Wagging the dog: Trump Does It This Time
In 2011 and 2012, years before he began his own presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of seeking war with Iran to help win the 2012 presidential election. He tweeted:
“In order to get elected, BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” (Nov. 29, 2011) “Now that Obama’s poll numbers are in tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.” (Oct. 9, 2012)
“Don’t let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected--be careful Republicans!” (Oct 22, 2012) On Thursday, January 2, 2020, President Donald Trump ordered the killing of Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander who was one of the most powerful men in the Middle East. General Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, was killed by a drone attack on his convoy at an airport in Baghdad. Among those killed was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iranbacked militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and five others. The strike came just a few days after supporters of the Iran-backed Iraqi militia, Kataib Hezbollah, mobbed the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The breach at the embassy followed U.S. airstrikes on Sunday (December 29, 2019) that killed 25 fighters of the Kataib Hezbollah. The U.S. military said the strikes were in retaliation for last week’s killing of an American contractor in a Dec. 27th rocket attack on an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk that the U.S. blamed on the militia.
The Defense Department said Thursday that Soleimani had “orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months - including the attack on December 27th - culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. The assassination of General Soleimani came with Trump’s approval rating languishing at 42.4 , according a model by FiveThirtyEight, and he is the first US president to face an impeachment trial while running for reelection.
Interestingly, Trump is not the only POTUS bombing or killing someone of high value when domestic politics shows a high a disapproval rating at home. The trend has repeated many times since at least the time of Bill Clinton (1993-2000).
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998 and 1999, President Bill Clinton initiated bombing campaigns in Sudan and in Iraq, and critics claimed he was trying to divert attention. The Al Shifa factory in Khartoum was the largest manufacturer of medicines in all of Sudan, producing over half of the country’s pharmaceutical products and specializing in anti-malaria drugs. It was “pulverized,” reduced to nothing but “broken concrete and iron bars,” leaving “thousands of brown bottles of veterinary and other medicines” littered across the sand on the direct orders of Bill Clinton on August 20, 1998. The strike was in retaliation for Osama bin Laden’s recent bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. When it was pointed out to the Clinton administration that they had just eliminated one of Sudan’s major medical suppliers, spokespeople “claimed the plant was actually a disguised chemical weapons factory.” .........