February 15, 2019
President Trump says he disagrees with his intelligence chefs saying Iran is “wonderful,” although US intelligence has never said anything of the kind.
In an appearance February 3 on Face the Nation before the Super Bowl football championship, Trump spoke at length about his thoughts on US intelligence and how he wants to spy on Iran. But where US intelligence disagrees with Trump over Iran’s nuclear program, Trump acted as if they disagreed with him on Iran being a difficult country that follows many policies hostile to the United States—which they do not.
Trump was asked if he trusted US intelligence. He said, “My intelligence people, if they said in fact that Iran is a wonderful kindergarten, I disagree with them 100 percent. It is a vicious country that kills many people. When you talk about torture and so many other things. And maybe they’ll come back. The country is getting absolutely—when I ended the horrible Iran nuclear deal—it was a horrible deal done by President Obama and John Kerry that didn’t know what the hell he was doing. When I ended that deal, Margaret, all of a sudden Iran became a different country. They became very rapidly—right now they’re a country that’s in big financial trouble. Let’s see what happens.”
Interviewer Margaret Brennan pointed out Trump’s intelligence staff “do say Iran’s abiding by that nuclear deal.”
Trump shot back, “I disagree with them.”
He discussed the testimony on Capitol Hill a few days earlier in which the intelligence chiefs spoke in public and delivered a 42-page annual intelligence report that said Iran had no active nuclear weapons program. Trump then met the next day with the intelligence chiefs. “They said they were mischar-acterized,” Trump told Brennan. “Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. I don’t really know.”
But he said he disagreed with the news reports on what they said, “When I look at Iran, I look at Iran as a nation [meaning regime] that has caused tremendous problems.” But the intelligence chiefs didn’t disagree with that assessment. What they disagreed with was the view that Iran was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon today. Trump mixed the two.
Trump said, “When I came in as president of the United States,… we were in many, many locations in the Middle East in huge difficulty. Every single one of them was caused by the number one terrorist nation in the world, which is Iran. So when my intelligence people tell me how wonderful Iran is, if you don’t mind, I’m going to just go by my own counsel.”
Last month, President Trump made a quick and previously unannounced trip to visit US troops at the Ayn Al-Asad Base in the West of Iraq. Trump told Face the Nation, “We spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.”
But Ayn Al-Asad Air Base is not an American base. It is an Iraqi base, built in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein, but expanded by the US during its occupation. Part of it is now used by some of the US and British troops stationed in Iraq.
Trump went on: “I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable and expensive military base built in Iraq. It’s perfectly situated for looking all over different parts of the troubled Middle East, rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don’t understand. We’re going to keep watching and we’re going to keep seeing and if there’s trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we’re going to know it before they do.”
But military specialists said Iran’s nuclear program is watched by spies on the ground and satellites flying overhead, not by troops sitting on the ground more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the major Iranian nuclear sites at Natanz and Esfahan.
Trump’s comment about using the base to spy on Iran infuriated many in Iraq, however. President Barham Salih said, “We find these comments strange.” He said the US had never asked Iraq to allow the base to be used for spying, and observed that the Iraqi Constitution forbids the use of Iraq as a base to threaten any neighbor.
A number of political leaders long opposed to the US presence started using Trump’s remarks as a justification for kicking the United States out of Iraq.
The US withdrew all its troops from Iraq in 2011, but several thousand returned in 2014 at the invitation of the Iraqi government to organize the military operation to expel the Islamic State.
In his State of the Union address February 5, Trump made a brief and harsh reference to Iran, in which he added anti-Semitism as another crime committed by the Islamic Republic. It was believed this was the first time he had cited Iran for anti-Semitism. Here is Trump’s full section on Iran in the State of the Union address.
“My administration has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran. It is a radical regime. They do bad, bad things.
“To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. (Applause.) And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed by us on a country.
“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘Death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people. (Applause.) We must never ignore the vile poison of anti-Semitism, or those who spread its venomous creed. With one voice, we must confront this hatred anywhere and everywhere it occurs.”
The Islamic Republic has never even hinted at supporting “genocide” of Jews, though it actively calls for Israel to be abolished as a state.
