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[h=1]Four Years Ago, Trump Had No Clue Who Iran’s Suleimani Was. Now He May Have Kicked Off WWIII.[/h]
Mehdi Hasan
January 3 2020, 8:56 a.m.
President Donald Trump makes a video call to the troops stationed worldwide at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Dec. 24, 2019.
Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
In September 2015, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump
appeared on the syndicated radio show of conservative media star, Hugh Hewitt, to talk foreign policy. “Are you familiar with General Suleimani?” Hewitt asked the real estate mogul from Queens.
“Yes,” said Trump, before hesitating. “Go ahead, give me a little … tell me.”
When Hewitt told Trump that Suleimani “runs the Quds Forces,” Trump responded: “I think the Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated by us.”
“No, not the Kurds, the Quds Forces,” Hewitt interjected. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Quds Forces. The bad guys.”
“I thought you said Kurds,” a sheepish Trump replied.
Got that? Candidate Trump
confused the Quds Force, an elite Iranian military unit then led by high-profile Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, with the Kurds, a high-profile ethnic group in the Middle East.