Making Sense of Trump's Shifting Justification for War with Iran

0:26The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Hello again from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. This is the 1600, and I'm Carlo, back at you guys. This country was stone cold dead. I wanted to talk a little bit about the war, the justifications for it, or lack thereof, or shifting justifications, I guess you could say. If you're confused about what our strategy is in Iran, or why we're even there in the first place, feel free to join the club. That club apparently includes not just myself, but the president of the United States, as well as senior members of his administration, all of whom have been all over the map in the last several weeks, but particularly this week, coming up for reasons for why they started this conflict, which is now three weeks old.

1:12So let's take a look at the weak and shifting justifications for war with Iran. And let's start with the nuclear threat. This is the one that they've been trotting out lately. Here's Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, who made up some sob story about how we're doing it for his kids and I guess presumably my kids as well. Take a look. My 13-year-old son popped into my office last night while I was editing these remarks. He asked about the war and the families I met at Dover. And I looked at him and I said, they died for you, son, so that your generation doesn't have to deal with a nuclear Iran.

1:51OK, so if you take Hegseth, that is where that that actually happened. He didn't just make it up. It still begs a lot of questions. Right. So this comes after Joe Kent, who was Donald Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center. So big guy with a big job, lots of security clearance. Also a decorated veteran. This guy had 11 deployments. His wife was actually killed in an ISIS bombing in Syria. So he knows this stuff better probably than anybody else, sadly. He resigned his post this week that you've probably seen now via a scathing letter in which he blamed Israel for dragging us into this war, despite there being no threat to the United States.

2:31This is Joe Kent talking to Tucker Carlson this week and telling Tucker Iran was no closer to getting a nuke than it was last June when we hit them during Operation Midnight Hammer. Take a listen. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No, they weren't. you know, three weeks ago when this started and they weren't in June either. I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling, a fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004. That's available in the public sphere. But then also we had no intelligence to indicate that that fatwa was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted.

3:09Okay. So again, this is Joe Kent, who was until a couple of days ago, the chief counterterrorism official in the Trump administration. Now Trump and MAGA are distancing themselves from him. They're smearing Kent as a traitor, as a leaker, and also as an anti-Semite, of course, because in America you cannot criticize Israel without being called an anti-Semite, something I've probably been called in my emails just over the last couple of weeks at least a half a dozen times, if not more, which I find offensive, but part of the gig. Anyway, Donald Trump himself actually took a bit of a softer approach when asked about Joe Kent.

3:42Well, I read his statement. I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security. I didn't know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy. But when I read his statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat. Every country realized what a threat Iran was. The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it. Okay, that of course begs many questions, one of which is if you thought somebody was soft on security or weak on security, as the president said, why would you make them lead the counterterrorism unit?

4:22But we'll leave that question for another day. Helpfully, Carolyn Levitt, the press secretary for Trump, helped explain. The president spoke on this a little bit yesterday in the Oval Office. He said he always thought Joe Kent was a good guy, obviously has a commendable military record and experience. However, he was not someone who was involved in the presidential daily brief, part of the president's intelligence briefings over the last several months. I have not seen him here at the White House for quite some time. And the president feels it's deeply disappointing that after the president gave him an opportunity in this administration to serve the American people, that he would resign with a letter filled with falsehoods, accusing the president of the United States by being controlled by a foreign country.

5:08That's both insulting and laughable all at the same time. The president is the leader of the most powerful country and military in the world. Nobody tells him what to do. He makes decisions based on what's in the best interest of this country. Nobody tells him what to do. Okay, so if you're keeping track now, Kent was a good guy who was soft on terrorism, also a traitorous anti-Semite who was running our counterterrorism operation with the highest security clearance, but also not involved in the presidential daily briefing or visible at the White House in any way. Okay, all of that is noted. So now let's move on to the more vague imminent threat justification, which is this is one that the administration and their mouthpieces in the media are really trying to spin into the reason why we attacked Iran.

5:55Tulsi Gabbard, she's the director of national intelligence, former Democrat who sort of turned MAGA, doesn't really appear to have much influence in this administration, but she's a notable character in this whole charade. She was at a Senate hearing, testifying at a Senate hearing this week, and she was asked by Senator John Ossoff of Georgia about this imminent threat that Iran allegedly posed to the United States. Here's Ms. Gabbard. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.

6:35Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, yes or no? Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president. False. This is the worldwide threats hearing where you present to Congress national intelligence, timely, objective, and independent of political considerations. You've stated today that the intelligence community's assessment is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated and that, quote, there had been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.

7:09Was it the intelligence community's assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. That is up to the president based on a volume of information that he received. It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat. Okay, so that's the director of national intelligence, right? That's our top spook. That's our top spy saying that it's not the intelligence community's job to determine what is or is not an imminent threat.

7:46I mean, okay, let's just, all right. It's not just coming from the administration, though. Here's Dan Bongino, who was the former deputy director of the FBI. He quit that job, couldn't last a year to go back to podcasting and making appearances on Fox News. Here is him on Fox making sort of a vague case that Iran was an imminent threat to the United States. How you could come to the conclusion that the Israelis did it and there was no imminent threat here? Really? What about the anti-ship ballistic missiles, the drone program? 440 kilograms of 60 percent enriched nuclear material. Their constant death to America chance.

8:23I mean, you know, that's called evidence. In some limited circles, we call that, you know, a clue.

8:53Right now at GlobalGamingLeague.com. That's GlobalGamingLeague.com. Everybody games. Let's take Dan at his word there that the Iranians chanting death to America is some sort of imminent threat to my or your way of life. But then we have Carolyn Levitt, again, the press secretary, just last week denying a report in ABC News about an Iranian threat to the West Coast in the form of terror attacks via drones. Levitt wrote on Twitter, quote, no such threat to our homeland exists and it never did. But then here she is a couple of days later. She's denying Joe Kent's claim that Iran posed no imminent threat to the U.S., saying, quote, the president had strong and compelling evidence Iran was going to attack the U.S.

