Editors at National Review Online address misinformation about American military action in the Middle East.
Joe Kent, the Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday in protest against the war on Iran.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote. So, what, in his estimation, was the reason for this war? Simple: The Israelis wanted it, and they get what they want.
Kent accused “Israeli officials” and their American fifth columnists of mounting a “misinformation campaign” that “sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.” They whispered sweet falsehoods into President Trump’s ear about the “path to a swift victory” before him. That was a “lie.” Indeed, it was the same lie “the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War.”
Israeli perfidy is so extensive that Kent even blamed them for the rise of ISIS in the last decade and the “manufactured” war against them in which the former director tragically lost his first wife, a Navy cryptologist killed in an ISIS suicide attack in Syria in 2018.
If these are the baseless suppositions Kent took with him into public service, Americans should be gratified by his departure.
Iran may be more of an existential threat to Israel, but the Iranian threat to U.S. civilians, service personnel, and interests abroad is constant and has been since 1979.
Iran has killed hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks throughout the decades in Lebanese and Saudi barracks, in U.S. embassies, and on the streets of Iraq. They have plotted assassination campaigns and terror attacks on U.S. soil targeting foreign dignitaries, American civil servants, and even U.S. presidents. They built the region’s most formidable arsenal of missiles, were racing toward a nuclear bomb that many Iranian officials insisted they had every intention of using, and aligned themselves with America’s foreign adversaries in an active campaign designed to overturn the U.S.-led world order.
