With the threat of war with Iran looming larger than ever after U.S. strikes, some former members of President George W. Bush's administration are sending encouragement to President Donald Trump's acts of provocation.
On MSNBC Saturday, Joy Reid warned that that might not be the best idea for them.
"Remember the early 2000s?" said Reid. "The American president and his administration insisted that after 9/11, we couldn't afford to wait for the threat of Iraq to become more imminent. We had to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction and even nukes, probably. Keep in mind, Iraq basically had no air force that could even reach us, nearly 7,000 miles away, even if they did have nukes or WMDs, which, of course, they didn't. Remember that? Well, welcome to your deja vu."
"Donald Trump and his administration, without providing any real proof, wants you to believe that they had to take out the top military leader in Iran, Qassim Suleimani, because he posed an imminent threat," said Reid. "And Trump knows that because the same intelligence community that he has called liars and accused of plotting a coup against him proved it to him. Yeah, okay. Did they run that proof by Vladimir Putin first to make it believable to you, Mr. President? Meanwhile, unlike the Bush team, Team Trump isn't even bothering to do a misleading, lie-filled U.N. presentation. They just jumped right in with the drones."
"And over the past 24 hours, as this escalating mess unfolds, various prominent Iraq war supporters have stepped forward to bless us with their opinions of the raid," continued Reid. "Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, who, to be clear, has been jonesing for war with Iran since the Bush era, said, 'Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.' Perfect! Bolton is echoing a narrative that will sound familiar to those of you old enough to remember 2003, when we were told by our government that we were invading Iraq, a sovereign nation, to liberate them from their murderous dictator who was allegedly building a war chest of nuclear weapons and planning to wage a war on us at any minute! And don't forget the lying implication by the Bush administration that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, which he didn't. That helped make the war much more marketable."
"Pro tip: The Bush White House alumni might want to sit this one out, because we all remember all of that!" concluded Reid. "There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but once we were done, there were American torture chambers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi soldiers and dead Iraqis, period, tens of thousands of injured or dead American troops, and it turns out all for nothing, for a lie. and now we're stuck with a giant, enormous Iraq embassy, the largest U.S. embassy in the world, that is to be defended by this guy. The bone spurs guy."
Watch below:
