TEHRAN - Robert David Steele, a former Marine Corps infantry officer and CIA spy as well as an activist for Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE), contributes regularly to Tehran Times

Q. From a legal perspective in the context of international law including the law of war, how do you evaluate the assassination of an Iranian official, General Sardar Suleimani, who was on a public diplomatic mission, traveling by commercial air, to a third country, Iraq, which was his host?

As a patriotic American; as an intelligence professional; and as a retired Marine Corps infantry officer, I consider the assassination of General Sardar Suleimani to be an atrocity demanding atonement, and one of the single worst decisions ever made by a US President since Harry Truman was bribed into agreeing to the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians, or Barack Obama agreed to the sale of Libya to France and the sale of Syria and Yemen to Saudi Arabia so that he and Joe Biden and the Clintons could make billions in payoffs. At a very personal level, this act violated all applicable international laws to include directed by name assassination; assassination of an individual on an open diplomatic mission; and assassination of an individual in a third country where he was an invited guest.

I hope that Iran’s leadership is aware – as I have tried to outline in multiple articles for the Tehran Times and in an earlier book, – of the ongoing soft coup in the USA against our President that is led on the outside by John Brennan particularly, and on the inside by Mike Pompeo, a Christian Zionist who I believe should be held personally culpable for deceiving President Trump into ordering this heinous act.

A proportional response from Iran would be the assassination of Secretary of State Pompeo the next time he is traveling overseas. I am not at all certain that anyone in the US Government understands that Iran now has both the right and the capability to assassinate our Secretary of State.

I understand Iran’s earlier need to launch a counter-attack on a US base in Iraq in order to quell public anger over this atrocity but I believe that going forward from today Iran is best served by demonstrating the level of restraint that President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated, to include forgoing any targeted assassination of any US senior official including the fat blustering fool that we have in place as Secretary of State.

Q. The Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, disagreed publicly with President Donald Trump’s declaration that General Suleimani was organizing threatening actions against US Embassies in the region. How do you interpret this public divergence of view?

Although our Secretary of Defense is from the same West Point Class of 1986 as Mike Pompeo, he appears to be much more balanced and I hold him – and the President – blameless for this assassination. From where I sit, three things went very wrong: Secretary Pompeo, arguably an agent of a foreign power (Israel), was able to persuade the President to approve this action; our intelligence community (particularly Gina Haspel, Director of the CIA) failed to provide the President with compelling holistic intelligence (decision-support) against the assassination; and the Secretary of Defense chose not to put his job on the line against the decision. In publicly diverging from the President on this matter after the fact Secretary Esper was making the honest and obvious point: there was no threat to our Embassies and in fact it is known that part of the reason for General Suleimani’s visit to Iraq was to disperse the crowds outside the US Embassy, which was done.

Q. When Iran counter-attacked, in a proportional response, against a US military encampment at Ayn al Asad, President Trump initially claimed no casualties, then a few casualties, then he mocked many of those evacuated to Germany, and now there are one hundred and ten stated casualties.  How do you account for this “casualty creep” and could the President have been aware from the beginning of the facts on the ground?

I grew up in Viet-Nam as the son of an oil engineer, and in my subsequent professional reading as a Marine Corps officer have always marveled as the degree to which we lie to ourselves.  From enemy body counts that are inflated to friendly casualties that are under-stated, we are simply not capable of telling the truth. I like to say that “the truth at any cost lowers all other costs.” Our President has three big problems, all centered on the amount of false information and the lack of truthful information available to him. The Department of State is controlled by Zionists. The CIA is led by professional liars, most of them overweight bureaucrats far removed from the rigors of either clandestine tradecraft on the street or all-source holistic analytics. The Department of Defense has too many officers who believe that telling their chain of command a lie is justified when the chain of command makes it clear that it wants to be lied to. The single greatest work on this point is from the US Army Strategic Studies Institute, Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.

I am quite certain our President was not aware of the casualties from the beginning, and the creeping numbers are more a sign of a very flawed and generally dishonest reporting system within the US military.

Whatever the number of our casualties, they pale in comparison to the 75,000 amputees we have suffered, or the 250,000 mentally injured individuals on disability, unable to find employment, and of course nothing can compare to the pain of the mothers of the Fallujah mutant babies resulting from the use of depleted uranium there, or the hundreds of thousands of dead across the Middle East, and the millions of displaced, a large number now in or about to enter Europe.

I have myself been personally and directly threatened with assassination by the leaders of a country where I was responsible for penetrating the extreme left, and I oppose both directed assassination, and elective wars fought for the profit of the banks without regard to the human and social cost for all engaged countries.

In my view, the 110 casualties are helpful as a stopping point. Restraint should be the order of the day.

