This Dog Won't Wag

Well whaddya know: Another fiasco

I have exhausting travel the next two days, and won’t be able to do proper posts. But I have a few minutes Tuesday night, and am scheduling a brief post about Iran and all that.

Not my department, I know. But I do have some history here. In 2002 and 2003 I was one of the few people writing for a major media organization willing to say that we were being lied into war in Iraq, which was obvious to anyone willing to face the facts. Management was not happy, but to their credit allowed me to keep writing.

What I learned from those days was never to trust people who obviously want a war. Don’t trust what they say about the justifications; don’t trust what they say about how it’s going. This was true even for the Bush people, who were models of honesty compared with the current crew.

This time even mainstream media more or less acknowledged that the intelligence didn’t support claims about Iran’s nuclear program. And it took only days rather than years to acknowledge that the attack appears to have been basically a failure.

Still, many pundits rushed to support Trump’s boom-boom — and assumed that the public would rally around him the way it did around Bush in 2002-3.

But initial polling suggests that this dog didn’t wag. Even before we learned that the bombing wasn’t remotely as effective as Trump claimed, most people opposed it. I guess the nation’s state of mind isn’t what it was in the aftermath of 9/11; invading Iraq wasn’t in any reasonable sense a response to terrorism, but to many people it felt like one. This time, it looks as if many Americans saw this for what it was, a desperate attempt by Trump to look powerful and manly.

And of course it followed Trump’s pathetic military parade. You have to wonder if the fact that his attempt to impress people with tanks in DC failed played a big role in his a decision to make some big holes in Iran.

But here’s the thing: We know that nothing bothers Trump as much as poor ratings. So what will he do next?