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The Killing of Soleimani: Is This The Beginning of WWIII?


GreyhoundFan

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This is how you should respond.

 

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7 minutes ago, SPHASH said:

I'm trying to embed a tweet here by Maggie Haberman and I keep getting blocked.  Any way around it.

Can you copy/paste it instead of embedding it?

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Don‘t get your hopes up regarding Bolton willing to testify

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I don‘t agree with George Conway here. It‘s not an impulse from 45, he does purposefully create chaos because it serves him. It’s no coincidence we have no Director of National Intelligence, no Homeland Security Secretary etc. when he decided to kill Suleimani. This man is much more intelligent than we think, he‘s just playing from the dictators handbook.




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I came here to post that last tweet cited by Smash! .  "No Director of National Intelligence, no Dep Dir, no Homeland Security Secretary, no Dep Sec, no head of CBP or ICE, no State Dept Under Sec of Arms Control, no Asst Sec for Europe, and no Navy Sec..."

I'm terrified.  We have an evil toddler at the helm and he's home alone.

And WTF with the Ukrainian Airlines plane crashing earlier in Tehran?  How can that be a coincidence?

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31 minutes ago, Smash! said:

I don‘t agree with George Conway here. It‘s not an impulse from 45, he does purposefully create chaos because it serves him. It’s no coincidence we have no Director of National Intelligence, no Homeland Security Secretary etc. when he decided to kill Suleimani. This man is much more intelligent than we think, he‘s just playing from the dictators handbook.
 

 

 

 

 

I hate to disagree with you, so I won’t exactly. But to an extent, you’re a little off with your assessment of Trump’s intelligence. That man is not smart, by any definition of the word. He has no plan. He lacks any forward thinking skills. He lives in the now, and reacts purely based on his emotions, or rather on the way he perceives others make him feel. If one makes him feel good, he heaps praises. If one makes him feel hurt, he retaliates. He does not think about anything other than his personal needs. He follows any advice whispered in his ear by soothing sycophants with their own personal agenda’s stroking his ego, or fearfully does what his blackmailers tell him to (or else).

He is a narcissistic fool with sociopathic tendencies and a delusion of grandeur. 

It’s almost certain he takes some sort of drug or medication that deprives him of reasonable coherent thought, possibly exacerbated by some mental deficiency, and it incapacitates his ability to speak as well (hence his slurring and mispronouncing words).

Is that all an act to hide a devious mastermind out to conquer the world? I used to entertain that thought but after watching three years of his increasingly unstable and erratic conduct, I no longer think that is a realistic possibility.

He really just is that stupid.

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He really just is that stupid.

 

Maybe you‘re right on this. But then he‘s more of a puppet and the strings play Putin, Bolton ([emoji1785]) and others with an agenda. Because what I meant and probably didn‘t articulate clearly is that there is an agenda. It seems to be chaotic but exactly this chaos with the potential of a war at a time where very crucial positions are vacant is in no way coincidence and helps 45 and his enablers to get exactly what they want.

45 loves power, looks up to dictators and by now it‘s clear that he wants to be one. In this scenario there are lots of people in his orbit who will make a lot of profit from a declining democracy so they actively enable it.

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6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

When I read this, I immediately checked Trump’s twitter feed.

And sure enough, he’s downplaying the hell out of it. 
“All is well. So far, so good.” What a godawful thing to say when your people are being attacked... and you don’t even know if there are casualties or wounded.

 

Do you ever get the feeling the first draft of that tweet was "ha ha missed me you losers!" Because that is basically how it reads to me. 

I am to be honest surprised that Iran did this... but then again they know Putin will handle the US response and deflect it, it helps the Iranian leaders look good in front of their home audience, and if US strikes kill a couple of hundred of their people or Iraqis... well they've previously proven they can live with that.

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7 hours ago, SPHASH said:

I'm trying to embed a tweet here by Maggie Haberman and I keep getting blocked.  Any way around it.

Is this the one you were trying to embed?

 

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6 hours ago, Smash! said:

But then he‘s more of a puppet and the strings play Putin, Bolton (emoji1785.png) and others with an agenda.