Q. Dr. Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser and some other US politicians, believe that the cost of assassinating of Sardar Suleimani has outweighed the US benefits. What do you think about this?

I despise Susan Rice at multiple levels – this is a woman who should be in jail for her complicity in the unmasking of US citizens (which is against the law pertaining to signals intelligence privacy) associated with the totally illegal investigation and framing of our President for collusion with the Russians – the witch-hunt, all lies with the active complicity of MI-6 and the Prime Minister of Great Britain. On this point I have to agree with her. I am particularly upset with the assassination because the US and Iran were on the verge of making some significant advances aided by President Vladimir Putin’s encouragement, and I have to say that I believe that the Zionists fed Secretary of State Pompeo a number of lies – and perhaps some financial incentives if not outright blackmail with Jeffrey Epstein videos – to get him to push our President into approving this utterly terrible and unjustifiable assassination.

Let me emphasize this: I believe the assassination was intended to destroy the growing rapprochement between Iran and the USA, which President Trump was actively seeking and to the best of my knowledge continues to seek today. It is my hope that Iran will join me and others in focusing on justice against those who manipulated our President, and not make the mistake of being manipulated, as our President was manipulated, into further escalation.

Q. Since the assassination of General Suleimani, one of Iran’s most beloved leaders, Israel and Turkey have become more aggressive against Syria, Russia has become more engaged, and China was briefly sidelined by the coronavirus panic.  How do you evaluate the current and near future of the West Asian region and do you anticipate the complete US withdrawal from Iraq and the region?

I am not an expert on this region so my impressions are based on general reading. As best I can tell, history and the passage of time favor Iran, Syria, and Palestine. Turkey is over-extended and I have the impression that President Erdogan is nearing the end of his life. Russia and China will continue to grow in influence while the US does eventually withdraw militarily from the region. I anticipate some major changes in US national security policy after President Trump’s inevitable re-election. Put simply, the return on investment for military occupation forces that cannot win wars or repress belligerent native tribes is not as great as the return on investment in homeland infrastructure and job creation, or in emerging markets development. China’s One Belt One Road initiative – and its cyber overlay – have finally forced the Americans to confront the fact that they have been willfully stupid for the past fifty years, allowing the Deep State to use our military as enforcers (General Smedley Butler was the first to say this in his book War is a Racket), and our military bases as lily pads for smuggling guns, drugs, cash, gold, and small children.

Our President is going to be inaugurating a new national monument soon, to General and President Ike Eisenhower, whose great-grand-daughter I know. I expect the President to use that occasion to reflect on President Eisenhower’s earlier warning against the military-industrial complex, and perhaps to announce his own vision for a future in which America is no longer engaged in endless war.

At some point the Middle East is going to have to deal with the reality that the current crop of Arab dictators is unsustainable; the current oil-based economies are unsustainable; and the current practice of sending millions of refugees to Europe is unsustainable. We must create peace and prosperity across the Middle East for the good of all including the hapless Europeans whose leaders sold them out with the 1995 Barcelona Declaration, which loosened migration controls in return for bribes.

The single greatest lesson I have learned in my life about transformation and reform is that it must be job and revenue neutral at the sub-state level.  George Will’s new book, The Conservative Sensibility, is strongly against what he calls “rent seekers” – companies that use the bribing of Members of Congress, and federal contracts, as a substitute for hard work and innovation. I am more practical – I now know how to make this corrupt system migrate from wars that profit the banks to peace profiting the poor.

I have outlined my personal vision for the future of America and the world in three recently published books on Reinventing National Security, Reinventing Intelligence, and Reinventing Engineering.

My vision calls for the closure of all US military bases overseas, to bring all those jobs – both military jobs and the support jobs that now go to local citizens – back to America. We need to redirect at least 40% of what we spend on a heavy-metal military that cannot win wars toward diplomacy, development, and commerce. My vision also applies to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and is outlined for them in NATO 2040: Intelligence (Decision-Support) as Root for Transformation.

Let me end by saying that I believe the way is open for Iran and Russia to facilitate a new form of information sharing and intelligence (decision-support) for the Middle East that integrates open sources of information in all languages, holistic analytics, true cost economics, and Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) including free energy and unlimited water desolation.

General Suleimani was assassinated by order of President Trump in the context of a dysfunctional US government process incapable of telling our President the truth. It is my personal goal to wage peace and enable prosperity with both open and secret intelligence that is shared among nation-states and I am deeply and personally committed to ensuring President Trump is never again blind-sided by lies.

I pray that day might come when the Supreme Leader of Iran, and the President of the United States of America, can share the same intelligence (decision-support) about every aspect of the Middle East, toward making evidence-based decisions that create peace and prosperity for all.