after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture.” Those culturally resonant places “WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” should Iran attempt to avenge Soleimani. It was a declaration of intent to commit what is by definition a war crime. It was also an expression of an impulse that has consumed America since 9/11 and that Trump has championed in its rawest form. Trump may declare his antipathy to endless wars, but the Soleimani assassination and its aftermath demonstrate why he hasn’t gotten around to ending them. He and his allies instead reached in the aftermath of the Soleimani strike for the template established by President George W. Bush in the years immediately following 9/11, complete with unreliable narratives about intelligence, inflated threats, and maximally asserted authorities. “The deceitful, fearful politics of the war on terrorism are a central and underappreciated part of Trump’s rise to power. ”The deceitful, fearful politics of the war on terrorism are a central and underappreciated part of Trump’s rise to power. Those politics and their underlying logic fuel disproportionate violence, particularly against what they understand as civilizational insults, and rage against the institutional domestic voices that caution restraint.Curdling as it ages, this kind of politics understands Iran’s clerical regime and its opposition to America in the Mideast as less a geopolitical adversary than a cultural insult stretching back even before 9/11, to the hostage crisis of 1979. That explains why Trump would respond to rocket attacks that killed a contractor with missile strikes in two countries, Iraq and Syria, and then respond to the subsequent assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad by killing the man in charge of Iran’s external security. The hit had less to do with national security than it did with an aggrieved, hysterical sense of national honor. That’s also why Trump and his allies demonstrate little concern about its consequences, which are already destabilizing the U.S. position in the Mideast even before Iran launches violent retaliation. Their template, honed over a generation, glorifies retribution and seeks to cower dissent into acquiescence. It shows why Trump is no alternative to the war on terrorism, nor any departure from it. He is its inevitable product. As long as the war lasts, he is by no means its final form. And the war, left to its own devices, will last forever. From the moment Trump killed Soleimani, legislators, reporters, and foreign-policy analysts asked what strategy the U.S. was now pursuing. Senate aides attending a Friday post-strike briefing came away frustrated at the lack of answers offered by administration emissaries. No strategy was on display–except for the obvious one, the last one left for a war in its 18th year: retribution. The administration insists that it has a strategy, which it calls Maximum Pressure. Pompeo, unveiling that campaign in 2018, outlined its endpoint as some form of U.S.-Iran grand bargain–one Iran would have to enter after giving up its entire regional strategy after the U.S. gives up nothing. Unsurprisingly, Iran has passed on that bargain, absorbing reimposed sanctions and U.S. bellicosity. Whatever pressure its government feels comes less from Washington than from its own citizens, who continue to suffer its violent repression. The administration’s response has been to declare Maximum Pressure a success while continuing to increase its posture of confrontation, a logic of escalation-to-nowhere that resulted in Soleimani’s killing. Just as the Bush administration used moralism and deception to dismiss concerns about its unfolding war on terrorism, the Trump team has offered rapidly shifting rationales about the need to kill Soleimani. One of those rationales was eerily reminiscent of Bush deceitfully claiming Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to America, necessitating the 2003 invasion. On Friday, Pompeo said, specifically, that an “imminent” threat from Iran necessitated the strike–something that clashed with the Pentagon’s Thursday-night statement that Soleimani was only “actively developing plans” for some attack. Attendees of the Senate briefing and those briefed on it who spoke with The Daily Beast did not hear anything that sounded imminent. Multiple reports over the weekend portrayed the threat intelligence about Soleimani’s fateful trip to Iraq as “business as usual” and Pompeo’s advocacy of killing Soleimani as months-old. On Sunday, Margaret Brennan asked Pompeo on CBS’ Face the Nation if killing Soleimani actually ended the supposedly imminent threat. “There are constant threats,” the secretary rejoindered, as if that was exculpatory instead of damning. Whatever Maximum Pressure has done, whatever killing Soleimani did, it has not stopped “constant threats.” To Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, Pompeo dismissed any violence that Iran will now launch against Americans–the entire rationale for killing Soleimani–as “a little noise here in the interim.” He completed his rhetorical move away from imminence in a Tuesday press conference that seemed to frame the killing not as preemption but retribution for the dead U.S. contractor. “If you’re looking for imminence, you need look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani,” Pompeo said, before asserting vague “continuing efforts on behalf of this terrorist to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead, potentially, to the death of many more Americans.”Nor could administration officials keep straight their versions of the scope of the allegedly imminent attack. Sometimes it threatened “dozens” of Americans, other times “hundreds” or even more. Pompeo on Sunday told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Trump “didn’t say he’d go after a cultural site. Read what he said very closely.” It took hours for Trump to lash out that it was only fair for him to respond to the history of Iranian roadside bombs in Iraq with cultural punishment. “We’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way,” Trump insisted. The absurdities compounded. Taking a hard pivot away from describing the intelligence agencies as a Deep State conspiracy to destroy Trump, Fox and Friends on Monday dismissed criticism of “our president’s decisions, our intelligence community’s decisions, our generals’ decisions,” since “everything [about the intelligence] can’t be made public.” The more plausible reason Trump killed Soleimani is the one administration officials kept coming back to after being challenged on the intelligence and the strategy. It was one Bush adopted about Saddam to dismiss similar pre-invasion questions. Soleimani was an evil man, Iran is an aggressive state, and America reserves for itself the right to kill people on that basis. The “terrorist” Soleimani–so designated by Trump, following in yet another post-9/11 tradition–”not only caused enormous death and destruction throughout the region, killed hundreds of Americans over the years, but had done so in the past couple of days, killed an American on December 27th,” Pompeo told Brennan. In other words, America was settling a 40-year-old score. As Jeremy Scahill detailed for the Intercept, many on the right, from neoconservatives to nationalists, have never been comfortable with leaving Iran out of the war on terrorism. Many consider Bush’s 2002 characterization of Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” a bold move that he unfortunately backed away from acting upon. They seethed as Iran faced no consequence for exploiting the Iraq occupation to kill and maim U.S. troops with powerful roadside bombs–something else that blurred the distinction between Iran and the war on terrorism.The insistence on Soleimani as the incarnation of Iran’s evil has additional utility. It seeks to intimidate those who oppose the assassination and portray them as terrorist sympathizers, morally bankrupt, inauthentically American, and contemptuous of a suppressed people’s struggle for freedom. That worked exceptionally well for the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. Democrats, sensing a vengeful national mood, opted for complicity or silence. Trump and his allies are running the play again. “The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates.”— Ex-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley“The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates” ex-U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley told Sean Hannity, who called Soleimani “evil.” On CNN, Bernie Sanders argued that U.S. assassinations of foreign officials will be useful for tyrants like Vladimir Putin, who see their value against domestic critics. “Bernie just compared @realDonaldTrump taking out a terrorist responsible for killing hundreds of thousands (including hundreds of Americans) to Putin assassinating his political dissidents,” tweeted a Republican National Committee communications director.Some of the Democrats most complicit in the Iraq War, like Joe Biden, quickly reverted to type. Biden issued a statement saying Soleimani “deserved to be brought to justice” before retreating into the sorts of process concerns familiar from post-9/11 Democratic reluctance to oppose Bush. (“[Trump] owes the American people an explanation of the strategy and plan to keep safe our troops and our embassy personnel…”) It fell to Sanders and the resurgent left–legislators like Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–to reject unequivocally any war with Iran in terms as strident as those who advocate one. Often explicitly citing the Iraq War, they presented a tacit case, absent for a generation, that progressivism cannot coexist with endless war.Liberals who consider Trump a departure from American traditions have hoped since 2017 that the military, the diplomats, the intelligence chiefs, and other security chiefs would stop Trump. But they–the people and institutions who built the war on terrorism and for whom hostility to Iran is often borne from direct experience–have been a minimal, reluctant bulwark. Many in uniform consider Iran owes the U.S. a debt of blood for its role in amplifying the horror of the Iraq occupation. The Times reported that the generals actually presented killing Soleimani as an option for Trump. It was the sort of thing their experience with Bush and Obama during the Iraq and Afghanistan surges taught them would be rejected by commanders-in-chief who don’t wish to appear so extreme. But even after Trump took the option, a luminary of the war on terrorism defended it. David Petraeus, his statements characteristically caveated, called the assassination “a very significant effort to reestablish deterrence, which obviously had not been shored up by the relatively insignificant responses up until now.” Yet it cratered what remained of U.S. strategy in Iraq. Caretaker Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, whom the U.S. outmaneuvered Soleimani to install, called for the end of the U.S. troop presence. Parliament voted on Sunday to expel the U.S., although a final decision may await Abdul-Mahdi’s successor. The U.S. military command in Baghdad announced it has suspended operations against the so-called Islamic State, even though the Pentagon