Yes, yes he is. And this is precisely why he's still in office. Because all those people with an agenda (I'm looking at you most of all, MoscowMitch) are getting all their dirty wet little dreams come true.

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Because we all need some satire to make us chuckle when times are so scary:

 

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2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Yes, yes he is. And this is precisely why he's still in office. Because all those people with an agenda (I'm looking at you most of all, MoscowMitch) are getting all their dirty wet little dreams come true.

The neoconservative faction in the US has been gunning for war with Iran since the 80s, except for that time when the Reagan Administration was selling weapons to Iran to fund right wing militias in Central America:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

The neoconservatives thought they could finally get their Iran war in the mid 2000s, but Iraq was such a mess that that didn’t happen. I guess “good things come to those who wait.” /s

The work of Jeane Kirkpatrick is also key to understanding what’s going on. Kirkpatrick famously made a distinction between “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” regimes and said that the US should support the latter but because they had the potential to evolve into a liberal democratic regime friendly to US interests.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Kirkpatrick

In practice, this means supporting ghoulish Right wing regimes like apartheid era South Africa, Pinochet in Chile, a revolving door of military dictators in Central American countries, Saddam Hussein (until he overplayed his hand), and too many others to list. Osama bin Laden was also a beneficiary of American largess in his battle against the USSR, until his success in that arena convinced him to fight against the US next. All this is to say that American belligerence towards Iran isn’t coming out of thin air and Russian influence definitely isn’t necessary to explain it (I haven’t even touched on how the CIA and MI5 overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 or how the US propped up the corrupt and unpopular Shah).

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"Nikki Haley’s incredible explanation of her comment that Democrats are ‘mourning’ Soleimani"

Spoiler

Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley has doubled down on her comment that Democrats were “mourning” the death of Qasem Soleimani.

Unfortunately, her explanation still doesn’t make sense.

Haley’s office provided a statement to the Dispatch in which she claimed Democrats were saying it would be better if Soleimani were still around and this constitutes “mourning.”

“Mourning comes in different forms,” Haley’s office said. “It doesn’t have to be literally crying over the casket like Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei. Leading Democrats are aggressively arguing that we would be better off if Qassem Suleimani was still alive today. That is effectively mourning his death.”

There are two problems with this: One, Democrats aren’t actually saying we’d be better off with Soleimani alive, and two, even the idea that that would constitute “mourning” just doesn’t track.

Democrats’ responses to Soleimani’s killing have largely been to question its strategic wisdom. Some have called it an “assassination” and warned about potential blowback. But even in their statements — compiled here by the Free Beacon — many emphasized he was a bad person who will hardly be missed.

Former vice president Joe Biden said explicitly, “No Americans will mourn Qassem Soleimani’s passing” and “He deserved to be brought to justice.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) began her statement by saying Soleimani was “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.”

“Soleimani has American blood on his hands,” Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) said.

Sen. Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) said “there is no mourning his death.”

Among the major candidates, apparently only Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declined to emphasize how bad Soleimani was in his initial statement.

By Haley’s standard, anybody who opposes a high-profile killing of a foreign adversary would be “mourning” that person. People who may think it’s not a good idea to take out someone like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — perhaps because of the threat of nuclear war — would suddenly be rendered as apologists for or sympathizers of Kim. However you feel about the wisdom of taking out Soleimani, it’s extremely reductive. There is a reason we don’t go around killing our adversaries, willy-nilly.

Indeed, if questioning the wisdom of killing a foreign adversary is fairly labeled “mourning,” there is a credible case to be made that Trump mourned Saddam Hussein. During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested it was a bad idea to take out Hussein because he killed terrorists.

Trump’s comments about Hussein, in fact, sound a lot like what the Democrats are saying today about Soleimani. He even said we’d be “better off.”

“You know, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but one thing about him: He killed terrorists,” Trump said at one point. At another, he added: “Look what’s happened since then: a disaster. Shouldn’t have been there, shouldn’t have gotten out the way we got out — but, if the president went to the beach, we would have been better off, believe me.”

The bigger point, though, is that “mourning” carries very specific connotations. Merriam-Webster defines it as “to feel or express grief or sorrow” and “to show the customary signs of grief for a death.” It clearly connotes an emotional regard for the individual who has died, not a strategic calculation about the value of them still being alive.

