According to a report at the Daily Beast, plans to go after Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani were months in the making and, after Donald Trump ordered his assassination, Pentagon and State Department officials were forced to scuttle their plans to handle the fallout because of how the president reacted in the aftermath.
The reports states, “The ensuing days became a mad dash to reconcile the intense intra-administration tensions over what the intelligence actually said about Iranian plots, and how best to sell their case to the American public. At the very top was a president who stewed and complained to staff about how the killing he’d just ordered might negatively affect his re-election prospects and ensnare him in a quagmire in the Middle East of his own creation.”
Plans for Soleimani were in the works for months, the report notes, and after the president chose the option of killing the popular Iranian leader and put it in motion not everyone was on the same page about how to sell it to the public. Continue reading.