TEHRAN- As an elderly American now, I have witnessed the apparent decline of my country in most all respects (except perhaps in military power) in to what appears to be an insane number of wrong-way turns since I was a youth in in the 1960s. It was with the Vietnam War that the pretensions or fact of “Empire” really began to take hold.

That was a war based on a lie in the Gulf of Tonkin just as all the other aggressions have been based on lies, in particular the war on Iraq beginning in 2003, which was anathema to Soleimani and gave rise to all sorts of carnage in the Mideast and gave rise to ISIS.

The “Pax” part of any alleged "Pax Americana" may have been mostly evident for those actually living securely in the U.S., but rarely overseas, and like many Americans who still have a brain I have been appalled by the bellicose actions of my government. I was horrified by the murder of Qassem Soleimani three years ago no less even though I knew not much about this lionized Iranian leader — except that what I saw of this general in the news suggested that if a military man could ever at bottom be a "man of peace", Soleimani fit that description. He appeared extremely smart and extremely warm and charismatic to anyone who took a close look, and he was not afraid of calling out “wrong way” turns by the U.S. which, of course, made him seem an enemy of the deeply entrenched Washington establishment which has long been built around hostility to any country or person objecting to U.S. pretensions of a dominance that spurned fairness and justice and basic respect for other polities and cultures.

“What I saw of this general in the news suggested that if a military man could ever at bottom be a ‘man of peace’, Soleimani fit that description.”Interesting or not, it’s worth mentioning that I remember exactly where I was when I heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated —a teenager in a study hall in a boarding school in Connecticut that Kennedy had also attended as a youth. And now Joe Biden recently opened up files about the Kennedy assassination, but not all of them. ALL of them apparently suggested that the CIA may have had a hand in the murder because Kennedy was opposed to the burgeoning, then potential war on Vietnam unlike his vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Kennedy may have also believed the CIA ought to have been disbanded. Real truths have always been hard to ferret out because lies have often been deployed to underpin the so-called U.S. empire. Propaganda silencing dissent back in the 60s was as rampant then as it remains today. No doubt the official posture about General Soleimani as some sort of U.S. enemy who seriously threatened the U.S. was pure propaganda. The U.S. for example pretended to be an enemy of ISIS, an organization it originally may have helped create in Iraq and Syria in opposition to Assad’s Syria especially, but who in fact was the real and effective enemy of the ISIS scourge? Soleimani, who largely more or less defeated most of ISIS power both in Iraq and Syria.

What’s largely unknown to most Americans is that before the U.S. invasion of Iraq right after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Soleimani and Iran actually worked indirectly with the U.S. and helped the U.S. subdue the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, groups which also constituted a threat to Iran as its immediate neighbor. This was reported even by the Washington Post. One might be hard pressed not to expect the U.S. to go after al-Qaeda whose leader Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, was holed up in Afghanistan, but of course nothing was done against other perps in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. attacked and occupied Afghanistan at least on the presumption the Taliban was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, which allegedly knocked down the twin towers and set off the U.S. military rampages across West Asia. The U.S. had some justification perhaps to go after Osama bin Laden, and Iran and Soleimani did assist in some fashion.

“He (General Soleimani) appeared extremely smart and extremely warm and charismatic to anyone who took a close look.”Some have opined that the assassination of the great general in Baghdad was a gross reaction of revenge to the fact that Assad survived the bloody carnage in Syria and remains in control of much of the country, except in the east where the U.S. is still stealing Syria’s oil and wheat and has impoverished the country at large with that theft and other sanctions. The Russians and Soleimani  literally saved Assad’s Syria, which before the war there, despite having the Golan stolen by the Zionists, had been a relatively peaceful, self-contained country and largely self-sufficient and relatively prosperous by Mideast standards since 1973.

And the U.S. revenge factor is now playing out in Ukraine where the U.S. undeniably provoked Russia to attack and has seen that, albeit proxy, war as a means to hobble Russia and Putin, perhaps in part because of Russia’s assistance to Assad among other issues. Well, digging a bit deeper, what country has been behind the U.S. wars on Iraq and the war on Syria? Israel, it can be argued, has been the prime underlying cause of every U.S. hostility in West Asia against countries that rightfully deplore Zionist aggressions, especially in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s a good thing the nascent Netanyahu government with racists Ben Gvir and Smotrich in high positions in the Apartheid state has come to power. It’s so extremely racist and selfish that even some members in Congress are sounding alarms, as well as some Israelis as reported in Ha'eretz, Israel’s sole newspaper with at least some credibility and wisdom. This new government may be in time the key that forces a tipping point where Washington will be obliged to reject so much support for the Zionists. One can imagine that if Soleimani were still alive he’d be especially appalled again by the Zionists but might have some scintilla of optimism that things will get so out of hand and craven in Israel that change will come in time. Meanwhile Biden has recently killed hopes that the JCPOA may be revived and sanctions on Iran lifted. Scuttling the JCPOA has long been encouraged by the Zionists, perhaps because they know if it were revived, Israel could not attack Iran. It’s hard not to believe that especially in this century Israel is at bottom the causative factor in so much chaos and carnage in West Asia.

But in any case, Soleimani was a great leader and a man of such charisma that he will never be forgotten. He had a smile and a twinkle in his eyes like few others have ever had.