Chris Hedges's Blog, page 62

Leslie Jamison’s Kaleidoscope of Loneliness

“Make It Scream Make It Burn”
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Years back, I read Leslie Jamison’s brilliantly conceived book of essays, “The Empathy Exams,” and was attracted to her scorching and original voice that circled around the rough edges of female pain, rage and powerlessness while zeroing in on her own. Jamison’s father left when she was a young girl.

Her older brother had already left for college, and her beloved younger brother was getting ready to go. All the men were leaving. Sadness, confusion and vulnerability were already her steadiest companions. By the time she was 8, she had already developed a taste for champagne sweetened with spoonfuls of sugar.

Other obsessions soon took hold. She was starting to starve her already thin body, and would occasionally cut thin lines into her ankle, taking pleasure in the pain. She started messing around with boys early, and established a destructive pattern of being with one man after another. Cocaine and other drugs followed.

One day in a small town in Mexico, a man punched her hard in the face and grabbed the digital camera around her neck. She fled back to Los Angeles for extensive surgery to repair her severely disfigured face. She soon got pregnant but aborted the fetus. Her drinking binges swung out of control. In 2010 she took herself to AA and the initially rocky path to sobriety began. During all this, she managed to graduate from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and got a Ph.D. from Yale in literature. But these credentials did not soothe her demons.

Jamison’s turbulent and self-destructive early years made me think hard about two pieces of her recent writing I found. One is about her mother:

It was just the two of us. We made vegetarian Sloppy Joes for dinner. We watched “Murder, She Wrote” on Sunday nights, eating our two bowls of ice cream side by side. … In many photos from my childhood, she is embracing me—one arm wrapped around my stomach, the other pointing at something, saying, look at that, directing my gaze toward ordinary wonders. To talk about her love for me, or mine for her, would feel almost tautological; she has always defined my notion of what love is. … Trying to write about my mother is like staring at the sun. It feels like language could only tarnish this thing she has given me my whole life—this love. For years, I’ve resisted writing about her. Great relationships make for bad stories. Expression naturally gravitates towards difficulty. Narrative demands frictions, and my mom and I live—by the day, the week, the decade—in closeness.

The other piece is about Amy Winehouse. When Jamison watched Winehouse perform, she saw someone whose heart was breaking into pieces as she sang.

Jamison was already seven years sober when she wrote this piece, but watching Winehouse on film with empty bottles of booze surrounding her made her “remember what it had felt like to be unsober—gloriously, unapologetically unsober: drinking whiskey by a bonfire, feeling the sluice of heat down my throat, its rhyme with the flames at my fingertips. … I remember how the prospect of sobriety seemed like unrelenting gray, after luminous, disjunctive nights—a bleak horizon, a shirt washed so many times it had lost all its color. What could the straight line of on the mend hold that might rival the dark, sparkling sweep of falling apart?”

These two passages seem to be a prequel to Jamison’s masterful new collection of essays, “Make It Scream, Make It Burn.” How could such a loving mother raise a girl who wanted to do nothing more than destroy herself? Jamison’s ability to capture this essential contradiction is her secret power as an artist.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Make It Scream, Make It Burn” at Google Books.

“52 Blue,” the first essay in “Make It Scream, Make It Burn,” is about a huge whale with whom researchers have become obsessed. All male whales moan at a certain decibel to find mates, but 52 Blue, as he has been named, does so at an incredibly loud decibel—and no other whale seems to answer his exuberant call. No one has ever seen him, but he has accumulated a host of loyal online followers who track his whereabouts, perhaps seeing in him a metaphor for their own loneliness.

One woman, Lenora, woke up unsteady and unsettled after surgery for a severe intestinal blockage and the coma that followed. Her friend’s brief visits left her feeling helpless. She started following 52 Blue online: “Like the whale, she felt that her own language was adrift. She was struggling to come back to any sense of self, much less find the words for what she was thinking or feeling. The world seemed to be pulling away, and the whale offered an echo of this difficulty. She remembers thinking, ‘I wish I could speak whale.’ She found a strange kind of hope in the possibility that 52 knew he wasn’t alone.”

In “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again,” Jamison spends time with families who believe one of their children has led a prior life. At first, the cynic in Jamison resists their stories, which seem beyond rational belief. She thinks these parents and their children are engaging in some sort of elaborate charade. But as her inquiries deepen, so does Jamison’s empathy for these families. At the time she was researching this piece, she was heavily involved “in a twelve-step recovery program for more than three years. I’d found that its grace required extinguishing, or at least suspending many forms of skepticism at once: about dogma, about clichés, about programs of insight and prefabricated self-awareness, about other people’s ostensibly formulaic narrative of their own lives. In recovery, we were asked to avoid ‘contempt prior to investigation’ and writing a piece about reincarnation … seemed like a different test of this willingness to keep an open mind.”

Instead of castigating these families for their possible deceptions, Jamison claims it is more important to focus upon what these deceptions were offering these families, which she describes as an “articulation of faith in the self as something that could transform and stay continuous at once…”

Jamison understands the immense power of deception to move us. One of the best essays in the collection, “No Tongue Can Tell,” is about Civil War photography. Jamison learns that many of the most revered shots of the Civil War’s carnage were staged. Limbs and corpses were artistically arranged against backdrops chosen by photographers. She writes, “Conspicuous forms of distortion, however, only force us to confront the truth that all photos are inevitably mediated, inevitably constructed, inevitably distancing.”

While visiting a museum exhibiting Civil War photographs, she finds herself unmoved, her focus on how the photographers micromanaged the images they produced. Only one shot grabbed her. It was a framed portrait of three elaborately dressed dead men in full military gear seeming to stand proudly, the middle one with his eyeballs missing. This shot got through to her, not the rows of pictures showing battlefields filled with bloated corpses and weapons. She finds out afterward that the man with no eyes was a Union soldier named William R. Mudge, a Massachusetts native, and a photographer before the war.

Another engaging story, “Maximum Exposure,” is about Annie, an American photographer who spent almost three decades following an impoverished family in a shantytown in Mexico, while photographing some of their most intimate moments.

These pictures appear throughout the essay. The family eating supper while looking past one another silently. Dazzling laughter between a mother and one of her children in a spontaneous moment of affection. The father sitting on a bus staring threateningly into Annie’s camera as if it were a weapon.

