Democrats who have criticized the killing of General Qassem Soleimani of Iran do not seem to realize exactly who it is they are defending, a highly decorated military veteran told Fox News.
Retired Green Beret Master Sgt. Terry Schappert said that Soleimani should be remembered as someone who left his brutal mark on the families of American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq and elsewhere, in a biting rebuke of Democrats who have downplayed the danger the Iranian general truly posed.
“If you’re in my community, it’s pretty safe to say that you’ve probably buried somebody who was killed by him [Soleimani], you know someone who’s lost a limb or been catastrophically wounded, and you know a Gold Star family who has been destroyed by this guy,” he said.
Green Beret blasts Dems
While many Americans had not heard of Soleimani prior to his death, he has been described as one of Iran’s most powerful figures and a key player in the regime’s operations throughout the Middle East. The Trump administration has said that Soleimani was behind a “reign of terror” and was planning more threats when he died.
As leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Soleimani was in charge of the regime’s foreign operations throughout the Middle East, including in Iraq, where Iranian-made bombs killed hundreds of American troops, the Trump administration said. Schappert said that most families of fallen soldiers likely knew who Soleimani was, despite Democrats’ attempts to minimize the Iranian general’s significance.
“If you can’t care about that, you can care about all the people he’s killed over there…Iraq, Syria, Lebanon…his own country…he’s murdered and tortured people,” Schappert said.
The State Department said that Soleimani’s killing is at least as consequential as that of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but Democrats have slammed the strike that killed him as a heedless escalation in tensions with Iran that threatens open war.
Many Republicans have responded by accusing Democrats of defending a terrorist and engaging in appeasement of the Iranian regime.
Trump accused of “war crimes”
As in the wake of al-Baghdadi’s killing, the Washington Post, which had described Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar,” was mocked for referring to Soleimani as a “revered” figure in Iran. The rapidly evolving Iran situation has become a political inkblot test, with most Republicans praising Trump for taking decisive action to establish deterrence against a rogue regime, as Democrats accuse the president of plunging the world into a dangerous war.
With Iran announcing Sunday that it will no longer honor the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Democrats have slammed Trump for paving a path to war by ripping up the international agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions — but Republicans have said that Iran was never interested in diplomacy with the West. Relations between Tehran and Washington have deteriorated consistently since Trump left the Iran deal in 2018 and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran’s economy.
With Iranian retaliation expected at any time, Democrats have accused Trump of contemplating “war crimes” for threatening to target any of 52 “cultural sites” in Iran, and Democratic lawmakers have introduced a resolution condemning Trump for taking military action without authorization from Congress. But the Trump administration has maintained that Trump’s strike was a perfectly legal act against a regime that has been at war with America for decades.
“This was legal, totally justified and damn, it couldn’t have been done much better,” Schappert concluded.
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