Former SEAL and Commander of US Special Operations Command Retired Admiral William McRaven was in command of the SEAL Team 6 operation that ended Osama bin Laden’s life. Sunday, he issued a warning for all Americans. He said that Iran will have to retaliate against Israel, the US, or both for the assassination of its top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The hit had all the fingerprints of Israel’s Mossad.
Admiral McRaven appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Military.com reported that he said:
‘The Iranians are going to be in a position where they have to retaliate. I don’t see any way around it. [Iran is] going to have to save face. And so now the issue becomes, what does that retaliation look like?’
Admiral McRaven said:
“The rest of the world is looking for a Biden administration to come in. The international community is concerned that President Trump is “not a coalition builder.’
“The rest of the world is looking for a Biden administration to come in,” retired Navy Adm. William McRaven, who led raid that killed bin Laden, says.
The international community is concerned that President Trump is “not a coalition builder,” he adds. https://t.co/BhAIlCh4N0 pic.twitter.com/lrzH3fGvIu
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 29, 2020
McRaven continued:
‘The concerns the international community has had for quite some time is that President Trump is not a coalition builder. He doesn’t believe in alliances. The problem is if we don’t abide by our own treaties, if we don’t recognize and support our own treaties, then who in the international community is going to want to partner with us in the future?’
‘So President Trump has been playing a short game, I would offer. I hope President Biden will come in and strengthen these alliances, strengthen these coalitions, get back into some of these organizations, as imperfect as they might be, and begin to play the long game.’
On Friday, Iran’s state media announced Fakhrizadeh was assassinated. Iranian officials pointed fingers at Israel for the attack and have promised retaliation:
‘The Iranians don’t want to go to war with us. We don’t want to go to war with Iran. So everybody needs to do the best they can to kind of lower the temperature and try not to get this into an escalation mode.’
Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Bill Mullen was on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. He said he was alarmed by Donald Trump firing the top Pentagon leadership team and installing an entirely new team. This was an odd move, given that the president had less than two months left in his tenure. Admiral Mullen said:
‘I’m actually very concerned about the Trump loyalists who have now gone to work in the Pentagon.’
Trump canned Defense Secretary Mark Esper on November 9. Then, the president replaced him with retired Army Colonel and Special Forces officer Christopher Miller in an acting role. Mullen said “a whole host of other people left the building (Pentagon):”
‘[It was] pretty difficult to think that over the course of 50 or 60 days you can do something constructive, but you can do something that’s really destructive.’
The only thing that Trump had to say about Iran’s threats of retribution was a retweeted statement from Israeli commentator Yossi Melman. The Israeli said:
‘Fakhrizadeh’s death was “a major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a last-minute trip which included Israel, leaving pundits questioning his timing, according to CNN. Why now? The State Department officials worried about his unprecedented trip, saying “this was Pompeo’s call:”
‘This is something he wanted to do. It was not a visit that State Department career officials suggested.’
After the assassination in Iraq, one wondered whether Pompeo’s trip to the West Bank was just a smokescreen:
‘[His trip was the] first time a top American diplomat has visited a settlement in the West Bank, considered illegal under international law. For any other Secretary of State, this move would have been unprecedented, breaking with decades of US foreign policy and ignoring UN Security Council resolutions.’
Central Command announced that the US Central Command had flown an “unspecified number of B-52H Stratofortress bombers” from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to an unannounced base in the Mideast on November 21. Supposedly, it was to “deter aggression and reassure U.S. partners and allies.”
The Pentagon and the Navy’s 5th Fleet out of Bahrain announced a shift just hours before the news was released about the Iranian scientist’s assassination. The carrier Nimitz and its strike group came back from the naval exercises with our allies in the Indian Ocean and moved to the Gulf.
The Pentagon and the 5th Fleet chalked it up to a coincidence, saying it had nothing to do with “specific threats.” Instead, they attributed the move to providing security as the US troops in Afghanistan drew down.
Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, claimed the attack on Fakhrizadeh was completed “with American bullets,” whether. literally or figuratively, according to The Iran’s Tasnim news agency.
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