To hear the mainstream media talk about it, Americans are distraught that President Trump ordered an airstrike to take out the world’s N...
To hear the mainstream media talk about it, Americans are distraught that President Trump ordered an airstrike to take out the world’s No. 1 terrorist.
Uh, they aren’t.
According to a new poll from the uber-liberal HuffPost, 43% of registered voters surveyed said they supported Trump’s order to kill Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Within that number, 30% said they strongly approved.
On the other hand, just over a third of those polled — 38% — said they disapproved of the action, while 19% they just didn’t know how they felt (must be Bernie Sanders’ supporters).
While 84% of Republican and right-leaning independents said they approved of the hit, a surprising 29% of Democrats and left-leaning independents also approved (that’s nearly a third).
The poll found a few other interesting things, The Hill reported.
The survey also found that 43 percent of respondents think Trump did not plan carefully enough before ordering the airstrike, while 35 percent said he did plan carefully enough. A majority, 57 percent, also said that they think the strike makes further military conflict between the U.S. and Iran more likely than before. Just 8 percent said that the strike would make it less likely, while 20 percent said that it would make it neither more or less likely.Trump argued last week that he authorized the strike “to stop a war.”In addition, 44 percent of Americans polled said Trump should have received congressional authorization before ordering the strike on Soleimani. Thirty-four percent said he should not have gotten authorization from Congress. Top members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have said they were not briefed on Trump’s decision until after the fact.
On Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus [Ret.] said it is “impossible to overstate” the significance of Trump’s order to to strike Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander and the world’s No. 1 terrorist. He also called the strike “bigger” than the death of Osama bin Laden.
“It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the attack that takes out Qassem Soleimani and the number two militia leader in Iraq as well, who also never dared to set foot in Iraq during the surge after we’ve missed him and he escaped,” Petraeus said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That No. 2 leader was Iraqi paramilitary chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. “So this is bigger than bin Laden. It’s bigger than Baghdadi,” Petraeus said of the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who U.S. forces took out last October.
“This is the equivalent in U.S. terms of the CIA director, CENTCOM commander, JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Command) commander, and presidential envoy for the region for Iran,” Petraeus said of Soleimani’s role in the Iranian military.
Petraeus said the U.S. may not have gone far enough.
“It’s not quite enough, I don’t think, to say, well, they know how to reach us. I think we should actually be trying to reach out through intermediaries first, of course, as we have in the past, and then trying to come to some kind of agreement about how to get back to the nuclear deal that was had its strengths, as well as some shortcomings, to be sure, and then address the other legitimate grievances and issues that we have about militia activity, support and the missile program,” he said.
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