Trump may surprise us in a disastrous way, but so far his unvaried-from pattern has been to shrink from attacking a target that can hit back hard. He’d much rather beat up on desperate refugees and others who can’t retaliate. He’s been that way his whole life. He portrays himself as tough and bold but in fact he’s only cruel.
I don’t know if there’s anyone around him who knows it but he’s also not credible enough to order military strikes, especially against a country we had stable relations with until he tore up an agreement because it had Barack Obama’s name on it.
He is also inherently an agent of chaos because he wants to do big things with big consequences, without any real consideration of what those consequences might actually be or how different actions might conflict. The easiest big actions are almost always for bad ends, and thus we find ourselves where we are.
The cynical side of me believes that Trump orchestrated this to temporarily stop the flow of Dems supporting impeachment. Getting to a 100 is quite possible in a few weeks.
If he did, terrible execution. This waffling bit, taking us right up to the brink of war before stopping because his chambermaid happened to mention that there’s a great golf course in Tehran for sale, doesn’t make any sort of case for him to remain in charge.
This is the hand of Vladimir Putin up Cheatolini’s ass manipulating him.
Putin does not want the US to attack it’s ally Iran, and neither does China who have substantial projects in Iran.
Both let Trump know that they will oppose him in the UN Security Council if he attacks Iran, and they will both cut off his personal cash flow and expose his Grifting if he tries it.
With Cheatolini, money talks, so he listened.
On top of that, he realized that Bolton and Pompeo were calling the shots and that made him look weak and stupid and unable to control his own White House and Administration (which is of course true) so he cut them off at the knees to reassert his “Dominance”.
So why is this not a typical Trump move? Create a crisis. Rattle the sabers. Pull back from the brink. Then take credit for having solved/diffused a crisis of his own making (“the adult in the room” is already being thrown around). This is a typical Trump move.
The dude launched a gov’t shutdown, announced abrupt and careless withdrawal from Syria in response to his NSA being called out as a traitor in federal court and his former attorney pleading guilty to federal crimes which he likely directed relating to the ultimate kompromat: TT Moscow. That he would set up a fake missile strike to pause the Dem caucus from moving to a majority pro-impeachment position isn’t that much of a stretch.
Remember how the Dems didn’t want to investigate the run-up to the Iraq war so as to ‘heal’ and give ‘good will’ to republicans? Well here we are with the almost the exact same cast and crew starting another pointless middle east war since they took that as a sign there is no repercussions for their actions.
Hope all the ‘good will’ republicans gave back during the Obama presidency was worth another war.
Yes, I would agree. So we have the spectacle of a reality star in the WH, deciding whether an attack will boost his ratings. Or rather, panicking, because he has no fucking clue what to do. Vlad on one side, Bolton on the other. A television star. I pity the poor Iranian civilians.
It does give him the news cycle for the moment, which seems to be a common motive. And who is talking about Hope Hicks or Barr? (I presume that this will also occupy some of the Sunday Talk shows, which would otherwise be anticipatory of the upcoming Democratic candidates debates next week.)
This assertion is questionable, I have a small but I believe representative sample of testimony that the US Military has been itching for a fight with Iran for years.
