Cliff Kincaid
A so-called “former CIA analyst” is leading House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s effort to stop President Trump from taking further military action against Iran’s top terrorist leaders. Her name is Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and she says that she “participated in countless conversations on how to respond to Qassem Soleimani’s violent campaigns across the region.” In other words, she’s all talk, no action.
Now that Trump has acted, authorizing the killing of this terror master, the Pelosi argument is that Trump must be stopped and Iran’s other top terrorist leaders must be saved, so they can scheme against America in comfort and security. Slotkin is the CIA face for this effort. Pelosi is counting on people to think the title “CIA analyst” carries some credibility.
This is a twofer for Pelosi. A CIA analyst sparked impeachment, and another CIA analyst will now save Iran from Trump.
Pelosi has announced that a War Powers Resolution in the House to tie Trump’s hands will be led by Congresswoman Slotkin, whose bio says, “She was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be a Middle East analyst and went on to devote her career to protecting the United States from national security threats. In her role at the CIA, Rep. Slotkin worked alongside the U.S. military during three tours in Iraq as a militia expert.”
Being an analyst and actually protecting the U.S. from national security threats are two different things. Iraq was liberated by American troops but the Bush and Obama Administrations looked the other way as Shia Iran expanded into Iraq and took control. That, in turn, sparked the creation of ISIS, a Sunni group and al Qaeda off-shoot. That is what got us into the current mess. It’s another problem inherited by Trump. He took care of ISIS. Now Iran is the main problem.
Regarding Soleimani (also spelled Suleimani), Slotkin seems to understand what has happened. Her Twitter account declares, “I watched friends and colleagues get hurt or killed by Iranian rockets, mortars and explosive devices that were provided to Iraqi proxies and used against U.S. forces under Soleimani’s guidance. We watched as his power increased and he brought strength and capability to groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and to smaller cells around the Middle East and the world, with devastating consequences.”
The operative term is “watched.” Suleimani traveled throughout the region, flying in and out of international airports, and the CIA watched. It looks like Trump finally acted on the intelligence that the CIA or some other agency had provided about his whereabouts. Until Trump, our other leaders just “watched.”
This Iranian carried the title of “General” but he was really just a terrorist kingpin, no different than the thugs who run Mexican drug cartels and murder anyone who gets in their way. He answered to the Iranian Ayatollah, the phony man of God whose religious regime took over the country when the pathetic President Jimmy Carter abandoned the pro-Western Shah of Iran.
Slotkin said, “If you worked on the Middle East over the past 20 years, you dealt with the growing organization and sophistication of Soleimani’s covert and overt military activities, which have contributed to significant destabilization across the region.”
What she is saying is that CIA paper-pushers and scribblers have been watching this develop for 20 years and the threat has grown to the point where Iraq has been lost to Iran and the entire region has been destabilized. Along the way the Bush and Barack Hussein Obama Administrations did nothing about Iran’s growing power and influence, making the one-time “liberation” of Iraq into another debacle that cost our nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
It has been one intelligence and policy failure on top of another.
Of course, the problem was exacerbated by Obama’s official policy of giving the Iranians billions of dollars and lifting sanctions, allowing the regime precious time to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump reversed all of this.
In the words of former Obama CIA Director David Petraeus, “Suleimani was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia crescent, stretching from Iran to Iraq through Syria into southern Lebanon. He is responsible for providing explosives, projectiles, and arms and other munitions that killed well over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition and Iraqi partners just in Iraq, as well as in many other countries such as Syria.”
Until Trump acted, Slotkin added, “What always kept both Democratic and Republican presidents from targeting Soleimani himself was the simple question: Was the strike worth the likely retaliation, and the potential to pull us into protracted conflict?” This was the rationale for more watching and doing nothing.
Let’s understand that Iran is waging a war on American troops and the people in the region and America’s leaders did nothing about the architect of that mayhem until Trump. And because American leaders did nothing, the media now echo the cries of analysts that Iran is too powerful to do anything about and that we can still do nothing because they promise to hit us. All we can do is wait for their development of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
This is the kind of CIA “analysis” that makes an objective observer wonder if the agency is worth saving. Perhaps we need intelligence agencies that act to protect Americans rather than sit back and watch.
Fortunately, America has a friend in the Middle East called Israel and this nation understands the threat far better than Slotkin and her fellow CIA analysts because its own survival is at stake. The threat grows day by day. Senior Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards commander Gholamali Abuhamzeh says that “Some 35 U.S. targets in the region, as well as Tel Aviv, are within our reach.”
With Slotkin and the House of Representatives threatening to tie Trump’s hands, it’s time for Israel to take the lead. Pelosi’s War Powers Resolution won’t apply to Israel.
*Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org
© 2020 Cliff Kincaid – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net