deployed a fresh brigade to Kuwait, and is no longer mentoring the Iraqi military. “Iran, and primarily Soleimani, outplayed the U.S. in Iraq repeatedly.”Whatever ultimately happens with the call for withdrawal–something which Abdul-Mahdi tempered on Monday–Trump’s first response was to threaten America’s nominal ally Iraq. He warned that he would sanction Baghdad, something that conjured the devastating human consequences of the '90s era sanctions, “like they’ve never seen before” and demanded reimbursement from a state the U.S. attempted at agonizing cost to secure as its major Arab client.But Iran, and primarily Soleimani, outplayed the U.S. in Iraq repeatedly, something the past three presidents have refused to accept as the inevitability it always was. Iran is next door, and is now more unified that at any time in recent memory. Popular protests against the regime have given way to the massive national funeral processions for Soleimani, strengthening the hand of Iran’s maximalists. It turns out other countries also have nationalists who thrive off attacks from hostile foreigners. For an exhausted, frustrated America, strategy is beside the point, as it only entangles the U.S. in a Mideast morass. What Trump seeks instead is zipless, frictionless violence. As he put it in a Sunday tweet, the response to any Iranian reprisal will be another U.S. attack, “perhaps in a disproportionate manner.” That impulse is the inevitable result of the catastrophe of the war on terrorism, where for 18 years raids and decapitation strikes have substituted for victory.Trump’s threat against Iranian cultural heritage reflected the subtext of the Forever War: a clash of Western Civilization against supposed Islamic Barbarism, against which anything is permissible. That subtext has never been respectable among the politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, diplomats, lawyers, and other institutional figures that created and maintained the war on terrorism. Some deny that subtext even exists, preferring to consider declarations like Trump’s a vulgar, embarrassing deviation from an unfortunate geopolitical responsibility. But it has always been present, to varying degrees, in all their institutions, even at times prompting some of them to make efforts at eradicating it. (It has been on relatively blatant display in American journalism, deliberately as well as tacitly, since immediately after 9/11, as when prominent conservative pundits lamented that the U.S. didn’t kill enough “Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35” to forestall the Iraq insurgency.) Whatever their intentions, the inability or reluctance of the political and security classes to resolve the Forever War guaranteed the viciousness would grow. Being at war for so long has left a considerable number of Americans unable to reconcile their global dominance with the agony of being in a limbic state of neither peace nor victory. It has led a considerable number of them to consider brutality, which America can deliver, a substitute for victory, which America can’t.In a post-draft America with minimal shared wartime sacrifice, few Americans actually wage the war on terror, meaning most of us experience it as a media event, the background noise from the TV or on social media, where its consequences are abstract but its frustrations intense. Such an experience is conducive to seeing an answer in “bombing the shit” out of people who live in “shithole countries”; to locking them up indefinitely with little or no legal redress; to surveillance scaled up to global levels and scaled down to Muslim-American civil-society leaders and even mosques; to torturing people in captivity; to hardening the border against the potentially dangerous, broadly defined, through the conflation of immigration with terrorism. Versions of all of those practices have been justified, in sophisticated and eminently respectable ways, by Republican and Democratic leaders and the leadership of the security services. Republicans, for a generation, have exploited this strain in American politics, while Democrats, more often than not, have cowered before it. Trump decided it was time that constituency had a champion–not someone who winked and nodded at it, let alone someone who condescended to it or called it racist. Trump understood the totemic force of defining an ever-elusive enemy through the deceitful, inflammatory phrase Radical Islamic/Islamist Terror, which means that terror is something Muslims, who are seen as subhuman, do and are. It is a moral judgment about who the architecture of state violence ought to be aimed at–and, inescapably, which Very Fine People ought to escape it. Failing to exercise maximum brutality on Muslim combatants and civilians alike is why, in Trump’s explanation, “We don’t win anymore.”“Trump correctly calls the car a lemon while revving its engine into the red.”Trump expresses an antipathy for the war on terrorism that has confused elite observers, most infamously Maureen Dowd, who assessed him as “Donald The Dove.” Yet Trump’s stated antipathy has its limits. As president, he dramatically stepped up the aerial bombardment of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. However pointless Trump considers the Afghanistan war, he nearly doubled the troop commitment to it he inherited and cancelled peace talks with the Taliban in response to highly predictable Taliban violence. In his first two years in office, Trump ramped up drone strikes beyond even what President Barack Obama, whose reputation is inextricable from drone warfare, did in his own first two years as president. He also removed restrictions placed by Obama that existed, however porously, to prevent unnecessary civilian death. When a CIA official showed Trump drone footage of a strike that killed a man after he walked away from his family’s house, the president misunderstood the message of precision the agency attempted to convey and asked, “Why did you wait?” To send his own message, he made a woman deeply implicated in torture the director of the CIA. Trump possesses greater clarity about what the war on terrorism is than his journalistic or security-sector critics. His great political insight is to recognize that, for his supporters, the war on terrorism’s grotesque subtext of violence against nonwhites who are viewed as alien marauders is its emotional engine. Contemptuous of their traditional elites’ inability to subdue a diffuse enemy, Trump and his allies, to the adulation of their political constituency, prefer to subdue those closer to home and easier to identify: Muslims, immigrants, nonwhites who expect America to fulfill its promises of equality and liberty, and the white progressives who claim to support the same objective. Trump correctly calls the car a lemon while revving its engine into the red. Doing so unlocks a panoply of authoritarian possibilities that stretch far beyond the war on terrorism, like separating migrant children from their families and locking them in cages. This is what it truly means to be exhausted by a war without end. Whether Trump destroys Iran’s heritage or not, he reveals his understanding of victory: defilement, in cultural terms, of those who would frustrate him. Under Trump’s watch, the foreign battlefields of the war on terrorism have seen intensified bombings, raids, and other punitive measures. Even those who fought America’s wars for it can be abandoned to their violent fate once Trump sees them as encumbrances, just more subcontractors to stiff. With an embrace of brutality comes a delight in transgression, particularly when the typical lawyers or liberals or foreigners or Deep Staters howl objections. They walk into Trump’s trap: Aren’t these the people who got us into these stupid wars? One of the things those people told them was not to start a war with Iran. For the Trumpists, though not only for them, Iran, the supposed architect of Radical Islamic Terror, has been at war with America since 1979, all while the U.S. refuses to fight back. This long cultural insult is inflamed by the insistence on restraint from the same political, diplomatic, intelligence, and military voices whom many allies of Trump view as enemies of the president. Cowing them into submission is as delectable for the nationalists as vaporizing Soleimani.An important figure in the history of the war on terrorism exemplifies the intensifying grievances at its heart. When the planes hit the towers, Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit, its leading al-Qaeda expert, and architect of its renditions program. Frustrated that his superiors and the Bush administration misdiagnosed al-Qaeda’s political agenda and were unwilling to pull the U.S. out of the Mideast, Scheuer–also a harsh critic of the Iraq war–published a book in 2004 arguing that “Islam is at war with America” and that the U.S. had no choice but to respond with far greater violence as a matter of survival. After he left the agency, Scheuer’s trajectory followed America’s nationalist turn. He became a birther, a Trump supporter, and a devotee of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He recently mused about “loyal-citizen firing squads chosen by lottery” executing “Democratic coup-ists and insurrectionists” like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Barack Obama, his old CIA colleague John Brennan, and ex-intelligence chief James Clapper. After the Soleimani killing, Scheuer praised Trump for the kind of “non-intervention” and “America First” policy that the ex-CIA official believes is warranted.“An Iranian military attack must prompt President Trump to unleash U.S. military power to destroy Iran’s oil-production facilities, or its navy, or its merchant fleet, or, better yet, all three. No U.S. troops on the ground, no occupation forces led by an imperial pro consul, no U.S. demands for changes in Iran’s government or its political and social systems, and no U.S.-taxpayer-funded reconstruction assistance. Simply let the Iranians lick their wounds, work out their post-catastrophe future, and reflect on the fact that, hereafter, it would be terribly unwise to again fuck with the Americans,” Scheuer wrote. He presented this as an alternative to the endless war, rather than its next phase. But the war on terrorism isn’t only something that happens in Iranian oil fields, or in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere on the map of violence. The war happens in America. The war on terrorism is the Muslim-focused travel ban. It’s Trump’s demand that Muslim congresswomen Omar and Rashida Tlaib and two of their nonwhite colleagues go back where they came from. It’s the durability of mass surveillance, the refusal to admit refugees, the post-conviction detention of noncitizens, the militarization of law enforcement, the legal architecture that permits presidents to execute American citizens abroad without trial if an intelligence agency says capturing them is unfeasible, the enthusiasm not only for war crimes but for the men who commit them. As long as all this and more remain entrenched in American political culture, the war on terrorism will survive any pullout from Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan. It will produce more conflicts with countries like Iran. And it will produce more Donald Trumps.

