The hole card

Factoid:

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.

So he knows a little bit.

His piece, War with Iran details the eminent blowback coming to the US, thanks to this incredibly stupid act of killing Qassem Suleimani, thus continuing a bankrupt foreign policy iniative started in 1953 with the assassination of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosedagh by the CIA in order to ...

1. Give access to BP to Iran's oil and ...
2. Install the Shah to ensure cooperation with the US. 

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 hole card indeed.