The Senate Refuses To Block Trump From Ordering Military Strike On Iran

By Theodore Shoebat

The Republican dominated Senate refused to block Trump from ordering a military strike on Iran, as we read in a report from USA Today:

The GOP-controlled Senate defeated a measure Friday that would have blocked President Donald Trump from launching a military strike against Iran unless he got explicit congressional approval.

The 50-to-40 vote came after a rare congressional debate over war powers and amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran. The measure needed 60 votes to pass. Four Republicans broke ranks to support the measure: Sens. Susan Collins, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran and Rand Paul.

Supporters said the battle would now move to the House, where Democrats hold the majority and have a similar measure in the legislative hopper. And they argued that Friday’s vote still marked a significant step in pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy.

“A bipartisan majority of the Senate today sent an important message to President Trump: you do not have a blank check to pursue another endless war in the Middle East,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

As he left the Senate floor Friday afternoon, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., agreed and added that it helps set up the House for success.

“We did not win on this vote but forced the vote to happen. We showed a majority of the Senate believes the president is not the king, and can’t go to war on his own,” Kaine said, adding that it puts up some “guardrail against the president doing something stupid.”

Kaine pointed to Trump being in Japan for the G-20 summit, which attracts leaders from around the world, and said that it may help cool down the possibility of war. But, he added, “the fact that we were 10 minutes away and the fact that the president said this week that he didn’t need Congress, that should scare everybody. We’ve got to stay on our toes.”

Democrats and some Republicans have grown alarmed by the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions on Iran.

I wonder what these Senators have in mind when they affirm with their vote that Iran needs to be bombed. Perhaps it is the coins of silver flowing from the big political funders like Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus. $259 million to Trump presidential campaign flowed from these major GOP funders. And all of them have been promoting aggression towards Iran. It was Sheldon Adelson who, in 2014, said that the US should drop a nuke on the Iranian desert and then threaten Iran with this type of rhetoric:

“Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes’”

Adelson also exhorted that Trump remove H.R. McMaster as his security advisor because, as he saw him, he was too weak on Iran, and replace him with John Bolton. In 2017 the Zionist Organization of America — which like Trump is also funded by Adelson — commenced a campaign calling for the removal of McMaster because he was supposedly not friendly with Israel. Upon Trump replacing McMaster with Bolton, the Zionist Organization of America president, Morton Klein, called Trump’s decision “spectacular”. Their evidence against McMaster was that he wanted to remove Ezra Cohen-Watnick from Trump’s National Security Council. Cohen-Watnick was a war hawk who, according to the New York Times, wanted the CIA to do regime change in Iran. Edelson said that he was convinced to back the campaign against McMaster by Safra Katz who  “enlightened me quite a bit” about McMaster, said Edelson in an email that was later released by Morton Klein.

Bernard Marcus is another major financier for the Trump administration, giving $7 million to his campaign. He is also a big supporter for John Bolton, giving $530,000 to John Bolton’s super PAC over its existence. Marcus has also expressed adversity towards Iran, calling the country “the devil” in a 2015 Fox Business interview.

Paul Singer was second biggest funder for the 2014 candidacy of one of the biggest hawks, Tom Cotton, who called for a strike against Iran, saying: “I think retaliatory strikes were warranted”. Paul Singer has financed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a lobbying group that was one of the most vocal backers of regime in Syria and has also exhorted for a policy against Iran, including pressuring the country through economic and military means. According to Lobe Log, “Adelson contributed $1.5 million, Paul Singer contributed $3.6 million, and Bernard Marcus, who sits on FDD’s board, contributed $10.7 million.”

Another funder for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is Bob Shillman.

Shillman is on the honorary committee of the Washington Forum which is under the FDD, or the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In 2011, for the conference of that year, the Washington Forum released a document, entitled Ideology, Power, and Alliances in a Changing Middle East, in which Shillman is mentioned as a member of its honorary committee. The meeting was all in support for military intervention and regime change in Syria. Basically, the continuation of the very CIA policy of destabilization in the Middle East. This conference took place in 2011, the year that the Syrian revolution began. So its very interesting to read about this conference in context of the greater agenda to commence chaos in the Middle East.

