Why Trump’s Iran War Was ‘Doomed From the Very Start’
The U.S. president desperately wants out of the bloodbath he started. It took months to get here, but the fate of the war was sealed in the first 72 hours.
I have spent the past few days looking over old notes on conversations I’ve had with senior U.S. officials, Donald Trump advisers, and other sources since January, before Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started their war on Iran. Like many of you, I am still trying to make sense of what on earth just happened – how a war so stupid, so self-defeating, so grossly nihilistic unfolded behind the scenes, orchestrated by the most pathetic, fascist dorks a collapsing American empire could ever belch out.
In reviewing my own reporting, there’s one thing I can’t quite get past: President Trump didn’t just lose this war. He lost it within its first 72 hours, long before he made us all endure the last several months of death and destruction. And I don’t say this lightly: Trump’s Iran war is not just the most Orwellian war of our lifetimes – it is also the worst-run war in modern U.S. history, perhaps in all of our nation’s history.
“It was doomed from the very start,” one senior Trump administration official tells me. “We went in with no real mission and we all knew that. Now we have to spend the next five months hoping voters don’t bitch-slap us for it.”