Never mind, the president* explained:

President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago if Iran's increased aggression resulted in the death of an American, according to five current and former senior administration officials. The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final signoff on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said.

That decision explains why assassinating Soleimani was on the menu of options that the military presented to Trump two weeks ago for responding to an attack by Iranian proxies in Iraq, in which a U.S. contractor was killed and four U.S. service members were wounded, the officials said. The timing, however, could undermine the Trump administration's stated justification for ordering the U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3. Officials have said Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, was planning imminent attacks on Americans and had to be stopped.

So reported NBC News. In response, the president tweeted:

The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was “imminent” or not, & was my team in agreement. The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!

(The original Tweet referred to the possible attack as “eminent,” which neither the president* nor his cover story ever has been.)

So the “imminent attacks” story was bullshit. The “imminent attacks on four embassies” were bullshit. According to his own Secretary of Defense, the intelligence didn’t support either of those conclusions—which means either that the SecDef is oblivious, or his boss is. In any event, the line now is that Qasem Soleimani was a bad guy who deserved to die in a tower of flame and only El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago had the giant presidential cojones to rain down death from above. You can’t have somebody running war powers like this. Also, you can’t have someone making up attacks, imminent or eminent, because he can’t think of anything else to say to Laura Ingraham.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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