AP OPINION
This morning I awoke with what felt like an ever expanding hole in my stomach. It could have been a combination of my body rejecting the two protein drinks and 3 slices of Little Caesars pizza I had for dinner but a more likely culprit was my late night reading of President’s Trump greenlighting of the assassination of Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani and wondering about the possible fall out. This morning, still lying in the recesses of the dark at 3:14 AM I am frightened for the future and, as I shudder at the myriad of possible outcomes, my mind shot darts at a wall of questions, some reasonable and some in the fringes of my jaded mind. Most prominent in my half-asleep / half-awake state and scrawled in bold scary REDRUM like letters on that wall were the words IMMINENT THREAT.
im·mi·nent
/ˈimənənt/
adjective
1. 1.
about to happen.
“they were in imminent danger of being swept away”
Similar: impending / at hand / close / near / approaching / coming / forthcoming / on the way /about to happen / upon us / in store / in the offing / in the pipeline / on the horizon / in the air / looming large / threatening
Attach the word imminent to threat and I think of the dramatic recent events in White Settlement, Texas when Church of Christ volunteer security guard Jack Wilson shot and killed Keith Thomas Kinnunen who entered a Sunday service disguised in a wig and long coat and began shooting parishioners with a shotgun. There was no time to negotiate, no time for to say “stop or I will shoot”, only time to take aim and stop the violence with violence. Thanks to Wilson, only two innocent lives were taken. The threat was imminent, real and had to be dealt with by deadly force.
In ordering the take down, the killing of Soleimani, President Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the killing saying specifically that Iran was “planning imminent action that threatened American citizens.” There is that word again, IMMINENT, but what does that word mean in the world political theater? There was no one disguised and killing American’s or anyone else at the time of the deadly drone attack. Was the imminent threat days away or months away? If there was a way to know that the crazed Church killer Keith Thomas Kinnunen planned on killing parishioners would any of us applaud simply putting a bullet in his brain as he ambled down a Texas sidewalk? Is the US Government working off Sci-fi Minority Reports or is this the same old tired and deadly regime building that Trump was supposedly against. For Christ’s sake, President Trump got chummy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. One wonders if Jon Un is sleeping less soundly these days.
In the firestorm of truth and consequences my mind stares and throws more darts, more questions at the imaginary wall, the largest being WHY and WHY NOW? From Trump’s perspective, the economy is doing well, the starry eyed stuff of reelection. Of course, there is that pesky Impeachment but as the third US president to ever be impeached, he will assuredly will be acquitted in the upcoming Senate trial (just like former President Clinton), so I wonder, again, why? And why now?
I think of the horrible stories of men killing their wife and child after learning that they are about to leave them. Is this state sanctioned assassination more to do about puffing out one’s chest after a nationally viewed severe rebuke? Trump’s pants were pulled down and he was appropriately spanked for the entire world to see. Is the very open assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani by faceless drones no less part of a temper tantrum? Or is it a massive diversion. We don’t know, we may never know but the prospect of openly killing members of other countries’ hierarchy is a scary prospect. Special United Nations rapporteur Agnès Callamard when commented on extrajudicial killing said, “The targeted killings of Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (the Iraqi-Iranian military commander who headed the PMF) most likely violates international law [including] human rights law”, adding, (The US) “need[s] to demonstrate that the persons targeted [constituted] an imminent threat to others.”
Once again we come back to imminent threat. All the vague treats, secret documents that play like Minority Reports, definitions of terrorism, of war, of who are the terrorists and who are the war lords will be clouded in redacted reports wrapped in someone’s flag. The thing that keeps me up at night is not knowing who in their well-fortified ivory towers is deciding who deserves to live and who dies and who in some foreign land decides which American, which of the “others” deserve to die.
Are we entering an open hunting season? A Wild West mentality where drones do the dirty work based upon decisions made in secret rooms? As we barely enter into the year 2020, do we enter with blood on our hands? Make no mistake about it, Major General Qasem Soleimani was not a good man, was not a stabilizing force in the region but, again, this is not a game. We are not in the fictional ideal of Mission Impossible where everything is written in black and white. I for one do not feel comfortable with President Trump, Mike Pompeo, cloaked puppeteers in dark rooms and even Tom Cruise deciding who lives or dies.
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Robb Donker
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