Greg Sargent: New details about Soleimani killing further undercut Trump's lies [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/13/new-details-about-soleimani-killing-further-undercut-trumps-lies/

By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer

Jan. 13, 2020 at 10:04 a.m. EST

Ever since President Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, one big unanswered question has been this: How did the option of killing the Quds Force commander get on Trump’s menu of possibilities in the first place, and why?

A new report from NBC News offers a striking answer to this question. In addition to further undercutting the Trump administration’s shifting rationales for the killing, it also means Congressional oversight on Trump’s decision-making and constraints on his warmaking authority have become even more imperative:

President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago if Iran's increased aggression resulted in the death of an American, according to five current and former senior administration officials.
The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final sign-off on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said.

That decision explains why assassinating Soleimani was on the menu of options that the military presented to Trump two weeks ago for responding to an attack by Iranian proxies in Iraq, in which a U.S. contractor was killed and four U.S. service members were wounded, the officials said.

The timing, however, could undermine the Trump administration’s stated justification for ordering the U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3. Officials have said Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, was planning imminent attacks on Americans and had to be stopped.

One can imagine a theoretical scenario in which Trump authorized the killing last spring while only giving the final order when an attack was indeed imminent. But if anything, the claim that the killing was necessary to avert an imminent threat has only gotten more flimsy.

To recap: On Sunday, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper admitted he “didn’t see” specific evidence supporting Trump’s claim that Soleimani was targeting four embassies, while adding that “I share the president’s view” that “probably” they were “going to go after our embassies.”

In other words, Trump made this up. In drawing this distinction between what the evidence showed and what Trump’s “view” was, Esper unwittingly demonstrated the yawning gap between those things, which is of course a reminder of why Trump is so unfit to be making such enormously consequential decisions.

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