Elizabeth Warren Blames Unrest on Trump’s ‘Reckless’ Decision to Ditch Iran Deal

Iran to unveil details on cuts to nuclear commitments
AFP
Hannah Knudsen

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday blamed President Trump for the unrest in Iran following news of an angry mob attacking the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, pointing to his “reckless” decision to walk away from the Iran Nuclear Deal.

A violent pro-Iran mob, angry over recent U.S. airstrikes against the Iran-backed Shiite militia Kataib Hezbollah (KH) in Iraq, attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday. The U.S. airstrikes came as a response to the death of a U.S. contractor in Kirkuk, Iraq.

As Breitbart News reported:

KH vowed to seek revenge for the airstrikes on Monday. Both KH and the Iranian military unit that supports it, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. The government of Saudi Arabia also described KH as one of several “terrorist militias supported by the Iranian establishment” in remarks on Tuesday condemning the assault on the U.S. embassy.

The attackers were able to smash open a gate and push into the embassy compound, lighting fires, smashing cameras, and painting messages such as “Closed in the name of resistance” on the walls. Gunshots were reportedly heard near the embassy, while tear gas and stun grenades were deployed by its defenders.

A uniformed militia fighter on the scene in Baghdad told Kurdish news service Rudaw that attacks were also planned against the U.S. consulates in Erbil and Basra, with the goal of destroying the consulates and killing everyone inside.

While the president said that Iran would be “held fully responsible” for “orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq,” several leftists, including Warren, placed the blame squarely on Trump.

“Trump’s reckless decisions to walk away from the Iran Deal and now to launch airstrikes in Iraq without Iraqi government consent have brought us closer to war and endangered U.S. troops and diplomats,” she wrote.

“We should end the forever wars, not start new ones,” she added:

Trump announced his historic decision to withdraw from the Iran Deal in May 2018, describing it as “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”

“A constructive deal could easily have been struck at the time,” Trump added. “But it wasn’t”:

He denounced the Obama administration for sending billions of dollars to a “regime of great terror” including vast sums of cash. He denounced Iran for using that money to further sponsor terrorism and violence in the Middle East, pointing out that the regime’s military budget had grown 40 percent since the deal was reached.

“At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: That a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program,” Trump continued.

“Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie,” he added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed intelligence in April 2018 that showed that Iran, indeed, lied about its nuclear weapons program.

As Breitbart News reported:

Netanyahu presented a trove of over 100,000 files, both paper and electronic, that he said Israel had obtained from a “vault” where Iran had stored an archive of its nuclear research. The files included diagrams of nuclear detonation devices, nuclear warhead designs, and plans for nuclear testing sites, among other incriminating information.

The intelligence haul, Netanyahu said, shows that Iran lied to the world when its leaders said it had never had a nuclear weapons program.

The news prompted unusual silence from supporters of the Iran deal, including Ben Rhodes, the former national security aide to former President Barack Obama who played an instrumental role in publicly selling the deal.

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