Seems Like Trump May End This War Soon. What Will It Have Been Worth? |
Seems Like Trump May End This War Soon. What Will It Have Been Worth?
Spooked by a falling stock market and rising gas prices, the president appears eager to find an off-ramp. He will have accomplished nothing but needless destruction and empowering our enemies.
Now the latest in the Iran war is that the Pentagon may deploy about 3,000 members of the legendary 82nd Airborne to Kharg Island. Or it might be 2,500 troops from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. Or it might be other Marines who first storm the island that Iran uses to stage its oil exports, followed by one of those units. That seemed to be what Senator Lindsey Graham wanted, who invoked the American victory at Iwo Jima in 1945, appearing to remember the stirring photograph that immortalized that important victory while forgetting perhaps that it cost nearly 7,000 American lives.
All these twists followed, by less than 24 hours, President Trump’s stunning Monday morning claim that, to paraphrase John and Yoko, war was almost over if we wanted it: He announced that he had been secretly working on a deal with Iran that would postpone for five days his planned bombing of civilian energy infrastructure targets in Iran, which was supposed to start Monday night, and not only that, but would involve “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.”
What’s next? A proposal for Iran as the fifty-first state? Well, the country is conservative and religious. Probably a lot of Republican voters.
This is craziness. Trump is saying, without any thought to his words’ long-term impact on American credibility, whatever pops into his mind at the moment. It quickly became clear that his Monday morning Truth Social post, which went out at 7:23 a.m., was intended solely to rally the financial markets and........