The Trump administration’s stated rationale for killing Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani — that he posed an “imminent threat” to Americans requiring the US to take him out — is looking more and more bogus.From political rallies to press conferences to secret briefings to official documents, Trump administration officials have repeatedly failed to provide evidence that Soleimani posed more danger to Americans at the time he was killed than he routinely did for decades. Trump’s team has so bungled its justification for the strike that even some Republicans have criticized the administration.Without evidence establishing the “imminent threat” rationale, which could help bolster a self-defense case, experts say the government would struggle to legally justify greenlighting the operation in court. And despite having now had over a week to provide that evidence to the public, officials from President Donald Trump on down have increasingly begun to talk about the operation as retribution for the killing of an American contractor in Iraq by members of an Iranian-backed militia and the storming of the US embassy in Baghdad in late December.This failure has turned what could’ve been a positive moment in Trump’s presidency — the removal of a deadly anti-American general during a standoff with Iran that may have deterred further lethal action — into an embarrassing botch. “I’m surprised at how poorly they are making any credible public case for it,” says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not sure if that’s arrogance or incompetence or some combination of both.”After a US drone bombed a two-car convoy carrying Soleimani outside Baghdad’s airport on January 2, the Pentagon put out a statement that would serve as the backbone of the administration’s case for killing the military leader.“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the statement read. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.” That statement offers two justifications for the strike, then: 1) Soleimani had been planning to kill Americans and thus needed to be killed immediately to prevent that from happening; and 2) killing Soleimani would deter Iran from making future plans to attack Americans. The next day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN that “there was, in fact, an imminent attack taking place. ... The American people should know that this was an intelligence-based assessment that drove this,” he added.Put together, the Pentagon and Pompeo statements made it clear the administration was choosing to justify the legality of the strike by claiming it was in self-defense (rather than, say, arguing it was legal under the 2001 Congressional authorization to use force against the 9/11 attackers, or under the 2002 Congressional authorization for the Iraq War). All Trump’s team needed to do was provide evidence that killing the Iranian general was truly an act of self-defense — as Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for in international law — and that killing him was the only way to prevent an imminent attack, and they’d be in the clear.And that’s where everything seems to have started falling apart. The administration has yet to provide the public with any evidence that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack beyond vague and often conflicting statements about plots to blow up one or more embassies.“Their justification has been completely crumbling,” Oona Hathaway, an international law expert at Yale Law School and former Pentagon lawyer, told me. “Each time they’ve been pressed to give facts for their ‘imminent’ case, they just can’t do it.”While some Republican members of Congress have said the administration provided sufficient evidence of an imminent attack in a classified briefing with the House and Senate on Wednesday, other GOP members — along with most Democrats — had a different view: “This was probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the US Senate,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told reporters after the Senate session.Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who attended the briefing, told Vox’s Worldly podcast on Thursday the officials “just didn’t have” the requisite evidence of an imminent threat, adding, “This was a lot of bluster.”On Monday, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters that the Soleimani intelligence the US got wasn’t overly specific. “Did it exactly say who, what, when, where? No,” he said. “But he was planning, coordinating, and synchronizing significant combat operations against US military forces in the region and it was imminent.”On Tuesday, after having said just a few days before that the administration had made “an intelligence-based assessment” that there was “an imminent attack taking place,” Pompeo was asked by a reporter to provide more details about that imminent threat.His response was to say that Soleimani deserved his fate for having American blood on his hands. “We know what happened at the end of last year, in December, ultimately leading to the death of an American,” Pompeo said. “So, if you are looking for imminence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani.” REPORTER: Can you be specific about the imminent threat that Soleimani posed?POMPEO: "We know what happened at the end of last year & ultimately led to the death of an American. If you are looking for immanence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike." pic.twitter.com/yhqyNToZxd— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2020 That same day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked by a Pentagon reporter if the intelligence America had showed Soleimani’s attack would take place in days or weeks. “I think it’s more fair to say days, for sure,” the defense chief responded. Esper also insisted the intelligence gathered by the US was “exquisite,” but whether it was worthy of the superlative remains an open question as he didn’t actually share any of it with the press.National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien — who was one of the administration officials who briefed Congress this week — offered a few more details in an interview with NPR. He said the intelligence showed an attack was “imminent” in Iraq and perhaps Syria, but that “you never know the time and place of these things with perfect particularity.”Pompeo gave a similar statement to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Thursday night. “There were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani,” he said. “We don’t know precisely when, and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.” Pompeo: “there were a series of imminent attacks, we don’t know when, we don’t know where. pic.twitter.com/ig6dluI63C— Jason Sparks (@sparksjls) January 10, 2020 It stated, in part:[T]he United States has undertaken certain actions in the exercise of its inherent right of self-defense. These actions were in response to an escalating series of armed attacks in recent months by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-supported militias on U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East region, in order to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against the United States or U.S. interests, and to degrade the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force supported militias’ ability to conduct attacks. These actions include an operation on January 2, 2020, against leadership elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force on the territory of Iraq.The January 2 operation referred to here is the Soleimani killing.The letter goes on to list several of those “armed attacks in recent months” by Iran and its proxies. They include an Iranian drone flying near a US warship in July, Iran’s shoot-down of a US drone in June, and the killing of a US contractor in Iraq by an Iranian-backed proxy group in December.What the letter doesn’t list, however, is any evidence of an imminent attack being planned by Soleimani. Even some UN officials I spoke to were surprised Craft had sent that letter.“The administration just pointed to general animosities between the US and Iran,” Hathaway says. “That animosity has been true for decades. So why kill Soleimani now?” The administration, she says, hasn’t come close to making a persuasive argument. “It just doesn’t hold up. The law can’t make up for missing facts. They actually needed to have a factual predicate to allow them to take the action that they did.”The administration’s stumbling, bumbling, fumbling imminence claims have left Iran experts like Maloney completely stunned. “They really need to get their story straight,” she told me. “The cover-up is always likely to get you into more trouble than the original crime.”

