The End of the Neoliberal Age

With the assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassim Suleimani the United States has started a war with Iran (see "U.S. Strike in Iraq Kills Qassim Suleimani, Commander of Iranian Forces" by Michael Crowley, Falih Hassan and Eric Schmitt):

Hawkish Iran experts said the strike would be deeply painful for Iran’s leadership. “This is devastating for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime and Khamenei’s regional ambitions,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to Ayatollah Khamenei.

“For 23 years, he has been the equivalent of the J.S.O.C. commander, the C.I.A. director and Iran’s real foreign minister,” Mr. Dubowitz said, using an acronym for the United States’ Joint Special Operations Command. “He is irreplaceable and indispensable” to Iran’s military establishment.

For those same reasons, other regional analysts warned, Iran is likely to respond with an intensity of dangerous proportions.

“From Iran’s perspective, it is hard to imagine a more deliberately provocative act,” said Robert Malley, the president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group. “And it is hard to imagine that Iran will not retaliate in a highly aggressive manner.”

“Whether President Trump intended it or not, it is, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war,” added Mr. Malley, who served as White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the gulf region in the Obama administration.

[snip] 

The strike killed five people, including the pro-Iranian chief of an umbrella group for Iraqi militias, Iraqi television reported and militia officials confirmed. The militia chief, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was a strongly pro-Iranian figure.

The public relations chief for the umbrella group, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Mohammed Ridha Jabri, was also killed. 

It is also a declaration of war on Iraq. Jason Ditz reports that in addition to the assassination of PMF leadership, U.S. forces have snatched Iraqi militia leaders:

Following the United States attack on the Baghdad International Airport on Thursday evening, a strike which killed seven people, including Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and two top Iraqi members of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), it is now being reported that US Marines carried out arrest raids inside Baghdad, capturing high ranking Iraqi MP Hadi al-Amiri and militia leader Qais al-Khazali.

Details are still emerging, but the Marines were reported by several Middle East sources to have conducted raids in the Jadriah district of Baghdad, and came out of it with Amiri and Khazali.

This comes a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Amiri to be “an Iranian asset,” citing his presence at the protests at the US Embassy in Baghdad. Amiri is the leader of Iraq’s second largest parliamentary bloc, as well as the head of the powerful Badr Brigade. In recent years he had been under consideration as a potential premier.

Khazali is the head of Qa’saib Ahl al-Haq, a substantial militia within the PMU in its own right. Though Khazali has politically been aligned to Amiri in recent years, in the past he was an aide to top cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, head of the main Iraqi parliament bloc.

This is dire. Muqtada al-Sadr is mustering the Mahdi Army. If the U.S. plans on staying in Iraq, it will have to fight to do so.

Caitlin Johnstone defines the politics behind Trump's assassination of Suleimani and his drive to war with Iran:

Many are understandably claiming that this geostrategically pivotal confrontation was precisely what Trump was installed to facilitate all along. The largest donor to any campaign in 2016 was oligarch Sheldon Adelson, who gave $25 million to the Trump campaign, and who in 2013 said that the US should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran. After Trump’s election win, Adelson gave another $5 million to his inauguration, the largest single presidential inaugural donation ever made. Newt Gingrich, another of the billionaire’s hired politicians, has said that Adelson’s “central value” is Israel.

Make no mistake, Iran is not Iraq or Libya. A full-scale war against Iran would be many times more deadly, costly and destabilizing than those interventions; the UK’s Admiral Lord West told The Daily Star Online last year that winning such a war would require no less than a million troops, or nearly the total number of active duty US military personnel in the entire world. Even if a direct war with Iran didn’t lead to a confrontation with China, Russia and the other unabsorbed allies, it would still be worse than Vietnam and Iraq combined in terms of death, destruction, expense, and regional destabilization. 

Trump was able to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by running to her left on war and peace. He won't be able to do that again.

Trump has overstepped. China and Russia will assist Iran. The U.S. is a rabid, destructive hyper-power that needs to be hobbled before every inch of the globe is drenched in blood. Events will quickly unravel U.S. hegemony, and not just in the Middle East. What will Trump do when North Korea launches a long-range ballistic missile over Japan?

The neoliberal age began with the Iranian Revolution, and now it will end with a war on the Islamic Republic of Iran.