Tucker is really playing fast and loose with that statement. For starters, nobody in the Administration is saying that we're going to go to war with Iran, and there's no way in hell Iran wants an open war with us either. So to some extent, Tucker has set up a strawman. Then there's all this:
On Monday's Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News host chided his colleagues for readily believing U.S. intelligence that the risk of terrorism from Iran has gone up prior to the death of General Qassem Soleimani. "Seems like about 20 minutes ago, we were denouncing these people as the deep state... Now for some reason, we do trust them, implicitly and completely," Carlson said.
I'm not aware of anyone who considers Pompeo part of the deep state, and the problems with the CIA were with respect to intereference with domestic politics. Foreign military intelligence has not been the issue.
"It's harder to get rich and powerful during peacetime, so our leaders have a built-in bias for war," Carlson declared. "So they decided on television studios over the weekend to describe in detail the type of violence they are prepared to wreak on a country very few of them know about."
This is just plain annoying. The "52 hostages" thing, the threats, etc.., are all messaging to Iran, for Iranian consumption, and for the purpose of convincing them that any escalation will backfire. To take those statements -- as Tucker does -- as some sort of formal desire for more war is just ridiculous. They're clearly intended to
deter an Iranian response.
"It's hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, people didn't consider Iran an imminent threat," he noted, criticizing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's reasoning for the airstrike which killed Soleimani.
What "people" is Tucker talking about? All the "people" who hadn't been reading ME intelligence reports for the last couple of month, as had Pompeo and others? Just because
Tucker didn't consider Iran to be an imminent threat to U.S. personnel doesn't mean that the people whose daily job it was to assess those threats agreed.
"Iranian saboteurs were not committing acts of terror in our cities. Oh, but our leaders tell us, 'They were about to any second! That's why we struck first.'"
Okay, now Tucker is just flat out lying, which is actually very disappointing to me. In this statement, he's claiming that our leaders are telling us (and presumably lying) that we struck first because attacks against "our cities" were imminent. But literally on the exact same day he made that statement, he also criticized the attack because
Pompeo acknowledged that the threats were only overseas, and
not against "our cities". Check out from about 2:20 to 3:20:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=WlcsuJtXYkM&feature=emb_logoThat's just really disappointing because I generally like Tucker.
