Yet another terrorist bites the dust

[madhatter]

[Bubba]

Interesting commentary from a Time contributor. Thoughts?


President Trump's Bold, Justified Gamble in Killing Soleimani May Just Pay Off
By David French

https://time.com/5759007/trumps-gamble- ... tter-brief" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Highway Star]

Interesting commentary from a Time contributor. Thoughts?


President Trump's Bold, Justified Gamble in Killing Soleimani May Just Pay Off
By David French

https://time.com/5759007/trumps-gamble- ... tter-brief" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"Weak Strategic Hand".....................ROFL. This guy can't be serious.

I'm also very suspicious of anyone pushing the EFP meme in the current news cycle. The large majority of battlefield munitions have armor penetrating capability, that's the point.

[madhatter]

Rouhani Says "Never Threaten Iran" In Evoking Downed Airliner With 290 People Onboard

"Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290. #IR655. Never threaten the Iranian nation."

if anything even remotely like this happens trump should vaporize the entire country of iran...

[Rez]

Rouhani Says "Never Threaten Iran" In Evoking Downed Airliner With 290 People Onboard

"Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290. #IR655. Never threaten the Iranian nation."

if anything even remotely like this happens trump should vaporize the entire country of iran...

These religious fanatic terrorists have gotten the memo from a president that won't f*** around. Iran cannot afford a war with the U.S. Cannot afford it economically and do not want their status diminished with an instant decapitation. My guess is lots of saber rattling from here on out. Big hat, no cattle. Once again Trump understands leverage and isn't afraid to use it.

[Highway Star]

The media has really gone all in on this. NPR couldn't help themselves this morning.

[brownman]

Brilliant
Batten down
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-006a

[Highway Star]

Brilliant
Batten down
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-006a

You want threatening? This is is threatening:

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/us ... li=BBqdg4K" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

B-52 are good for three things. Cruise missiles, bombing once air superiority is established, and nukes.



If this goes down Iran won't have a single SAM or radar site intact in the country after a few hours.

[madhatter]

Brilliant
Batten down
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-006a

Iranian Cyber Activity
According to open-source information, offensive cyber operations targeting a variety of industries and organizations—including financial services, energy, government facilities, chemical, healthcare, critical manufacturing, communications, and the defense industrial base—have been attributed, or allegedly attributed, to the Iranian government. The same reporting has associated Iranian actors with a range of high-profile attacks, including the following:

Late 2011 to Mid-2013 – DDoS Targeting U.S. Financial Sector: In response to this activity, in March 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted seven Iranian actors employed by companies performing work on behalf of the IRGC for conducting DDoS attacks primarily targeting the public-facing websites of U.S. banks. The attacks prevented customers from accessing their accounts and cost the banks millions of dollars in remediation. [1]
August/September 2013 – Unauthorized Access to Dam in New York State: In response, in March 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted one Iranian actor employed by a company performing work on behalf of the IRGC for illegally accessing the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems of the Bowman Dam in Rye, New York. The access allowed the actor to obtain information regarding the status and operation of the dam. [2]
February 2014 – Sands Las Vegas Corporation Hacked: Cyber threat actors hacked into the Sands Las Vegas Corporation in Las Vegas, Nevada, and stole customer data, including credit card data, Social Security Numbers, and driver’s license numbers. According to a Bloomberg article from December 2014, the attack also involved a destructive portion, in which the Sands Las Vegas Corporation’s computer systems were wiped. In September 2015, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence identified the Iranian government as the perpetrator of the attack in a Statement for the Record to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. [3]
2013 to 2017 – Cyber Theft Campaign on Behalf of IRGC: In response, in March 2018, the U.S. Justice Department indicted nine Iranian actors associated with the Mabna Institute for conducting a massive cyber theft campaign containing dozens of individual incidents, including “many on behalf of the IRGC.” The thefts targeted academic and intellectual property data as well as email account credentials. According to the indictment, the campaign targeted “144 U.S. universities, 176 universities across 21 foreign countries, 47 domestic and foreign private sector companies, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the State of Hawaii, the State of Indiana, the United Nations, and the United Nations Children’s Fund.” [4]

so this has been going on for 9 years +? while the sh!tstain was sending pallets of cash, dropping sanctions and putting on james taylor concerts? was there some kind of point you were trying to make? if so what was it? any idea? or are you just doing what your masters tell you?

obviously all rhetorical questions...keep sucking that dick...

[Highway Star]

This did not get enough exposure:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/opin ... imani.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

(quoting in case of paywall or removal)

Trump Kills Iran’s Most Overrated Warrior
Suleimani pushed his country to build an empire, but drove it into the ground instead.

Thomas L. Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

Jan. 3, 2020

1011

A portrait of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani carried during a demonstration in Baghdad in 2015.
A portrait of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani carried during a demonstration in Baghdad in 2015.Credit...Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters
One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

Think of the miscalculations this guy made. In 2015, the United States and the major European powers agreed to lift virtually all their sanctions on Iran, many dating back to 1979, in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program for a mere 15 years, but still maintaining the right to have a peaceful nuclear program. It was a great deal for Iran. Its economy grew by over 12 percent the next year. And what did Suleimani do with that windfall?

