President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Iran's Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani a few days ago following a Hezbollah mob's attacks on the United States' embassy in Baghdad. Now that Soleimani is dead, we're learning that this isn't the first opportunity a nation has had to kill the Iranian terrorist.
In fact, Israel was "on the verge" of killing Soleimani back in 2015 but the Obama administration put a stop to it. The administration alerted Iranian officials about Israel's plans and their close tracking of the military leader.
Despite what we know, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow the Obama administration never had the opportunity to take down Soleimani.
"There's been a bunch of reporting, over years that the U.S. had previously assessed that it could be more dangerous to kill Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, than to allow him to live, even when U.S. forces did potentially have a shot at him," Maddow said. "I just wanted to ask – there's a lot of discussion about that reporting now that the airstrike has happened and that Soleimani is dead. What's your – what can you tell us, in this non-classified setting here, about that reporting, whether it's accurate and is there any reason we should think that that calculation somehow changed before this airstrike?"
"Well, to my knowledge, Rachel, and certainly while I was National Security Advisor, the Obama administration was presented with an opportunity by our intelligence community or by the U.S. military to strike Qasem Soleimani," Rice explained.
Of course, the former National Security Advisor gave her take on what the Obama team would have done if that opportunity presented itself.
"Had we been presented with such an opportunity what we would have done is weighed, very carefully and very deliberately, the risks versus the potential rewards. We would have assessed all of the ways in which this could have enhanced our security and degraded our security and I think that what – judging from what I know and what we're likely to see I think that the real reason to believe that in all likelihood that the benefits will be outweighed by the risks," she said. "And we also would have taken all sorts of time and effort to prepare to ensure that our personnel, diplomatic and military, in the region were protected against the likelihood of Iranian retaliation."
Was Susan Rice unaware of the fact that Israel had the ability to take down Soleimani years ago? Or that the Obama administration put an end to that? Talk about lying by omission.
But then again, this isn't the first time she's had questionable judgment. Back in 1996, when she was the National Security Council’s senior director for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, she urged the White House to refuse the Sudanese offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the United States.
Then there was Benghazi, which she repeatedly blamed on some bogus anti-Muslim video that sparked "protests." It was later revealed that those talking points were blatantly false.
Susan Rice: "The Obama administration was not presented with an opportunity by our intelligence community or by the U.S. military to strike Qassem Soleimani." pic.twitter.com/y0CrcnfLvw
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 4, 2020