SESAME STREET IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
One of These Things Doesn’t Belong
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
SESAME STREET IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
by Adam Carroll Draper
More and more now, it feels like life is turning into a Sesame Street skit and I am supposed to ask myself, “Did you guess which thing just doesn’t belong?” Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.” OK, but Clausewitz is sort of a given at this point. What happens when you lose track of the pieces or the players? What if none of these things belong. I guess, you long for chocolate milk and Big Bird again. At least you got the answer on Sesame Street.
By now, everyone has heard that the US used a drone to blow up two vehicles carrying the top Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, and his entourage, which included Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a pro-Iranian leader of an Iraqi militia. The rationale for this was that Suleimani was orchestrating an effort to kill Americans in Iraq. Now, that seems straightforward enough. It is also standard for the leadership of the opposition in congress to be mad that they weren’t informed of the strike beforehand. Remember Obama’s drone strike on Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen?
I started hearing Ernie singing that song, however, when I read that Suleimani flew from Syria (or Lebanon) into the Baghdad Airport (the civilian airport), where he was picked up on the tarmac by al Muhandis. The cars were blown up as they were exiting the airport in an area controlled by the military. Think about it this way, what if one of our top generals, like Stephen Clark, was directing the US backed militias in Syria and suddenly got blown up in a car in which he was picked up by Syrian rebels on the tarmac at the airport in Damascus? Why would he fly there in the first place? Do generals routinely fly into civilian airports - in their enemies’ capitals no less?
While you are pondering that one, this is where the plot moves from something resembling a thickening into the bizarre. This is where Big Bird asks the guest host (maybe Bill Cosby) to help him figure it out. On Thursday (January 2nd) at 1:38 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, several hours before the strike killing Suleimani, the New York Times tweeted an article about hypersonic weapons in which the author proffered that such weapons are “moral hazards” in the hands of those who like to intervene in other countries because they can be used without being drawn into a larger conflict. As a supporting example he posited: “What if the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Suleimani, visits Baghdad for a meeting and you know the address.”
Don’t believe me? Here’s the article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opinion/hypersonic-missiles.html
First of all, at 1:38 p.m. on January 2, 2020, Suleimani was the current (very much alive) commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Second of all… WTF?
Before you reflexively respond, “This is mere coincidence, Burt,” there is another piece to the puzzle. The article the New York Times tweeted was written by Steven Simon. OK, who is that? Amazingly enough, he was a member of the Obama National Security Council AND headed the NSC’s Middle East task force. Do you think he made any friends in that position? Still think this article is a coincidence or could it have, perhaps, been a heads up? This is the part when Oscar the Grouch shows up, yelling, “Why?”
Consider this about General Suleimani, he recently orchestrated the slaughter of thousands of Iranian protestors and then demanded that the families of the dead pay for the bullets used to kill their loved ones before they could claim the bodies. This is the same guy to whom the Obama Administration literally gave pallets of dollars, billions.
Steve Simons is now a professor at Georgetown and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Wonder how he knew about the strike on Suleimani? Still wonder why the Democrat leadership in the House was not told about the strike beforehand… or the one on Baghdadi?
Just as an aside, have you ever heard of Eric Ciaramella? He works for the CIA and was in the Obama White House, heading matters involving Ukraine. He remained in the Trump White House until recently. He also had close ties to Vice-President Biden. The press cannot say it (because Adam Schiff, who does not know the whistleblower’s name – although they met before the complaint was filed - doesn’t want the press to report it), but Eric Ciaramella is most likely the whistleblower.
Are you still clinging on to the current media narrative that there is no deep state, and that it is not at odds with itself? It’s like we are all watching a propaganda flick about an actual event going on across town. But Prairie Dawn is starting to narrate something in an adjacent theater and the song is bleeding over into our propaganda flick, “One of these things is not like the others.” Or maybe that is just my childhood reminding me that this is not real. It is the theater of the absurd.
“Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?”