Iran's missile strikes into Iraq were "almost a public relations gesture," after the U.S. airstrike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday.
"I think the mullahs believe they have to look tough," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "They just lost their most important and most powerful general. They had to do something. What they did was very carefully calculated. I assume that they deliberately avoided killing Americans, and basically had a show of a demonstration of force without any immediate human consequence."
This means Iran left it up to President Donald Trump to make the next move.
"He can play it either way and say look, no Americans were killed, therefore I don't need to retaliate, or he can say, you know, you fired these missiles and I said if you did that I'm going to retaliate," said Gingrich.
However, he said he does not think Iran launched their missiles in a way that forces retaliation from the United States, but Iran still has a "long record of trying to kill us."
Iran still wants the United States out of the Middle East, Gingrich added, and as a result, "we have to have a long-term strategy that recognizes this is a regime which is dedicated to creating an anti-American movement."
What should happen now is that the United States should decide if it wants to design a strategy that changes the Iranian regime, or "do we play games this week and then three months from now, they do something horrible," said Gingrich. "That's what the record has been. They get away with an amazing number of things, including court findings and the 9/11 Commission finding that they directly helped the people who attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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