Annie chronicled her experiences with the Mexican family in multiple journals, speaking of times she helped the family with money and other times when she refused. Her journals spoke about her need to be close to them, but also her desire to flee, which she often did, only to return again. Annie wrote of the lingering guilt that she was stealing their most precious resource: the relationships they had with one another. Jamison writes, “The language of photography conjures aggression and theft. You shoot a picture. You take a photograph. You capture an image or a moment. It is as if life—or the world, or other people, or time itself—has to be forcibly plundered or stolen.”

Both Annie and Jamison are drawn to the drama of ordinary people who struggle to survive on the margins. They are both interlopers of a sort, women from privileged backgrounds who are free to come and go as they please. And they recognize that their elevated status mars the empathy they seek with others from different worlds, regardless of the intimacies that might sometimes develop for a time. They will eventually return to their own world of choice and free agency. It is a devil’s bargain.

In the final essays of the book, Jamison turns the narrative lens upon herself and her present life as a teacher, mother, stepmother and wife in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she juggles family life and her career with an enthusiasm she never guessed possible.

Mostly, she seems to rejoice in the daily pleasures life serves up. The strange delights of sobriety. The dailiness of work and love. Scrambled eggs at the diner with her husband while a babysitter watches their children. There are insecurities about stepparenting that she struggles with. And times the desire to be alone overtakes her. But she doesn’t want to run away. She wants to be present. She wants to embrace the messiness of family life head-on. Her narrative voice has shifted from her earlier work; it is less dark but it is no less daring, powerful and innovative. She is a writer at the peak of her powers, sharing with us the hard-won reflections of a woman who has finally decided to let some light in.

Iraq Parliament Votes to Expel U.S. Military

BEIRUT  — The latest on U.S.-Iran tensions (all times local):

4:45 p.m.

Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. military from the country.

Lawmakers voted Sunday in favor of a resolution that calls for ending foreign military presence in the country. The resolution’s main aim is to get the U.S. to withdraw some 5,000 U.S. troops present in different parts of Iraq.

The vote comes two days after a U.S. airstrike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani inside Iraq, dramatically increasing regional tensions.

The Iraqi resolution specifically calls for ending an agreement in which Washington sent troops to Iraq more than four years ago to help in the fight against the Islamic State group.

The resolution was backed by most Shiite members of parliament, who hold a majority of seats.

Many Sunni and Kurdish legislators did not show up for the session, apparently because they oppose abolishing the deal.

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4:20 p.m.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group says America’s military in the Middle East region, including U.S. bases, warships and soldiers are fair targets following the U.S. killing of Iran’s top general.

Hassan Nasrallah says evicting U.S. military forces from the region is now a priority.

The U.S. military, which recently killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani “will pay the price,” he added in a speech Sunday.

“The suicide attackers who forced the Americans to leave from our region in the past are still here and their numbers have increased,” Nasrallah added.

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4:10 p.m.

Pope Francis is calling for dialogue and self-restraint in his first public comments amid soaring tensions between the U.S. and Iran, after a U.S. airstrike killed Iran’s top general in Iraq.

During his Sunday noon blessing, Francis warned: “War brings only death and destruction.” He led the tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square in a silent prayer for peace.

Speaking off the cuff, Francis said: “I call on all side to keep alive the flame of dialogue and self-control, and to avoid the shadows of enmity.”

Francis had hoped to visit Iraq this year to minister to the Christian minorities that have been targeted by the Islamic State group. Vatican officials and local Catholic bishops in Iraq have voiced concern about the impact of any new conflict on the weakest and most marginal in Iraq.

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3:55 p.m.

Iraq’s parliament has begun an emergency session and will likely vote on a resolution requiring the government to ask foreign forces to leave Iraq.

The resolution specifically calls for ending an agreement in which Washington sent troops to Iraq more than four years ago to help in the fight against the Islamic State group.

The resolution is backed by most Shiite members of parliament, who hold a majority of seats.

The request was put forward Sunday by the largest bloc in the legislature, known as Fatah. That bloc includes leaders associated with the Iran-backed paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, which were a major force in the fight against IS.

Many Sunni and Kurdish legislators did not show up for the session, apparently because they oppose abolishing the deal.

At the start of the session, 180 legislators of the 329-member parliament were present.

3:40 p.m.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group says the U.S. killing of a top Iranian general puts the entire region at the beginning of a “completely new phase.”

Speaking before thousands of supports at a rally in southern Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah has called the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani a “clear, blatant crime” that will transform the Middle East.

Sunday’s comments were his first public statements since Soleimani was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Iraq Friday.

The Shiite militant group is Iran’s key proxy and most successful military export. Nasrallah, who has been in hiding fearing Israeli assassination since 2006, spoke to supporters through a large screen via satellite link.

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2:10 p.m.

The daughter of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani says the death of her father will “not break us” and the United States should know that his blood will not go for free.

Zeinab Soleimani told Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV — which is linked with the Iran-backed Hezbollah group — that the “filthy” President Donald Trump will not be able to wipe out the achievements of the slain Iranian leader.

In the short interview aired Sunday, Zeinab Soleimani said Trump is not courageous because her father was targeted by missiles from afar and the U.S. president should have “stood face to face in front of him.”

The young woman, who spoke in Farsi with Arabic voice over, said that she knows that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will avenge the death of her father.

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2:00 p.m.

The U.S. has warned American citizens in Saudi Arabia “of the heightened risk of missile and drone attacks” amid soaring tensions with Iran.

A security alert message sent Sunday by the U.S. mission there said that in the past “regional actors hostile to Saudi Arabia have conducted missile and drone attacks against both civilian and military targets inside the kingdom.”

It warned that U.S. citizens living and working near military bases, oil and gas facilities and other critical civilian infrastructure are at heightened risk of attack, particularly in the Eastern Province where the oil giant Aramco is headquartered and areas near the border with Yemen.

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1:55 p.m.

Britain’s foreign minister says it is trying to “de-escalate” a volatile situation after a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Sunday in an interview with broadcaster Sky News that Soleimani “was a regional menace.”

Raab added that the U.K. understood the U.S.’s “position” and “right to exercise self-defense.”

But Raab said the U.K. was discussing with top officials in the U.S. and Europe, as well as Iran and Iraq, about how to avoid a war, which he said wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests. Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said late Saturday that he had ordered two British Navy warships, the HMS Montrose frigate and the HMS Defender destroyer, to return to the Strait of Hormuz amid the soaring regional tensions.