Washington and Moscow traded barbs over Venezuela on Sunday, with Russia’s foreign minister urging the United States to abandon its “irresponsible” plan to depose Nicolás Maduro and his US counterpart slamming Russian meddling in the South American country.Sergei Lavrov made the comments during a visit to Moscow by Venezuela’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza – an apparent bid to stress international support for Maduro following last week’s abortive uprising against him in Caracas.“Attempts to stage a violent upheaval in Caracas have nothing to do with democratic process, and only disrupt any prospects of political settlement,” Lavrov said, according to the Moscow-backed broadcaster RT.Any US attempt to topple Maduro through force would bring “grave consequences”, Lavrov reportedly warned.Earlier, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, urged Russia – which, alongside China, is one of Maduro’s two key international backers – to stop interfering in Venezuela.“We want [Venezuela] to be an autonomous, independent sovereign state, with democratic elected officials. This is what we desire for the Venezuelan people,” Pompeo, who is due to meet Lavrov in Finland on Monday, told Fox News.“We don’t want anyone messing around with Venezuela.”The exchange came after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a 90-minute phone call on Friday, after which Trump claimed Putin was “not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela, other than he’d like to see something positive happen”.Five days after Tuesday’s dramatic pre-dawn attempt to remove Maduro, an uneasy calm has returned to the streets of Venezuela’s capital.The only reminders of the failed revolt are stretches of scorched asphalt outside La Carlota airbase beside which it began and a handful of graffitied messages left by protesters on a nearby overpass. “Freedom! Freedom! No more bullets!” reads one.On Saturday, Venezuela’s opposition held a series of anti-Maduro protests designed to maintain the pressure. But attendance was far short of the massive demonstrations held since Juan Guaidó – the man most western governments now recognize as Venezuela’s legitimate interim president – launched his US-backed challenge to Maduro in January.Sol Castro, a retired university professor who attended one protest in west Caracas, said she feared the solution to Venezuela’s crisis increasingly appeared to lie in foreign hands.“[It feels like] we may be approaching an end … but [also] that we’re only pawns in a larger game where superpowers, or former superpowers, or superpower wannabes will decide when and how this ends,” Castro said. Topics Venezuela Nicolás Maduro Russia Americas Europe US foreign policy US politics news

The United States has announced new sanctions against the son of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, 29, known as Nicolasito, is a member of the pro-government Constituent Assembly.Juan Guaidó, who is seen by the US as the country's legitimate leader, heads up a rival parliament that has been side-lined by the government.The sanctions will freeze any US assets Nicolasito has and bars US firms and individuals from working with him.Announcing the move on Friday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said they were punishing him for serving his father's "illegitimate regime"."Maduro's regime was built on fraudulent elections, and his inner circle lives in luxury off the proceeds of corruption while the Venezuelan people suffer," Mr Mnuchin said in a statement. "Maduro relies on his son Nicolasito and others close to his authoritarian regime to maintain a stranglehold on the economy and suppress the people of Venezuela." Venezuela crisis in 300 words What's behind Venezuela's political crisis? Venezuela crisis - in nine charts The statement also accused the president's son of engaging in propaganda and censorship on behalf of the government. He joins dozens of other Venezuelans already under economic sanctions.The US has been ramping up pressure since it recognised Juan Guaidó as the country's legitimate leader. Since he declared himself interim president in January, Mr Guaidó has won the backing of more than 50 countries, but has struggled to take power. Mr Maduro has largely retained the support of his military and key allies including Russia and China.Earlier this week, the Venezuelan government claimed it had foiled an international-backed "fascist" plot to assassinate Mr Maduro - a claim Mr Guaidó dismissed.Venezuela has been in severe economic crisis for several years - struggling with hyperinflation, high unemployment and chronic shortages of food and medicine.Some four million people have fled the country since 2015, according to the UN.

This series is hardly the first work to explore the pains and triumphs that come with moving to and adapting to the United States. But the anthology format serves the show’s goals in crucial ways. Most obviously, Little America’s depictions of eight different families grappling with relocation free individual episodes from the burden of representation. The framing of the show necessarily rejects the idea that each story can be a stand-in for the Immigrant Narrative writ large, or that there is a single narrative to begin with. Unlike migration-focused works that have prioritized their own putative importance over fidelity to the people they represent, Little America doesn’t sensationalize violence. The creators, Lee Eisenberg, Kumail Nanjiani, and Emily V. Gordon, didn’t set out to capture the most politically urgent tales, either. “The stories are very personal, and the stakes are hopefully universal. ‘I want to provide a better home for my family’; ‘I want to fit in at a new school,’” Eisenberg told The Ringer recently. “Those kinds of themes and storylines are what we were chasing, and the fact that they were with people that are so rarely front and center was something that really excited us.”Indeed, Little America is at its best when depicting intimate moments, including scenes of its subjects’ domestic life—especially in their home countries. In “The Manager,” the first episode, a young boy named Kabir (played by Eshan Inamdar) becomes a spelling-bee champion in large part because of his father’s promise to buy him a Trans Am if he learned every word in the dictionary. This setup renders the family’s later separation especially heartrending. When Kabir’s parents return to India to await news of their U.S.-residency status, the process stretches on for years, meaning they never get to witness their son’s spelling-bee wins in person. By the time they return to the States, he’s an adult—one whose adolescence they observed through the obfuscatory filter of Skype. The small changes in Kabir’s parents are foreign to him; he’s surprised to learn that their old celebratory meal can no longer include Pepsi for his father, who has developed diabetes. These are lives and bonds and families on hold, and Little America conveys the weight of these losses without sacrificing its characters’ vitality.Kabir’s parents aren’t the only subjects who struggle with the arcane American immigration system. In the final and most wrenching episode, “The Son,” a gay Syrian man flees home after his sexuality is discovered by people outside his immediate family. Upon his arrival in Jordan, Rafiq (Haaz Sleiman) becomes a regular at an internet cafe, where he constantly refreshes the webpage tracking his application for asylum in the United States. His anxiety is palpable. Though the series avoids story lines about more harrowing migration paths, Little America underscores the fear that seemingly minor—and arbitrary—administrative updates can inspire in immigrants. The punishing nature of the American immigration system directly affected the show’s production: Because of the ban that restricts travel from Syria, the final episode of Little America was filmed in Montreal. (According to show writers, the episode has been banned in 11 countries; Apple has yet to comment publicly on “The Son” being unavailable for streaming in those areas.)

Meet the Intellectual Founder of Brazil’s Far Right Olavo de Carvalho’s anger has inspired a number of Brazilian far-right politicians, the country’s president among them. Klara Auerbach / The Atlantic Story by Letícia Duarte Editor’s Note: This article is part of our “Democracy Undone” series about the erosion of liberal democracy around the world.PETERSBURG, Virginia—Talking with Olavo de Carvalho can be an exercise in self-restraint. As I walked into his house for an interview recently, he was sitting behind his desk, his gray hair neatly combed back. More than 100 smoking pipes were lined up on a rack, and thousands of books were stacked on the shelves of his home office alongside at least 20 rifles. He greeted me with a deep frown and wide eyes before pointing at a printout of a recent article I had written and bellowing, “What the fuck is that?”So began our second meeting.Sitting across from him, I saw that he had already set up his computer to film our exchange, his laptop camera framing my face. (He records all his interviews with reporters, whom he calls “enemies of the people,” often releasing them on YouTube. These are then spread by his followers, with titles such as “Olavo humiliates journalist.”) His wife, daughter, and a handful of other relatives and friends sat on a couch behind me, eating Burger King and smoking cigarettes, like an audience waiting for a show.I had been trying for months to get back in touch with him, and just two hours earlier, he had agreed to meet. He had read my story about him and wanted a chance to respond. Before long, he was extending his right arm and pointing his index finger at my face. “You’re very malicious, naughty, a liar—you are defaming me!” he shouted.