The United States has entered dangerous territory, possibly stumbling toward a war under the leadership of an inconstant, impressionable, and incontinent commander in chief who blusters over Twitter.
At the same time, our predicament is nothing new. Although little noticed, the U.S. was in a low-key war with Iran long before President Trump ordered the successful drone strike that took out Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Also, we killed Soleimani in Iraq, where our forces have been firing missiles at terrorists for at least 17 years.
There’s also a broader context in which this Trump-era story is normal: If the president really did just launch an ill-conceived war in the Muslim world, he would merely be participating in an American tradition that has lasted at least this whole millennium.
If our incurious and volatile president might endanger Americans and destabilize the world by launching us into war, he will be doing exactly what the responsible, bipartisan, expert, foreign-policy establishment has repeatedly done in recent decades.
On the other hand, none of this is normal. Trump’s personal flaws, such as his short attention span and his unwillingness or inability to get beyond his petty concerns, ensure that everything will be FUBAR — to use a military term.
Trump has neither a director of national intelligence nor a deputy director. The Department of Homeland Security has no secretary or deputy. The positions of Navy secretary and the State Department’s under secretary of arms control are also vacant. These continuous and widespread vacancies are a hallmark of Trump-era dysfunction, and in times of military conflict with a country working on a nuclear arsenal, this dysfunction could be dangerous.
Also worrisome is Trump’s personal behavior.
Trump promised on Twitter to commit war crimes by deliberately attacking Iranian cultural sites “VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.” This left Defense Secretary Mark Esper in the position of refuting the commander in chief, pointing out we would not, in fact, openly commit war crimes.
Trump also promised “very big sanctions” against Iraq if Iraq asked the U.S. to leave. But Iraq asked the U.S. to leave, and no sanctions have followed.
Instead, the Pentagon sent a letter to Iraq’s security forces announcing U.S. withdrawal — a shocking turnabout. Soon after, though, the Pentagon informed Congress that this letter was a hoax and part of malicious disinformation. Then, the generals clarified that neither account was true. Instead, the letter was a draft, we were told, accidentally “circulated” to Iraqi security forces, apparently.
Amid all these disturbing differences, though, is a more disturbing sameness.
George Conway, the Republican lawyer-turned-resistance-hero, wrote on Twitter Tuesday night that “it’s extremely difficult now to escape the conclusion that @realDonaldTrump started a war because he was impeached.”
If this explosive charge is true today, it would place Trump in the same class as President Bill Clinton, who bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan three days after he admitted to a sexual affair with his wife. Oh, and Clinton did it again in December 1998 by bombing sites in Iraq just before the House brought up its articles of impeachment against Clinton.
Likewise, Republicans defending Trump’s actions are using the same demagogic talking points that Democrats deployed in defense of Clinton’s and Obama’s wars.
“Democrats are falling all over themselves equivocating about a terrorist,” Republican Mark Meadows tweeted Tuesday, objecting the Democrats were “writing a resolution to prevent POTUS from responding.”
The Democrat leading the charge on the resolution to restrain the president and assert Congress’s war-making prerogative happens to be congressman Eliot Engel.
Engel, a New York Democrat, was incensed in 1999 that the House voted to assert that Clinton couldn’t send ground troops into the Balkans without congressional approval. He said the resolution “aids and abets [Yugoslav strongman Slobodan] Milosevic” and “undermines the president.”
“Why would we want to make it difficult for the president to be the commander in chief?” Engel asked back then. “Why would we want to tie the hands of the president? Why would we want to hurt our men and women in the area?”
Engel, along with most Democrats, also cheered on President Barack Obama’s unauthorized regime-change war in Libya.
Throughout the Trump era, two things have consistently been true: The administration is bizarre and unlike any before it, and yet so many things that commentators declare are unprecedented are thoroughly precedented. That includes the possibility of unwise wars in the Muslim world.
