I feel confident saying that if Donald Trump had been our president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wouldn’t be here and neither, most likely, would you. That’s because most if not all Americans would have died seven years before I was supposed to be born. That didn’t happen only because a young inexperienced president who had already been burned by the Bay of Pigs, was willing to stand up to bullies and warmongers among his advisers and find a face-saving way to pull back from the brink.
With Trump, things are certainly different.
Military officials got Donald Trump to agree to the botched Yemen raid by suggesting Barack Obama would never have had the courage to do it, it has been reported…
…Defence Secretary, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, reportedly convinced Mr Trump to go ahead with the raid by suggesting Mr Obama would never have been so bold as to actually go through with it.
The contrast with Kennedy should be self-explanatory, and he was following the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower.
Most of the focus recently has been on Trump’s reorganization of the National Security Council, in which he demoted incoming National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and Joint Chiefs chairman Dunford and elevated white supremacist political operative Steve Bannon. But here we see Dunford manipulating Trump with grade school playground psychology. People have been hoping, foolishly in my opinion, that responsible leaders in the Pentagon will serve as a reality check on ill-advised military operations. That hope failed its first contact with reality.
There’s reporting that President Obama was considering the Yemen raid but that the desire for a moonless night meant that it would have to wait until after the expiration of his term in office. He never signed off on it, and it should be noted that no one ever accused Obama in eight years of authorizing a major covert military operation “without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.” But that’s exactly what unnamed sources raced to say about Trump in the aftermath of the raid in Yemen.
Anyone who is familiar with the process that led up to the successful bin-Laden raid would not accuse Obama of either timidity or recklessness. He would have treated the raid in Yemen with methodical skepticism, which perhaps was something that got on Dunsford’s nerves.
That Trump is this easy to manipulate shows that he’s weaker than any president than we’ve ever seen, and since he doesn’t do his homework, he simply can’t be trusted to serve as commander in chief.
I don’t believe the story. Sounds too much like spin from Bannon to me.
explain this theory of yours.
Simple blame shifting. If Trump can lay the blame on the military, he’s no longer on the hook for a SEAL getting killed on an unsuccessful mission Trump was hellbent on pursuing.
Though blame-shifting for the lack of success, the leak certainly is unfavorable to Trump which seems to be the point of the leak.
If it was a leak intended to exonerate Trump, I think the leaker would have simply lied and said that the military gave Trump bad information. And heads will roll.
Which brings up another point: Have there been ANY leaks which have been favorable to Trump? I can only think of one. I can’t remember the content but it was so divorced from reality that it was laughable.
Ridiculous. Shift the blame to the military by making Trump look stupid and easy to manipulate?
Multiple inquiries (Josh Marshall, NYT etc.) have established that the Trump Admin has more leaks than any other five Admins put together…and that’s two weeks in (Nixon took six years to get here.) That doesn’t happen because Rasputin wants it.
But the very plausibility of the story is alarming. We’ve known from all available sources that a Yemen raid has been in the works for months. Both the military and the administration agree on that, though they differ on the precise details of the where, the when, the objective, and so forth.
So, why didn’t the raid happen earlier, during the Obama administration? I’ve heard different reasons (need for a moonless night that didn’t happen until Jan. 27 is one), but I strongly suspect that one of the reasons the Yemen raid never got going is that the Obama administration had too many unresolved issues with it. Certainly the administration and the Pentagon didn’t see eye-to-eye on everything, and the administration was chary about being too gung-ho for missions of dubious provenance or hoped-for results.
The inexperienced Trump administration hasn’t learned the same skepticism, and I find it quite believable that appealing to Trump’s ego (Obama didn’t have the guts to do this, what about you?) was the way to get a green light for the raid. We’ll see how it shakes out in the future, whether the hawkish elements of the military and in the administration win out consistently in spite of poor results, or if the administration learns to ask the right questions about military force proposals, and is properly skeptical of the answers it gets.
“the inexperienced Trump administration”
This administration isn’t just ‘inexperienced’; they’re aggressively anti-competence. About our only hope is that they can keep tripping over their own tails often enough to allow time for us to block them, and that the naked greed of his advisers leads to infighting over the grift.
Good lord can, you imagine the damage a COMPETENT Trump Administration could do?
Forgive me for posting this aside … it’s hilarious.
Last item on yesterday’s Rachel Maddow’s show … some clown The Tyrant has proposed to head the FDA … couldn’t find his name. I don’t mind that he wants to construct floating barges on the ocean for human habitats. Shit, go live on Mars if it gives you a hard-on. BUT, he’s also advocating IMMORTALITY for the ultra-wealthy … and why not? With all that unspent bread floating around, go become a god. BUT … get this … he wants to get away from clinical testing of new drugs and just put shit in the drug stores and “let the market sort it out”. In other words, the drugs that don’t kill people must be good shit. Of course, the drug companies won’t be held liable for any deaths or bad stuff. SO … the American public as lab rats to come up with IMMORTALITY drugs for the uber-wealthy.
Com’on, how cool is THAT!
Hmm, blood transfusions from adolescents not doing it?
Peter Thiel has discovered an unpleasant side effect involving sunshine, italian food and various religious symbols…
Trump is vain, shallow, and needy. His constant childish demand for attention and loyalty from those around him will result in many poor decisions. Those who know enough to make things work are afraid to stand up to him when he’s making bad choices, and those who don’t know anything want him to do their bidding and will be yes-men all the way. There are zero checks and balances.
He showed himself when he ran for president; he’s shown who he really is for decades. His followers and those who sought bold changes in the White House knew, too. And they gave him the job for which he is intellectually, emotionally and physically unable to execute.
Saner minds may be able to slow him down, but he really has no roadblocks to stop him completely. They will burn the country to the ground.
What saner minds? The GOP has been off the rails for decades. The Democratic party? Ok maybe they are sane but they are gutless beyond belief and their heads remain firmly in the sand…
It was quite obvious that this utterly unqualified, mentally unbalanced ignoramus was unfit to be commander-in-chief, but the incompetent white electorate thought otherwise. And as you sensibly point out, this torpedoes the cretinous idea that having a cabinet of generals will somehow restrain our incompetent prez. Instead they merely manipulate him to carry out their preferred ends.
Of course, far from being concerned, our wonderful Sturmtruppen gaily parade TRUMP! flags on their convoys.
And just to be an equal opportunity curmudgeon, has it entered elected Dems minds to comment upon and demand investigations into how exactly the woefully failed Yemen raid was undertaken—and run with this as the GOoP did (for years) with Benghazi!!
At least here the incompetent Commanderer-in-chief is the responsible party. An abject failure in his first military operation—quite encouraging, but keep flying the TRUMP flag, boyz!
One of President Obama’s greatest strengths was his ability to say NO to the national security apparatus. Not every time, certainly, but often enough to matter.
Was the donald’s Yemen raid failure due to the fact he issued a Muslim ban before he executed the raid in a Muslim country? If true, it’s proof the man cannot chew gum and walk at the same time.
But…but…but Donald said on the campaign trail that he had military experience. He was a student captain at the New York Military Academy, for gosh sake. Surely that gave him the experience he needed to make critical tactical decisions. Well, it gave him the overconfidence anyway.
And his The Apprentice apprenticeship was an example how he could question
everyday peoplegenerals on life and death matters of national security.By his own reckoning, he was fully prepared. What could have gone wrong? I’m sure he’s learned from this mistake….
But we can accuse him of failing to get a warrant.