Trump’s Top Counterterrorism Official Resigns in Protest Over Iran War

President Donald Trump’s top counterterrorism official resigned on Tuesday in protest of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, in the first high level resignation sparked by the conflict.

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a letter posted to X that he had to resign because he cannot back the war.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” he wrote.

He says that the reasoning for entering the Iran war is a “lie” akin to the Bush administration’s lie regarding weapons of mass destruction that led to the “disastrous Iraq war.”

“I 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,” Kent wrote in the letter addressed to Trump. “You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos.”

Kent is a Trump nominee and top adviser for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. He was deployed as a Green Beret 11 times and also worked at the CIA. When Kent was nominated, he made headlines for his extremist right-wing views. But the Iraq War veteran has also been a voice within the administration urging for more restraint in foreign policy, reports say.

In his letter, Kent wrote that prolonged Middle East wars are a “trap” and suggested that the Trump administration became the victims of a “misinformation campaign” led by Israeli officials and the American media — perhaps sweeping aside the Trump administration’s culpability in pushing for and starting the war.

Kent is the first high level Trump official to resign over the war, which has been condemned by many legal experts and humanitarian advocates as illegal and immoral.

The U.S. and Israel’s bombardments have killed nearly 1,500 people so far, including over 200 children, many of whom were killed in the U.S’s strike on an elementary school in Minab during the initial round of strikes on February 28. At least six hospitals in Iran have had to evacuate as a result of attacks, according to the World Health Organization, and at least 31 health care workers have been killed.

On Tuesday, a top World Food Programme official warned that 45 million people in Iran would be at risk of acute hunger due to food price increases caused by the war if it continues through June.

Over a dozen U.S. officials resigned during the Biden administration in protest of the administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Kent’s resignation is a reflection of the extreme unpopularity of the war among the public. The war is the least popular U.S. intervention in an international conflict in its first days at least since World War II, an analysis by The New York Times found, with many polls finding that the majority of Americans oppose the war.