President Donald Trump said he was set to assassinate Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, contradicting his earlier denial that he’d sought to kill him, Bloomberg reports.
“I would have rather taken him out,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox News. “I had him all set, Mattis didn’t want to do it.”
Trump said during the Fox interview that he doesn’t regret deciding against moving forward with the killing, but faulted former Defense Secretary James Mattis, whom he called “highly overrated” and a “bad person.” The ex-Pentagon chief, who left the administration in January 2019, has been critical of Trump.
“To me he was a terrible general; he was a bad leader,” Trump said of Mattis.
A book written by journalist Bob Woodward in 2018 said Trump urged Mattis to come up with a plan to kill Assad, but that the then-defense secretary didn’t go along with the president’s demands. The discussions about killing Assad, according to the book, came after a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017 that was blamed on the Syrian government.
U.S. policy for more than four decades has generally banned government involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders.
The U.S. launched cruise missiles at Syria in response to Assad’s chemical attack, but the targets were limited to military installations.
After details of Woodward’s book became public, Trump denied that he’d sought Assad’s death.
“No, that was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated,” the president told reporters in September 2018. “And it should not have been written about in the book. It’s just more fiction. The book is total fiction.”
During the Tuesday interview, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade tried to temper Trump’s criticism of Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general who led U.S. troops in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kilmeade said while the two men did not “gel,” Mattis is a “great American.”
“I don’t say he is a good American or a bad American. I just say he didn’t do a good job. I let him go,” Trump said of Mattis.
Mattis in December 2018 resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
Trump has faced scrutiny of his views on military service members after the Atlantic magazine reported this month that that he privately referred to U.S. Marines buried at a cemetery in France as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump again denied making the remarks on Tuesday, calling the story “phony.”
The president’s comments came on the same day he is hosting a White House ceremony in which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain sign agreements establishing formal diplomatic relations with Israel. Trump has touted the pacts as major progress toward Middle East peace.
SOURCE: BLOOMBERG