The official Trump line on Soleimani strike starts to unravel [View all]

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http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-official-trump-line-soleimani-strike-starts-unravel?cid=sm_fb_maddow&fbclid=IwAR29OKM9biOBX2iTDvfhUbcKIlVIv101k37qUCkB0e0IyvciAs9C4_-vIQk

The official Trump line on Soleimani strike starts to unravel
01/06/20 08:00 AM
By Steve Benen

snip//

To be sure, Team Trump’s absence of credibility, coupled with the political context, made it difficult to take seriously the White House’s line about an imminent attack, necessitating an immediate assault. But the reporting brings the problem into sharper focus: Team Trump’s official story about one of the president’s most dangerous decisions doesn’t appear to be true.

All of which leads to an important follow-up question: if the airstrike wasn’t needed to prevent an imminent attack, why exactly did the president green-light such a radical offensive?

Trump thought the dangerous new posture would help his weak image. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the president was motivated to act, at least in part, “by what he felt was negative coverage after his 2019 decision to call off the airstrike after Iran downed the U.S. surveillance drone, officials said. Trump was also frustrated that the details of his internal deliberations had leaked out and felt he looked weak, the officials said.”

Trump was preoccupied with his predecessor. The same Post report added, “The president has long fixated on 2012 attacks on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, and the Obama administration’s response to them, said lawmakers and aides who have spoken to him, and he felt the response to this week’s attack on the embassy and the killing of an American contractor would make him look stronger compared with his predecessor.”

With his impeachment trial looming, Trump saw value in wagging the dog. The New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi noted that Soleimani’s ‏whereabouts have been known before, and his resume of “killing-by-proxy is not a secret.” So why launch this specific strike, to the surprise of the president’s own team? As Callimachi put it, it’s difficult “to decouple” Trump’s decision from the “from the impeachment saga.”

In case this isn’t painfully obvious, it’s a problem that the official White House line is unraveling. It’s just as significant a problem that the alternate explanations are indefensible.