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1:40 p.m.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman says that officials in the Islamic Republic plan to meet Sunday night to discuss their next step out of the nuclear deal and that it will be even bigger than initially planned.

Abbas Mousavi made the comment Sunday during a briefing with journalists after a U.S. airstrike killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Mousavi said the step would be greater than planned as “in the world of politics, all developments are interconnected.”

If taken, it would be the fifth step to break terms of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Mousavi did not elaborate on what that step could be. Iran previously has broken limits of its enrichment, its stockpiles and its centrifuges, as well as restarted enrichment at an underground facility.

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12:15 p.m.

Major stock markets in the Middle East are trading down on fears of a conflict between Iran and the U.S. after an American drone strike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The Boursa Kuwait closed down 4%. The Dubai Financial Market closed down just over 3%. Riyadh’s Tadawul was down over 2% as trading continued. The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange fell 1.42%.

Egypt’s stock exchange also fell 4%.

Meanwhile, oil prices continued to rise. Brent crude traded up 3.5% to $68.60 a barrel.

The U.S. killed Soleimani on Friday. Early Sunday, as Iran threatened “harsh retaliation,” President Donald Trump tweeted the U.S. was prepared to strike 52 sites in the Islamic Republic if any Americans are harmed.

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11:50 a.m.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says President Donald Trump is “worthy of all appreciation” for ordering the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Netanyahu told his Cabinet Sunday that Soleimani “initiated, planned and carried out many terror attacks” in the Middle East and beyond. Israel has long accused Soleimani of being the mastermind of Iran’s belligerency in the region.

Netanyahu said Israel stood alongside the United States in its current campaign against Iran.

Netanyahu has been among the strongest voices against Iran’s Islamic rulers in recent years. The Israeli leader pushed hard against the nuclear deal Western powers signed with Tehran in 2015 and which Trump later reversed.

The United States killed Soleimani in a drone airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport early Friday. The Iranian commander was widely seen as the architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East.

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11:45 a.m.

The deputy leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group says the United States carried out a “very stupid act” by killing Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Sheikh Naim Kassem made his comments on Sunday after paying a visit to the Iranian embassy in Beirut where he paid condolences. He said the attack will make Tehran and its allies stronger.

Kassem told reporters “now we have more responsibilities” adding that the United States will discover that “its calculations” were wrong.

Heazbollah is a close ally of Iran’s and considered part of a regional Iranian-backed alliance of proxy militias.

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11:40 a.m.

Iranian officials are criticizing President Donald Trump’s threats to target sites important to Iran’s culture.

Trump threatened Iranian cultural sites would be hit fast and hard if Tehran attacks U.S. assets to avenge the killing of a powerful Iranian general.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter Sunday that after committing “grave breaches” in the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Trump is threatening new breaches of international law.

Zarif wrote: “Targeting cultural sites is a WAR CRIME.”

Telecommunications minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi compared Trump’s threats to the Islamic State group, Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.

“They all hate cultures. Trump is a ‘terrorist in a suit’,” Jahromi wrote on Twitter, warning that nobody can defeat Iran.

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11:30 a.m.

Iraq’s Iran-backed militias say that some remains of the Iranian top general and Iraqi militant leader killed in the U.S. drone strike in Iraq were sent to Iran for DNA tests to identify their corpses.

The Popular Mobilization Forces said in a statement Sunday that the bodies of the two commanders as well as an Iraqi bodyguard were torn to pieces and mangled by the explosion of the American missiles near Baghdad’s international airport.

It said the test will take few days after which the remains of the Iraqi commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, will be brought back to Iraq for burial in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.

Al-Muhandis was closely allied with Iran for decades.

Iran has declared three days of public mourning over Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s death in the U.S. attack.

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6:45 a.m.

The body of a top Iranian commander, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike, has arrived in Iran as the crisis between the two countries escalates.

Throngs of mourners carried Sunday the flag-draped casket of Gen. Qassem Soleimani off a plane in Ahvaz in southwestern Iran.

The U.S. drone strike targeting Soleimani in Iraq Friday also killed a leader of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

President Donald Trump threatened to bomb 52 sites in Iran if it retaliates by attacking Americans.

The tensions take root in Trump pulling out of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. That accord soon likely will further unravel as Tehran is expected to announce as soon as Sunday another set of atomic limits the country will break.

Al-Shabab Attacks Military Base Used by U.S. Forces in Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya — Al-Shabab extremists overran a key military base used by U.S. counterterror forces in Kenya before dawn Sunday, destroying U.S. aircraft and vehicles, Kenyan authorities said. It was the al-Qaida-linked group’s first attack against U.S. forces in the East African country, and the military called the security situation “fluid” several hours after the assault.

It was not yet clear whether any U.S. or Kenyan forces were killed. A U.S. Africa Command statement, issued after al-Shabab released photos of blazing aircraft, said “an accountability of personnel assessment is underway” and the Manda Bay airfield was “still in the process of being fully secured.” Kenyan military spokesman Paul Njuguna later said five attackers were dead.

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Al-Shabab, based in neighboring Somalia, claimed responsibility. In a statement Sunday evening proclaiming the 10-hour attack over, it asserted that nine Kenyan soldiers had been killed and seven aircraft destroyed. The U.S. statement called the al-Shabab claims exaggerated and said U.S. and Kenyan forces repelled the attack.

Kenya is a key base for fighting al-Shabab, one of the world’s most resilient extremist organizations. A plume of black smoke rose above the airfield Sunday after residents said a car bomb had exploded. Lamu county commissioner Irungu Macharia told The Associated Press that five suspects were arrested and were being interrogated.

An internal Kenyan police report seen by the AP said two fixed-wing aircraft, a U.S. Cessna and a Kenyan one, were destroyed along with two U.S. helicopters and multiple U.S. vehicles at the Manda Bay military airstrip. The report said explosions were heard at around 5:30 a.m. from the direction of the airstrip. The scene, now secured, indicated that al-Shabab likely entered “to conduct targeted attacks,” the report said.

The U.S. military said only that “initial reports reflect damage to infrastructure and equipment.” The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority said the airstrip was closed for all operations.