While people always and ceaselessly accuse us of being traitors for exposing the counterjihad, claiming we are ‘secret Muslims,’ the very people who are funding the counterjihad, like Bob Shillman, are themselves collaborating with pro-jihadists. Present in the conference was Syrian opposition leader Ammar Abdulhamid who, according to the document, is a “Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a member of FDD’s Syria Working Group” and “the Founder and Director of the Tharwa Foundation, a grassroots organization that works to break the Assad government’s information blockade”.

The document goes on to recount the talk that Ammar gave, describing how he called for regime change and for the United States to support the Free Syrian Army (the FSA), a CIA backed Islamist terror group that was involved in anti-Christian persecution and other acts of violence:

For weeks, Syrian protesters had been demanding foreign intervention, a nofly zone and safe havens, said Ammar Abdulhamid, an FDD fellow and Syrian-born activist. The protesters “want a more proactive international role,” he said, noting that the international response has been completely inadequate. The Western decision not to put a military option on the table assures President Bashar Assad “that he can continue doing whatever he wants.” Abdulhamid argued that the United States should intervene in Syria to prevent a civil war, and suggested that Washington send a special envoy to work with Assad’s opposition.  He said the Free Syrian Army—composed of defectors from the regular army, who face the death penalty if they are caught—is emerging as the strongest opposition force. If the FSA “is not supported and encouraged to put all the [opposition] groups under its wings, it could be a dangerous situation,” he said, as smaller groups may become radicalized if left to themselves.

If you want to have influence with the FSA, Abdulhamid continued, “You have to become the institute that is influencing them and giving them advice.”

Ammar, while he presents himself has being for democracy, is merely just another cog in the wheel of the interventionist military industry. Here is a video of him from 2012 calling for US regime change policy in Syria:

Now fast forward from 2012 to a 2015 video in which Ammar is very proud that Assad is longer really in power over Syria, and that the revolution has “succeeded” (regardless of the morbid reality that Syria has been utterly reduced to (in his own words) “a failed state”):

Ammar is a very interesting character. While he is in this prestigious think-tank that touts itself as a defender of democracy, he himself is a supporter of the very policy — Western intervention — that served for the destabilization and destruction of the Middle East. Ammar claims not to be a Muslim, writing once regarding his study on the conflict between Shia and Sunni: “both sides suck and that I had better things to do with my life than spreading hate and cater to mindless prejudice.” He also wrote: “By the time I graduated college, I had become an atheist.”

In 2012, the year after the beginning of the Syrian revolution (2011), Ammar and two other Syrian opposition leaders, took a trip to Kosovo to learn from leaders of the Albanian Islamist and nationalist terrorist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA) to learn how to successfully carry out a revolution. Ammar told the Associated Press in an interview: “We come here to learn. Kosovo has walked this path and has an experience that would be very useful for us … In particular, we’d like to know how scattered armed groups were finally organized into KLA.” 

Serbian political analyst Srdja Trifcovich said that the meeting was done “under the auspices of the United States,” which means that it was part of a US government plan. 

Trifcovich also made another astute observation: the fact that Ammar went to the Islamist KLA for advice, shows the violent and nefarious objectives of the revolution:

“I understand that Ammar Abdulhamid, one of the Syrian opposition leaders who came to Pristina and actually spoke to an AP reporter, said “We are here to learn.” Now this should be a huge wake-up call for those Syrians who are not supportive of the opposition, especially the minorities: the Alawites, the Christians – either Orthodox or Greek Catholic – the Shiites, the Kurds. The moderate Sunni Muslims should remember that if the Syrian rebels learn from the KLA, that means there will be a bloodbath after the fall of Assad and there will be no room for anyone but the majority group which subscribes to its extremist credo, whether it is that of greater Albania in Kosovo or the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot in Syria.”

This is very interesting, because it sheds more light on the connections between America’s role in the destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the US’ role in the destabilization of the Middle East, specifically in Iraq, Syria and Libya. General Wesley Clark, who led the bombing of Kosovo in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, was told by Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 that the US has 5-10 years to “clean up those old Soviet client regimes, Syria, Iran, Iraq, before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” So right in the time when the CIA was facilitating the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, the CIA was already planning on destabilizing the Middle East. It is not a coincidence that in the year after the Syrian revolution, a leader of the Syrian opposition, Ammar Abdulhamid — who is part of a major government think tank — went to Kosovo to learn from KLA fighters to learn what do in Syria what they had already done, with US backing, in the Balkans.   

