Yahoo has an interesting piece about the Soleimani assassination. It was quite an operation. But it was made more dangerous and provocative by Donald Trump:
Given the CIA’s long history of tracking Soleimani — and the Pompeo-led discussions about eliminating him — the decision to use special operations forces rather than agency operatives to oversee the killing led to some “hard feelings” at Langley, which had been almost entirely marginalized from the planning process, said former officials. Agency officials felt “cut out” of the decision making, says a former senior CIA official, who was told the agency “had other options” that were “more discrete.”
But the administration’s compressed timeline for killing Soleimani likely precluded the CIA’s plans from being viable, if indeed they were viable. “Conspiracy is hard, and it takes a lot of time to do it right,” said the former senior official.
Senior NSC officials had extensive discussions about overt and covert options for killing Soleimani, and settled independently on the recommendation that the strike be carried out overtly, said Coates, the top NSC official for the Middle East at the time of the operation. While “the Pentagon was worried about being blamed,” says Coates, “my perspective was, we’re going to be blamed anyway,” so “if the president is going to take action this dramatic, you kind of need to own it.”
President Trump, however, may have had different calculations. A covert strike by Joint Special Operations Command was “doable all the way to the end,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with discussions preceding the killing, but “the thing that pushed Trump over the top was for him to take credit for it,” said this person. He “wanted it for his reelection.”
Of course he did. He thought it would even out Obama’s big success at killing bin Laden and make him into a military hero. It didn’t because 99% of Americans had never heard of Soleimani and he quickly remembered that his rabid cult prefers to fight the libs.
But it had some consequences.
Killing Soleimani covertly may also have led to some type of lethal Iranian response down the road, particularly if Iran were able to privately confirm the U.S. role. But the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate the Iranian general so brazenly forced Iran’s hand, says Mulroy, who served in the Pentagon from 2017 to 2019.
“We’re obsessed with using drones and such, but there are lots of things we could have done to obstruct U.S. fingerprints,” Mulroy said. If the U.S. had declined to take credit for the operation, the Iranians “wouldn’t have felt the need for overt retaliation, and to shoot missiles at our embassy and military.”
Since the killing, Iran’s plans for revenge seemed to have multiplied. Last fall, U.S. officials picked up intelligence that Iran was plotting an assassination of the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. In January, U.S. officials intercepted communications between Quds Force operatives discussing a plot to attack Fort McNair, an Army base in Washington, D.C., and try and assassinate the Army’s vice chief of staff.
Apparently, Pompeo is at the top of their list which isn’t surprising. He’s is the worst Iran hawk in the GOP. But apparently, the government is going to have to provide protection forever to a whole bunch of former officials.
I don’t think it helped Trump’s election prospects. So, the big question is, what good did any of this do?