long advocated<\/a> for bombing Iran, Trump, on Wednesday, made no mention of further military strikes. Instead, he said that Americans \u201cshould be extremely grateful and happy. No Americans were harmed in last night\u2019s attack.\u201d He added, \u201cIran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.\u201d But the rest of the speech was far less reassuring. It simply confirmed what has long been obvious to most sane people: Trump doesn\u2019t merely lack a strategy; he hasn\u2019t got a clue, and his occupancy of the Oval Office represents an enduring threat to us all.<\/p>\nThe speech sounded as if it had been cobbled together by someone with cognitive dissonance\u2014or, more likely, someone who was trying to save face for the boss while simultaneously mollifying the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. (Hannity had cheered the decision to kill Suleimani; Carlson had mocked the Administration\u2019s claim that Iran represented an imminent threat.) The first half of the speech was Trump the Pax Americana bully, laying down the law. \u201cAs long as I am President, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon,\u201d he said. Suleimani, he added, was \u201cthe world\u2019s top terrorist,\u201d and the U.S. would \u201cimmediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.\u201d But in the second half he sounded more like an America Firster who was eager to get out of the Middle East completely and leave the entire mess he had created for other countries to clean up. \u201cWe are now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0\u201cWe are independent, and we do not need Middle East oil.\u201d He went on to hail the missiles in the Pentagon\u2019s armory, which he described as \u201cbig, powerful, accurate, lethal, and fast,\u201d adding that \u201cunder construction are many hypersonic missiles.\u201d He didn\u2019t spell out the message explicitly, but it was clear enough. Uncle Sam would like to go home and leave the hand-to-hand combat to others.<\/p>\n
Of course, it would have been a good deal easier for Trump to pursue such an objective if he hadn\u2019t ripped up the nuclear deal with Iran that the Obama Administration had negotiated and crippled the Iranian economy with more economic sanctions, setting off a tit-for-tat process that, even before this past week\u2019s crisis, had prompted the Pentagon to dispatch thousands more American troops to the Middle East. As usual, Trump tried to turn things around. He described the nuclear deal as \u201cvery defective\u201d and called on \u201cFrance, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China\u201d\u2014the other signatories\u2014\u201cto recognize this reality\u201d and work together on a new deal. Mystifyingly, he also said, \u201cToday, I am going to ask NATO<\/em> to become much more involved in the Middle East process.\u201d<\/p>\nFinally, Trump delivered a message to the people and leaders of Iran. There had been some speculation that he might repeat his July, 2019, offer to negotiate directly with Tehran, but he stopped well short of that, saying, simply, \u201cThe United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.\u201d<\/p>\n
We should all be grateful for small mercies. What would have happened if one of the Iranian missiles had killed any number of American service members? But, make no mistake, Trump doesn\u2019t deserve credit. His impetuous blundering almost produced a full-scale conflagration, and it has left behind a terrible foreign-policy mess that one speech can\u2019t mitigate. In the past week, the Iraqi parliament voted for the withdrawal of American troops on its soil, Iran announced that it will no longer abide by the limits of the nuclear deal, and the Pentagon suspended the campaign against ISIS<\/em> in Iraq and Syria because of concerns about the safety of U.S. troops on Iraqi bases.<\/p>\nDespite these ominous developments, Trump had the gall to boast about all the ISIS<\/em> fighters who had been killed or captured since he entered the Oval Office. Gall is about all he\u2019s got.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] Nearly a week after recklessly causing a New Year\u2019s war scare by ordering a drone attack on Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, and about sixteen hours after Iran had responded by firing ballistic missiles at a pair of Iraqi military bases that house American troops, Donald Trump finally deigned to make a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-33"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}