It is not surprising at all that this think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that Ammar is a part of, has on its Board of Advisors Richard Perle, who back in 2003 was calling for regime change in Syria and Libya.   

Also in this panel discussion was Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who said that the United States should use Turkey to create a “safe haven” for rebels fighting to overthrow Assad:

“Tabler added that Turkey or the Arab League might create a buffer zone inside Syria, along the Turkish frontier, to give Syrian dissidents a safe haven.”

Also present in the conference was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA agent, and Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish-American think tank analyst of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Turkish research program. In their talk both of these men expressed their full support for the United States to back Turkey as the top nation of the Muslim world:

“Turkey plays an increasingly important role in the new Middle East, said Soner Cagaptay, who directs The Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Turkish research program.

“The view from Ankara is that Turkey is the region’s leader.” “Turkey’s role in the Arab Spring can be boiled down to Turkey’s role in Syria,” Cagaptay said, noting that Syria—unlike the other Arab Spring countries of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—shares a border with Turkey, bears an Ottoman imprint, and has economic, social, and historical connections to Turkey. As the first country in the region—outside of the Gulf States—to have a successful, middleclass Muslim society, Turkey can serve as an economic model for the Mideast.  Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at FDD and former CIA Iran operative, agreed. Turkey represents the “possibility you can be devoutly faithful and you can be rich,” said Gerecht. “The best thing for Turkey is to have it become a democratic inspiration and to actually trumpet its own economic success.”        

This same Cagaptay is a lobbyist for Turkey’s nationalist desire to make sure that the United States does not label the Armenian Genocide as a genocide. In January of 2017, Cagaptay, and  former U.S. ambassador to Ankara James F. Jeffrey, exhorted Trump never to pass an Armenian Genocide resolution. In their own words:

“[T]he United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue”     

Cagaptay describes the Armenian Genocide as simply the “deportation” of Armenians, which is interesting given that the idea of deportation is becoming more and more popular in the United States, Europe and Israel. In 2007 Cagaptay wrote that a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide should not happen because it would ruin American-Turkish relations:

“Exacerbating these developments is the October 10 House Foreign Affairs Committee vote in favor of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (AGR), which recognizes the deportation of Ottoman Armenians during World War I as genocide. Regardless of its intent, the AGR could hold a number of negative consequences for U.S.-Turkish relations.”

Just by looking at all of this information, what we can conclude is that one of the biggest financial backers of the Counterjihad — Bob Shillman — is a member of the honorary committee for a major think tank — Foundation for Defense of Democracies — that supports Turkey, the most powerful of the Muslim countries, and the very Islamist uprisings in the Middle East that helped to cause the migrant crises in Europe which has served as the strongest fuel for the nationalist and identitarian surge. This very think-tank — the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — also supports Turkey being the superior role model in the Muslim world, and the defender of the Islamic revolutions in the Middle East. Why would one of the biggest donors for the Counterjihad, support a think-tank that supports ‘the jihad’?

We cannot really make an emphatic answer, since information is limited. But it would not be surprising that these industrialist donors are playing both sides: supporting the conditions in which Islamic violence would thrive, and then supporting the nationalist reaction, thereby facilitating the two entities that would bring the world further into war.

According to the American Freedom Law Center, “Dr. Robert J. Shillman is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Culture Officer of Cognex Corporation (www.cognex.com), the world’s leading supplier of machine vision systems (computers that can “see”), in other words, artificial intelligence (AI), the type of artificial intelligence that would be used in a war by the most technologically advanced nations. 

Shillman’s corporation, Cognex, is in deep with the international military industrial complex. On August 12th of 2005, Cognex, as we learn from one aerospace publication, announced that it had entered into an agreement with Lockheed Martin to “jointly promote products to help Department of Defense contractors meet new government requirements for unique identification of parts.”

This information cannot really be used against Shillman, since it just shows that he is a successful businessman. But what it does show is a link between the military industrial complex, and the various nationalist movements and figures that have recently surged in popularity. And even when nationalists like Wilders gain prominence, these shills must pay respect to Shillman, they must pay their respects to the industrialists who made them. 

Jesus said, “if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” (Mark 3:24) You can have all of the “secularist” activists ‘fighting the jihad’ that you want. As long as they are godless, they will war against God and His people. “All they that hate me love death.” (Proverbs 8:36)