As I wrote Tuesday, Haley’s comments are particularly jarring given her past emphasis on civility in politics. “Civility and accomplishment go hand in hand. Leadership is persuasion, and leadership is impossible if we’re yelling at each other,” she said as recently as September.

However technically justifiable you might think Haley’s comments are, they have the effect of throwing gasoline on the very serious debate over Soleimani’s killing. Her choice of words was extremely provocative, which is the kind of thing she used to warn against. Her decision to double down on all of it suggests she’s now choosing a very different path.

 

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7 minutes ago, apple1 said:

Add Nikki Haley to the very long list of those who have sold their souls.

And me to the list of wondering if they have dirt on her and just how bad it is.

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15 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

And me to the list of wondering if they have dirt on her and just how bad it is.

That was my first thought too. Especially after reading that article that @GreyhoundFan posted yesterday mentioning that someone in the administration had fallen for a honey trap. Because where there's one, there's bound to be more.

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Well, Mike Lee and Rand Paul seem to say they’ll support Tim Kaine’s war powers resolution. Of course, the majority of the republicans interviewed are still firmly stuck up Fucknut’s butt, but I think Lee is somewhat more “teabagger” than moderate, so it’s a start. Again. I guess. If you’re losing both Tucker Carlson and a Utahan teabagger, your policy really sucks...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1112596

Quote

Lawmakers came away with vastly different interpretations of two classified briefings that top Trump administration officials held Wednesday about the airstrike last week that killed top Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, with two Republican senators sharply criticizing the officials.

"It was probably the worst briefing I've seen at least on a military issue in the nine years I've served in the United States Senate," Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said. 

Lee said he left the briefing "somewhat unsatisfied" with the information given "outlining the legal, factual and moral justification for the attack."

"I find this insulting and demeaning," Lee added, saying that he now plans to vote in favor of a new war powers resolution from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. "That briefing changed my mind," Lee said.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., standing next to Lee, concurred, saying, "Today, this is Sen. Lee and I saying, we are not abdicating our duty."

...

Pompeo and the other administration officials wouldn't directly answer the question. Instead, they responded by chiding the senators for harping on the issue and arguing that asking for authorization emboldens Iran. Their response set off both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who were in the room, the aide said, and the briefing ended soon after.

"They had to leave after 75 minutes while they’re in the process of telling us that we need to be good little boys and girls and run along and not debate this in public," Lee said. "I find that absolutely insane. I think it's unacceptable."

 

Edited by AnywhereButHere
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The House voted yesterday, mostly along party lines, on a resolution to prevent Agolf Twitler from taking additional military action in Iran. That was not a surprise, but this was: "Matt Gaetz, the ‘Trumpiest Congressman,’ cites principles for bucking president on war powers. Kevin McCarthy is ‘very shocked.’"

Spoiler

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has been called “the Trumpiest Congressman in Trump’s Washington,” a judgment that he features proudly and prominently on his campaign homepage, along with quotes depicting him as “Trump’s Best Buddy,” “Trump’s Ultimate Defender” and “Rising star of the Trumpian right.”

Gaetz wants so much to impress President Trump that he sometimes wakes up around 5 a.m. so he can be on “Fox & Friends” as early as possible. That’s when “the president is watching,” he told The Washington Post’s Dan Zak. He strives to please Trump in every way, every day.

Every day except Thursday, that is.

Gaetz was one of three Republicans who voted in favor of a House resolution to prevent Trump from taking additional military action against Iran unless Congress declares war or in the event of “an imminent armed attack upon the United States.” The president and the Republican leadership vigorously opposed it.

He spent the rest of the day explaining himself, assuring the MAGA faithful that his vote wasn’t aimed at Trump. It was instead a matter of principle. The need for Congress to approve or disapprove of war, he said, is “something I deeply believe.”

And that left House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs shaking their heads in disbelief. The “surprise there was Congressman Matt Gaetz,” said Dobbs. “Stunning … I was just shocked.”

Not just “shocked,” agreed McCarthy, but “very shocked.”

