Will Old Joe Biden’s handlers throw Donald Trump to the wolves to appease the Islamic Republic of Iran? Really, can the possibility be dismissed out of hand? Last Tuesday was the third anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. While the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was once again a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. And on Thursday, underscoring the status of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq as a satellite of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the President of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, Faiq Zaidan, announced that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Donald Trump for this alleged crime.
Iraqi News reported Thursday that Zaidan “mentioned in a statement that the Iraqi judiciary issued an arrest warrant for former U.S. President Donald Trump, who confessed to having committed the crime.” Well, yes and no. Trump certainly took responsibility for the U.S. Army action, but this was hardly a confession to having committed a crime. Soleimani was killed near Baghdad International Airport shortly after an Iranian-backed militia attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — an attack Soleimani oversaw. The strike against him was a clear warning to Iran not to continue to target Americans and American installations.
The Islamic Republic, however, has consistently portrayed the killing of Soleimani as an unprovoked, gratuitous strike by the Great Satan. And so now, the Iraqi High Court, dutifully carrying out the will of the Iranian mullahs in Tehran, is “calling on those investigating the assassination of the Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani, and chief of staff of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis,” who was also killed in the strike against Soleimani, “to make an exceptional effort to uncover the perpetrators.” Zaidan asked, referring to Trump: “Why has he not yet been held accountable for this heinous crime?”
The answer, of course, is because this was a military action against a rabidly hostile power, which no reading of international law classifies as a crime of any kind. The Islamic Republic has not yet succeeded in imposing its will upon the rest of the world, and that’s why few people outside Iran or Iraq think that Trump committed any kind of crime at all in the killing of Soleimani. However, Faiq Zaidan and the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council might consider contacting Merrick Garland for help. The voraciously partisan and authoritarian Garland might be only too happy to help the Iraqis arrest Trump and extradite him to Baghdad for prosecution. That might save Garland and his Gestapo colleagues the trouble of formulating a bogus indictment of the former president over his supposed role in the trumped-up (in more ways than one) Jan. 6 “insurrection.”
Meanwhile, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, echoed the statements of Faiq Zaidan, saying Monday in Ankara (the capital of our putative ally Turkey) that Trump and his “accomplices” must be prosecuted for the “criminal act” of killing Soleimani, which he claimed was a “flagrant and absolute instance of state terrorism.” And the Tehran Times reported Friday that Abbasali Kadkhodaei, who is the “head of a special legal committee tasked to investigate the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani,” has “called for formation of a joint Iran-Iraq court to follow the issue at international courts with greater speed.” The affable Kadkhodaei claimed that “the crime that the regime of the U.S. committed in the assassination of Hajj Qassem and his companions was an open violation of international law,” and what’s more, the killing was a “violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and violation of the (political) immunity of other countries’ officials.” He claimed that “this crime is so obvious that most international lawyers insist on its illegality.” Is that so? If it isn’t, Biden’s handlers are likely strongly tempted to get to work to make it so.
Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, meanwhile, said Thursday, “The crime of assassinating the ‘Commanders of Victory’ and their companions represented a flagrant violation of Iraq’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty. The targeted killings of the commanders, who had a leading role in elimination of the scourge of terrorism, is an utter disrespect to bilateral agreements [signed between Baghdad and Washington].” No doubt all this is music to Merrick Garland’s ears.
Will Biden’s handlers deliver up Trump to the Iraqis to curry favor with the Iranian mullahs they have courted so assiduously to no avail? Would you put it past them?
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