"WASHINGTON — In the 10 days since it carried out the drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Trump administration has been struggling to draft an after-the-fact narrative to justify it. On Monday, President Trump put an end to that hash of explanations. “It doesn’t really matter,” he tweeted, “because of his horrible past.”
Until that message on Twitter, the administration had insisted in various ways that General Suleimani, Iran’s most important military official, was planning myriad “imminent” attacks. The unraveling of the explanations accelerated over the weekend after Mr. Trump said four embassies were under immediate threat, a charge that his own administration could not back.
With the president’s latest utterance, he bolstered critics of a strike that had raised fears of an all-out war with Iran and had led Iraq to call on the United States to leave the country. And, the critics wondered, was it reckless and irresponsible for the United States to kill Iran’s second most important leader if the reason did not “really matter”?"
The Trump team’s inability to explain the Suleimani assassination ended yesterday when the President tweeted that the reasons for the assassination that kicked off an international crisis did not “really matter”. After all, Suleimani was a “bad guy.”
Is that good enough for everyone here? Is the role of the United States now to kill bad guys when the opportunity arises?
What if the reason for the killing was that the President wanted to appear tough… after backing down in the face of previous provocations?
What if the reason for the killing was that the President was trying to secure to votes of Republican Iran hawks in the Senate to insure they would not vote in favor of calling witnesses for the Senate trial?
Have we reached the point where the President owes no explanations to the American people or the world?
Is it any coincidence that iran and north korea both started stirring up more trouble as the dimocrats were busy impeach in the POTUS and trying to overturn the 2016 election??
America’s enemies clearly thought it was a good time to attack/cause trouble. pelosi helped facilitate that.
More trouble? North Korea was testing before the call and after Being “no longEr a threat”. Iran’s militia has been fighting the proxy war for a couple of years
The Republicans made a huge deal out of the shifting explanations provided after the Benghazi attack. Are you saying that did not matter? It mattered a great deal to our distinguished host at the time.
That’s a complete distortion of what has gone on in the United States over the past week. This is a discussion about how the American government should operate. Did the standard the Republicans insisted on after Benghazi mean anything or was it just spin to gain political advantage?
I love this other thing that’s becoming really popular lately…this push to hold our own government and our own selves to standards maybe just a tad higher than the worst nations out there.
“America…it could be worse” has just such a nice ring to it…
You have no basis for assuming the correlation of events implies causality. Numerous terrorist attacks against American targets have occurred while impeachment was not in play.
