Sound advice in Washington is never to take a job unless you’re prepared to resign, and more people should heed it. The resignation Tuesday of a Trump counterterror official in protest against the Iran war is notable on those grounds, but why was he in the Administration in the first place?
FILE: Joe Kent delivers a speech during a rally in support of defendants being prosecuted in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in Washington. (REUTERS)
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in a public letter. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
Mr. Kent, who worked under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, added that as “a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times” he “cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”
Resigning over sincere differences is an honorable tradition, but Mr. Kent couldn’t leave without adding some dishonor: It “is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote. Mr. Kent said “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign,” and he suggested Israel dragged America into Iraq in 2003. Ah, yes, the nefarious Jewish lobby.
This is a smear about an ally fighting alongside U.S. troops. Mr. Kent’s portfolio was terrorism—and it isn’t reassuring that he was more concerned with Israel than with an Iranian regime that has sought to kill President Trump and other U.S. officials.
Mr. Kent hails from the corner of Mr. Trump’s base that paints any U.S. action in the world as a quagmire, and the White House let many of them into the Administration as coalition management. Ms. Gabbard is another, and now one of her underlings has produced a spectacle to undermine Mr. Trump during a war.
“When I read his statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out,” Mr. Trump said of the resignation. May there be more such resignations, voluntary or otherwise.