It was another telling snapshot of Washington in 2020. An otherwise hyper-loyal and sometimes boisterous defender of Trump, particularly during the impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee last month, casts a vote with the other side on a nonbinding, purely symbolic resolution, citing his principles — and the leadership is shocked.

“I’ve got to ask him” why he did it, McCarthy told Dobbs.

Gaetz had answered that question repeatedly Thursday on the House floor and on Fox News.

“This resolution offers no criticism of the president, no critique,” he said on the floor. “It doesn’t criticize the president’s attack on [Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem] Soleimani. I take a back seat to no member of this body when it comes to defending the president,” he said.

Yet, “it also articulates our non-delegable duty as members of Congress to speak to matters of war and peace. I represent more troops than any other member of this body,” he said. “I buried one of them early today at Arlington, and that sergeant died a patriot and a hero.

“If the members of our armed services have the courage to go and fight and die in these wars,” he continued, “as Congress, we ought to have the courage to vote for them or against them.”

Gaetz, a lawyer whose district in the Florida Panhandle includes thousands of military and ex-military constituents in and around major military bases, is serving his second term in the House.

For those who might not immediately identify Gaetz, he was the member who criticized Hunter Biden for his problems with drug addiction during the impeachment proceedings. “I don’t want to make light of anybody’s substance abuse issues,” Gaetz said, “but it’s a little hard to believe that Burisma hired Hunter Biden to resolve their international disputes when he could not resolve his own dispute with Hertz rental car leaving cocaine and a crack pipe in the car.”

For this he was called out by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), who reminded Gaetz of his 2008 arrest for driving under the influence. “I would say that the pot calling the kettle black is not something we should do,” said Johnson.

Gaetz does fawn over Trump, and he escalated the fawning Thursday.

“I spoke to the president today,” he told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “He’s more antiwar than I am, and I love the president for that.” He was sure, Gaetz said, that it wasn’t Trump but “a few of the advisers of the president” who “are trying to slow-walk the president into a war.”

In fact, Gaetz’s position on war powers should have come as no shock. In July, he joined Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and other Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in sponsoring an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to bar expenditures on military action against Iran without congressional authorization. The amendment did not survive.

Thursday’s House resolution, which does not require a presidential signature, has no legal force. While taking care to condemn Iran as a “leading state sponsor of terrorism,” and to blast Soleimani, who was killed Jan. 3 in a Trump-ordered drone strike, it was meant by Democrats, if not by Gaetz, not only as a rebuke of Trump. It was also a symbolic effort to reclaim Congress’s constitutional war-related authority.

The three Republican “aye” votes, cast by Gaetz and Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Francis Rooney (Fla.), made no practical difference. The Democratic-controlled House passed the resolution by a 224-to-194 margin. But they allow Democrats to tout the resolution as “bipartisan.”

That, in turn, may help parry Republican smears, that supporters of the resolution are somehow “in love with terrorists” or are Soleimani sympathizers or are “emboldening the enemy,” as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said this week in response to Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.). They have said they will vote for a Democratic-sponsored Senate measure to constrain Trump’s authority to launch future military actions without authorization.

Debates over congressional versus presidential war powers have historically produced splits in both parties, as well as between parties, with fault-lines reflecting partisan, institutional and constitutional interests.

Most modern presidents have jealously guarded their “commander in chief” roles, resisting most efforts by Congress to involve itself as unconstitutional, despite the fact that the Constitution gives the legislative branch numerous war-related powers. President Barack Obama faced criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike for not seeking congressional authorization before deploying U.S. air power in Libya in 2011.

The fault lines were visible on Fox News’s website as well as on-air. During an interview with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, Gaetz said it thought it “ludicrous to suggest that we are impairing the troops from doing their job by not doing our job articulated in the Constitution to speak to these matters of war and peace.”

“I think the Constitution requires that,” said Carlson. “I think it’s pretty obvious that it does.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano, in his own opinion piece, agreed.

Dobbs, meanwhile, along with National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, flayed those who question presidential authority to wage war.

