Originally Posted by
Earl
It’s easy to blame Trump. But the Iran plane disaster isn’t his fault.
Kathleen Parker
Columnist
Jan. 10, 2020 at 7:07 p.m. EST
"It may be tempting to blame President Trump for the downed passenger jet in Iran this week, but a linear conclusion it is not.
At the least, such a judgment is premature and rigged with the politics of emotion.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who sits on both the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, essentially said the president was at fault for the downing of the plane, while media reports from Canada, which lost at least 63 countrymen in the disaster, featured mourners pointing fingers at the United States.
Officials from the United States, Britain and Canada have all said that intelligence reports strongly suggest that the airliner was hit by an Iranian surface-to-air missile. Iran called that assessment a “big lie,” instead blaming technical issues.
During an interview on Thursday on CNN, Speier insisted that the disaster was “collateral damage” from Trump’s “provocative” actions toward Iran. When pressed during another CNN interview on Friday, she said that, while she wasn’t placing blame on Trump specifically for Iran’s apparent shoot-down of the plane, “it all emanates from the killing of [Maj. Gen Qasem] Soleimani” ordered by Trump. Speier added that, in the wake of the airstrike that targeted the Quds Force commander, Iran is “providing vengeance . . . to the United States,” which, though useful to the narrative dispensary, isn’t supported by logic in the case of the airliner. Never mind the worrisome possibility that Trump’s aphasia-like means of expression may be a contagious tic.
Were Trump a more trustworthy president — and his foreign policy more than just a “series of impulses,” as my colleague Fareed Zakaria so aptly put it recently — then people might be more inclined to wait out an investigation. In times of shock and grief, we humans quickly seek to assign blame, if only in part to designate a target for the anger that follows.
But, even considering Trump’s dubious foreign policy record and the Soleimani assassination, laying even partial blame on the U.S. president for a crime (or accident) that Iran apparently committed doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of fairness or logic.
Consider: Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 took off from Tehran with 82 Iranians on board. By what strain of logic would killing so many of one’s own citizens hurt another nation? No doubt, Iran would love to “provide vengeance,” but Iranian officials announced early on that they would seek reprisal against the United States by striking military targets. Thus, this week, just hours before the airliner exploded midair, Iran fired more than a dozen short-range ballistic missiles at Iraqi military bases that housed U.S. troops."
wapo.com
Only the Democrat Socialist apologists for a terrorist were blaming President Trump.
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