Al-Shabab’s statement included photos of blazing aircraft it asserted were from the attack. A second al-Shabab claim, issued hours later, asserted that “ïntense close-quarters combat” against U.S. forces continued.

The military’s Camp Simba in Lamu county, established more than a decade ago, has under 100 U.S. personnel, according to Pentagon figures. U.S. forces at the Manda Bay airfield train and give counterterror support to East African partners, according to the military. A U.S. flag-raising at the camp in August signaled its change “from tactical to enduring operations,” the Air Force said at the time.

According to another internal Kenyan police report seen by the AP, dated Friday, a villager that day said he had spotted 11 suspected al-Shabab members entering Lamu’s Boni forest, which the extremists have used as a hideout. The report said Kenyan authorities did not find them.

Al-Shabab has launched a number of attacks inside Kenya, including against civilian targets such as buses, schools and shopping malls. The group has been the target of a growing number of U.S. airstrikes inside Somalia during President Donald Trump’s administration.

The latest attack comes just over a week after an al-Shabab truck bomb in Somalia’s capital killed at least 79 people and U.S. airstrikes killed seven al-Shabab fighters in response.

Last year al-Shabab attacked a U.S. military base inside Somalia, Baledogle, that is used to launch drone strikes but reportedly failed to make their way inside. The extremist group also has carried out multiple attacks against Kenyan troops in the past in retaliation for Kenya sending troops to Somalia to fight it.

This attack marks a significant escalation of al-Shabab’s campaign of attacks inside Kenya, said analyst Andrew Franklin, a former U.S. Marine and longtime Kenya resident.

“Launching a deliberate assault of this type against a well-defended permanent base occupied by (Kenya Defence Forces), contractors and U.S. military personnel required a great deal of planning, rehearsals, logistics and operational capability,” he said. Previous attacks against security forces have mainly been ambushes on Kenyan army or police patrols.

The early Sunday attack comes days after a U.S. airstrike killed Iran’s top military commander and Iran vowed retaliation, but al-Shabab is a Sunni Muslim group and there is no sign of links to Shiite Iran or proxies.

“No, this attack was no way related to that incident” in the Middle East, an al-Shabab spokesman told the AP. He spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

One analyst, Rashid Abdi, in Twitter posts discussing the attack agreed, but added that Kenyan security services have long been worried that Iran was trying to cultivate ties with al-Shabab.

“Avowedly Wahhabist Al-Shabaab not natural ally of Shia Iran, hostile, even. But if Kenyan claims true, AS attack may have been well-timed to signal to Iran it is open for tactical alliances,” he wrote, adding that “an AS that forges relations with Iran is nightmare scenario.”

But a former member of the U.N. committee monitoring sanctions on Somalia, Jay Bahadur, said in a tweet that “the attack is far more related to AS wanting a do over on their spectacular failure at Baledogle four months ago.”

When asked whether the U.S. military was looking into any Iranian link to the attack, U.S. Africa Command spokesman Col. Christopher Karns said only that “al-Shabab, affiliated with al-Qaida, has their own agenda and have made clear their desire to attack U.S. interests.”

The al-Shabab claim of responsibility said Sunday’s attack was part of its “Jerusalem will never be Judaized” campaign, a rarely made reference that also was used after al-Shabab’s deadly attack on a luxury mall complex in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, in January 2019.

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Anna contributed from Johannesburg

Trump Says 52 Targets Already Lined Up if Iran Retaliates

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump issued a stark warning to Iran on Saturday, threatening to hit dozens of targets in the Islamic Republic “very fast and very hard” if it retaliates for the targeted killing of the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

The series of tweets came as the White House sent to Congress a formal notification under the War Powers Act of the drone strike on Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a senior administration official said. U.S. law required notification within 48 hours of the introduction of American forces into an armed conflict or a situation that could lead to war.

The notification was classified and it was not known if a public version would be released. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the classified document “suggests Congress and the American people are being left in the dark about our national security.”

In unusually specific language, Trump tweeted that his administration had already targeted 52 Iranian sites, “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture.” He linked the number of sites to the number of hostages, also 52, held by Iran for nearly 15 months after protesters overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Thousands of Iranians lined Baghdad streets Saturday for the funeral procession for Soleimani. The Islamic Republic has vowed revenge for the Trump-ordered airstrike that killed him and several senior Iraqi militants early Friday Baghdad time.

Trump appeared to respond to such threats with tweets justifying Soleimani’s killing and matching the bellicose language from Iran.

“Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters,” the president tweeted. “He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.”

Trump also warned: “The USA wants no more threats!”

Trump’s reference to targeting sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture” could raise questions about whether striking such targets would violate international agreements. The American Red Cross notes on its website that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols, ratified by scores of nations in recent years, states that “cultural objects and places of worship” may not be attacked and outlaws “indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations.”

The notification document sent Saturday to congressional leadership, the House speaker and the Senate president pro tempore was entirely classified, according to a senior Democratic aide and a congressional aide. The aides and the senior administration official were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and requested anonymity.

In a statement, Pelosi said the “highly unusual” decision to classify the document compounds concerns from Congress.

“This document prompts serious and urgent questions about the timing, manner and justification of the administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran,” Pelosi said and reiterated her call for a full briefing for lawmakers.

Pelosi said the Trump administration’s “provocative, escalatory and disproportionate military engagement continues to put service members, diplomats and citizens of America and our allies in danger.” She called on the administration “for an immediate, comprehensive briefing of the full Congress on military engagement related to Iran and next steps under consideration.”

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Daniel reported from Washington. AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

‘Not Safe to Move’: Fire Threats Intensify in Australia

SYDNEY — A father and son who were battling flames for two days are the latest victims of the worst wildfire season in Australian history, and the path of destruction widened in at least three states Saturday due to strong winds and high temperatures.

The death toll in the wildfire crisis is now up to 23 people, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said after calling up about 3,000 reservists to battle the escalating fires, which are expected to be particularly fierce throughout the weekend.

“We are facing another extremely difficult next 24 hours,” Morrison said at a televised news conference. “In recent times, particularly over the course of the balance of this week, we have seen this disaster escalate to an entirely new level.”

Dick Lang, a 78-year-old acclaimed bush pilot and outback safari operator, and his 43-year-old son, Clayton, were identified by Australian authorities after their bodies were found Saturday on a highway on Kangaroo Island. Their family said their losses left them “heartbroken and reeling from this double tragedy.”

