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Veterans slam Trump for using threat of Iran strike to 'fluff up his own image'

Trump called off a strike on Iran 10 minutes before it was slated to happen. A veterans group says Trump deserves no praise for the move.

By Emily Singer - June 21, 2019
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Trump’s last-minute decision to call off a strike against Iran deserves no praise, a veterans group said Friday.

The comment came in reference to Trump’s admission that the U.S. military was ready to retaliate against Iran for shooting down a drone, but that Trump called the strike off 10 minutes before it was slated to happen because the thought it was a disproportionate response to Iran’s provocation.

“The idea that Donald Trump is so benevolent that he called off a strike with only 10 minutes to spare, because of his concern over loss of life, is a fiction that only Donald Trump could think up,” Jon Soltz, an Iraq War veteran and chair of VoteVets, said in a statement to Shareblue. “This is a guy who lets kids die in border camps and doesn’t care. We have a really huge problem with Donald Trump using a powder-keg of a situation to fluff up his own image.”

Trump’s balk at striking Iran consumed all of the oxygen in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

Democrats are furious that Trump was planning a military action without notifying Congress.

“Hostilities must not be initiated without the approval of Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Friday.

Republicans, on the other hand, have been largely silent about the incident, as some conservative Fox News personalities work to goad Trump into using force against the Middle Eastern nation.

Ultimately, one of the most worrisome aspects of the situation — aside from the fact that Trump could have started World War III with a retaliatory strike — is that he appears to have not gotten all of the information he needed before the military readied itself for an attack.

In an interview with “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd on Friday, Trump said that he asked 30 minutes before the strike was set to take place what the number of Iranian casualties would be.

After learning 150 Iranians would die, he decided that was too high a cost and called off the strike 10 minutes before the point of no return.

“I thought about it for a second and I said, you know what, they shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it, and here we are sitting with a 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead,” Trump told Todd. “And I didn’t like it, I didn’t think, I didn’t think it was proportionate.”

One would think that before ordering such a consequential military strike, Trump would get all of the information he needed.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.


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