9:37first. So there was an imminent threat, but only Trump knew about the imminent threat. But also there wasn't. OK, so those are two of our justifications. Now, the third one is the talking point that I keep hearing. I'm getting this from people from from newsletter readers as well as hearing it on the news, which means that it's probably coming down from some sort of some sort of talking point, probably on Fox. But the talking point is this. Iran has been at war with us, with the United States for the last 47 years. Trump is finally the president who's coming in and ending that 47 year forever war.

10:10A 47 year war. 47 year war. At least 47 years. 47 years. 47 years. 47 years. So the evidence cited for this is several things, right? One is the hostage crisis, which did happen 47 years ago. They also tend to cite the barracks bombing of the Marines in Beirut. That was 43 years ago. They tend to cite the roadside bombs that Iran unleashed in the war in Iraq. That was at least 20 years ago. So none of the presidents from Reagan all the way through Biden, and including Donald Trump, including Trump in his first term, determined that any of those things were enough to justify a war with Iran, based on that record and, you know, those terrible things that they did do to Americans and to American troops and American civilians.

11:00So what's changed since then? Well, let's listen to the commander-in-chief himself. We did it. It's almost, you could say we did it out of habit, which is not a good thing to do. But we did it because we have some good allies there. We have some great Middle Eastern countries there, Israel there. So we did it for a lot of reasons. OK, so if we want to take President Trump at his word there and I mean, why wouldn't you? He is the president and he does tend to talk in such a way that is, you know, he talks through his gut. Right. For better or worse. We know that about him now. He says things that he often shouldn't say, but are often true in that regard.

11:39So he's saying that we either did this, quote, out of habit or on behalf of our allies, by which he means Israel and the Israelis. By the way, Trump's not the only person to say that we essentially did this for the Israelis. Marco Rubio said the same thing back when this first began three weeks ago. But then when you bring this up, when you point out that these things that are being said by the president, by the secretary of state, by the director of counterterrorism in the United States, that we basically got pushed into this by the Israelis, it comes across as anti-Semitic or some sort of conspiracy theory.

12:11It's interesting. So anyway, Iran was either about to get a nuke, which they've been months away from developing for at least the last decade, even though we obliterated their nuclear capabilities last year in that Operation Midnight Hammer, but we also attacked them preemptively last month because they were once again months away from developing nukes, even though their uranium is by all accounts the uranium that Bongino mentioned there is by all accounts buried deep under a mountain that nobody can get to because we obliterated it. Or it's because Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S., which they also didn't, but we had to hit them first, not because of Israel, of course, but because they posed an imminent threat, which they also did not.

12:50So the Trump administration, I have to say, they're making George W. Bush look like Winston Churchill here with all of this circular logic. At least the big lie about weapons of mass destruction, about WMDs in Iraq, at least it made sense, right? It wasn't true, but it was easy to follow. It was easy to understand. This administration, they're not even really bothering with coming up with a single lie to sell this war post hoc, just like they didn't try and manufacture consent for it ahead of time. Meanwhile, we are now removing sanctions on Russian oil that were in place to harm them over the war in Ukraine.

13:23And not just Russian oil. Now we're doing it, removing those sanctions on Iranian oil. That's according to Scott Bessent. In the coming days, we may unsanction the Iranian oil that's on the water. It's about 140 million barrels. So depending on how you count it, that's 10 days to two weeks of supply that the Iranians had been pushing out. That would have all gone to China. In essence, we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down for the next 10 or 14 days as we continue this campaign. So what he's saying is that we're going to unsanction the sanctioned oil, which will help our two adversaries in Russia and Iran, except no, it won't because it's going to bring down oil prices, which are spiking, of course, because no tankers can get through the Strait of Hormuz right now because the Iranians are controlling that.

14:15Now, this is oil that Trump says we don't need. We don't need oil. We have all the oil we need for ourselves. But we need to keep prices down, which is true, right, because oil is a global commodity. So you can't just, you know, it's priced on a global market. So even if we don't need that oil, our oil prices will still spike. So we're on sanctioning Iran's oil, which will give them access to billions of dollars that they could use to rebuild their war machine, which Trump says we have destroyed because we've already won the war, even though he's now considering a ground invasion, at least according to reports this week, although he actually then just took that off the table yesterday here.

14:50And do you intend to potentially put U.S. troops or more troops in the region? No, I'm not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you. Okay. Makes sense, right? You got all that? We understand what we're doing here now? I don't. And look, I've said this before. I've said this in the newsletter. People have disagreed, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's my millennial trauma, having watched the last Republican president we had launch two, not one but two disastrous wars in the Middle East, wars whose failures, by the way, directly led to the rise of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is an anti-war and anti-establishment candidate.

15:30The same Donald Trump who now spends his second term playing golf with washed up boomers like Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin while launching Middle East wars without a plan or strategy articulated to the American people for what the point is, what the end game is and what the day after looks like. So the only question I have here is if there's anybody listening to this who's still on the Trump train, when are you going to when are you going to realize this guy is just not the savior that you thought he was? Right. It's OK to admit you were wrong. Right. We've all been wrong. I thought Joe Biden was going to be an FDR like president.

16:03I was wrong about that. Right. It's OK to admit you're wrong about these people, about these craven politicians, regardless of who they are. And really, Trump is just a craven warmonger who's also very corrupt when it comes down to it. He would sell you up the river for Israel. He would sell you up the river for a couple bucks for himself, for bribes, for money for his family of grifters, for really for anything. Is that America first? Is that the America first presidency that you voted for? Please tell me.