Lang, known as “Desert Dick,” led tours for travelers throughout Australia and other countries. “He loved the bush, he loved adventure and he loved Kangaroo Island,” his family said.

Clayton Lang, one of Dick’s four sons, was a renowned plastic surgeon who specialized in hand surgery.

The fire danger increased as temperatures rose Saturday to record levels across Australia, surpassing 43 degrees Celsius (109 Fahrenheit) in Canberra, the capital, and reaching a record-high 48.9 C (120 F) in Penrith, in Sydney’s western suburbs.

Video and images shared on social media showed blood red skies taking over Mallacoota, a coastal town in Victoria where as many as 4,000 residents and tourists were forced to shelter on beaches as the navy tried to evacuate as many people as possible.

By Saturday evening, 3,600 firefighters were battling blazes across New South Wales state. Power was lost in some areas as fires downed transmissions lines, and residents were warned that the worst may be yet to come.

“We are now in a position where we are saying to people it’s not safe to move, it’s not safe to leave these areas,” state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters. “We are in for a long night and I make no bones about that. We are still yet to hit the worst of it.”

Morrison said the governor general had signed off on the calling up of reserves “to search and bring every possible capability to bear by deploying army brigades to fire-affected communities.”

Defense Minister Linda Reynolds said it was the first time that reservists had been called up “in this way in living memory and, in fact, I believe for the first time in our nation’s history.”

The deadly wildfires, which have been raging since September, have already burned about 5 million hectares (12.35 million acres) of land and destroyed more than 1,500 homes.

The early and devastating start to Australia’s summer wildfires has also been catastrophic for the country’s wildlife, likely killing nearly 500 million birds, reptiles and mammals in New South Wales alone, Sydney University ecologist Chris Dickman told the Sydney Morning Herald. Frogs, bats and insects are excluded from his estimate, making the toll on animals much greater.

Experts say climate change has exacerbated the unprecedented wildfires around the world. Morrison has been criticized for his repeated refusal to say climate change is impacting the fires, instead deeming them a natural disaster.

Some residents yelled at the prime minister earlier in the week during a visit to New South Wales, where people were upset with the lack of fire equipment their towns had. After fielding criticism for taking a family vacation in Hawaii as the wildfire crisis unfolded in December, Morrison announced he was postponing visits to India and Japan that were scheduled for later this month.

The government has committed 20 million Australian dollars ($14 million) to lease four fire-fighting aircraft for the duration of the crisis, and the helicopter-equipped HMAS Adelaide was deployed to assist evacuations from fire-ravaged areas.

The deadly fire on Kangaroo Island broke containment lines Friday and was described as “virtually unstoppable” as it destroyed buildings and burned through more than 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of Flinders Chase National Park. While the warning level for the fire was reduced Saturday, the Country Fire Service said it was still a risk to lives and property.

New South Wales Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers warned that the fires could move “frighteningly quick.” Embers carried by the wind had the potential to spark new fires or enlarge existing blazes.

Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fizsimmons said the 264,000-hectare (652,000-acre) Green Wattle Creek fire in a national park west of Sydney could spread into Sydney’s western suburbs. He said crews have been doing “extraordinary work” by setting controlled fires and using aircraft and machinery to try to keep the flames away.

More than 130 fires were burning in New South Wales, with at least half of them out of control.

Firefighters were battling a total of 53 fires across Victoria state, and conditions were expected to worsen with a southerly wind change. About 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) of bushland has already been burned through.

In a rare piece of good news, the number of people listed as missing or unaccounted for in Victoria was reduced from 28 to six.

“We still have those dynamic and dangerous conditions — the low humidity, the strong winds and, what underpins that, the state is tinder dry,” Victoria Emergency Services Commissioner Andrew Crisp said.

Thousands have already fled fire-threatened areas in Victoria, and local police reported heavy traffic flows on major roads.

“If you might be thinking about whether you get out on a particular road close to you, well there’s every chance that a fire could hit that particular road and you can’t get out,” Victoria Emergency Services Commissioner Andrew Crisp said.

___

McMorran reported from Wellington, New Zealand.

Rockets Fired After Day of Mourning for Slain Iranian Leader

BAGHDAD — Thousands took to the streets of Baghdad for the funeral procession of Iran’s top general Saturday after he was killed in a U.S. airstrike, as the region braced for the Islamic Republic to fulfill its vows of revenge.

The day of mourning in the Iraqi capital ended Saturday evening with a series of rockets that were launched and fell inside or near the Green Zone, which houses government offices and foreign embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.

Iran has vowed harsh retaliation for the U.S. airstrike ordered early Friday by President Donald Trump that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force and mastermind of its regional security strategy, and several senior Iraqi militants. The attack has caused regional tensions to soar, raising fears of an all-out war, and tested the U.S. alliance with Iraq.

Trump says he ordered the strike, a high-risk decision that was made without consulting Congress or U.S. allies, to prevent a conflict. U.S. officials say Soleimani was plotting a series of attacks that endangered American troops and officials, without providing evidence.

Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional policy of mobilizing militias across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, including in the war against the Islamic State group. He was also blamed for attacks on U.S. troops and American allies going back decades.

Though it’s unclear how or when Iran may respond, any retaliation was likely to come after three days of mourning declared in both Iran and Iraq. All eyes were on Iraq, where America and Iran have competed for influence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

After the airstrike early Friday, the U.S.-led coalition has scaled back operations and boosted “security and defensive measures” at bases hosting coalition forces in Iraq, a coalition official said on the condition of anonymity according to regulations. Meanwhile, the U.S. has dispatched another 3,000 troops to neighboring Kuwait, the latest in a series of deployments in recent months as the standoff with Iran has worsened.

In a thinly veiled threat, one of the Iran-backed militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, called on Iraqi security forces to stay at least 1,000 meters (0.6 miles) away from U.S. bases starting Sunday night.

“The leaders of the security forces should protect their fighters and not allow them to become human shields to the occupying Crusaders,” the warning statement said, in reference to the coalition bases.

An Iraqi security official said there were no injuries reported from the series of rockets launched Sunday evening. A Katyusha rocket that fell inside a square less than one kilometer from the U.S. embassy, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. Another rocket in Baghdad landed about 500 meters from As-Salam palace where the Iraqi President Barham Salih normally stays in Jadriya, a neighborhood adjacent to the Green Zone, the official said.

