Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   1/14/2020

Crossfire, collateral damage, tit-for-tat

Those terms, and more—risky escalation, reckless provocation, unauthorized assassination—were all used by various Democrats and their media mouthpieces. They sought to blithely tie President Trump’s indisputably proper and laudable killing of Iranian terrorist general Case o’ Salami, aka Qasem Soleimani, to Iranians shooting down Ukrainian Flight 752, killing over 170. The less-hysterical among them (a vanishing breed) were content to pore over every word of briefings and press statements by Trump spokespersons in a vain attempt to squeeze out some inconsistency or contradiction.

While shamefully fallacious on its face, the attempts to place some culpability for the Iranian atrocity at Trump’s feet quickly fell out of favor when the fringe found that the so-called responsible mainstream press had little appetite for appearing, well, lunatic. Hence the “isn’t that a contradiction…?” type of gotcha questions about the lack of sensitive details over attacks planned by Case o’ Salami on embassies and military sites. Cue thinly-veiled efforts to construct a “wag the dog” narrative of phony threats by Trump. Congenital liar Adam Schiff used the term, “fudging the intelligence,” three uncontested times on CBS.

No embarrassment issued over such luminaries as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews saying Q.S.’s demise would be received like the deaths of Princess Diana or Elvis Presley; or the Washington Post calling Salami, ok, Soleimani, “a revered military leader”; or sentimental mentions of his love of poetry. Frankly, I think his resemblance to the actor Sean Connery factored into the media’s attitude.

The (broadcast) Sunday talk shows reinforced their leftist leanings. Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, answering questions by NBC’s Chuck Todd, concisely laid out the case that Trump was not going to let the Iranian-created attacks on America’s Iraq embassy turn into “a Tehran or a Benghazi.” However, seeing where the sentence was going, Todd quickly stepped on O’Brien’s answer and talked over the “Benghazi” part. The transcript is accurate; the audio shows Todd’s rude tactic.

Also quite revealing was another interruption by Todd as O’Brien pointed out, in passing, the disinterest shown by American press for the Iranian anti-regime, anti-Soleimani mass protests. Sensing the slight-but-accurate critique of slanted Iran coverage, and knowing O’Brien would avoid an extended debate over biased Iran-related news, Todd interjected that “Iran is a tough place to cover” due to the theocracy’s tight control.

O’Brien agreed with the “tough place to cover” trope to get in his primary contention that Iran’s people have much revulsion for their mullahs and their onerous restrictions on freedom. That anyone with Internet access can see the protests and learn of the 1000+ dead protesters suggests MSM disinterest.

A brief history of Iran-sympathetic, obsequious, deferential treatment: From the Tehran embassy/hostage debacle under President Carter—a stain only slightly erased when hostages were released upon President Reagan’s swearing in—to Obama’s Iran deal (incapable of getting approval as a treaty), America’s State Dept and media establishment have internalized one overriding theme—Iran approval.

Kid glove treatment could only be set aside if direct military threats and attacks occurred; hence, Iran’s theocratic mullahs—guided in no small part by the above-mentioned terrorist Quds Force leader Soleimani—built up vast networks of one-degree-removed terrorist outfits like Hezbollah. They even strongly brushed back the iron-spined Ronald Reagan by blowing up the Marine barracks, killing over 240. Iraq War hawk President George W. Bush could do little to prevent, let alone militarily respond to, Iranian/Soleimani roadside bombs—600+ dead, 1000s maimed.

Deference to, and enshrining of, Iranian interests in Middle East dominance reached its peak under Barack Obama’s tutelage. Set aside Obama’s motivations (I don’t know his heart) and accept that putting Iran et al on a diplomatic pedestal—culminating in the Iran deal that the mullahs violated in “plausibly deniable” fashion from the start—sent the unmistakable message of approval for Iran’s terrorist activities, with billions to fund them.

When President Donald J. Trump applied his “swamp-draining” perspective to Middle East policy vis-à-vis Israel and Iran, he used a version of Reagan’s “we win, they lose” attitude for USSR hegemony and aggression. Unstated, it could be expressed “Our side, including Israel, gets every measure of aggressive support; the enemies of our side no longer get the diplomatic and military deference of 40 years of (wink/wink) ‘whatever Iran wants, it gets.’”

Just apply that to the current dispute (some would say “low-grade war”) with Iran and you can see—setting aside the partisan tribalism behind blind Trump opposition—how legacy news coverage, editorial analysis and diplomatic establishment priorities cannot conceive of America actually killing Iranians meddling in our business. Oh, the potential recriminations—they might kill someone else!

Trump thinks, correctly in this opinion, that a hard application of not just military violence but also economic leverage, will force Iran to consider that it has more, much more, to lose in terms of dead Iranians, destroyed energy infrastructure, sunk naval vessels and anti-theocratic masses finding sympathetic generals. There’s nothing Iran can do to us, our European allies or Israel that they can’t suffer 10 times worse—and they know it.

Fast takes: Bemusement ensued over the “sky is falling” reaction to Trump rolling back onerous environmental delays to projects. Just guessing that if the costs and delays were simply reduced to those in force when the regulations first applied decades ago, Trump and the economy would approve; enviros not.

Documented FISA abuses—the “wiretaps and spying” that Carter Page and Trump et al suffered—is not likely to be corrected, let alone punished, by Obama-era FISA abuse defender/apologist David Kris.

Nancy Pelosi, quoted on This Week, revealed her Trump/Russia obsession through at least 6 lies on the topic; she also suggested that she believes in (to paraphrase George Wallace’s infamous quote) “impeachment now, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever.”