US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has made remarks that clearly contradict earlier comments by President Donald Trump who alleged Iranian top commander Qassem Soleimani had been plotting attacks against four US embassies before he was assassinated in an American airstrike.
Trump personally ordered the drone strikes that targeted Lieutenant General Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) as well as eight other companions on January 3.
Speaking on Fox News Friday, the US president alleged that “four embassies” would have been targeted in the US had not carried out the operation, but failed to provide any details to substantiate his claims.
“We will tell you probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad,” Trump claimed. “I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.”
Commenting on Trump’s remarks, however, Esper told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that had had seen no intelligence to suggest that those attacks had indeed been planned.
“I didn’t see one with regard to four embassies,” he said when asked if there had been any tangible threat prior to the US airstrikes.
In a separate interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Esper appeared to row back on his earlier comments, saying he shared Trump’s view that Iran was planning attacks against multiple embassies, yet he did not confirm intelligence supporting the president’s claims.
“I’m not going to discuss intelligence matters on the show,” Esper said.
Members of Congress have also questioned whether an Iran attack was imminent, which the Trump administration said was the case in defending the decision to conduct the strikes in intelligence briefings before lawmakers.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday called the killing “provocative and disproportionate,” and other members of Congress said they were unconvinced following the closed-door briefing.
In an interview with CBS, Adam Schiff, Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, criticized Trump for his remarks on Fox News, saying that he was “fudging the intelligence.”
In retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani, Iran targeted the American airbase of Ain al-Assad in Anbar province in western Iraq and another in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region on Wednesday.
A USA Today/Ipsos poll released Thursday found that Americans, by 55%-24%, said they believed the killing of General Soleimani has made the United States less safe, rejecting a fundamental argument the Trump administration has made that the assassination made the US safer.
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