Another security official said three rockets fell outside an air base north of Baghdad were American contractors are normally present. The rockets landed outside the base in a farm area and there were no reports of damages, according to the official.

Also on Saturday, a spokesman for the Iraqi armed forces said the movement of coalition forces, including U.S. troops, in the air and on the ground will be restricted, conditioned on receiving approval from Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the commander in chief of the armed forces.

It was not immediately clear what the new restrictions would mean, given that coalition troops were already subject to limitations and had to be coordinated with the Joint Operation Command of top Iraqi military commanders.

NATO temporarily suspended all training activities in Iraq due to safety concerns, Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said Saturday.

Iraq’s government, which is closely allied with Iran, condemned the airstrike that killed Soleimani, calling it an attack on its national sovereignty. Parliament is meeting for an emergency session Sunday, and the government has come under mounting pressure to expel the 5,200 American troops based in the country, who are there to help prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group.

In Baghdad, thousands of mourners, mostly men in black military fatigues, carried Iraqi flags and the flags of Iran-backed militias that are fiercely loyal to Soleimani at Saturday’s ceremony. They were also grieving Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a senior Iraqi militia commander who was killed in the same strike.

The mourners, many of them in tears, chanted “No, No, America,” and “Death to America, death to Israel.” Mohammed Fadl, a mourner dressed in black, said the funeral is an expression of loyalty to the slain leaders. “It is a painful strike, but it will not shake us,” he said.

Helicopters hovered over the procession, which was attended by Abdul-Mahdi and leaders of Iran-backed militias. The procession later made its way to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where the mourners raised red flags associated with unjust bloodshed and revenge.

The slain Iraqi militants will be buried in Najaf, while Soleimani’s remains will be taken to Iran. More funeral services will be held for Soleimani in Iran on Sunday and Monday, before his body is laid to rest in his hometown of Kerman.

The U.S. has ordered all citizens to leave Iraq and temporarily closed its embassy in Baghdad, where Iran-backed militiamen and their supporters staged two days of violent protests earlier this week in which they breached the compound. Britain and France have warned their citizens to avoid or strictly limit travel in Iraq.

No one was hurt in the embassy protests, which came in response to U.S. airstrikes that killed 25 Iran-backed militiamen in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. blamed the militia for a rocket attack that killed a U.S. contractor in northern Iraq.

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have steadily intensified since Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal and restore crippling sanctions, which have devastated Iran’s economy and contributed to recent protests there in which hundreds were reportedly killed.

In an apparent effort to defuse tensions, Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, made an unplanned trip to Iran where he met with Rouhani and other senior officials.

Qatar hosts American forces at the Al-Udeid Air Base and shares a massive offshore oil and gas field with Iran.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with various world leaders including Iraqi President Barham Salih, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the United Arab Emirates. “I reaffirmed that the U.S. remains committed to de-escalation,” Pompeo tweeted.

As threats of “harsh revenge” against the U.S. looms, major streets in Iran were filled Saturday with billboards and images of Soleimani, who was widely seen as a national icon and a hero of the so-called Axis of Resistance against Western hegemony.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited Soleimani’s home in Tehran to express his condolences. “The Americans did not realize what a great mistake they made,” Rouhani said.

On the streets of Tehran, many mourned Soleimani.

“I don’t think there will be a war, but we must get his revenge,” said Hojjat Sanieefar. America “can’t hit and run anymore,” he added.

Another man, who only identified himself as Amir, was worried.

“If there is a war, I am 100% sure it will not be to our betterment. The situation will certainly get worse,” he said.

In a sign of his regional reach, supporters in Lebanon hung billboards commemorating Soleimani in Beirut’s southern suburbs and in southern Lebanon along the disputed border with Israel, according to the state-run National News Agency.

Both are strongholds of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has close ties to Soleimani.

Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, including the territory’s Hamas rulers, opened a mourning site for the slain general and dozens gathered to burn American and Israeli flags.

The killing of Soleimani was “a loss for Palestine and the resistance,” said senior Hamas official Ismail Radwan.

___

El Deeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem, Jon Gambrell and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Zeina Karam in Beirut and Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip contributed.

Trump’s Illegal, Impeachable Act of War

Violence begets violence; revenge engenders cycles of vengeance. This is exactly why war, or acts of war, must not be taken lightly. It also explains why America’s recent adventurism in the Middle East has only increased Islamic terrorism, killed hundreds of thousands worldwide, and ultimately left the U.S. no better off than when it began its crusade after the 9/11 attacks. Instead, this cycle of violence and revenge has produced nothing but “blowback” in the form of global anti-Americanism.

Which brings me to President Donald Trump’s worst decision yet, one for which he actually should be impeached: the assassination of Iranian general, and head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force, Qassem Soleimani. The weapon of choice in this genuine act of war, was, fittingly, the era’s ubiquitous armed drone. Soleimani, perhaps the second or third most powerful figure in Iran, was blown away in Baghdad, where he’d long led intelligence and military proxy operations for Tehran. And more than any of America’s many provocations of late, this killing might just lead to war—a war that would, even more than the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, inflame, destabilize and perhaps destroy the region for good.

With so much on the line—both for the United States and the world—the time for silence is over. Public resistance is the only tool we the people have left.

It doesn’t get any more illegal than a war with Iran or even the singular killing of Soleimani. The assassination of foreign leaders has long been prohibited under both national and international law, even if the U.S. hasn’t always followed such strictures. As has long been the case in the so-called war on terror, the President’s action was unilateral; Congress, it seems, wasn’t consulted, and it certainly didn’t provide sanction. And to be clear, while the assassination of a foreign general is an overt act of war, the U.S. is distinctly not at war with Iran, despite appearances to the contrary.

Few of the reports on the mainstream cable networks have even bothered to mention this salient fact. Why would they? U.S. troopers are engaged in combat in West Africa, Somalia and Syria, to name but a few countries. Washington is not technically at war with any of them. Congress, for its part, has shirked its constitutionally-mandated duty to declare (or at least sanction) America’s wars for nearly two decades—at a minimum. One wonders if this latest act of unvarnished militarism will alter the calculus on Capitol Hill. I remain doubtful.

