Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Missile Attack A Face Saving Maneuver for Iran? (Updated and bumped))

Vox Day has posted comments from someone purporting to be active duty military officer in Iraq about yesterday's missile attacks. Basically, the officer says that they had advance warning that there would be two waves of missile attacks, although not when, and that President Trump tweeted that there were no casualties before the officer had even received a damage assessment. He also noted that Trump and Iran were talking deescalation right after the attacks. The officer's thoughts:
The whole night, I couldn't escape the feeling that the whole thing is intended to give Pres Trump a reason to remove troops from Iraq, while giving all three parties (Iran, Iraq, and the USA) reason to claim a win - the USA killed a very bad man, Iran struck The Great Satan, and Iraq gets to reassert their sovereignty.
Update: Stephen Green seems to confirm the forgoing information from Vox Day, writing:
Iran reportedly alerted both Baghdad and Washington, quietly, that an attack was imminent, and then made sure the missiles were badly targeted. Hence, zero casualties. The harmless explosions were mostly for domestic propaganda purposes, so the Mullahs have something to show the people on TV and claim to have killed a jillion infidels with their mighty missiles or whatever. But the whole world knows exactly what they just saw: Tehran backing down after Trump ordered the death of their terror mastermind.
 Also from Michael Pregent at Fox News: "Iranian missile attacks on two joint U.S.-Iraqi military bases Wednesday morning didn’t kill or injure any Americans, according to initial reports – and that appears to have been a deliberate move by Iran to avoid a retaliatory strike by U.S. forces." And the Daily Mail reports that "Iraqi Prime Minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, revealed today that Iran gave him a tip-off about last night's missile strikes, giving time for troops to scramble to bunkers."

Update (1/9/2020): The Daily Mail reports that "Iran warned the U.S. via a European embassy of missile attack so troops had THREE HOURS to prepare - and Tehran made sure American satellites could detect their plans, report claims."

2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. This is looking more and more like a faction within Iran wanted Soleimani dead.

      Delete

Hand Grenades Of The Spanish Civil War

Karl Dahl has published an interesting article on " Commercial and Artisanal Hand Grenades of the Spanish Civil War ." The "a...