One year ago, the Raging Twenties started with a murder.   

It was an act of war for President Donald Trump to assassinate Major General Qassem Soleimani, Iranian commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi militia, by laser-guided Hellfire missiles launched from two MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The drone strike at Baghdad airport, directly ordered by Trump, was not only unilateral, unprovoked and illegal; it was engineered as a stark provocation, to detonate an Iranian reaction that would then be countered by American “self-defense” packaged as “deterrence.” Call it a perverse form of double down, reversed false flag.  

The imperial Mighty Wurlitzer spun it as a “targeted killing,” a pre-emptive op squashing Soleimani’s alleged planning of “imminent attacks” against US diplomats and troops.