After years demeaning his own intelligence experts, Trump now needs them to look believable

The credibility of the president’s Iran policy depends on ignoring many of his previous statements

The president has spent months denigrating the intelligence agencies but now wants the American public to trust them implicitly (EPA)

America’s intelligence community is extremely naive and is wrong about Iran. Its leaders need to go back to school. They behave like they’re in Nazi Germany. And the professional opinions of its experts are worth less than those of hostile foreign leaders.

Says who? None other than Donald J Trump, 45th president of the United States.

Trump has spent three years publicly insulting and undermining America’s intelligence community, accusing its operatives of corruption and incompetence. It has been speculated – by outlets including Just Security, a non-profit website focusing on US security issues – that the purpose of all these insults is to discredit and demean agencies like the CIA and FBI so that, should they disagree with the president or accuse him of wrongdoing, he will have laid the groundwork for them not to be believed. They can be portrayed to his supporters as part of a “never Trumper” deep state.

Which may be all well and good if that’s what you want. But if you suddenly need to cite them in your defence, things might get complicated.

Amid the outcry over Trump’s decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the figurehead of Iran’s foreign operations, there is a growing focus on the president’s claim that US intelligence had uncovered an “imminent threat to American lives”.

This has been the main line pushed by Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state and a former head of the CIA, in numerous television interviews.

For many commentators, the initial reaction was: If the intelligence agencies are really as untrustworthy and useless as you’ve been telling us all this time, why believe them now – or expect us to?

But there’s also a growing scepticism over whether there really was an imminent threat at all. A reporter at the New York Times quoted sources saying the evidence was “razor thin”, while others have pointed out that such an attack would not be foiled by killing a single individual.

Senator Mark Warner, Democratic vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee who was briefed on the operation to kill Soleimani after it happened, told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I accept the notion of a real threat. The question of how imminent is something I need more information on.”

Adam Schiff, Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, told CNN’s State of the Union: “I haven’t seen intelligence that taking out Soleimani was going to either stop the plotting that’s going on or decrease other risks to the United States.” On the contrary, he said, if the assassination saw the US forced out of Iraq – as a vote by the Iraqi parliament suggests is now possible – ”that would be a real coup for Iran”.

On Sunday the Washington Post reported that Pompeo had been advocating the assassination of Soleimani for months – further undermining the idea that it was an urgent response to an imminent terror attack.

Back in 2003, Trump supported George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq, although he has since claimed that he opposed it and has held up the false claims of the intelligence community about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as yet another reason not to trust them.

While the circumstances are very different, Trump now finds himself on the other side of the fence, seeking to defend the legality and ethics of his own violent intervention in the Middle East based – or so he says – on US intelligence. It will be an uphill struggle.

Yours,

Phil Thomas

US assistant editor