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Donald Trump needed to strike a senior Iranian navy commander in August 2020, a number of months earlier than the US presidential election, his former secretary of protection has claimed in a brand new e-book.
An advance copy of “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Protection Secretary in Extraordinary Instances,” by Mark Esper was obtained by The Guardian.
In accordance with the British newspaper, the e-book portrays Esper as a Trump aide who rejected quite a few unlawful or ill-contrived plans floated by the US president and his workers, together with firing “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs” and dipping the decapitated head of a terrorist chief in pig’s blood as a warning to different Islamist militants.
When it got here to the Iranian commander, Esper wrote that Basic Mark Milley, who heads the Joint Chiefs of Employees, informed him that then-national safety adviser Robert O’Brien referred to as to say that “the president needed to strike a senior navy officer who was working exterior of Iran,” shortly earlier than the 2020 election.
The US had already beforehand killed Qassem Soleimani, the pinnacle of Iran’s elite Quds Power, in a January 2020 strike in Baghdad.
“This was a very unhealthy concept with very huge penalties,” Esper wrote of the plan to hold out a strike forward of the US presidential election.
“Milley and I have been conscious of this particular person and the difficulty he had been stirring within the area for a while. However why now? What was new? Was there an imminent menace? What about gathering the nationwide safety staff to debate this?” he added
“Milley mentioned he was ‘surprised’ by the decision, and he sensed that ‘O’Brien put the president as much as this,’ making an attempt to create information that may assist Trump’s reelection.”
In accordance with Esper, Milley informed O’Brien he would talk about the request with the protection secretary and different senior officers.
“I couldn’t consider it,” Esper mentioned. “I had seen this film earlier than, the place White Home aides meet with the president, stir him up, after which serve up considered one of their ‘nice concepts’. However this was a very unhealthy concept with very huge penalties. How come people within the White Home didn’t see this?”
Esper recalled telling Milley he wouldn’t act with out an order in writing from Trump, the Guardian report mentioned.
“There was no means I used to be going to unilaterally take such an motion,” he mentioned, “notably one fraught with a spread of authorized, diplomatic, political and navy implications, to not point out that it may plunge us into struggle with Iran.”
The previous Pentagon chief wrote that the alternate between O’Brien and Milley in August 2020 was “the final time one thing involving Iran significantly got here up earlier than the election.”
Trump’s opposition to Iran was a key plank of his reelection marketing campaign and plenty of feared he would try to impress a struggle as November 2020 neared.
“Any assault by Iran, in any type, in opposition to the USA will likely be met with an assault on Iran that will likely be 1,000 instances higher in magnitude!” Trump tweeted in September 2020.
Milley mentioned within the e-book that he believed Trump didn’t desire a struggle, however mentioned the outgoing president saved pushing for a missile strike in response to Iranian provocations and assaults in opposition to US pursuits within the area.
In accordance with Axios, Esper’s e-book has been vetted by the Pentagon and reviewed by generals and cupboard members.
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