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3 Reasons To Reject Trump’s Iran Smokescreen
It’s ultimately all about him. As usual.
On Friday, an American airstrike at Baghdad’s airport took the life of Qasem Soleimani, a high-ranking and popular military figure who served as the head of the Iranian Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces. U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming he ordered the killing of Soleimani in order to stop a war, not to start one.
And yet, I’m having a hard time swallowing that spoonful of political pablum, for three major reasons.
Airborne and In-Transit
First, there were already troops on their way to the region before the killings were carried out. According to CNN, the Americans sent reinforcements from the 82nd Airborne earlier in the week, ostensibly to help deal with protests at the U.S. embassy in Iraq should the situation worsen. If you were thinking you’d like to drop a bomb on one of your most irksome adversaries halfway across the world, having a contingent of your own soldiers already in transit to Iraq to deal with any fallout is convenient, to say the least.
However, there should be no illusions about whether it was a coincidence — the assessment of risks and options factored in an assassination attempt days before it…