As the night wore on, Gaetz’s fate preoccupied a segment of Twitter.

image.png.ad6427c5c72d4f5da8e3936120ee145b.png

But he also had his fans. “You’re doing the right thing here,” one person said in a tweet. “And it’s pretty clear … that a large share of your followers have never read the Constitution.”

image.png.a18b15edf9ad8b9e2d0aa6b38c4ac314.png

 

 

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"New Iran revelations suggest Trump’s deceptions were deeper than we thought"

Spoiler

Believe it or not, the Trump administration may not have been completely honest about its policy toward Iran and its rationale for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

Not that officials have offered a single explanation for why the assassination was carried out — their story has changed numerous times. But the justification they keep returning to is that intelligence indicated an “imminent" threat, that Soleimani was planning specific attacks against American interests and personnel, attacks that were so imminent that he had to be killed to stop them.

But now we learn that much more appears to have been going on. That’s one key takeaway from this blockbuster scoop in The Post:

On the day the U.S. military killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad, U.S. forces carried out another top secret mission against a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, according to U.S. officials.

The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration’s killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated.

The attempt to take out Shahlai simultaneously with Soleimani suggests that this wasn’t an isolated, defensive operation but may have been part of a broader attack on the Quds Force.

Shahlai is operating in Yemen, meaning the conflict he is waging at the moment is less against the United States than against Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a war in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels with our support.

In recent statements, administration officials have noted Shahlai’s role in a 2007 attack on American soldiers in Iraq, his support of Houthi rebels in Yemen and his “long history of involvement in attacks targeting the U.S. and our allies."

But if someone like Shahlai was planning to attack American forces — let’s say “imminently” — Yemen wouldn’t be the place to do it. Which suggests this may have been part of a broader operation to kill Iranian military leaders.

Democrats sound the alarm

In an interview, Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told us there’s “no doubt” in his mind that the assassination of Soleimani and the effort to target Shahlai are part of a wider effort that’s mostly being concealed from Congress.

“The more you hear, the more you realize that you’ve been fed a bunch of untruths,” Engel told us. “Was Shahlai an imminent threat? I think not.”

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, added that this news badly complicates the rationale offered for the Soleimani killing.

“This does make it harder for the administration to argue that the operations were solely designed to eliminate somebody who was plotting attacks on Americans,” Malinowski, a former State Department official, told us.

Malinowski also said this new report means Congress will have to orient itself toward asking broader and deeper questions about the administration’s secret military operations.

“If the objective was to weaken the Quds Force irrespective of any intelligence about imminent attacks on Americans, then where does that end?” Malinowski said. “And is it over?”

You’d think Congress could bring in administration officials to answer these questions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been invited to testify next week to the Foreign Affairs Committee.

But Engel told us that Pompeo has not said whether he’ll appear. “Right now it looks like he’s not coming,” Engel told us. “We haven’t heard from him.”

If so, perhaps this is because Pompeo has not been faring well lately when asked tough questions about all this.

On Thursday, he seemed to undercut the administration’s public story by telling Fox News the following about the threats Soleimani posed: “We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real."

Pompeo has also been struggling to clean up after Trump’s public statements. In extemporaneous remarks Thursday, Trump said Soleimani was about to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — the first time it had been suggested by anyone.

That led Pompeo to tell reporters on Friday: “Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad.”

Numerous Democratic senators are now saying that the threat to embassies was not part of the briefing given to members of Congress on Wednesday.

Which raises the possibility that it’s not actually true, but once the president said it, his national security team felt obligated to back him up.

All of which underscores the urgency of bringing in Pompeo. Will he show up? Who knows?

You’d think these new revelations would make it much harder for Republicans to resist asserting congressional authority over Trump’s war powers. The House has passed a measure requiring Trump to seek congressional authorization for future hostilities against Iran, and the Senate is set to vote on a companion version next week.

The latest news "creates an additional reason for the Senate to follow suit,” Malinowski said, because “if the strategy goes beyond protecting Americans from imminent attack, it could include further strikes.”

If Congress were to assert its authority, it could use the ensuing debate over any future actions to probe more deeply into all the questions that remain unanswered.

It’s hard to imagine that four GOP senators — which is all the war powers measure would need to pass — would not be willing to assert congressional authority, given this latest news and all it indicates about how much we do not know about what the administration is secretly up to.

 

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"Why did the Pentagon ever give Trump the option of killing Soleimani?"

