Trump's main obsession doesn't make America any safer

The trouble with reprisals is that they never end. The resentment over loss always creates a new target, and retaliation itself spawns another cycle of violence.

News that the West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue was targeted by a naturalized immigrant from Lebanon whose relatives were killed in a recent Israeli air strike felt as inevitable as it does irrational. His truck smashed into a temple where young children were in classes, burst into flames, and the driver apparently killed himself.

At Old Dominion University in Virginia, it was a former Army National Guard member imprisoned for attempting to aid the Islamic State who opened fire on a classroom before ROTC students subdued and killed him, authorities said. He had yelled "Allahu Akbar" before the shooting, which left one person dead and two wounded, according to the FBI.

The only surprise is that both cases seemed personal rather than a specific expression of "asymmetric" warfare involving organized acts even by "lone wolf" reprisals.

Only a few months ago, the FBI intercepted an Islamic State terror plots seemed to show ISIS regaining its powerful appeal among young men in the West who have been radicalized online, in part, by the war in Gaza and now Iran, terrorism experts are saying. The number of federal court cases involving attacks and disrupted plots by ISIS-inspired suspects has risen since the conflict in Gaza started, according to the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska.

The incidents in Michigan and Virginia come amid heightened concern about Iranian and Hezbollah cells globally being triggered into action by the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran.

In Gaza, in the West Bank, in Israel, in the eastern Ukraine provinces, military attacks are leaving new generations to rise amid promises to avenge the deaths of parents and relatives in an endless cycle.

Iranian Ripples
By whatever justification that Donald Trump uses each day – they keep changing – at base is an undisturbed grudge that Iran has been killing Americans and allies for 47 years, either directly or through proxy groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis or Islamic State fighters. That exactly mirrors the reprisal thinking that apparently is motivating this week's acts.

For Trump, reprisal and retaliation are features of his presidency, not errors. It is reprisal thinking that is pushing for investigation and prosecution of political foes or endless attempts to rewrite the histories of Jan. 6 rioting or the 2020 elections or even the Epstein Files mess. The choice of weapons varies, of course, but the intent is the same.

To have entered this war with Iran now, without specific immediate cause, is to raise retribution and reprisal to official state-backed policy. We should not be shocked that a militarily weakened Iran wants to fight back with mines in the Gulf to halt global shipping or by awakening faraway cells that can launch individual terror incidents. Even if Michigan and Virginia were not specific Iranian plots, they show that such attacks are anticipatable or predictable.

We should be sobered by the idea that Team Trump's reprisal thinking has resulted in dismissal of a third of FBI counter-intelligence agents, many of whom had specific understanding of Iranian militancy, and an equal effort to rid the Justice Department of its associated prosecutorial experience or redirected many FBI agents to Homeland Security deportation campaigns.

U.S. counterintelligence readiness focuses on detecting, deterring, and neutralizing foreign intelligence threats through the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. Trump's policies under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have been to "restructure" national counterintelligence to focus on investigating "politicization," rooting out internal leaks and releasing classified documents. What in that description is linked with preparing for anticipatable asymmetric Iranian violence or blowback from bombings in eight countries over the last year?

Simply put, how do these dismissals ordered for Trump's retribution over perceived slights to himself make the rest of us any safer?

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