“You’re a slut,” he went on, wagging his finger. “You come to my house with this cynical smile … You’re worth nothing, woman!”His language could be disregarded if they were random attacks, if he were an eccentric from the political hinterland. But Olavo de Carvalho is something else: Known simply as “Olavo” across his native Brazil, the former astrologist, former communist, and former journalist has become the most virulent voice against the left in Brazil. His commentary immediately reverberates across the country, propagated by his more than 1 million followers on YouTube and Facebook. Worshipped by the right and ridiculed as an extremist by the left, Olavo and his beliefs are discussed almost daily in Brazil, everywhere from threads on Twitter to long magazine articles.He is powerful for another reason. The 72-year-old is the architect of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right vision. A self-educated philosopher who never completed high school, Olavo has formed a new generation of conservative leaders in Brazil through an online philosophy course he has taught for 10 years. He estimates that about 5,000 students are currently enrolled in his program, and 20,000 people have watched his classes, including members of Bolsonaro’s cabinet.Now, from his ranch-style home in this rural county south of Richmond, he’s at the center of an anti-intellectual ideology shaping the policies of a nation of more than 200 million people, providing inspiration for one of the world’s most extreme leaders and, in so doing, turning fringe beliefs into government action.It would be easy to liken him to another, better-known, right-wing ideologue who offered guidance to a surprising presidential winner. Yet Olavo bristles at the comparisons to Steve Bannon, or at least he used to. When I first met Olavo, a year ago, Bolsonaro had been elected but not inaugurated, and Olavo had not yet met Bannon in person. He told me at the time that he didn’t take Bannon seriously. Much has changed since then. Two weeks after Bolsonaro’s inauguration in January, Bannon met with Olavo at his Petersburg home, and a couple of months later, Olavo was the guest of honor at an event hosted by Bannon at the Trump Hotel in Washington, where the former White House chief strategist introduced him to a select group of about 100 conservative guests. “Olavo is one of the great conservative intellectuals in the world,” Bannon has said.The day after Bannon feted Olavo, it was Bolsonaro’s turn. During a visit to Washington—the Brazilian leader's first international trip as a head of state—Bolsonaro hosted a formal dinner at the residence of the Brazilian ambassador. Olavo sat on Bolsonaro's right, Bannon on his left. Bolsonaro said in a speech that he had long dreamed of setting “Brazil free from the nefarious leftist ideology.” Then he looked at Olavo and said, “The revolution we are living, we owe in large part to him.”It was not the first time that Bolsonaro had publicly honored Olavo. In his first speech to the nation after his election, the former army captain placed four books on his desk: the Bible, Brazil’s constitution, Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War, and a book by Olavo—The Minimum You Need to Know to Not Be an Idiot. “What I want most is to follow God's teachings alongside the Brazilian constitution,” he said. “I also want to be inspired by great leaders, giving good advice.”A supporter of Jair Bolsonaro salutes during a celebration in front of his residence after he was declared the winner of the election runoff, in Rio de Janeiro, in October 2018. (LEO CORREA / AP)Bolsonaro met Olavo in person only after his election victory, but their relationship started almost a decade ago, when Olavo's online accounts came to the attention of Bolsonaro’s children, who are themselves politicians. In 2012, the Brazilian leader’s eldest son, Flavio, who was a representative in Rio de Janeiro’s state assembly, traveled to Olavo's house in Virginia to award him the Tiradentes medal, the legislature’s highest distinction. Five years later, another son, Eduardo, a national legislative representative, broadcast a video from Olavo’s house wearing a T-shirt that read Olavo tem razão (“Olavo is right”). Protesters chanted that same slogan in street demonstrations against the federal government before Bolsonaro’s election, decrying the corruption scandals that helped propel him to power.These days, when Olavo speaks, Bolsonaro listens. The president took Olavo’s recommendation in appointing as foreign minister a conservative Christian who has called climate change a “Marxist conspiracy.” Those running Bolsonaro’s “hate cabinet,” charged with maintaining a tone of anger on social media and in his public appearances, appear to have taken inspiration from Olavo. A former student in his online philosophy course is now Brazil’s minister of education and has set about converting its teachings into government policy: To combat “cultural Marxism,” the government has slashed operational funding for federal universities—considered centers of leftist indoctrination—by 30 percent.Olavo’s stated hatred of communism, however, perhaps most strongly informs Bolsonaro’s policies within Brazil. It forms the core of both men’s beliefs, providing a rationale for “law and order” policies in which the president has facilitated civilian access to guns and encouraged a police crackdown in the favelas; offering a critique against “leftists” who argue human rights are being trampled; and allowing for a defense of Brazil’s military dictatorship, interpreted in Olavo’s worldview as a “revolution” that saved the country from communism in the 1960s. In his 27 years as a congressman, Bolsonaro frequently spoke out in favor of the dictatorship, saying its biggest mistake was that it stopped at torturing dissidents, rather than simply killing them.When I quoted some of these public statements to Olavo, he dismissed them. Bolsonaro’s remarks, he said simply, were often “full of hyperbole and jokes.”Bolsonaro and members of his cabinet are followers of Olavo’s—in August, he was awarded Brazil’s highest diplomatic distinction, for “service and merit”—yet his reach actually stretches further, thanks to his online presence.Olavo first came to the United States in 2005, to work as a Washington correspondent for Diário do Comércio, then a financial print newspaper. He told me that although he was previously in close contact with American politicians and journalists, he soon “lost interest” because “they are a bunch of boring people.” He found his calling on the internet.In 2009, he created his online course to tackle what he had diagnosed as the main problem facing Brazil: the “leftist dominance” of the country’s media and universities. He told me that he hoped to build a conservative political class in 30 years. In reality, it took much less time.In his lessons, he spreads the falsehood that the Nazis were a left-wing party (rhetoric used by Bolsonaro’s supporters against their political opponents), teaches his students that disrespecting the enemy is a basic principle required to defeat the left, and often uses sexually charged language to garner attention—in our initial meeting, Olavo described Bolsonaro’s election as a “premature ejaculation.” He argues that dissidents should be intimidated and, in one video posted by a supporter on YouTube, instructs viewers on how to use personal attacks to intimidate “communists.” His followers should, he says, use “all bad words from the Portuguese language” against critics. “It’s not about destroying ideas,” Olavo continues, “but destroying the careers and the power of people. You have to be direct, and without respect—that’s very important.”Our conversation in his home office reflected that strategy. I quoted multiple examples to him of his public support for Brazil’s dictatorship: his statements that the regime was “too soft,” that its “mildness” allowed “leftist lies” to perpetuate. He dismissed them all and instead shifted focus, saying I was ignoring people that communists “are killing every day” around the world. Then he became angry, accusing me of trying to paint the right as evil. “Don’t you have any real thoughts?” he asked me. “Do you just want to seem cute? Is your life only that?”As our 90-minute interview came to an end, Olavo said he was barring me from publishing any of his quotes—despite the entire conversation’s having been on the record (indeed, recorded by us both)—and threatened to expose me on the internet, although he has not yet uploaded the video of our interaction to his YouTube channel.After a brief pause, his tone suddenly turned solemn: “I wanted you to know that you disgusted my whole family.” Then it rose again as he stood up and snapped, “Get out!”As I left his home and walked back down the narrow road surrounded by pine trees and American flags, past an old Dodge van with a rear-bumper sticker that read commie hunter, and got into my car to go home, I marveled at him—our meeting had been a master class in his philosophy and style: hate speech targeting the press, doubt sown about historical facts, and threats to weaponize his online following to cow his critics.Olavo proudly told me that through his teachings he has created a “genius factory” online. “My influence on Brazil's culture is infinitely bigger than anything the government is doing,” he said. “I am changing Brazil's cultural history. Governments go away; the culture stays.”Support for this article was provided by the GroundTruth Project. Letícia Duarteis a Brazilian journalist based in New York. She is a global reporting fellow with the GroundTruth Project and a Global Migration Project Reporting fellow at Columbia Journalism School.Connect Twitter

Protests erupted in Iran over the weekend as vigils to mourn the 176 victims of the Ukrainian jet crash transformed into anti-government demonstrations. The Iranian government had tried to conceal that its military accidentally shot down the plane, killing all on board. When it finally admitted its culpability, protesters reacted with rage and fury. It shattered the perception of national unity that seemed to exist last week, when thousands of Iranians turned out to mourn the death of Qassem Soleimani, the powerful general killed in a US targeted strike.But neither is a full picture of Iran. Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said it’s very possible the same people who came out to mourn Soleimani also protested the regime for its handling of the Ukrainian airline tragedy. That’s because the underlying problems plaguing Iran — corruption, economic stagnation, and mismanagement — didn’t abate after Soleimani’s assassination. The same issues that sparked massive protests in November continued to boil under the surface. The deaths of 176 airline passengers, and the government’s attempt to conceal its involvement in them, set them off again. I spoke with Geranmayeh about what the protests might mean and how the regime is responding. And since Iran news never stops, I threw in a question or two about some of the other developments this week.Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.What was your first impression when these anti-government demonstrations erupted?A lot of people, particularly in November, myself included, predicted that unless there are some systematic reforms in the way the country and the economy is managed, there are going to be quite frequent cycles of protest inside Iran, triggered from anything small to anything big. These vigils very quickly turned into protests that then — I think even more quickly than the last two big rounds of protest inside the country — turned into slogans that were anti-establishment, targeting Iran’s supreme leader within hours of the protests starting. Previously, it would take at least a couple days for the more radical slogans to emerge, but now there is no inhibition about going directly to what many inside the country are seeing as the source of the problem, which is the Iranian political establishment at large. And how does that sit with the Iranian regime?What I think will be more interesting to watch is how the security apparatus responds to the protesters if they do continue over a period of days or weeks. In November, it did culminate in a very brutal crackdown, which was a big shift from the way the state authorities responded to the protests in the country back in 2017 and 2018, where they were largely allowed to continue and allowed to more or less fizzle out. In November, we saw reports of huge numbers of protesters killed and arrested. This time around, I think there has been some statement [from the top] to Iranian officials that they want a restrained response from the security forces. What we’re starting to see at the moment is a number of high-profile arrests across the country. Some