Friends,
Trump told reporters today that unless Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, “every bridge in Iran will be decimated” and “every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” adding that “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”
What about international law, which makes it a war crime to destroy civilian infrastructure? What about Trump’s repeated assurance that the United States has already “obliterated” the danger Iran poses?
The biggest absurdity here is that Trump is now focusing his war’s endgame on Iran’s willingness to open the strait. But the strait was open before Trump attacked Iran on February 28. Iran blocked it in retaliation for that attack.
Iran said today it will reopen the strait only if it gets a guarantee that it will not be attacked again, if Israel ends its strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the U.S. lifts all economic sanctions on Iran. Sounds as if Iran believes it has more bargaining power now than it did before Trump began his war.
Trump also made a stunning admission today. “If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.” But he’s not going to do that, he said, because “unfortunately the American people would like to see us come home.”
Hello? Trump is already blaming the American public for his failure to achieve his objectives in Iran?
The problem isn’t that the American public wants this war to end. It does, but most of the public was against the war from its start.
The basic problem is we have a commander-in-chief who took the nation into this unwinnable war for reasons he never articulated, without a strategy for how to respond if Iran did the expected and closed the strait in retaliation, and without an exit strategy if Iran doesn’t surrender.
What if Iran refuses to reopen the strait by Trump’s deadline tomorrow? Has he really thought through the consequences if he goes through with his threat — likely thousands of Iranian civilians deaths? And what then? Has he thought through what happens if he doesn’t go through with his threat and loses still more credibility?
The problem underlying all this is we have a president who is no longer thinking straight. As Senator Chris Murphy posted, Trump “is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
How do we deal with this underlying problem? Murphy suggests the 25th Amendment, section four of which authorizes the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or the vice president and a majority of an “other body” created by Congress, to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Doing so would elevate the vice president to acting president.
It won’t happen soon, but if Trump continues to deteriorate — subjecting Americans to ever-higher prices and ever-greater dangers — Republicans won’t have any alternative. Neither will America.
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