Trump's Iran War is far from an excursion

Here we go again. What else can one say to the stream of misinformation and disinformation flowing out of the White House and Pentagon since the war with Iran broke out? We have grown wearily familiar with President Trump's cavalier relationship with the facts. Combine that with his tendency to snatch words out of the air, appropriately or not, and you come up with a jumble of head-scratchers. A leading example is his repeated oddball description of the Iran war as an "excursion," which caused brows to furrow and eyeballs to roll in newsrooms around the planet. Excursion? Does the president know the true meaning of the word? Last Monday, 10 days into the war, Trump summed up the situation this way to reporters: "We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. And I think you'll see it's going to be a short-term excursion. How good is our military, right? Amazing. How good? Short term. Short term." Right. The war had already killed a half-dozen American troops and injured about 150. Then there's the Tomahawk missile that flattened an Iranian elementary school, killing at least 175 civilians, most of them children. This is some excursion. Predictably, the war has shaken up the already unstable Middle East and driven oil prices skyward. Some industry experts are calling it the largest oil shock in history. But Trump dismissed that as something he'd already thought of. "We figured oil prices would go up, which they will. They'll also come down," he said on March 7. "They'll come down very fast." Brent crude traded above $100 a barrel in recent days, and some observers see it surging much higher if the war starts spiraling. As I write this, the Iranian military isn't quite ready for the excursion to be over. That's because they have effectively squelched tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for 20% of the globe's liquid petroleum traffic. One has to wonder whether Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth had taken this entirely predictable eventuality into consideration. The growing war concerns caused me to flash back to an earlier era, when an excursion in Southeast Asia to help a friend with their colonial problems became the Vietnam War. I remember it vividly because I happened to be in college and of age for conscription. We used to say on campus, nothing concentrates the mind like the realization that you might be draft bait. If you're too young to remember, take it from me. Furor over the draft became a leading reason why Americans have not had a draft since then. Other reminders of the Vietnam era are all the hazy spitball takes on just what the nature and duration of our commitment is. Asked in early March how long this excursion might take, the president offered that it could take four to five weeks. Days later, he bragged that Iran had better watch out because the U.S. had "virtually unlimited supply" of munitions and that it could fight a war "forever." Later he put aside his initial four-to-five-week estimate and declared "whatever it takes." A week ago (March 8), the Defense Department said the war was in its early stages. Hegseth said on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, "What I want your viewers to understand is this is only just the beginning." In apparent agreement, the Defense Department's Rapid Response X account posted Monday afternoon, "We have Only Just Begun to Fight." In contrast to Hegseth's bravado, Trump told CBS News on that same afternoon that the war is "very complete, pretty much," without defining what "complete" would look like. If the administration's understanding of this war strikes you as confused, contradictory and not at all confidence-inspiring, you're probably being generous. Trump and Co. have also been mendacious. Trump claimed that Iran had bombed the elementary school. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell blamed Iran for using the school as a "human shield" for its missile and drone launchers. But as the New York Times reported, an ongoing military investigation suggests the Feb. 28 airstrike on the school "was the result of a targeting mistake by the U.S. military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base." Officers at U.S. Central Command apparently "created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency." In other words, as many of my fellow veterans (Yes, Uncle Sam's draft finally got me) understand all too well, the tragedy stemmed from a bad old-fashioned SNAFU. "Situation Normal, All Fouled Up," as we would say in the linguistically cleaned up version. That's what happens when you go on an excursion with gunboats and cruise missiles. Some folks get caught up in the glory, others marvel at the flash-bang technologies. But, as much as the weapons of war may change, they tend to slaughter a lot of innocents along with enemy combatants. What Trump is presenting as a little excursion is, for Iran, an existential struggle. Whatever one thinks of the U.S.' capability to take out the mullahs and their military, they seem to have the power to take a great deal down with them.