President Donald Trump "got bad advice" to kill Qassem Soleimani, because while it was intended to stop potential attacks on Americans, it now guarantees it and is essentially the "death of diplomacy," according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
"While Soleimani may have been plotting attacks and probably was, it's now a certainty there will be attacks in revenge for his killing," Paul, a notorious opponent to military action in the Middle East, told CNN's "The Situation Room."
Paul lamented "this has emboldened the hard-liners" in Iran, which now will respond with a strike as opposed to the desired, and U.S.-stated, goal of coming to the negotiation table.
"This is sad," Paul told host Wolf Blitzer. "The death of Soleimani, I think, is the death of diplomacy with Iran. I don't see an off-ramp. I don't see a way out of this."
Paul rejected Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's seeing this as the way to get Iran to come to the negotiation table after a decertification of the Obama-era Iran nuclear agreement and a maximum economic pressure campaign.
"No naive child would believe that," Paul added. "You would have to be brain dead to believe that we tear up the agreement, we put an embargo on you, and we kill your major general, and they're just going to crawl back to the table and say, what do you want, America?
"Military escalation is really what you would predict with this."
Paul wanted to be clear, though, "nothing justifies their military action, but it is predictable given what path we've chosen."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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