Moulton: Strike at Iranian official may set off new conflict

SALEM — Congressman Seth Moulton said Friday that the killing of Iran’s top military official in a drone missile strike ordered by President Donald Trump has created an “incredibly dangerous” situation.

Gen. Qassem Soleimani, believed to be the second most powerful man in Iran, was one of at least three Iranian officials killed in the drone missile strike, the Pentagon announced late Thursday. Soleimani was in a convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport when the car he was in was struck by a missile.

Response to the strike has been split largely along political lines.

Moulton, a Salem Democrat who did four combat tours in Iraq as a Marine, was quick to call Soleimani “an enemy of the United States with American blood on his hands,” in a statement shortly after the killing was announced Thursday night. But he was just as quick to say that the president’s decision had escalated tensions that could start another war, “with still no strategy from the administration.”

“That’s the way President Trump has done everything with regard to national security, by the seat of his pants, with no strategy and no plan for what comes next,” Moulton said Friday in an interview with The Salem News. “It’s incredibly dangerous. This could absolutely ignite a regional war, and if our experience in Iraq is any guide, I’ve got to worry now about whether my daughter will be fighting in a war with Iran, and she’s only 14 months old.”

Moulton rejects the argument that Soleimani was simply held to account by the president for hundreds of deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers caused by materials supplied by Iranians.

“Where’s the strategy? How is this part of the plan?” Moulton said.

Throughout the Iraq War, the goal was to stop terrorists without creating new ones, he said.

“I’ve been on the ground in Iraq dealing with situations like that,” Moulton said. One situation he dealt with in 2005, he said, involved a militia problem in one city and a governor who was being backed by Iran. “The governor was awful, and I wanted to kill him, but that was not a smart strategic move because it would have created more problems than it solved, and I fear that is what the administration has done here.”

The president’s so-called “maximum pressure” and decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement has accomplished exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration claims it wants to achieve, said Moulton.

“The administration’s stated policy is to one, to stop regional aggression but all they’ve done is encourage it; two, to stop their nuclear weapons program, but Iran re-started their program when Trump shut down the nuclear deal; and three, to bring Iran back to the negotiation table. Nothing any administration has ever done has pushed them farther away than this.”

Asked whether the move could be an effort to distract from looming impeachment proceedings, Moulton said it’s clear just from his Twitter feed alone that Trump knows about distraction. “We know he understands using war as a distraction for domestic issues,” said Moulton, pointing to numerous tweets by Trump during the Obama administration along those lines.

“He’s tweeted a lot about using Iran to distract from domestic issues,” said Moulton.

Asked about a Trump tweet Friday in which the president contended that the United States had paid Iran “billions of dollars” while it gained “more and more control over Iraq,” Moulton said it’s just another example of the president’s lack of meaningful understanding of the situation.

“Iran gained more control over Iraq because Trump pulled our diplomats out of Iraq,” said Moulton. “This guy’s truly an idiot.”