January 2020 has probably been one of the most eventful months I can honestly remember, and it is only halfway over.
The new decade started off with U.S. President Donald Trump issuing a drone strike against Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Major General in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corporation.
This strike was unprecedented for a lot of Americans, but the Trump administration has stated that there was an “imminent” threat against American diplomats that were in the region.
The administration, though, is having difficulty explaining what they mean by an “imminent” threat. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that “We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.”
The Wall Street Journal had reported that President Trump told his associates after the strike that he was under pressure to do so by Senators he views as important in his upcoming impeachment trial.
If this is true, it is very hard not to think of how dangerous it could be for a president to start a war to pacify some Republicans to potentially help his impeachment end favourably.
This is not the first time that a U.S. president has ordered an airstrike during an impeachment trial. Bill Clinton was impeached 21 years ago, and during the impeachment process he ordered an airstrike on Iraq.
Although the two men are very different and on opposite sides of the American political spectrum, it is quite easy to see some similarities between their presidencies.
Both men had taken part in some questionable conduct and repeated the actions later – Clinton had repeated incidents of infidelity and Trump had similar repeated incidents of foreign influence (firstly with Russia and then with Ukraine, which was what kickstarted the impeachment process).
We will never know the real reasoning behind why President Trump issued the airstrike, but a tweet from 2011 have made many people question his intentions. The tweet that was posted in November of that year says:
In order to get elected, @BarackObama will start a war with Iran.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2011
If Trump executed this strike to start a war, he might have succeeded in his mission. On Jan. 8, 2019 a Ukraine International Airlines flight crashed after taking off from Tehran, the Iranian capital. This devastating crash killed 176 people, including 57 Canadians, 82 Iranians and 11 Ukrainians.
Originally, Iran had claimed that the plane has suffered from some technical problems after takeoff.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization chief Ali Abedzadeh stated that they were certain the plane was not hit by a missile.
However, on Jan. 9, 2019 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that there is intelligence from multiple sources that the plane was hit by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. This is something that could have been unintentional. This was later confirmed by Trudeau.
A subsequent statement delivered by the Iranian military read on state television stated that the flight was hit by a missile by mistake.
They claim that the plane was headed towards a sensitive military centre and, because of the heightened tensions with the United States, the Iranian military was very ready in case of another incident. But this incident itself happened because of “human error”.
If Trump is trying to start a political unrest around the time of his impeachment, he is achieving this goal as the world is preparing for the worst-case scenarios.
The only way I could see the possible war and tragedies surrounding it going away is if President Trump’s impeachment trial continues on as planned.
President Trump is trying to make himself seem as though it is unnecessary to look at his conduct since other dangers are present in the world, and he is the only person ‘brave’ enough to do anything about it.
