Column By John Young
For the one-time reality-show guy, things just got real.
Real, except for any trustworthy explanation or justification about what happens or what he directs our military to do in the war into which he has enlisted all of us. As anyone with ears should know, the truth is not what this president does.
Millions of Americans went to bed Saturday with a sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs.
The man ordering the airstrikes has done nothing to earn investors’ trust in his latest enterprise: war. Worry not. He alone can do it.
I wonder if he wishes today he had practiced honesty or humility somewhere along his climb so that when he said he was sending our jets and our warriors into harm’s way, all could say, as with Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Truman, “This is judgment I can trust.”
Too late for that.
You may not remember this amid a near-decade of tall tales, but the first time we all heard the under-sonar voice of Stephen Miller, speaking for the newly elected president, Miller was saying the Democrats trucked thousands, yes, thousands of voters from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to vote illegally.
This was after Miller’s man won.
That was the beginning of the greatest cavalcade of lies in American political history, a four-year term to test a fact-checker’s very soul. The Washington Post counted 30,573 “falsehoods or misleading statements” during the man’s first term. I don’t see how a misleading statement can be anything other than a falsehood. Regardless, it is we who were misled.
And now we are at war with the 90 million people of Iran, an act endorsed by a cadre of unimaginably suspect enablers. The rest of us have our two-word order, which in commander vernacular means, “Bug out.” That would include — correction, excludes — Congress, whose counsel presumably would be sought as a body.
The man in our highest office today called himself a “wartime president” once before — in 2020 when he played politics with a virus that killed over a million of us. This hardly could engender confidence in a war with real bombs and real mortal enemies.
Waging war is nearly always good politics in the short term. Over the long haul, not at all.
Consider the trade war launched on false pretenses. (“No cost to you, dear consumers.”) China, with communal sacrifice as its very essence, knows it can wait us out until the end of time.
In a “strike back” way, that type of vow most surely applies to Iran and any other devout Islamic players drawn into the wartime vortex. It’s the stuff of which the 9/11 attacks were born.
This should make Americans wonder why the administration is ripping up international agreements left and right. War is not something to wage solo, and rarely is it waged remotely. And in those circumstances, Bibi Netanyahu is definitely not the type of passenger with whom I would share my dinghy.
War also isn’t something to wage impulsively. As with rolling tanks into Iraq in 2003 — something this president has derided — our bombing of Iran was not based on an imminent threat. We did it because we could.
Call me subversive, but I’ll say it: Conditions in this country have been the stuff of which ill-conceived and impulsive overseas military actions are made.
The president has seen his support plummet amid hideous miscalculations like his inflation-reducing trade war, his sneak attack on federal agencies, his overreaching on deportations, and the wholly unnecessary use of the military to deal with garden-variety unrest in Los Angeles.
Well, here we are. He made the call, but the “we” part of this is worth hammering home. Someone needs to remind him that war is public policy.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