Spoiler

Sending the U.S. military to use force is among the most consequential decisions presidents can make. Matters may get out of control even with the most careful and deliberate planning. Skipping such steps shows callous disregard for American lives and interests. And there is overwhelming evidence in the past week that President Trump instigated an escalation cycle with an American enemy without such consideration. According to multiple news reports, policymakers gave Trump the option of killing Qasem Soleimani as one of several choices, perhaps hoping that including such a dramatic measure would push him toward a middle course; instead, he went for it, reportedly with little forethought or preparation. Our national security system is not meant to function that way.

Instead of holding a tightly managed, inclusive debate in the Situation Room, Trump made one of the most dangerous choices of his presidency among a tiny group at Mar-a-Lago. Such decisive moments are usually preceded by hundreds of people spending countless hours in dingy government offices and conference rooms, building PowerPoint slides and questioning lawyers. These individuals create the parameters and permutations of what the decision-makers consider. They identify the possible options, vetting their likely operational, diplomatic, economic and other effects. That work enables the commander in chief to make wrenching decisions about his military options wisely.

At least, that is how decisions are supposed to be made, and how we helped leaders make them when we worked in government. Bad options, considered with little serious deliberation on an unnecessarily rapid timeline, should never get to the president in the first place.

Like the broader system of government, which is designed around cumbersome checks and balances to prevent impulsive action, the traditional decision-making process for employing military force is ponderous. These steps frustrate some who view military advice as best when it’s direct and unadulterated, but they are supposed to ensure that the president chooses only from options that have been examined thoughtfully by experts in a variety of relevant areas. And the process is meant to consider all possible reactions with due preparation. To do otherwise may come at a toll of blood and treasure, credibility and certainty.

Since Soleimani’s death, many foreseeable consequences have unfolded. Iran threatened retaliation and took at least two such actions, first announcing the death of the 2015 nuclear agreement, then launching a ballistic missile attack on Iraqi bases where U.S. forces are deployed. The Iranian public — probably under some pressure — rallied around its government, expressing anger in massive street demonstrations. Elements of the Iraqi government also signaled that the U.S. strike has imperiled that bilateral relationship, with the parliament voting to expel American forces from the country. In his first public address on the crisis Wednesday, Trump suggested that he will pause further military action, but the American position in the Middle East is almost certainly worse now, with little benefit to show for the strike.

Soleimani and his campaign of violence were provocative and merited an American response. But killing him, and doing it in Iraq, needlessly escalated the situation. Any standard Defense Department and interagency process of vetting options would have seen the threats, counterthreats and missile launches coming and recommended against it — which we know because two very different administrations rejected targeting the general. But many press accounts say no such process was followed under Trump.

In our combined 25-plus years in the Pentagon and the White House, use-of-force and even show-of-force decisions created some of the tensest moments between civilian and military leaders, revealing differences in approaches and assumptions. We saw controversies over the U.S. naval presence in the South China Sea, counterterrorist strikes in areas outside active hostilities across the Middle East and Africa, and troop deployments in Afghanistan. Interactions can be so fraught, and secrecy so important, it was often tempting for both sides to limit the number of people involved or go directly to those with decision-making authority. With Soleimani’s death, we don’t know whether civilians cut out military planners or if military officials took shortcuts in the process. Regardless, whatever truncated steps led to the choice to kill him had alarming results.

In our experience, any serious process to consider military force should include six key criteria.

First, the use of force must be consistent with international and domestic law. Deliberately targeting civilians or cultural sites, for example, should be off the table — and the Pentagon ruled those options out after Trump suggested them this past week.

Possible courses of action should be aligned to the broadest strategic objectives. The Soleimani strike was a tactical success, but it damaged the goals of countering the Islamic State, stabilizing Iraq and getting Iran to the negotiating table; it also put U.S. personnel across the region at risk. Before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, planners considered many parallel matters: the risk to U.S. service members; the possibility of civilian casualties; the likely diplomatic fallout with Pakistan and what that might mean for the war in Afghanistan; the legal authorities and implications; the domestic political cost if the raid resulted in American casualties, failed or both; and how Congress would react to all of those considerations.

