Welcome to pushback. I'm Aaron Mate.

The U.S. assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, is the culmination

of three years of Trump administration war-mongering against Iran.

It began with the sabotage of the Iran nuclear deal and has continued with a number of escalatory steps,

none more brazen and potentially catastrophic as this murder inside Iraq.

Democratic centrists are criticizing Trump, but they have played a role here too.

Back in 2017, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, Democrats in Congress voted for sanctions

on Iran that helped Trump kill the nuclear deal.

And even recently, Democrats overwhelmingly voted for a massive military budget and helped

kill a proposal from Bernie Sanders and Rokana that opposed unauthorized military action

against Iran.

Well, earlier I spoke to Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

Jamal Abdi, welcome to pushback.

The line given to us by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is that Qasem Soleimani was planning attacks on U.S. forces, and that was the

reason for his assassination. Do you buy that rationale? Not for a minute. Now, you know, was

Soleimani potentially drawing up plans for further, you know, proxy attacks on U.S. interests and

things of that nature, potentially. Was the U.S. drawing up similar plans, potentially? This has been a back and forth that has

been going on for, you know, three years now. And the notion that there was some imminent attack

in which the U.S. had to take Soleimani out, and by doing so, was going to prevent this attack,

it just defied reason. It pretty clearly, just another lie that has been put out by this

administration that really feels like a reverse engineering

of a legal basis for this strike

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