Attention to the Unseen

Robin Wright writes: On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared three days of public mourning and warned that “harsh vengeance awaits those criminals behind martyrdom of General Suleimani.” He moved quickly to name Brigadier General Esmail Gha’ani, who had worked closely with Suleimani, as the new Quds Force commander. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s U.S.-educated Foreign Minister, who spent two years negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States, called the American air strike an act of international…

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The Guardian reports: Qassem Suleimani started his working life as a skinny, impoverished child construction labourer, and ended it as the most influential military commander in the Middle East. Through intellect, ruthlessness, courage and a dose of luck that finally ran out this week, he rose to become Iran’s second-most powerful man, official commander of Iran’s elite Quds forces and unofficial commander of a proliferation of proxy militias and allied politicians across the region. He was killed by US drone…

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Reuters reports: U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Thursday there were indications Iran or forces it backs may be planning additional attacks, warning that the “game has changed” and it was possible the United States might have to take preemptive action to protect American lives. “There are some indications out there that they may be planning additional attacks, that is nothing new … we’ve seen this for two or three months now,” Esper told reporters. “If that happens then…

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Tallha Abdulrazaq writes: Tensions between the United States and Iran have reached a new high in the past few days in a manner not seen since perhaps the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Events were kicked off last Friday night by a rocket attack against a military base near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, that houses U.S. service personnel and other citizens. The attack killed an American contractor and wounded several service members, drawing the ire of the White…

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Peter Beinart writes: Over the past 18 months, Donald Trump has picked a fight with Iran that he won’t end and can’t win. That fight has had horrifying consequences for the Iranian people, led Tehran to restart its nuclear program, and now left parts of the American embassy compound in Baghdad in flames. In the days and weeks to come, Trump’s policy will likely lead either to war or to additional American humiliation, or both. The fight began in May…

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The Guardian reports: A new wave of mercenaries from Sudan is fighting in Libya, deepening concerns that the conflict in the north African state has descended into an intractable international war that could destabilise much of the region. Leaders of two different groups of Sudanese fighters active in Libya have told the Guardian that they had received hundreds of new recruits in recent months. Both groups were fighting with the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by General Khalifa Haftar against…

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Josh Rogin writes: As the Assad regime slaughters its way to victory on the ground in Syria, its partner Russia is using the United Nations to try to cut off crucial humanitarian aid to millions of innocent Syrians still living outside the government’s control. The Trump administration is trying — but so far failing — to stop Moscow’s sinister plan. Last Friday, Russian and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council Resolution that would partially renew international authorization for cross-border routes…

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In a two-part column, Christopher Dickey writes: The Washington Post’s vast investigative report about the delusions and lies of successive American administrations in Afghanistan reads almost like a celebration of superpower humiliation. Drawing on hundreds of internal U.S. government interviews about “lessons learned,” it would reinforce anyone’s belief the best lesson would be to get the fuck out. Like, yesterday already. Certainly the documents dovetail with U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s promise that he’ll be the one to end this…

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The Washington Post reports: A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished…

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David Ignatius writes: There’s an intriguing anomaly in global politics this Thanksgiving: Despite a summer of confrontation in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are exploring possible dialogue with Tehran and its allies about easing tensions in Yemen and elsewhere. The gulf countries are more open to talks with Iran and its proxies partly because they’ve lost some of their former confidence in the United States as a reliable military protector. That’s one cost of President…

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The New York Times reports: After abruptly axing nearly a year of delicate peace talks with the Taliban in September, President Trump put the negotiations back on the front-burner this week in a similarly jolting fashion by seeming to demand a cease-fire that his negotiators had long concluded was overly ambitious. Despite a sense of relief at the prospect of resuming talks to end the 18-year conflict, Western diplomats and Taliban leaders were scrambling to figure out whether Mr. Trump…

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Richard Spencer writes: Earlier this year, [Chief Petty Officer Edward] Gallagher was formally charged with more than a dozen criminal acts, including premeditated murder, which occurred during his eighth deployment overseas. He was tried in a military court in San Diego and acquitted in July of all charges, except one count of wrongfully posing for photographs with the body of a dead Islamic State fighter. The jury sentenced him to four months, the maximum possible; because he had served that…

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