There’s substantial evidence to doubt the administration’s imminent threat message.
For example, the Pentagon’s original press release about the Soleimani operation didn’t mention it, and the immediate US reaction was to order all American civilians out of Iraq for fear of retaliation — clearly, nobody was made safer in a direct, immediate sense.
Those actions are consistent with a scenario in which Soleimani was a dangerous person in general, and the decision to take him out was made by policymakers seeking long-term benefits at the short-term cost of elevated risk to American lives. That’s fine as far as it goes; sometimes in life you need short-term pain for long-term gain. But when someone asks you to suffer short-term pain, you normally ask them to explain what kind of gain they’re promising so you can consider whether it’s a fair deal.
The administration, instead, said it was heading off imminent attacks even as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conceded that he couldn’t say where or when these attacks were supposed to happen.
Similarly, senators briefed on the intelligence simply said there was no evidence presented of an imminent threat.
Then on Friday, John Hudson, Missy Ryan, and Josh Dawsey reported for the Washington Post that on the same day as the successful strike on Soleimani, there was a second, failed anti-Iranian operation. That operation, which the administration neglected to tell us about, targeted Abdul Reza Shahlai, described in the Post as “a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen.”
This is another nail in the coffin of the idea that the Soleimani strike was about disrupting an imminent threat as opposed to a broader shift in policy. That the administration kept this quiet, even as it went on a multi-day victory tour about killing Soleimani, is further confirmation that it is not leveling with us about its actions.
And that’s unacceptable.
CPO1
Article URL : https://www.vox.com/2020/1/11/21060271/trump-soleimani-imminent-threat-dishonest