Former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Calls Iran Strike ‘Catastrophe’ and ‘Strategic Disaster’

Former Colin Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson savaged President Donald Trump’s strike against Iran on MSNBC, calling it a “catastrophe” and a “strategic disaster.”

“Let’s just look at what we did. The act we performed despite its tactical positive nature perhaps, was a strategic disaster,” Wilkerson told Joy Reid Saturday. “We are now going to have to occupy Iraq and good luck doing that. 165,000 Iraqi soldiers – however bad they may be – vastly outnumber the few thousand soldiers we have in Iraq. So good luck with that we’re going back to 2004 and 2005 … maybe Mark Esper will say ‘it’s not an insurgency’ but I guarantee there will be an insurgency and it will be Sunnis and Shia attacking U.S. facilities and troops in Iraq. So are you ready for another 165,000 Americans to deploy to Iraq? I don’t think Trump’s base is.”

“This is a catastrophe largely created by us,” he continued on AM Joy, harshly criticizing the military strike that killed top Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani and plunged the Middle East into high tension.

“This group is the most incompetent bunch of liars I have ever encountered. I served an administration that had skillful liars in it like [Dick] Cheney and so forth, but this administration gets caught every day in its lies and in the aftermath of those lies,” he told Reid. “These people are caught in their lies every day and it seems like it has no impact on the people who are supporting them – the Americans who compose President Trump’s base. I hope I’m wrong, I hope it’s slowly eroding that base because any person out there can see that they’re lying.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

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