people have been released, including Robert Macaire, the British ambassador, who was involved in that momentary detention. It’s unclear if others have been or not. So we’ll have to see if security forces respond with a very heavy fist as they did back in November. Also, I’d put in parentheses that one the biggest shifts we’re seeing in this round of protests following the shooting down of the plane is that an increasing number of supporters of the [regime] are coming out, accepting responsibility, accepting that mistakes were made, accepting that people would be allowed to protest and demonstrate their anger, and accepting that there was a total mismanagement that is unforgivable that has culminated in this event. What might that mean for the political leadership in Iran?Some have been saying that this is a watershed moment for the political leadership, that this should be a wake-up, that they need to now expand the political space in the country — to basically allow some breathing room for the general public. All of this is happening as there are parliamentary elections scheduled in Iran next month. And, so far, we’re not seeing great indicators that the leadership in the country is actually expanding that political space, because we’ve had an initial review of candidates that are allowed to run, and several high-profile reformist figures have been disqualified from running.There is still a space of time when they could appeal and maybe change that decision. But it’s a good indication that some of the more established defenders of the Islamic Republic are not seeing what’s happened as a wake-up call that they need to actually have a national dialogue process, that there needs to be greater involvement of opposing views, rather than restricting the space further. But we’ll see. How might the death of Soleimani affect those elections?Let’s go back one more step. After November, there was a lot of concern that there would be an extremely low turnout at the elections in February. After Qassem Soleimani’s death, and the massive turnout at his funeral — which I think took a lot of people by surprise — there was a sense that, okay, maybe this moment of nationalism will unify people around the flag and could boost voter turnout in the elections, which is traditionally used by Iran’s leadership to show legitimacy of their governance. But now, I think after this passenger plane was shot down, it risks reverting back to an extremely low political participation, and people will look to the streets as the place to actually send messages to their leadership rather than through the ballot box. Who is participating in these recent protests?It’s being largely led by university students in the major cities, unlike the protests in November, which was mostly the lower economic social base in Iran that was coming out to protest in multiple cities — more than 30 provinces, as Iranian officials said. That could change. Over time, if these protests are allowed to continue, other factions of the society may well join in. But again, I think that if there is a real threat felt by the security apparatus, there will be an extremely repressive response to these protests, and we should wait and see if that transpires, or see if protest is allowed, or if it might actually lead to some rethinking by the political establishment at the top. Unfortunately, I remain a bit pessimistic that a) these protests are going to be allowed to grow into mass scale, and b) even if they’re allowed to continue without a crackdown, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of peer leadership for these protests in the way that, for example, in 2009, the so-called Green Movement had a clear leader with clear demands. That’s likely to inhibit their capacity to actually sustain themselves. And I’m also pessimistic, from what we’re seeing so far, that there is going to be a shake-up of the political leadership in terms of creating some sort of a relaxation or civil political freedom at a time when Iran is facing incredible external pressures and incredible internal pressures. There are some figures inside the country that are trying to push for that, but right now, we’re not seeing indications that the leadership is moving toward that direction. What does seem odd about these protests is how swiftly the mood in Iran seemed to change. Last week there looked to be a national outpouring for Soleimani’s funeral. Now, protests. Why that whiplash, so to speak?The short time frame between the two has really undermined the Iranian position of strength it may have wanted to demonstrate to the Americans. But I’m not surprised that eventually this whiplash came, though it came much quicker than it perhaps otherwise would have been. It was only a matter of time before some event would have triggered that whiplash, because the leadership has done very little to address the underlying causes of the protests in the country. It was a matter of when, not if. Iran is a country of over 80 million people from diverse social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds. So it’s very plausible that many of the same people that came out into the street for Soleimani’s funeral may have also come out on the street either in the November protests or in what we’re seeing happen in the country now. I think that’s because a lot of the people who turned out for Soleimani were there to express the sentiment of nationalism, rather than necessarily support for the really elite.The positions are not mutually exclusive, of feeling both frustrated at the US aggression but also frustrated at the mismanagement [and] corruption taking place in the country. That’s one thing.The second thing is, again, because of this diversity and the large population, you have polarized positions within the population. About 16 million or so people in the last presidential election turned out to vote for one of the more hardline candidates.There is a base for the hardline stance in the country. It might not be the biggest proportion of the country, but I don’t think we can deny that they exist — that support for the more hardline position is somehow obsolete.After at first denying responsibility, the Iranian government admitted that it shot down the jet. It also arrested the people responsible. Does this signal some sort of opening — similar to the political space you were mentioning? Look, the types of changes that Iran will require are systematic, and they’re not going to happen overnight.On the one hand, it is unprecedented for senior IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] figures to come out and publicly take ownership and apologize for mistakes. I don’t remember a time when that’s ever happened, at least in my lifetime looking at the country. The fact that they are making these arrests and they said that there will be some sort of a military court, I think these are all positive steps that could get somewhere. And also I should add the fact that Iran is now being much more open with international parties to conduct the investigation.These are all positive steps, but at the same time, for every step that’s going forward there’s maybe one or two steps going backward. We’ve had these first steps in disqualifying prominent reformist figures in the country from running for election. You’ve had also arrests of political, cultural activists in the country. And you’re not seeing what a lot of people on the streets are calling for, which is resignations of some of the high-level people in the country that should be held, in their view, accountable for what happened. Some low-level arrests of people who may have have pressed the button or may have not followed protocol is not going to really remove the shadow of frequent protests from the country. There is a sense on social media, “Okay, well, that doesn’t quite cut it. You can apologize all you want, but we want action. And we want to see you really taking accountability for what’s happened.” So even if there are some steps made to calm the current unrest we’re seeing in the country, there’s going to have to be a road map that explains to the public how the government can complete some of the more systematic changes that are required to tackle the economic problems, tackle the mismanagement, tackle the corruption in the country, and open up the political space.And these are things that in any country could take years and decades. But what is necessary now is for the Iranian leadership to communicate a road map to the public about how it gets there. Right now we’re not seeing indications of that. Ultimately, the final call is made by the supreme leader. And so far, there has been a resistance by the more powerful factions toward making those systematic reforms. But maybe there’s hope this tragic incident may unfold the pathway toward that kind of road map for systematic change and reform.I wonder, particularly on the economy, if the regime is hemmed in a bit — or limited in what it can do — because of sanctions, including the United States’ campaign of maximum pressure? There is undoubtedly significant external pressure that’s gotten Iran where it is. It’s a country that for four decades has been under increasing US sanctions. It has for periods of time been in severe diplomatic isolation, as well as a long extended period of direct conflict with Saddam Hussein in Iraq [in the 1980s].After the 1979 revolution, within a year, you had the start of an eight-year war. And even in the post-conflict reconstruction phase, Iran was facing sanctions after sanctions from the United States.Then you had this moderation project that was being led by President Hassan Rouhani — which was about having a certain degree of compromise with the United States as this kind of middle way or sweet spot, where some of the hardliners in the country could still hold on to the Islamic parts of the revolution, while the republican part of the revolution could also have some space to grow.But unfortunately, given the position President Donald Trump has taken, we’ll never know if that position of moderation could have succeeded or not because it faced a major setback. And the whole theory behind that project of moderation was to essentially have Iran’s economic growth being the engine of reform in the country. By connecting Iran to international institutions, you would basically factor in the process of reforms that Iran required. We saw that even happening when the nuclear deal was signed, when there was a push to bring Iran’s banking and financial regulations up to international standards.There were steps being set in motion within the first year and a half of the 2015 nuclear deal that indicated that Iran was on its way to first economic reforms and then hopefully political reforms. But unfortunately, because of the current US stance, we’ll never know if that project could have been successful or not.And I guess that’s a good place to pivot to the announcement this week that the Western European countries that were part of the nuclear deal — Britain, France, and Germany — threatened sanctions back on Iran after it said it would no longer abide by the deal after Soleimani’s death. What is the endgame here for the so-called E3 countries? It’s been in the cards for a few months now. The E3 governments have been consulting on how to respond to the