New York Times Reporter Tom Friedman: 'Qassem Soleimani Was Possibly The Dumbest Man In Iran'

Iranian President Rouhani and Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qasem Soleimani. Iran Project

FOX News: As press questions intel, an unlikely voice blames Soleimani’s stupidity

Seventeen years after the press rolled over for faulty intelligence on Iraq, journalists are training a harsh spotlight on disputed intelligence on Iran.

It’s healthy for the media to question how President Trump decided to take out Qassem Soleimani, and to examine the far-ranging consequences — though some of the coverage has been cloaked in the usual anti-Trump hostility.

Several network and cable anchors pressed Mike Pompeo during his Sunday rounds on whether he could prove that the general was plotting “imminent attacks,” the details of which the secretary of State called an “irrelevant distraction.”

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WNU Editor: From New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman ....

“One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran,” he said in his Times column — this from a liberal commentator who generally supported Barack Obama and is a fierce Trump critic.

The reason? “Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East.”

Rather than the evil genius portrayed by much of the press, he says, Soleimani is an idiot who squandered the lifting of sanctions that was part of the 2015 deals and helped plunge his country into poverty and protests that left some critics jailed or killed.

Soleimani did this by fighting proxy wars against Americans and in such places as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, says Friedman, freaking out U.S. allies and forcing the Trump administration to take action. The use of pro-Iranian militias to storm the American embassy in Baghdad was one provocation too far.