Opponents of the Iran war see Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned on Tuesday, as a dissident. He quit his post to protest an unjust war. That’s what the populist podcaster Tucker Carlson told The New York Times in a piece that emphasized Kent’s principled resignation. Carlson said Kent “is the bravest man I know” and warned that “the neocons will now try to destroy him.”
Some of Carlson’s allies were not so brave. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence who has long opposed attacking Iran, defended the president in a statement without bothering to refute Kent’s main charge: that Trump was hoodwinked by Israel and its supporters into thinking Iran was an imminent threat to the U.S. “After carefully reviewing all the information before him,” Gabbard posted on X, “President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.”
