Yes we will no we won’t yes we will wait what time is it again?
The Post reports on the childish chaos of Trump Playing War all day and then telling the world that he’s a Big Boy and he can Change His Mind.
The plans had been drawn, the targets set, and a single word from the commander in chief would have activated the U.S. military to strike a foreign adversary. But President Trump was having second thoughts.
After giving his top Pentagon officials permission to prepare for U.S. military strikes against Iran, Trump convened his top advisers in the Oval Office on Thursday evening and began asking crucial questions just minutes before the operation was set to commence, according to officials familiar with the episode.
Cool that he asks crucial questions, but the trouble is, the questions had already been asked and answered. This isn’t somebody marshaling all the reasons on both sides and then making a judgement, this is somebody playing dress-up.
What are the potential risks, he asked. How many people could be killed? What could go wrong?
Trump had already been briefed in detail on such questions earlier in the day, including a Pentagon estimate of up to 150 Iranian casualties.
But hey, why not ask them all over again at the last minute, so that you can tell dramatic stories about yourself the next day? I mean why not?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing he’d gone ahead. I’m wishing he weren’t a childish idiot with no clue what he’s doing.
“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die,” Trump wrote Friday on Twitter, embellishing several of the events in question. “150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.”
The whole thing is so that he could get that “sir” in there. He’s so excited that he gets to tell us that generals call him sir. (I bet they swallow quite a lot of vomit as they do it, too.)
Trump’s reversal was the culmination of 24 frenzied and frenetic hours marked by public inconsistencies, congressional bewilderment and palpable concern among national security experts that the administration might inadvertently stumble into the kind of bloody Middle East conflict that the president had campaigned so vigorously against.
Simply because the president’s brain might as well be cream of wheat for all the use it is.
The administration’s debate over how to respond to the drone attack played out over the course of four meetings at the White House on Thursday beginning at 7 a.m. Trump was supportive of military action throughout the day as Pentagon officials, lawmakers and national security officials made their cases for or against escalation, making his sudden change of mind all the more striking to those inside the administration.
He just loves surprises!
He didn’t bother to tell Congress that strikes were planned.
Later in the afternoon, the Pentagon was gearing up to announce a strike. Around 6 p.m., defense officials including Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist huddled with Shanahan in his office overlooking the Potomac River.
That’s when Trump started to ask key questions, as he huddled in the Oval Office with top advisers, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
The president was especially interested in the number of potential casualties, noting that Iran’s downing of a drone hadn’t killed any Americans. He was told again that as many as 150 Iranians could be killed.
“I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘You know what? They shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it. And here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead.’ ” Trump said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Friday. “And I didn’t like it . . . I didn’t think it was proportionate.”
Light goes on in trumpian brain. “Ohhhhhh, people will be killed. Well why didn’t somebody say so?!”
Trump’s decision to call off the strikes, citing the potential casualties, came as a surprise to Pentagon officials who had spent the late afternoon gearing up for the operation. Some Defense Department officials had privately expressed concerns because they saw it as a major escalation, officials said.
Trump’s cancellation at about 7 p.m. came about two hours before the strikes were supposed to occur.
Whatever. Two hours, two seconds, who cares – hey is there any ice cream left?
Trump told advisers Friday morning that he was glad he didn’t go forward with the strikes.
He also claimed on Twitter that new sanctions had been imposed on Iran on Thursday night. But officials said later Friday that no new measures had been imposed.
The whipsaw approach left some in Congress concerned that the president didn’t have a clear strategy for managing relations with Iran.
Ya think?
See, this is the problem that was pretty much inevitable once presidents and Congress decided the president could just start a war without it being officially declared. Congress should be in the loop, and in fact no president should be able to take this action without Congressional approval.
Not that I think Congress is all that mature and sound, but compared to Trump, they are all valedictorians.
A friend on FB, not a supporter of Trump, was nonetheless giving Trump credit for having made a good decision here. I’m going with the idea that he made no decision at all; people around him were finally able to manipulate him into calling off this stupid strike. He gets no credit from me.
Sackbut, that’s the scariest part, knowing that we have a president with so much power and so little discipline, and so easily manipulated.
Sackbut,
I’m actually not so sure of that. Going by his past actions (e.g. working to reach a detente with North Korea, pledging to withdraw from Syria) and some insider accounts (e.g. in Bob Woodward’s book), Trump is actually a lot more cautious and skeptical about military action than many of his advisers. Not that that takes away from iknklast’s point about the ridiculousness of one individual having all the power to make war.
So he’d been briefed on these details, but needed another briefing on the same thing because he forgot the briefing had taken place. Hilarious and terrifying.
Hilariffying.
Holms, ‘Hillarifying’.
Bernie Sanders:
“Congress must do everything it can to prevent this war. The constitution is very clear: it is Congress, not the president, who decides when we go to war. It is imperative that Congress immediately make it clear to the president that taking us into hostilities with Iran without congressional authorization would be both unconstitutional and illegal.”
Trump and Bolton could be working up a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Find a pretext, attack Iran, then step back and see what they do in response.
It worked before. It got the US into the 10,000 day quagmire that was Vietnam, and changed the whole US culture in the process. Trump could go down in history, not so much for making America ‘great again’ as for making himself into another Lyndon Johnson or Tricky Dick Nixon.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/21/us-iran-bernie-sanders-airstrikes-drone-attack-war
“Clear strategy for managing relations with Iran?” He couldn’t find Iran on a map if you paid him.
This is unfortunate, as one of the things he’s actually paid to do is find iran on a map.
The whole thing is so that he could get that “sir” in there. He’s so excited that he gets to tell us that generals call him sir. (I bet they swallow quite a lot of vomit as they do it, too.)
God, I love that you see these things so consistently and point them out. Almost NO ONE does.
Does he still call them ‘my’ generals?
I find it hard to believe that Trump would be concerned about the possible deaths of 150 people. Especially brown people. At best, he had a vague notion that pretending to care would make him look good. Most likely, someone bribed him to call off the strikes with a promise of all the ice cream he could eat.
“Only 150? Do you know how much those bombs cost? I want value for money!’