During a Sunday appearance on MSNBC’s “Kasie DC,” network foreign affairs analyst Brett McGurk, the former U.S. special envoy for the coalition against the Islamic State, weighed in on the U.S. military’s recent airstrikes in Baghdad to kill Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

McGurk called the action a “big piece of business” that he said “means war” with Iran.

“When this happened about 96 hours ago or so, my immediate reaction was: number one, as someone who served in Iraq, there is an immediate sense of justice for the removal of Qasem Soleimani,” McGurk stated. “But number two, we need to presume that we are now at war with Iran. I don’t say that lightly. We can hope for the best, but the presumption is we’re at war with Iran.”

He continued, “[W]hat has happened since then with the statements, the tweets, the reporting, the shifting narratives from the administration, just shows a decision that clearly was not gamed out, was not well thought through. And for the President of the United States to say that we are prepared to strike 52 sites inside Iran with to congressional authorization, including cultural sites, which is clearly a violation of international law, stretches the boundaries of our constitutional republic to a real extreme. It’s almost unprecedented.”

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