That’s his personal opinion
Adam Schiff makes an important point here. It may seem obvious to thinking adults, but sadly it’s not thinking adults who are running this shit show. Pompeo claims the hit will save lives, Jake Tapper says, and Schiff points out that that’s Pompeo’s personal opinion but the intelligence information doesn’t support it. He continues to cite intel as opposed to opinion. Opinions are easy, but they can be based on anything or nothing at all. Opinions can be the product of desire as opposed to intelligence (in all senses).
But Good Guys get to kill Bad Guys with impunity! Any time, any where! Whatever Good Guys do is Good, right? It says so in all those movies!
Does Trump think the Iranians won’t respond? Or is he counting on a response, ANY response, to respond to in turn, hoping there will be enough stupid people forgetting that he started it? He really wants to get to his list of war crimes, doesn’t he.
Fucking asshole. Evil fucking asshole.
I would not expect the Iranians to do nothing in response to this event.
Iran (and I went there a few years ago) believe it or not, was once a representative democracy, with a population all in favour of same. Its democratically elected Prime Minister was Mohammad Mosaddegh, “the 35th prime minister of Iran, holding office from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état orchestrated by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom’s MI6.”
But this just illustrates an important point about democratic elections: the people who put themselves forward as candidates in democratic elections tend not to be democrats themselves. (eg D. Trump)
Thus it came to pass that the democratic government of Mosaddegh was replaced by the ruthless, antidemocratic and blood-drenched regime of the Shah from the Pahlevi dynasty. And when the Shah was finally overthrown, his regime was not replaced by a movement led by democrats, but by Iranian theocrats: the Mullahs, led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose successors still run Iran. Democracy was deliberately and consciously destroyed by those pretending to be in favour of it; when all they could see was oil.
A similar story led the US into the Vietnam War of 1965-75, and its defeat there was alluded to by Donald (‘Captain Bonespurs’) Trump in his election slogan: ‘Make America Great Again!’, Trump, while declining to go himself to Vietnam, was all for other young Americans doing so.
(NB Eisenhower in his memoirs gave America’s justification for not holding the 1956 Vietnam-wide elections called for in the Geneva Agreement of 1954: US Intelligence reported that Ho Chi MInh would get 80% of the vote. So neither Eisenhower, nor Kennedy, nor Johnson, nor Nixon, nor Ford, nor Carter was in that or any other sense that mattered, a democrat.)
And what goes around can easily come back around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
Sadly, Omar, the majority of ‘Mercans don’t know or don’t care about the role the US has played in destabilising the ME. Thus came the culmination of the Right’s Long March through educational institutions, destroying everything that led to understanding and critical thinking and turning schools, colleges, and universities into factories that produced compliant worker drones.
War is a racket, and the biggest racketeers of the last century have spoken with American accents and carried very big sticks.
We can be very confident that Trump doesn’t know a thing about the CIA and Mossadegh and wouldn’t hear it if someone tried to inform him.
I think you could have ended your sentence right there.
I read about Mossadegh a couple of decades ago, during the run up to the Iraq war. I knew our government had targeted foreign leaders (Fidel Castro managed to defeat all their attempts to destroy him), but the sheer brazenness of that had never occurred to me. Why? My college history profs weren’t sycophants to the right, or to the commercial market (I went to school just before that became the norm), but none of that was ever discussed. We, as citizens of a democratic nation, enfranchised citizens, need to know about these things and their consequences. If we do not understand what our government can – and does – do, we cannot make informed decisions at the ballot box.
But we nod sagely and bow our heads at the claim of “state secrets”. There probably are a lot of things the citizens can’t know, at least at the time, but I think there are too many things being withheld from the public. Not just in the US…
I read a book about CIA overthrows a long long time ago, and it was a major eye-opener. See also: Guatemala, Haiti, Congo; the list goes on.
Yes, we have a lot to answer for. Oh, we love to “spread democracy” – right up until the democracy looks like we don’t like, or isn’t operating as if US business isn’t the only thing that matters.