Is a New Strategy Emerging for Targeted Killings?

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Ten minutes into President Trump’s speech at his first 2020 presidential re-election campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio, last Friday, he drew great cheers when he said, “If you dare to threaten our citizens, you do so at your own grave peril.

Moments later, Trump brought up the U.S. Special Forces raid that, last October, killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the ISIS terrorist group. One minute after that, he was on to the January 3, assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani, which Trump described as a “bold and decisive action to save American lives and deliver American justice.”

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