Trump trying to start a war with Iran to distract from impeachment troubles
The Trump administration is hell-bent on starting a war with Iran, and North Carolina military families are caught right in the middle.
3,500 soldiers based at Fort Bragg are being sent to the Middle East — part of the rising tensions with Iran created by Trump’s unilateral assassination of an Iranian official. Some military families say they feel blindsided by Trump’s haphazard escalation.
Ms. Morales, who arrived at Fort Bragg in September, said that her husband’s last duty station had been in Alaska, where he did not have rapid deployments. In the past, he usually had about a four-month notice. This time, the heads-up came hours before he needed to report on base.
She said she planned to temporarily move to Las Vegas to stay with her mother. She will dive into her studies to be a veterinary technician, she said. And she will try to remain calm. “Just trying to keep my head away from the news,” she said, “and, you know, not looking at Facebook as much.”
On Facebook, the wife of a recently deployed soldier confessed, “I’m slowly losing my sanity,” noting that she was pregnant and 12 hours away from the rest of her family.
At a local brewery, Ashley Thompson, a teacher, wondered whether any of her students would return to class next week with altered family situations.
“I’ll find out whether any of my kids had any parents that had been deployed,” she said. “That’ll be hard.”
Trump single-handedly created this conflict first by pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran and then by assassinating an Iranian official who was visiting Iraq without seeking congressional approval. Trump’s unprecedented belligerence has greatly damaged American interests in the Middle East and is putting U.S. troops at risk.
Before he became president, Trump repeatedly claimed (incorrectly) that President Obama would try to start a war with Iran in order to improve his own popularity at home. Now that Trump has been impeached, he is clearly doing the exact same thing he falsely predicted that Obama would do.
Trump has already shown his indifference for military families by cutting $80 million from North Carolina military bases in order to build his racist vanity wall on the border. Now, he is putting the lives of North Carolina soldiers at risk by trying to start a war with Iran.
Bottom Line: Starting an illegal war is shameful enough, but starting an illegal war in order to distract voters from the impeachment proceedings is downright vile. In this case, “supporting the troops” means stopping Trump from putting them in harm’s way.
