Morning Joe Host Asks Elizabeth Warren Point Blank if She Would Have Hit Soleimani and Her Answer is Pretty Much No
Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was asked point-blank if she would have given the order to kill Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, and she delivered a lengthy answer that amounted to a “no.”
Senator Warren sat for an extensive interview during Wednesday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a good portion of which was consumed by President Donald Trump’s decision to order Soleimani’s killing, and the aftermath of that decision.
Warren began the interview by turning a question about former Vice President Joe Biden into an attack on Trump’s “judgment,” the first of multiple opportunities she passed up to attack Biden. She called Trump’s decision a “dangerous act,” but added that he’d mishandled Iran “from the very beginning.”
Co-host Willie Geist returned to the theme moments later, asking Warren “Do you think that Joe Biden’s vote for the Iraq War, where we still are today and still are suffering the consequences, does that show a lack of judgment from Vice President Biden?”
“The Iraq war was a terrible mistake, and the United States has paid a huge cost, and so has much of the rest of the world,” Warren replied.
“Do you think it was a mistake for Joe Biden to vote for the war?” Geist asked.
“Look, I think the war was a mistake. And I think it was a mistake for anyone to vote for that war,” Warren replied.
“Including Joe Biden,” Geist said, to which Warren replied “Everyone.”
“So if you had General Soleimani in your sights, you said yesterday that he is a terrorist but you also said this morning that it was dangerous to kill him,” Geist said, and asked, “If your advisers were walking into the room and said ‘He just flew into the Baghdad airport, we’ve got eyes on him, we can take him out,’ this is somebody who has blood on his hands of American soldiers, what would you have said to your advisers in that moment?”
“You know, I think you have to remember that when Donald Trump made the decision to take out Soleimani, I don’t think anyone has argued it’s because that’s the first time they saw him or were able to do it,” Warren said.
“The question is, after this escalating series that Donald Trump has been engaged in that keep pushing us closer and closer to the brink of war, when we’re looking for a response to the next back and forth in this, what is the range of responses available to us, and what’s the judgment of the president of the United States?” Warren asked.
“If the strategy is to try to push us toward war, which certainly seems to be Donald Trump’s strategy, then the answer is pick the biggest, most incendiary, move the whole thing forward, and that was taking out Soleimani,” Warren said.
“But if the strategy is to try to find another response that dials down the tension, to work the back channels, to try to get Iran back to the negotiating table, then you want to be in a very different place on that spectrum,” Warren concluded.
Warren has not been shy about attacking Trump over the Soleimani strike and has repeatedly suggested it was ordered as a way to distract from and undermine the looming impeachment trial against Trump.
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.