Iranian pride, nationalism and basic sense of sovereignty, deeply wounded by Soleimani’s assassination, may demand an actual hot war with the U.S. But even if it doesn’t, this won’t end well for either side. Call me treasonous, but I, for one, would hardly blame Iran if it decides to further escalate. It’s not that Tehran is innocent, of course. Its domestic repression is sometimes abhorrent; the foreign militias it backs are often destabilizing, and some even killed U.S. troops during the height of the last Iraq War. Nonetheless, it bears repeating that unlike the U.S., Iran was invited into Syria, has many friends in Iraq, helped fight ISIS in both of those countries, and, as a sovereign state, is allowed to set its own domestic policy. The United States military’s interventions in the Middle East, by contract, frequently violate international law.

Doubtful a single, high-level assassination could cause an all-out conflict? Well, history disagrees. The British Empire once went to war with Spain over an alleged atrocity against a single merchant sea captain. Known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, it was in part precipitated by the amputation of Capt. Robert Jenkins’ ear in the West Indies in 1731. A century and a half later, that same British Empire fought a decade-long war in the Sudan, after one of its former celebrity generals, Charles “Chinese” Gordon, was killed by the forces of “The Mahdi” in the city of Khartoum. Ironically, one of the anti-American Iraqi militias that Iran loosely supported back in 2007-08 was called the “Mahdi Army,” named after that 19th century millenarian Sudanese Islamist leader. What’s more, I’d be remiss should I fail to remind readers that the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists in the Balkans provided the immediate catalyst for World War I—up until then humankind’s bloodiest.

Sure, that’s “ancient” history, one might retort, but imagine how the U.S. government would likely respond if one of our top generals was killed by Iran under similar circumstances. My guess is poorly. There seem to be, according to Washington, two sets of rules in international affairs: one for America and another for the rest of the world. Nevertheless, and while I doubt my advice will be followed, I’d urge restraint from Iran and the U.S. each. Both sides have powerful weapons, large, nationalistic armies, and a slew of nuclear-armed friends and backers. If one were to assess the risk versus reward of military escalation, the results would prove rather lopsided.

Then there’s the problem of evidence—specifically what, if anything, the Trump administration will present the American public to justify its act of war. The Pentagon claims, of course, that Soleimani was “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” But in the interests of “secrecy” and “national security,” it has yet to furnish any tangible proof to support such a bold assertion. Once again, we are being asked to take our government’s word for it. Then we are expected to collectively malign Iran, cheer U.S. intelligence efforts and “support” the troops.

Problem is, I’ve seen this movie before—three movies, actually, and very recently. Each is based on a true and increasingly prescient story. Just yesterday, I happened to rewatch “Shock and Awe,” which follows the only group of reporters to get the Iraq War “right” prior to the 2003 invasion. They uncovered a conspiracy by the Bush administration to cherry-pick and/or manufacture evidence, then leak it to the mainstream press in order to drum up an illegal war.

One week before, I viewed “Official Secrets,” the tale of a British intel analyst’s decision to risk her career and freedom by leaking a document that proved the U.S. National Security Agency planned to spy on and blackmail foreign delegates on the U.N. Security Council just prior to the Iraq War vote. Just one publication picked up that story and, predictably, it too failed to stop the invasion.

Several weeks ago, I watched “The Report,” a staggering drama about one Senate staffer’s years-long quest to investigate and publish his findings on the incompetence, crimes and lies of the CIA’s torture program under George W. Bush.

Sure, these are just films, but they hew incredibly closely to events as they happened. And while they’re yet to be dramatized, the Afghanistan Papers have shown definitively that senior U.S. military and civilian officials lied and obfuscated about that ongoing war for at least 17 of its 18-plus years. The point I’m making is this: Americans should never again blindly trust government efforts to either start a war or justify an act thereof. The risks—to U.S. soldiers, to the republic and to global stability—are far too weighty for all that.

Finally, the details of Soleimani’s assassination have thrown into relief the rank folly of American military policies. The Iranian general was killed in Iraq—a country the U.S. ought never to have invaded and whose institutions Washington has effectively shattered. Soleimani would never have been there had the U.S. not provoked a civil war whose centrifugal force has divided Iraq’s various sects and ethnicities while empowering a chauvinist Shia government.

Furthermore, Soleimani was killed even though one of the general’s major opponents in Iraq—the Islamic State—was one he shared with the United States. That one of the Shia militias he backed was allegedly responsible for the recent death of an American contractor that set this tit-for-tat in motion shouldn’t be too surprising, either. Many Iraqi nationalists have long seen American troops as occupiers, and with good reason. A quick glance at a map of the Middle East would suggest that Iran, bordering Iraq, has a greater claim to influence in the region than the U.S., which is some 6,000 miles away.

If Trump’s provocation is at once illegal, risky and impeachable, he’s not alone in carrying the blame. Both Bush and Obama helped normalize the kind of drone strikes in the region that made this mad act possible. Yet Trump’s assassination of Soleimani is unique in its peacetime targeting of a uniformed leader from a sovereign nation. It’s possible, then, to see Trump as the perfect candidate, temperamentally, to take matters to their logical, if farcical, conclusion in America’s off-the-rails war on terror. And I fear he just has.

Now, I’m no fan of Qassem Soleimani and the Quds he led. Because although the veracity of the U.S. government’s case may be less certain than it seems, it appears the Iranians did support militias that killed perhaps 600 American troops with advanced IED technology. Two died under my command—Alex Fuller and Michael Balsley—blown to pieces on a dusty East Baghdad street by elements of the Mahdi Army on Jan. 25, 2007.

I took it personally. But personal emotion ought to carry little weight in the development of national strategy, in honest old-school journalistic analysis, and any other empirical activity.

McConnell and Pelosi Give No Signs of Budging on Impeachment

WASHINGTON — Congress opened the new year with the Senate deadlocked over President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, leaving the proceedings deeply in flux as Republicans refuse to bend to Democratic demands for new witnesses.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell showed no signs Friday of negotiating with the Democrats as he aims for Trump’s swift acquittal. At the same time, the Republican leader acknowledged the Senate cannot begin the historic undertaking until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivers the articles of impeachment — which she is refusing to do until he provides details on the trial’s scope. Neither seems willing to budge.

“Their turn is over,” McConnell said about the Democratic-led House. “It’s the Senate’s turn now to render sober judgment as the framers intended.”

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Pelosi responded that McConnell’s stance “made clear that he will feebly comply with President Trump’s cover-up of his abuses of power and be an accomplice to that cover-up.”

