NEW YORK — If you thought the ayatollahs were responsible for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet over Tehran on January 8 think again. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s once-highly scenic prime minister, has found the culprit. He seems to blame President Donald J. Trump.
“I think if there were no tensions, if there was [sic] no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families,” Trudeau told Global News Television, referring to the 57 Canadians who were aboard the annihilated aircraft. The “escalation” appears to pin the responsibility for this atrocity on President Trump rather than Iran’s trigger-happy military and their Islamofascist overlords. After Iranian General Qassem Soleimani supervised violent and destructive protests against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, (among much more mayhem), Trump ordered a January 2 drone strike that blasted this terror master to bits.
Iran retaliated against Soleimani’s pulverization by launching rockets against Iraqi bases where U.S. troops are stationed. Most of these projectiles missed. None proved lethal, although 11 Americans GIs later were diagnosed with concussion injuries, for which they are being treated.
Rather than escalate this conflict any further, President Trump accepted Tehran’s ineffective tat as a tolerable answer to his tit. What could have devolved into total war between the US and Iran became a case of even-Steven?
The world breathed a huge sigh of relief.
This makes the words of the previously stunning Trudeau as ugly as the beard he has grown, in a tragic act of self-vandalism.
It is incredibly absurd and morally warped to accuse President Trump of doing something that happened by accident, which is how the incompetent Iranians explain this anti-aircraft attack that killed all 176 passengers and crew members aboard Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. If Iranians are not to blame because they unintentionally destroyed the jet, how does this lack of culpability suddenly turn into a guilty verdict against President Trump?
This proves, yet again, that for those on the Left, everything that goes wrong bears the president’s fingerprints. As I write these words, it is 21 degrees Fahrenheit in Manhattan. My Democrat neighbors surely are pointing their fingers at “Trump” for tonight’s chill. Of course, they would add, this proves the existence of so-called “global warming,” which (as everyone knows) the former real-estate magnate secretly launched in 1985, from high atop Trump Tower.
Meanwhile, the Democrat House voted to deny President Trump the authority to launch hostilities against Iran without congressional approval. Yes, it is Congress’s job to declare war.
However, short of that, there are times when America has bad guys in its crosshairs, and the commander-in-chief has mere minutes to decide whether or not to pull the trigger. Had the president waited to consult all of Congress or even the so-called “Gang of Eight” top Senate and House leaders, that window of opportunity could have slammed shut. The ability to smash Soleimeni via drone was such a case. Also, the risk of leaks flowing down Capitol Hill was simply unacceptable.
Remember: Soleimani and his bomb-planting ilk killed some 600 U.S. GIs. He led the aforementioned onslaught against America’s embassy in Baghdad. And he reportedly planned to hit other U.S. diplomatic missions. As a wise congressman recently explained, whether these assaults were imminent or not misses the point. If a sniper stops to reload, that’s the perfect time to take him out. One should not wait until his bullets go from imminent to airborne.
How much longer would President Trump’s Democrat enemies, and a handful of GOP naysayers, have expected him to wait before liquidating this terror master?
And had Trump not hit Soleimani, and Iran had struck any of these American targets, THE VERY SAME Trump haters would be busy battering him with sledgehammers for not connecting the dots or otherwise preventing these attacks.
It makes no difference. Whatever President Trump does, his foes kick him from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.