He and Iran’s supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. This freaked out U.S. allies in the Sunni Arab world and Israel — and they pressed the Trump administration to respond. Trump himself was eager to tear up any treaty forged by President Obama, so he exited the nuclear deal and imposed oil sanctions on Iran that have now shrunk the Iranian economy by almost 10 percent and sent unemployment over 16 percent.

All that for the pleasure of saying that Tehran can call the shots in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. What exactly was second prize?

With the Tehran regime severely deprived of funds, the ayatollahs had to raise gasoline prices at home, triggering massive domestic protests. That required a harsh crackdown by Iran’s clerics against their own people that left thousands jailed and killed, further weakening the legitimacy of the regime.

Then Mr. “Military Genius” Suleimani decided that, having propped up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping to kill 500,000 Syrians in the process, he would overreach again and try to put direct pressure on Israel. He would do this by trying to transfer precision-guided rockets from Iran to Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria.

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Alas, Suleimani discovered that fighting Israel — specifically, its combined air force, special forces, intelligence and cyber — is not like fighting the Nusra front or the Islamic State. The Israelis hit back hard, sending a whole bunch of Iranians home from Syria in caskets and hammering their proxies as far away as Western Iraq.

Indeed, Israeli intelligence had so penetrated Suleimani’s Quds Force and its proxies that Suleimani would land a plane with precision munitions in Syria at 5 p.m., and the Israeli air force would blow it up by 5:30 p.m. Suleimani’s men were like fish in a barrel. If Iran had a free press and a real parliament, he would have been fired for colossal mismanagement.

But it gets better, or actually worse, for Suleimani. Many of his obituaries say that he led the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, in tacit alliance with America. Well, that’s true. But what they omit is that Suleimani’s, and Iran’s, overreaching in Iraq helped to produce the Islamic State in the first place.

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It was Suleimani and his Quds Force pals who pushed Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to push Sunnis out of the Iraqi government and army, stop paying salaries to Sunni soldiers, kill and arrest large numbers of peaceful Sunni protesters and generally turn Iraq into a Shiite-dominated sectarian state. The Islamic State was the counterreaction.

Finally, it was Suleimani’s project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro-democracy forces — both Sunnis and Shiites — in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

As the Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh pointed out in a wise essay in Politico, in recent years “Soleimani began expanding Iran’s imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran’s various enemies.”

It was precisely those Suleimani proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — that created pro-Iranian Shiite states-within-states in all of these countries. And it was precisely these states-within-states that helped to prevent any of these countries from cohering, fostered massive corruption and kept these countries from developing infrastructure — schools, roads, electricity.

And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies — his “kingmakers” in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump’s America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.

First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.

Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.

Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.

And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.

I write these lines while flying over New Zealand, where the smoke from forest fires 2,500 miles away over eastern Australia can be seen and felt. Mother Nature doesn’t know Suleimani’s name, but everyone in the Arab world is going to know her name. Because the Middle East, particularly Iran, is becoming an environmental disaster area — running out of water, with rising desertification and overpopulation. If governments there don’t stop fighting and come together to build resilience against climate change — rather than celebrating self-promoting military frauds who conquer failed states and make them fail even more — they’re all doomed.

[SnoBrdr]

.

[Rez]

.

Obama never should have given money to Iran. But to imply these missiles were paid for with that money is political rhetoric. Money is fungible. It's not like they took the cash and sent it to the missile manufacturer. But if Senator Cruz (and please shave that crappy looking facial hair) wants to get into criticizing past administrations for the situation we're currently in with Iran he should start with the Bush administration and them selling us the Iraq invasion which opened pandora's box to all sorts of problems and will for a long time. The folly of the Iraq invasion cannot be overstated.

[brownman]

Brilliant
Batten down
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-006a

You want threatening? This is is threatening:

If this goes down Iran won't have a single SAM or radar site intact in the country after a few hours.

Hawks

Thank God and the Swiss that nobody got hurt while Khomeini flexed his guns.

That link was only intended to illustrate ..
Anyone involved with network infrastructure appreciates that Iran is capable of all sorts of asymmetric disruption. Pray that Nitro Zeus has the juice to respond to whatever their ankle biters might throw into the cyber. Our public sectors are quite vulnerable.
Persian ISPs have been extremely active last few weeks.
Fait attention.

[madhatter]

Brilliant
Batten down
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/aa20-006a

You want threatening? This is is threatening:

If this goes down Iran won't have a single SAM or radar site intact in the country after a few hours.

Hawks

Thank God and the Swiss that nobody got hurt while Khomeini flexed his guns.

That link was only intended to illustrate ..
Anyone involved with network infrastructure appreciates that Iran is capable of all sorts of asymmetric disruption. anyone who didnt already know that belongs in a different field...Pray that Nitro Zeus has the juice to respond to whatever their ankle biters might throw into the cyber. Our public sectors are quite vulnerable.
Persian ISPs have been extremely active last few weeks.
Fait attention.

yeah he's staying up all night working on some hot new antivirus stuff...