The House and Senate gaveled in for brief sessions Friday with the sudden crisis in the Middle East only adding to the uncertainty about how lawmakers will proceed with the impeachment trial, only the third in U.S. history.

Trump was impeached last month by the House on charges that he abused power and obstructed Congress in his dealings with Ukraine. Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, an Eastern European ally that depends on U.S. support to counter Russia, after asking President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to publicly announce an investigation into Trump rival Joe Biden. The aid was ultimately released after Congress objected.

Democrats believe their demands for witnesses are bolstered by new reports about Trump’s decision to withhold the aid and unease among some GOP senators over the situation.

“The American people deserve the truth,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Every Senator now faces a choice: to be loyal to the President or the Constitution.”

McConnell has said the trial should start and then senators can decide the scope. Acquittal seems likely in the Senate because Republicans hold a 53-47 seat majority and it takes two thirds of the Senate to convict. But McConnell’s leverage is limited during the trial. Either side needs to reach just a 51-vote threshold to call witnesses or seek documents, which could politically test some senators.

As he opened the chamber Friday, McConnell criticized House Democrats as having engineered a “slapdash” impeachment that was the “most rushed, least fair” in history, only to now forcibly postpone the proceedings while they seek more information.

The GOP leader did not defend or criticize the president’s actions toward Ukraine. But he invoked the Founding Fathers’ vision of the slower-moving Senate as “an institution that could stop momentary hysteria and partisan passions.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also drew on the founders to pressure Republican senators not to fall lockstep in line with Trump, as they typically do, but fulfill their role as jurors.

“The vital question, of whether or not we have a fair trial, ultimately rests with a majority of the senators in this chamber,” Schumer said. He is pressing to hear testimony from at least four new witnesses, all of whom refused to appear in the House proceedings before the House voted to impeach Trump last month.

“We need the whole truth,” Schumer said. McConnell, he said, has been unable to make “one single argument” against having witnesses and documents in the trial.

Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, have indicated they were open to hearing from more witnesses and registered their concerns about McConnell’s claim that he was working closely with the White House on the format for the trial. Senators up for re-election in 2020 will face particular pressure over their votes.

Trump wants not only acquittal in the trial but also vindication from his GOP allies.

The witnesses that Senate Democrats want to call refused to testify in the House proceedings under orders from the White House. They are Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and two other officials who were directly involved with Trump’s decision to withhold the military assistance for Ukraine. Republicans, in turn, could try to hear from Biden or his son, Hunter Biden, who worked for an energy company in Ukraine while his father was vice president.

More information keeps flowing. A federal judge on Friday allowed a Rudy Giuliani associate indicted on campaign finance charges, Lev Parnas, to turn over documents to Congress as part of the impeachment proceeding. Parnas and another man, Igor Fruman, played key roles in efforts by Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to launch a Ukrainian corruption investigation against Democratic presidential candidate Biden.

McConnell showed no signs of deviating from his opening stance. He defended his earlier remarks in which he said he would not be an ‘’impartial juror” in the trial and stuck with his plan to follow the process used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which the trial was convened and then votes were taken to decide if additional witnesses were needed.

The GOP leader suggested the Senate will carry on with its other business while it waits for the House to act. As if to emphasize that point, he set up a vote for Monday to advance a Trump nominee to run the Small Business Administration.

“We can’t hold a trial without the articles,” McConnell said. “So for now, we are content to continue the ordinary business of the Senate while House Democrats continue to flounder.”

The Constitution requires that the House and Senate convene on Jan. 3, though few lawmakers were in town for the perfunctory session. But the Senate leaders’ remarks were being closely watched for signs of next steps amid the crisis in the Middle East after the U.S. killed a top Iranian general with airstrikes in Iraq.

___

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Climate Change Is Affecting Us in Ways We Never Imagined

Cold weather doesn’t prove global warming is fake, despite what President Trump and other climate change deniers have tweeted for years. Climate scientists have spent considerable time and energy attempting to explain how, as National Geographic reported last year, “an atmosphere changed by rising levels of gases like carbon and methane leads to more climate changes than just warming.”

While it remains true that increasing levels of dangerous gases have multiple impacts on our weather, a new study conducted by researchers in Sweden and Norway, and published in the journal Nature Climate Change, would upend the long-established narrative that daily weather is distinct from long-term climate change, The Washington Post reported Thursday. The study also implies that we’ve been underestimating the human impact on extreme weather events like storms, floods and hurricanes.

Researchers used statistical models of weather patterns around the globe and climate modeling to simulate temperature and humidity variations worldwide. In doing so, the authors write in the study’s introduction, “we detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change, and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming.”

With help from machine learning, researchers pinpointed signals of human-induced global warming on a single day of observations. They concluded that the first signal of human impact on global warming occurred in 1999.

The researchers also concluded, per the Post:

… that the spatial patterns of global temperature and humidity are, in fact, distinguishable from natural variability, and have a human component to them. Going further, the study concludes that the long-term climate trend in global average temperature can be predicted if you know a single day’s weather information worldwide.

Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich’s Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, a co-author of the study, told the Post, “We’ve always said when you look at weather that’s not the same as climate.” That remains true in terms of local weather, but, Knutti continued, “Global mean temperature on a single day is already quite a bit shifted. You can see this human fingerprint in any single moment.”

“This … is telling us that anthropogenic climate change has become so large that it exceeds even daily weather variability at the global scale,” Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in an email to the Post. He called the study results “profoundly disturbing.”

Researchers are calling for a more holistic view of climate change. “Uncovering the climate change signal in daily weather conditions calls for a global perspective, not a regional one,” Sebastian Sippel, a postdoc working with Knutti, explained in a statement.

The study includes a few caveats, namely the accuracy of certain computer models and their ability to isolate all the potential factors that influence climate change. It will also need to be replicated by additional scientists in order to corroborate the results. Still, Sippel tells the Post, “We know from many other studies that the warming in the last 40 years is almost entirely human.”

Read the full study here.

War With Iran

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.

The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport, also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.

A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.

Iran, which has vowed “harsh retaliation,” is already reeling under the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel were wounded. The U.S. responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child’s play.

Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.

So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?

The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.

The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will not cooperate with Washington if the U.S. goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump administration’s view that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.

A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?

The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a new order would undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.

Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaker, is a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years covering the region, including Iran.