Operations must be proportional to the security context. Killing one of the most senior Iranian military leaders, even with his lengthy list of despicable crimes and ostensible involvement in imminent threats, was an extreme response to the staged protests against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the rocket attack on an Iraqi base that killed one American. Killing Soleimani in response to these acts — particularly without providing any public evidence of an impending attack against Americans (though the administration has repeatedly insisted that this is what it was trying to prevent) — skipped tens of rungs on the escalation ladder.

Military actions must also be operationally feasible. Political leaders may ask for proposals that belie the laws of space and time because of a well-intentioned but fundamental misunderstanding of military capability. The U.S. military cannot simply find and kill a target anywhere in the world at any time using drones, a demand sometimes made by policymakers. Research by one of us found that many senior officials involved in drone policy underestimate the cost and logistics and overestimate drones’ availability, capabilities and range.

Options for strikes should be real options. Reportedly, whoever drafted the president’s briefing slides used the Goldilocks paradigm — presenting options that were too mild, too extreme and one that was just right. In such frameworks, most of the options are meant to be throwaways; these typically receive much less attention and planning than the preferred option does. Such frameworks are deceptive and dangerous: The Soleimani strike was never meant to seem best.

President Barack Obama faced this paradigm during the Afghanistan strategic review in 2010, when the military leadership offered widely varying recommendations for troop levels. During the George W. Bush administration, former senior Pentagon official Peter Rodman lamented how difficult it was to get the military to tee up meaningful and discrete options besides “do nothing and thermonuclear war.” This kind of advice presumes that the decision-makers are in on the gag; they aren’t always.

Finally, options must be politically informed. Obama’s unwillingness to intervene in Syria, for example, was rooted in his belief that the public wouldn’t support it. When Congress signaled its resistance as well, his view was solidified.

Inside the Pentagon, by statute, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is responsible for the development of military analysis, options and plans to share with the defense secretary and the president as he sees fit. In reality, military advice is not just one individual’s best ideas but a massive and complex process that engages hundreds of military and civilian experts. Those people generate and vet the options and flag political considerations, calculating how to best mitigate risk and coordinate with allies.

Yet it appears that the tight circle at Mar-a-Lago involved in making the decision to kill Soleimani — mainly the secretaries of defense and state — neglected many of these key elements, as the convoluted messaging, lack of preemptive mitigating actions and failure to inform close U.S. allies, let alone members of Congress, demonstrate.

It seems that the national security apparatus skipped crucial steps while deferring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s advocacy. For example, consulting the Commerce Department might have flagged potential oil market impacts; Treasury could have noted the likely market fluctuations; the intelligence community could have offered real-time analysis on threats to U.S. personnel before and after the strike; and the State Department may have requested noncombatant evacuations of Americans from various Middle Eastern hotspots, highlighted the diplomatic fracas with European allies and underscored the need for deft diplomacy to repair the inevitable U.S.-Iraqi government crisis so that killing Soleimani did not cause a rupture.

Instead, Trump reportedly relied on a few advisers for what may be the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency. Small-group decision-making limits the imagination and thwarts checks and balances — and it can be dominated by impassioned advocates. The resulting decisions tend to be more about the president’s preferences than about national security interests. Now Trump needs to hear from a broad range of advisers about what might come next.

Of course, with this chaotic administration, lecturing on procedural deliberation from the outside may seem like wishcasting, at best. What, then, can responsible defense and military officials do when the president demands risky options, when the secretary of state inserts himself in the chain of command or the commander in chief publicly threatens war crimes? The answer is not to make post-hoc justifications or to pray that our system survives. The muscles of deliberation have to be exercised. Engaging Congress, which established the authorities that create good military options; reiterating to the troops and the world that the U.S. military follows the rule of law; telling senior commanders that they should not be tempted by those seeking private advice; promoting the secretary of defense as the face of the defense apparatus — these are all useful near-term steps.

No matter the president, bad military options should not land on his desk. We may have been lucky to ratchet down tensions with Iran. We shouldn’t have to rely on luck next time.

 

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My letter Got published today.   Of course some pearls must’ve gotten crushed because they changed my sentence about the need for BT to get their asses over to the recruiters got changed. And my line calling them out for their penis measuring contests got deleted. Seriously considering calling me out over this. 

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