Western Media on Trump’s Crime: A Reckless Gamble, Mistake That’ll Make Americans Less Safe

By Staff, Agencies

Under the title “Trump's decision to kill Iranian Gen. Soleimani was a mistake that will make Americans and the world less safe”, Brett Bruen wrote for the Business Insider:

The death of diplomacy with Iran is significant, not just sentimental. Its demise ushers in a period of unrelenting unrest. American officials traveling around the world now have a target on their backs. They will have to limit their engagements and exposure. The costs for protecting many more people will skyrocket.

We can also expect to see a significant response. Already Iran announced that it would no longer comply with any of the limits laid out in the 2015 nuclear deal, and there's likely more to come.

Tehran will not just come against our embassies and military bases, Bruen added. American businesses and organizations are extremely vulnerable. Iran knows very well how to use unconventional weapons such as cyberattacks to rattle stock markets, and companies will now have to pay considerable costs to protect their supply chains worldwide.

When Trump pulled us out of the Iran deal, I called it the end of the American era. No longer would the US serve as the guarantor of global security and stability. No longer could we be counted on to honor our word.

For a man who is always seeking to claim titles and tie himself to extraordinary accomplishments, this one may finally be worth of his ambition: an error of epic proportions.

For his part, CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen considered in a piece entitled “Trump's decision to kill Soleimani is beginning to look like a reckless gamble” that the targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani is arguably the most consequential American intervention in the Middle East since George W. Bush authorized the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Was this a bold move or a reckless gamble? Bergen asks.

Now we are teetering on the edge of a war between the US and Iran. Iran's top military adviser told CNN that revenge would be taken for Soleimani's death by attacks on American "military sites."

And there are many of those to choose from in the region, for instance, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to name just three countries where Iran wields considerable influence.

Meanwhile Trump has taken to Twitter to threaten war crimes against the Iranians in the form of strikes aimed at Iran's cultural patrimony; a form of warfare that we associate with ISIS, not the US military.

We are now exactly where Trump's former Secretary of ‘Defense’, Jim Mattis, worried that we would be.

According to the New York Times, Soleimani's killing was on a menu of options presented to Trump following the killing of a US contractor last month in Iraq that the US government blamed on Iran.

Trump seized on this most extreme option leaving top Pentagon officials "stunned' and "flabbergasted," according to the Times.

Also, Trump can no longer draw on the considerable expertise about the Middle East possessed by Mattis, as well as his former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, and his former national security adviser, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, all of whom served in Iraq.

These generals all resigned or were pushed out of office because they were willing to disagree with Trump about policy matters.

Trump should appoint advisers at the White House who can give him informed, expert advice about the likely fallout from his actions, which don't seem to have been well-considered when it came to ordering the death of Soleimani.

Would Trump listen to them? Who knows, but at least he would get a sense of all the different scenarios that might play out after such a consequential decision.