National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent says Trump “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
The Trump administration’s top official on counterterrorism has resigned from his position, citing opposition to the war in Iran, and urged the president to “reverse course”.
In a letter posted on Tuesday to his X account, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent said that Iran posed “no imminent threat” to the US and claimed that the Trump administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Kent, 45, is a US special forces and CIA veteran whose wife, navy cryptologic technician Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019.
This took courage and we should celebrate this. I can already see people pointing fingers at him; that is worth doing eventually, but this is not the time for that.
Let’s recognize good behavior and make sure we encourage more people to do the same.
It’s good that a “true believer” stepped down and I’m all for it. His reason for doing so isn’t super noble though. MAGA Classic isn’t a whole lot better than New MAGA. They really just have different awful priorities. And both parties in a ‘wrong kind of asshole’ fight are still assholes.
I think this says more about how universal opposition to the war is than anything particularly good about Kent.