Was Soleimani Killed Because He Was Trying to Avert Conflict?

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Liberation News reports: “Soleimani was in Iraq to ease regional tensions; then Trump said ‘Kill him.’ The New York Times also offers reporting on this, see below. Tuesday morning, Secretary of State Pompeo denied this, saying Soleimani “was not there on a diplomatic mission trying to resolve a problem.”

DOUGLAS VALENTINE, dougvalentine77 at gmail.com. Skype: Douglas_Valentine
Valentine is the author of The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. His rare access to CIA officials has resulted in portions of his research materials being archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and John Jay College. He has written three books on CIA operations, including the Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

He said today: “As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated in April 2019 while visiting Texas A&M University, that as CIA director, ‘we lied, we cheated, we stole.’ If the CIA assassinated or lured Soleimani because he was trying to defuse tensions, the U.S. government obviously wouldn’t admit it. That’s SOP [standard operating procedure].”

In his new interview with Parsi Policy, “Soleimani’s Assassination Act of Psychological Warfare,” Valentine states: “Psychological warfare — the shaping of beliefs, and thus political and social movements — is the most highly prized and effective of all intelligence operations. …

“Like all administrations, the Trump administration has ‘stated’ policies that satisfy its political base, and it has ‘unstated’ policies that are necessary to satisfy the Establishment. The CIA conducts Trump’s ‘unstated’ policies. …

“The CIA and military have ‘long range’ strategic plans in place. For example, the military has 800 bases around the world to ensure that U.S. corporations have access to foreign markets, and that the U.S. military dominates the world.”

See Valentine’s recent interview in CovertAction Magazine: “Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine.”

The New York Times reports: “President Trump and other American officials have said that General Soleimani was in the midst of planning attacks on United States forces when he was killed. But the general may have also been working as a go-between in quiet efforts to reduce the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

“Hostility and competition for influence had grown for years between the two regional rivals, but in recent months, Iran and Saudi Arabia had taken steps toward indirect talks to defuse the situation.

“In an address to the Iraqi Parliament on Sunday, Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi of Iraq said that he was supposed to meet with General Soleimani on the morning he was killed.

“It was expected that he was carrying a message for me from the Iranian side responding to the Saudi message that we had sent to the Iranian side to reach agreements and breakthroughs important for the situation in Iraq and the region,” Mr. Mahdi said.

“The content of the messages was not immediately clear, but Mr. Mahdi’s comments suggested that the drone strike ordered by Mr. Trump may have interrupted a diplomatic back channel aimed at averting conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”