Donald Trump’s former counterterror chief Joe Kent has said the US President was “led to believe” that the US military could go in and remove the Iranian regime after the success of the operation against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
Kent, who resigned from his post as the director of the US National Counterterrorism Centre after the Iran war broke out, said that a “very small circle” around Trump didn’t let him hear any alternatives.
“Post June, they created a very small circle around President Trump, and he didn’t hear any alternatives. Then Venezuela happened, and President Trump was led to believe that our military could just go in and remove leaders and would work out flawlessly,” Kent told Russia Today.
Kent said that after protests erupted in Iran in January over economic mismanagement and rising cost of living, Israel convinced the Trump administration to bomb the country and take out some of the leadership that was against the protestors, who they hoped would take over automatically after the leaders were killed.
“In essence, and this sounds like Iraq, we would be greeted as liberators. We would bomb the IRGC, who were killing the protestors, and then the protestors would take over,” Kent said about the Israeli pitch, adding that it was sold to Trump as an easy operation.
This comes as both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have denied that Tel Aviv convinced him to go to war with Iran, which began with the killing of Tehran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28.
According to the former official, Trump was sceptical about the operation, but the “echo chamber with the Truman show” around him “did a great job”.
Joe Kent’s repeated claims about Israel’s role in the US-Iran war
This is not the first time that Joe Kent has suggested that the US-Iran war was actually an Israeli idea. In his resignation letter that he wrote to Donald Trump earlier this month, he said that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and “it was clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
This goes entirely contrary to what the Trump officials and Israeli administration have said about the reasons for the start of the war, which has upended the global economy and sent oil prices soaring.
Joe Kent served in the US Army for 20 years. After retiring from the Army in 2018, he served as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Centre, and eventually entered public life. As a Republican, he also ran for the US Congress.
In his letter, he also mentioned how, in 2019, his then-wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing while serving in Syria.
Later in the month, when Trump said that he was negotiating with Iran to end the war, Kent warned him, saying that he needs to “restrain” Israel first.
“Step 1 in deescalation must be restraining the Israelis, otherwise all efforts to negotiate will follow this pattern: POTUS publicly announces deescalation. Israel takes major strikes to destroy the negotiations & in turn, weaken our ability to negotiate. The war accelerates,” Joe Kent wrote on X last week.
