For Some Never Trumpers, Killing Suleimani Was Finally Something to Like

Although it remains far from clear that Mr. Trump wants a full-scale conflict with Iran as he kicks off an election year — speaking to reporters on Sunday, he repeated his view that invading Iraq was “the worst decision ever made in the history of our country” — the concern is further stoked by similarities that some analysts see between his justification for the Suleimani strike and that of the Bush administration’s march to war in 2003.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former top State Department Middle East official in the Obama administration, said it was troubling to see a new administration “making a set of expansive claims about intelligence information and creating a sense of urgency that it’s not clear is actually backed up by the intelligence.”

Mr. Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have insisted that General Suleimani was killed to pre-empt planning for attacks that could have killed hundreds of American troops and diplomats in the Middle East, but they have declined to provide details. In 2002, Bush administration officials distorted intelligence to claim, falsely, that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

“There are elements of this that on the surface look like 2002 and 2003,” said James Mann, who has written several books about how Washington thinking shapes American foreign policy. He cited the Trump administration’s claim that it acted pre-emptively and the conservative belief in the efficacy of military force.

Mr. Mann, the author of “The Great Rift,” a forthcoming account of Mr. Cheney’s rivalry with Secretary of State Colin Powell, added that it was difficult to say whether the strike portends anything about Mr. Trump’s evolving worldview. “What foreign policy thought? I find that Trump doesn’t seem to have an overall philosophy.”

Although Mr. Bolton is gone from the West Wing and Ms. Cheney has little sway there, Mr. Pompeo’s messaging often echoes themes from think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, including the importance of “restoring deterrence” against Iran.

Days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, for instance, Michael Rubin, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington who also signed a 2016 letter opposing Mr. Trump on foreign policy grounds, wrote on the institute’s website that General Suleimani should no longer operate with impunity, and that Trump officials “should direct significant assets to seek the capture or killing of Soleimani.”

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