Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) suggested in an interview with Cosmopolitan published Thursday Americans should be worried about a World War III scenario.
Jen Ortiz, the magazine’s deputy editor, mentioned Warren’s opposition to the Trump administration’s elimination of Iran’s terror chief Qasem Soleimani during the exchange as well as President Trump’s threat to attack 52 Iranian sites.
“So if Trump moves ahead with ordering this sort of attack, would he be considered a war criminal? And should we be worried about World War III?” she asked.
“Let me start at the end. Yes, we should be worried about war,” Warren stated, conceding Soleimani was a “bad guy” but also referring to him as a “high-ranking Iranian government official.”
His elimination “has not made America safer,” she said — an assertion that contradicts the statement released by the Pentagon, which stated Soleimani was “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”
Warren continued:
Look where we are today. We have halted the actions against ISIS that we were taking with our allies. We have ordered American civilians out of the entire region because we are worried for their safety. And as you said, we have a president issuing threats to commit war crimes through his tweeting. That doesn’t make America safer. As I walked in, I was looking at the crawl on the TV screens, talking about ratcheting up fear of an Iranian response. What does that mean? The way I see this is that the president has failed in his principal duty. He has failed to keep us safer, and he has taken us directly to the edge of war. Americans don’t want more war in the Middle East. We’ve been there 20 years. We want to end the war in the Middle East and get out. And as president, that’s what I commit to do.
Warren questioned the timing of the strike on Soleimani during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, hinting that Trump could have made the move in order to distract from the looming impeachment trial in the Senate:
“Next week, the president of the United States could be facing an impeachment trial in the Senate,” she said.
“We know that he is deeply upset about that. I think that people are reasonably asking why this moment? Why does he pick now to take this highly inflammatory, highly dangerous action that moves us closer to war?” she asked.