President Donald Trump ordered the strike against Qassem Soleimani that led to the killing of Soleimani at the Baghdad Airport a couple days ago.  The Left, here expressed by members of those unified by their disdain for and resistance to Trump, has been objecting ever since.

[M]any Washington insiders and defense experts remain skeptical about whether those attacks were truly imminent.

Well, of course. This was a Trump move; it cannot be believed.  Never mind that these…insiders…and “experts” don’t have access to the intel the led to the strike’s necessity. More than that, though, is this: a former Pentagon official and Middle East expert, who refused to put his name to his claim (possibly because he knew a sentence or two from his claim might be taken out of context by his NLMSM interviewer) said (in part?)

I believe we have had plans [to eliminate Soleimani] all along. The attack on the US embassy was the trigger to get that ball rolling[.]

You bet we had those plans. We have contingency plans for every action we can think of that might threaten our security. Soleimani in particular has been a threat for years, and his PMF pseudo-protester attack on our Baghdad embassy certainly should have been a trigger to step up locating the thug. Coupling that overt attack with the intel we had added urgency to locating him and to our response.  Keep in mind: success occurs at the intersection of preparation—contingency plans and active intel efforts—and luck—finding him so quickly once his plans had been discovered.

Aside here: the official’s two sentences—what was their context? What else did he say that was edited out from the quote above? Something along the lines of having contingency plans for everything? We can’t tell, so we can’t say whether this person is a member of that resistance or was misquoted.

Then we get this from Jenna Ben-Yehuda, an ex-State Department official who worked with DoD—and so a member of the interagency coordination facility of which Fiona Hill was so proud and quite upset that was occasionally (often, even) bypassed by the man actually responsible for policy:

[H]is move to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization in April 2019, the first time the US has ever given that designation to an element of a foreign government, makes Thursday’s attack part of a destabilizing chain of events.
While Secretary of State Pompeo has asserted that the US made the decision to strike on Thursday in response to “imminent threats” against US personnel and assets, the fact that he appears not to have provided the public, Congress, or allies with additional information about those threats casts doubts on the veracity of his claim[.]

That the “chain” might be in some way destabilizing is a result of Iranian actions, not anything else. Her calling Pompeo a liar regarding the intel assessment is simply another example of the Left’s automatic rejection of anything coming out of this administration—especially when it contradicts the Hill/Ben-Yehuda interagency coordination facility decisions. I’ll elide the fact that, as an ex-official, she, like the unnamed ex-Pentagon person, had no access to the underlying intel, and so she’s completely ignorant of any relevant facts.

Her plaint that Pompeo (and Trump, come to that) didn’t spend time advising anyone in advance of the strike demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of the term “imminent.” Never mind that relevant classified briefings to Congress are scheduled imminently.

That neither Pompeo nor Trump briefed the public—especially her precious self—demonstrates her equally complete lack of understanding of the tenets of secrets and security.  And that explanations, now being made to the public (but not her particularly; she has to read about it in the press like the rest of us), must necessarily lack intel detail to protect, among other things, our methods and sources.

There’s this, too, from Kenneth Pollack, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute:

We know Qassem may have been planning an attack in general terms, but we don’t know about when and how. I would say we got an intel hit. He was going to be at the airpor…and an easy target….

Pollack is claiming that because he didn’t know imminence-of-attack particulars “we” didn’t know. Never mind that he’s no more privy to current intel than are Ben-Yehuda or the ex-Pentagon official.

None of that matters to the Left or to resistors in general. What Trump did violated their predetermined requirements and that’s to be condemned.

Baby Kim, MFWIC of northern Korea has told us all that he’ll soon unveil one of these. Timothy Martin, writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, speculated that it’ll likely be something along traditional lines.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the world will witness a “new strategic weapon” from the isolated regime in the near future as he sees little reason to stick with his country’s suspension of testing long-range missile technology.
But Mr Kim left vague whether the new weapon would be a nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s a cyber weapon, a broad suite of malware, perhaps, or a collection of mini-EMP devices. Either of those, or their combination, could paralyze us, leaving us not on our knees, but prostrate and helpless, given the lack of effort our government and our defense establishment have put into developing defenses in that milieu, and far more so and at far less cost to northern Korea than some bombs or missiles.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that if the US goes forward with sanctions over this NATO member’s purchase of advanced weapons systems from one of NATO’s (and the US’) staunchest enemies, he’ll close the bases we use there. He also implied such action in response to Congress’ belated official recognition of the genocide the then-Turkish government perpetrated on Armenians 100 years ago.

If necessary, we’ll close Incirlik and also Kurecik. If the threat of sanctions is implemented against us, we’ll respond to them in the framework of reciprocity.

Aside from air operations staging from these bases, we also have some nuclear bombs stored there.

In light of Erdoğan’s current behavior, we should leave Turkey altogether.  Given President Donald Trump’s decision to greatly cut back on operations in Syria (whether that’s a good decision or a bad one is not relevant in this context), we don’t need to stage much of anything out of Turkey. Aside from that, other alternatives would seem readily available for staging operations around the Middle East while still being able to move promptly to protect southern and southeastern Europe and the Black Sea.

The bombs long since should have been transferred elsewhere, anyway, but it’s time for them, especially, to be moved out rather than leaving them at risk within the borders of so unreliable an ally.  Recall that this unreliability has not begun with Erdoğan’s cozying up with Putin or his beef with Trump. He also, at the last minute, refused to allow us to stage from Turkey at the outset of our last war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, greatly complicating that operation.

It’s time to cut bait and move on from Turkey.  The nation was a good idea, once, but Erdoğan has ruined its utility as a friend and ally, and he’s ruining it as a nation.