Center Senior Fellow Victoria Coates discusses her role supporting President Trump’s decision to take down Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani.
On Jan. 3, 2020, the Trump administration carried out a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander. Soleimani was said to be planning imminent attacks against American diplomats and military personnel. Past administrations had considered making this bold move, but decided against killing Soleimani because of the risks of escalation. Victoria Coates, then-deputy national security adviser for the Middle East, was one of several officials who spoke to Yahoo News about the Trump administration’s thought process behind the decision.
Video Transcript
DONALD TRUMP: Last night, at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed a number one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.
VICTORIA COATES: At that point, when we got to the third, it– in a curious way, it was like an election day. You had already done everything you could do, and it was in the hands of, obviously, the professionals who were going to execute the mission. There was confusion about his travel during the day, and various reports coming in about different itineraries he may take. At one point, we thought he wasn’t going to Baghdad. Then he was.
And so that was really the lead-in to it. And that was probably the greatest source of tension before the strike. The president was, I believe, down in Mar-a-Lago. Secretary Pompeo was in Washington, as well, but was over at the Pentagon. We were in the situation room, my counterpart, Matt Pottinger, and I. Brian Hook was there, and a few other folks. And we had, obviously, audio and video links with our USG counterparts, and then in the region. And when we knew he was indeed heading for Baghdad, all we can do is wait and watch.
You know, it was an extraordinarily professionally executed maneuver. The truly kind of unusual aspect of it that most people probably wouldn’t know about is then, once it’s happened, you wait for people to figure it out. And so you start to hear, oh, there’s been a strike in Baghdad, oh my goodness. So the day itself is perhaps not as dramatic as most may think. The planning and then the president’s decision were, for the National Security Council staff, those were the momentous events.
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Coates previously served as the Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council staff and the Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy in the Donald J. Trump administration. She also served as the National Security Advisor in the office of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and as Director of Research for (former) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir, Known and Unknown.
Coates holds a B.A. from Trinity College, a M.A. from Williams College, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, all in art history. Coates is the author and presenter of dozens of publications and conference papers worldwide on the intersections of art and history, including David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art (Encounter Books, 2016) and the forthcoming Seeing the Light: A History of Christianity in Twelve Works of Art (under contract with Encounter Books), which are part of a projected trilogy on the key tenets of Western Civilization: democracy, the Judeo-Christian moral code, and the primacy of the individual.
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