fact that the United States has left the deal. They were unable to provide Iran with an economic package, which would have compensated for the US position. And Iran’s response has been a gradual withdrawal from its obligations, although it has made very clear that it still considered itself part of the nuclear deal.The Europeans really don’t have any good options. So they’ve decided that the dispute resolution mechanism, which is baked into the Iran nuclear deal, is the best way forward. And basically nobody right now is talking about this process leading into United Nations Security Council, which would snap back if they cannot come to a resolution.This has certain costs and certain benefits. On the benefits side, the Europeans are trying to use the dispute resolution mechanism as an opportunity to find a diplomatic solution out of the current stalemate with Iran. The focus will be on creating a new environment with Iran to try and find some sort of an agreement which will at least prevent Iran from furthering its nuclear program — although on paper, the intention is to have Iran go back to full compliance with the terms of the deal. There may be some space where there can actually be a breakthrough by using this process. If the Europeans are able and willing to actually put together some sort of an economic package — perhaps with the Russians and the Chinese — and if they convince the White House that they should be given some flexibility on US sanctions to implement that economic package, then that could also allow Iran to go back to full compliance with the nuclear deal and hold off from further military escalation with the United States.That’s the most optimistic reading of what could happen. The more likely reading is that the Europeans will momentarily win some points with Washington for acting tough toward Iran, but it won’t be enough. That the US administration will not be satisfied by this news and will want the Europeans to join its maximum-pressure campaign. We’ve had three years of the Trump administration, where the Europeans have unsuccessfully attempted to get the US on board with some sort of a multilateral negotiation with the Iranians. I don’t see indications so far that President Trump’s prepared to change his mind and take this step. But I’ll caveat that by saying with Trump, you never know. And what’s the downside of this plan?There are two other risks associated with this. One is that somewhere along this process, something happens either on the nuclear issue or on the regional issue. For example, we have something else go pop in the region, some sort of escalation that makes it extremely difficult to avoid the process reaching the United Nations Security Council.By mutual agreement, all the parties to the Iran nuclear deal can contain the dispute resolution process within the framework of the deal before it has to go to the UN. But some external or even nuclear-related event could basically force one of the parties — and I would say maybe the weakest link here is the United Kingdom — to say, “Okay, enough is enough. We’re pushing this to the UN Security Council.” That basically reduces the scope and space for diplomatic initiatives.And finally, the Europeans don’t really know how Iran is going to react in the coming months, as there could be further escalation with the United States. If Iran feels that the Europeans are pressuring and cornering the country, we may actually get the opposite from Iran, which is that Iran actually expands its nuclear activity beyond what it is now, kicks out International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, and makes the situation much more of a security dilemma to the Europeans than it is currently. So this is a gamble that has been taken in terms of blowback risk. The E3 wants to focus on diplomatic initiatives that could result in bringing Iran and the United States to some sort of a negotiation track centered around the nuclear issue.But, as I said, the chances of that succeeding with Trump are thin. The chances of any Iranian leader shaking hands with President Trump right now are close to zero after the assassination against Soleimani. In reality, what may end up happening is that through this mechanism, the Europeans will end up just buying time until the November elections to keep the outer shell of the nuclear deal in place. Even though from the inside it’s being hollowed out.

closeVideoMike Pompeo defends Soleimani strike, says Iranian general was on US radar for awfully long timeMultiple U.S. embassies were deemed at risk when decision was made to take out Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said he is "disappointed and frustrated" that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will not appear before the committee on Tuesday to answer questions about the U.S.-led airstrike that killed Iranian Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani and resulted in increased hostility between Iran and the U.S.Engel extended the invitation to Pompeo after Democratic lawmakers decried that President Trump did not seek Congressional approval before carrying out the Jan. 2 attack. Pompeo has repeatedly defended the surprise attack in Baghdad against Soleimani, saying it was necessary because of an imminent threat to the U.S., although neither the administration nor Pompeo has been able to explicitly define what that imminent threat was."Each passing day raises new questions about the strike that killed General Soleimani," Engel said in a statement Monday. "Was there really an imminent threat? Was it part of a larger operation? What was the legal justification? What is the path forward? With the wildly muddled explanations coming from the administration, the Secretary should welcome the opportunity to make the case and answer questions before the American people. The committee expects to hear from him soon.”Pompeo has repeatedly said that Soleimani was planning an attack on U.S. diplomats and service members in the weeks leading up to his death and that information presented by top U.S. intelligence officials made it necessary for the U.S. to kill Soleimani.Trump doubled down on the calls for further explanation of the reason behind the attack, telling Fox News' Laura Ingraham in an interview on "The Ingraham Angle" that the embassy in Baghdad was among four potential embassies being targeted by Soleimani.Statements by Defense Secretary Mark Esper contradicted those claims when he told reporters on Sunday that he hadn’t seen hard evidence that four American embassies were under possible threat.The House of Representatives on Thursday voted in favor of a War Powers Resolution meant to limit Trump's military action toward Iran and prevent further escalations in tensions between Washington and Tehran.The top Iranian military leader's death triggered a series of events including threats from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani who vowed revenge, and a retaliatory strike by Iran on two U.S. military bases in Iraq, for which Trump has levied additional sanctions.

Media player Media playback is unsupported on your device Video Soleimani: Iranians turn out for commander's burial At least 35 people have been killed in a stampede as Iranians flocked to the burial of a top commander killed in a US drone strike, according to Iranian media.More than 48 others were injured in the incident in Kerman, reports suggest.Read more: Iranians flock to Soleimani's hometown for burial

In 2013, a prominent Dutch banking executive made international news by describing bitcoin as a bubble. “This is worse than the tulip mania,” he said at the time. “At least then you got a tulip [at the end], now you get nothing.” Tulip mania was the 17th-century phenomenon that saw tulip prices skyrocket and collapse, driven in part by demand for tulip bulbs affected by a virus, known as Mosaic, that gave the blooms distinctive stripes. Without a clear understanding of how the virus affected tulip bulbs, the virus helped drive speculative buying and selling of the bulbs, which, legend has it, could be sold for the cost of a house. Whether or not tulip mania was truly a “mania” is still hotly debated by scholars, but it’s often held up as an example of an early speculative bubble–hence the recent comparisons to the cryptocurrency boom. Obviously there are major differences between these two complex economic systems, but both are often depicted by historians and bankers alike as an unstable frenzy, doomed from the beginning.The virus that stoked that 17th-century mania serves as the eponymous title of an artwork by the artist Anna Ridler. The piece, Mosaic Virus, was commissioned by Impakt Festival and is still a work in progress; a video of it shows a rash of pinkish tulip blooms waxing and waning in uncanny striped patterns. Those stripes visualize the price of bitcoin between July and December in 2017, as though the flowers were evolving with stranger and stranger patterns as bitcoin prices fluctuated. Ridler calls it a “Dutch still life for the 21st century,” depicting nature through wildly artificial means. “By making the price of bitcoin my ‘mosaic virus,’ that which controls the amount of stripe visible in the image of the tulip, I draw together ideas around capitalism, value, and the tangible and intangible nature of speculation and collapse from two very different yet surprisingly similar moments in history,” she explains in a statement.Ridler’s tulips are anything but natural. They’re the result of a machine learning algorithm that the artist trained with 10,000 images of tulips–each of which she collected, photographed, and categorized over the course of one tulip season in the Netherlands to create a kind of small-batch, self-generated training data set. Labeling each photo by hand, she categorized the stage of life each tulip showed–was it a bud, or was it beginning to wilt?–along with details such as color. The result is a handcrafted data set that has its own title as an independent piece of art: Myriad.“For me it becomes the decisive creative act,” Ridler writes, underlining “the humanness that is behind every algorithm, every decision made by an AI.” [Photo: courtesy Anna Ridler]“Even something as simple as a tulip is difficult to put into discrete categories,” she writes. “Is it white or pale pink? Is it orange or yellow? And if this is difficult for something as simple as a flower, imagine how difficult it will be for something as complex as gender or identity.” To generate new flowers based on bitcoin’s price, Ridler trained a generative adversarial network, or GAN, using her painstakingly constructed data set. The result is an endless parade of tulips that look almost real–another similarity to Dutch still life, which often depicted what she calls “botanical impossibilities,” or groups of flowers that don’t bloom in the same season. Some of the tulips her AI dreams up look passably realistic, others explode into alien flowers in the hands of the algorithm. “GANs in particular have a tendency to seem like they are improving and then suffer ‘mode collapse,’ just like markets do,” she explains. Ridler plans to continue developing Mosaic into a real-time visualization of bitcoin prices–a strangely beautiful warning that systems we don’t fully understand can bloom and wilt right before our eyes.

As Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in fall 2018 over allegations that he had committed sexual assault against a woman while the two of them were in high school, the hearings served as a proving ground for no fewer than three presidential hopefuls.But of the trio of Senate Judiciary members who would go on to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota had perhaps the most iconic moment of the proceedings, when the soon-to-be-confirmed Supreme Court justice testily asked if she had ever blacked out from drinking following a series of questions about Kavanaugh’s own habits.“I have no drinking problem, judge,” Klobuchar, whose father struggled with alcohol abuse, responded with a smile.Kavanaugh went on to be confirmed by the narrowest margin in U.S. history, but Klobuchar has pointed to that exchange as evidence that she is not to be messed with—and that, as president, she would not be cowed by any of the nearly 200 newly confirmed federal judges nominated under President Donald Trump.“I want to make it clear that I have opposed many, many judges—and I think everyone will remember what happened at the Kavanaugh hearing when that nominee went after me,” Klobuchar told moderator Judy Woodruff during the last Democratic presidential debate. “I stood my ground and he had to apologize.”As debate guests applauded, Klobuchar continued, calling herself “very strong on these judges,” and vowed to “immediately start putting judges on the bench to fill vacancies so that we can reverse the horrific nature of these Trump judges.”That moment—and her tag-team takedown of Pete Buttigieg with Sen. Elizabeth Warren—has helped give Klobuchar’s campaign a much-needed boost in the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, a state where her campaign recently announced it had doubled the size of her staff.But Klobuchar, who ran the largest prosecutor’s office in Minnesota before being elected to the Senate, has a more complicated history with the judges she dubbed “horrific” in last month’s debate. Over the course of the 2017-2018 congressional session, Klobuchar voted to confirm nearly two-thirds of Trump’s judicial nominees that came up for a vote, far outpacing every other Democratic senator currently seeking the nomination. In some cases, Klobuchar was the sole Senate Democrat of the seven who have sought the nomination to vote for the nominee in question. In January 2018, Klobuchar joined just six other Democrats in breaking a party-line vote on the nomination of Judge David Ryan Stras to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, joining Judiciary Committee Republicans and just one other Democrat to approve the pick.Stras’ nomination was deeply controversial, as liberal legal groups and advocacy organizations pointed to a longtime history of perceived hostility to LGBT legal rights and an essay in which he described the judicial expansion of abortion rights and school integration as having been accomplished in an effort at “pleasing constituent groups.”Klobuchar supported Stras’ nomination from the get-go, stating that if he weren’t nominated, he might be replaced with someone even less independent.“While Justice Stras was not my choice for the 8th Circuit Court, it is my view that he deserves a hearing before the Senate,” Klobuchar said in a statement following his nomination. “This position could simply go to a less independent judge from another 8th Circuit state… since this is not a permanent Minnesota position.”Once confirmed, Stras ruled as anticipated. In Burka v. Sessions, a case involving an Ethiopian asylum-seeker who feared being returned to her native country following her husband’s disappearance, Stras wrote a majority opinion finding that his court didn’t have jurisdiction to review the findings of an immigration judge asserting that the woman’s husband’s disappearance did not amount to a “new circumstance” under which she could file an asylum claim.In other cases, Klobuchar has been joined by Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who, like Klobuchar, is running a centrist campaign that emphasizes his cross-aisle appeal. One example is the confirmation of Judge Kurt Damian Engelhardt, who in December 2019 ruled in the majority to declare the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate unconstitutional—putting the legislation in danger of being undone by a Supreme Court ruling.Klobuchar, who has defended the ACA on the stump, voted to confirm Engelhardt to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in May 2018.As a result of her outsized support for Trump’s judicial nominees, Demand Justice, gave Klobuchar an “F” rating in its most recent report card for members of the U.S. Senate, noting that she voted to advance Trump’s district court nominees 70 percent of the time, and ranked 31st out of 47 Senate Democrats in voting to advance Trump’s circuit nominees. Only Bennet ranks worse.Last April, the organization ran an advertisement calling her out explicitly, saying, “If you’re not fighting for our courts, you’re not fighting for us.”Klobuchar’s campaign told The Daily Beast that the senator’s votes to confirm nominees have dropped in the current congressional term, with Klobuchar voting to confirm less than 40 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees over the course of his entire presidency thus far.As president, the spokesperson said, she would “prioritize reversing the damage done by Trump-appointed judges by quickly moving to fill vacancies with judges in the vein of Justice Kagan, Justice Sotomayor, and Justice Ginsberg.”“The fact that Senator Sanders and then-Senator Biden also supported [the other circuit court] judge who wrote the opinion to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate demonstrates what Senator Klobuchar said on the debate stage: you are not going to agree with every decision a judge makes,” a campaign spokesperson said.

Iran fired missiles at two US military targets in Iraq Tuesday night in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s decision last week to kill Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite military and intelligence force.The Revolutionary Guard Corps, a part of Iran’s military in which Soleimani was a leading figure, claimed responsibility for the attack, and top-level Iranian officials boasted about the strikes. For days, Iranian leaders signaled that they would strike US military targets in response to Soleimani’s killing, and it certainly seems like this was that strike. It’s unclear if there are more to come in the next few days or weeks.A spokesperson for US Central Command told me that Iran fired 15 missiles: Ten struck al-Asad airbase west of Baghdad, Iraq; one struck Erbil in northern Iraq; and four failed. David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times reports that the US was able to track the launches with radar, giving personnel time to take cover. Unnamed Iraqi military officials told the New York Times that Iran launched 22 missiles.A White House official told me Tuesday night that there were no American casualties, although the Pentagon has yet to officially say whether or not Americans were killed. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi released a statement on Wednesday saying no Iraqis were killed.CNN reports that some Trump administration officials believe Iran purposefully missed areas with Americans, but there is no official confirmation on that yet.Trump seems unbothered by what happened, tweeting hours after the attack that “All is well!” He plans to make a statement sometime on Wednesday morning. All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2020 It’s important to note that Iran doesn’t have missiles that can reach the US mainland from Iran, nor does it have a nuclear weapon. It’s why Iran uses proxies and weapons at its disposal mainly to strike US targets and American allies in the Middle East. There’s a chance for de-escalation, as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in a tweeted statement that “Iran took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense.” Concluded is an important word, signaling that Iran may be done. Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens & senior officials were launched.We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) January 8, 2020 However, Iran has threatened to attack inside the US if America responds specifically to this assault — which means an Iranian strike inside the US isn’t imminent. Iran has also vowed to attack the cities of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Haifa in Israel if Iranian soil is bombed.There’s more: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his nation’s final act will be to get all US forces out of the region. It’s unclear if that means using military force to compel US troops to leave or work with political allies, especially in Baghdad, to have the US military leave.And Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted Wednesday morning that Iran may take further action. They were slapped last night, but such military actions are not enough. #AlAssadBase— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) January 8, 2020 Planet Labs has released an image of Al-Asad airbase showing extensive damage to some of the installation’s buildings. — Christiaan Triebert (@trbrtc) January 8, 2020 The story is still developing, but here’s what we do and don’t know so far. We will continue to update this article as we learn more. A US Central Command spokesperson told me that Iran fired 15 missiles, four of which failed to hit their target. Ten struck al-Asad airbase and one struck Erbil. Iraqi officials say Iran launched 22 missiles. A White House official told me there are no American casualties, and Iraq’s prime minister said no Iraqis died. The Pentagon has yet to confirm if there were any US deaths. Iran has threatened to attack inside the US if America retaliates to this specific assault. Iran has also vowed to attack the cities of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Haifa in Israel if Iranian soil is bombed. The FAA has barred US airlines from flying over Iraq and Iran. If anyone has been confirmed by the US government as injured or killed. What Trump will say in his Wednesday morning statement.