Trump and His Team Are Lying Their Way to War with Iran
President Trump ordering the killing of Qassem Soleimani
is troubling on several fronts. The assassination has been treated as
an act of war in Iran, uniting disparate political factions after a
brutal crackdown on protesters in November. Now, U.S. forces are on a
state of high alert across the region, with many anticipating potential
Iranian counter reprisals that risk further deepening the escalation
spiral from which there could be no escape.
But there’s another troubling aspect to this decision — Congress was left in the dark, and the
administration appears to be lying about the intelligence they used to justify the strike.
The official administration line — that this disrupted an imminent attack, saving lives—
was somewhat dubious from the start. Soleimani was a commander of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, and thus gave orders to
associates to carry out various operations. Killing him would be
unlikely to stop an imminent attack, as many observers have pointed out.
As former intelligence analyst Jon Bateman said,
killing Soleimani “would be neither necessary nor sufficient to disrupt
the operational progression of an imminent plot. What it might do
instead is shock Iran’s decision calculus.” If anything, killing a
senior Iranian military commander could guarantee the action it is
purported to have forestalled.Moreover, while Congressional leaders were
kept out of the loop about the strike, Trump had reportedly been boasting about it for days to guests at Mar-a-Lago.
As reported by The Daily Beast, Trump told several different guests at
Mar-a-Lago in the days leading up to the strike that he was “working on a
‘big’ response to the Iranian regime that they would be hearing or
reading about very ‘soon,’” with Trump claiming that he’d been in touch
with his national security team “gaming out options for an aggressive
action that could quickly materialize.”
If true, it would beggar belief that
there was a specific and imminent threat emerging from Iran that could
be eliminated with Soleimani’s death. Instead, this was a calculated
provocation and reckless ratcheting up of tension that Trump couldn’t
wait to crow about.
Subsequent reporting confirms that the
strike was contemplated for days, calling into question the
administration’s narrative and its legality. According to the Los Angeles Times,
President Trump surprised his national security team when he chose a
strike on Soleimani from a list of follow-on actions after clashes with
Iraqi Shiite militias that left one civilian contractor dead as well as
dozens of militia members. The decision was “spurred on in part by Iran
hawks among his advisors,” and set off a furious effort to locate
Soleimani and carry out the order.
Similarly, The Washington Post reports
that the decision to strike was made Sunday, with officials reminding
Trump that he had not responded to earlier provocations including Iran’s
downing of a U.S. drone, egging on the reckless decision. Trump was
reportedly swayed by their arguments, as he was “frustrated that the
details of his internal deliberations had leaked out and felt he looked
weak,” according to officials.
Lastly, the actual evidence behind the
intelligence appears to be “razor thin,” according to two U.S. officials
who have been briefed. As reported by the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimanchi,
the intelligence includes Soleimani’s travel pattern, a purported
conversation with the Supreme Leader, and heightened hostilities between
the U.S. and Iran. Or, as one intelligence official described, it is
“hardly evidence of an imminent attack that could kill hundreds,” with
the administration’s conclusion being an “illogical leap.”
Add it all up, and you have an administration that ignored Congress while planning an assassination of a foreign general
that risks a disastrous war without any plausible argument that doing
so was authorized by Congress. This is an administration that has lied
over matters big and small,
and thinks it can get away with lying Americans into war while repeating
the George W. Bush playbook that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Hence, the warnings of an imminent terror threat that doesn’t appear to
have existed as well as the bizarre lie from Vice President Mike Pence
attempting to link Soleimani to the September 11 attacks. And, just
like the George W. Bush administration had delusions about what would
come after the invasion of Iraq, many members of Trump’s team are
apparently deluded about what comes next. As one senior State Department
official claimed, they don’t expect additional retaliation from Iran because the U.S. is “speaking in a language the regime understands.”
The American people don’t want a war with Iran.
Avoiding such a disaster will require Congress to step up, cut through
the administration’s lies, and pass legislation that reins the
administration in and removes American forces from hostilities against
Iran. Failing to do so will only empower a reckless administration that
appears to be lying us into a war.
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The original source of this article is Responsible Statecraft
Copyright © Ryan Costello, Responsible Statecraft, 2020
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