President Trump seems to have achieved his finest foreign policy feat in his successful directive to kill Qassem Soleimani. He took out a terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and likely thousands of his own people’s.
Unfortunately, and, as per usual, Trump can’t help but try and snatch political defeat from the jaws of victory.
Just as President Barack Obama rightly guided the nation in celebration after the killing of Osama bin Laden, Trump took a deserved victory lap that both benefited him personally and his leverage in reminding Iran that this was a declarative shot of deterrence. Trump has rightly flexed and remained unpredictable, but he took a detour for the disastrous over the weekend.
….targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly brushed off the tweets on the Sunday shows, maintaining that the administration would comply with international law, but, on Monday, Kellyanne Conway decided to double down.
Democracies require that governments are held to account. Who better than Kellyanne Conway to aggressively trash that notion? pic.twitter.com/52qUBgNGdi
— dimasciov (@dimasciov) January 6, 2020
Trump’s threat isn’t just teasing illegality or poor political strategy. It’s imitating the tactics of some of our most barbaric foes on the planet: the Islamic State.
ISIS’s particularly extremist bent of Salafism means that not only can their iconoclasm not tolerate images of life, but they must destroy every sign of evidence of the heretical. This includes not just bombing churches and religious monuments predating Islam, but also Shiite and Sunni mosques. Their rationale is deeply ideological, but often the sowing of discord is good enough for a cult of death.
Trump likely doesn’t know this, and, no, the leader of the free world is not remotely comparable to ISIS. But this strategy is accidentally pulled from their playbook. He’d be wise to immediately put down the phone and end it now.
