US House Speaker Pelosi says Trump's order to assassinate Soleimani has not made America safer
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she does not believe the administration of President Donald Trump had made America safer by assassinating Iranian Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, calling the US attack “provocative" and "disproportionate."
“Last week, the administration conducted a provocative, disproportionate airstrike against Iran which endangered Americans and did so without consulting Congress,” Pelosi, the highest ranking Democrat in Congress, said on Thursday at her weekly news conference.
"What happened, in the view of many of us, is not promoting peace, but an escalation," she added.
"I do not believe in terms of what is in the public domain, that they have made the country safer by what they did," she said.
Pelosi said that when she was briefed on the airstrike over the weekend by Secretary of US Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, she said that they were “disdainful in terms of not consulting Congress” and “dismissive.”
Pelosi spoke hours before the House is scheduled to vote on a war powers resolution to prevent Trump Trump's ability to launch military action against Iran.
“Today, to honor our duty to keep the American people safe, the House will move forward with a War Powers Resolution to limit the President’s military actions regarding Iran,” Pelosi said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Members of Congress have serious, urgent concerns about the Administration’s decision to engage in hostilities against Iran and about its lack of strategy moving forward,” Pelosi said in her statement.
The war powers resolution will likely pass in the House of Representatives, where Democrats hold the majority, but its passage in the Senate, where Trump’s fellow Republicans have majority, is not clear.
The US military carried out an airstrike on the direction of Trump at Baghdad’s international airport early on Friday, assassinating Iranian Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani and the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, as well as eight other companions.
Early on Wednesday, Iran responded to the assassination, striking the American airbase of Ain al-Assad in Anbar province in western Iraq and another in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
CNN said in an editorial that the US assassination of General Soleimani has brought America to the “brink of its first hot war” with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
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