{"id":2452887,"date":"2020-01-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-05T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=318675"},"modified":"2020-01-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-05T07:00:00","slug":"mike-littwin-trump-got-us-into-this-iranian-crisis-but-can-he-get-us-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/mike-littwin-trump-got-us-into-this-iranian-crisis-but-can-he-get-us-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike Littwin: Trump got us into this Iranian crisis, but can he get us out?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Let\u2019s begin with the obvious. Two things: Donald Trump has put us onto the path of a possible catastrophe, and Donald Trump is the one now charged with heading off this very real chance of catastrophe. God help us.<\/p>\n

This would be the same Donald Trump who can\u2019t be trusted to tell the truth about the path of a hurricane much less about the decision to go to war, or near-war, or however you\u2019d describe the present situation.<\/p>\n

And in case you\u2019ve forgotten, it\u2019s also the same Donald Trump who walked away from the Iran nuclear deal because, well, it was Barack Obama\u2019s nuclear deal. You can make a reasonable argument that if Trump hadn\u2019t walked away, we would not be in this fix.<\/p>\n

And, yeah, it\u2019s the same Donald Trump who tells us he knew the war in Iraq was a disaster from the beginning \u2014 although that may not be quite true \u2014 and now tells us that we\u2019re not on the brink of disaster in Iran.<\/p>\n

How\u2019d we get here? The way it looks, Trump\u2019s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, inarguably a leading force of terrorism in the region, was done basically unilaterally. Trump consulted few members of Congress. It\u2019s not clear he consulted any NATO allies, although Israel was apparently warned. According to the Daily Beast, though, he was giving broad hints to the patrons at Mar-a-Lago.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration is framing the Iran crisis as the killing of a terrorist who, they say, had planned a series of attacks on Americans as a shadow war between America and Iran was escalating. It was a defensive move, Trump said, designed to stop a war, not to start one. This is what they say.<\/p>\n

But whatever else Suleimani was, he was more than just a terrorist. He was a high-ranking Iranian official, meaning Iran has little choice but to retaliate for his death. And he was killed in Iraq, complicating Iraq\u2019s relationships with both Iran and America.<\/p>\n

And now we face the risks unknown. Or as George Packer, who has extensively covered the wars in that region of the world, writes in The Atlantic: \u201cWe don\u2019t know how to think about a war with Iran, let alone win one, and it\u2019s not at all clear why we should try. For this reason, killing Soleimani was a blunder \u2014 briefly satisfying, possibly catastrophic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, there will be repercussions. As we wait, we can only guess how Iran will retaliate and when and in what measure. While Trump was saying how proud he was to bring to an end Suleimani\u2019s \u201creign of terror,\u201d it\u2019s pretty obvious that the terror and Iran\u2019s proxy wars throughout the region won\u2019t end with Suleimani\u2019s death. There may be disruption, but someone will take over his role.<\/p>\n

More immediately, we\u2019re left to wonder if Iran\u2019s supreme leader is savvy enough to retaliate in a way that won\u2019t force an out-of-control escalation. For that matter, is Trump savvy enough? Who would you bet on? As Max Fisher writes in The New York Times, \u201cIn a sense, both sides have already lost control: It\u2019s not as if the United States wanted its Baghdad embassy stormed or Iran wanted its Quds Force commander killed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is where we find ourselves, in what the TV commentators were repeatedly calling \u201cuncharted territory\u201d and what Iran must see as an act of war. We can expect that Congress will remain divided as to how to proceed. Cory Gardner has already offered his support for the move. Chris Murphy, Democratic senator from Connecticut, called the killing an execution. We can expect that at least half the country will remain skeptical. Internationally, we\u2019ve already seen Russia condemning the act while NATO allies call for restraint.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much we don\u2019t know. In a brief appearance before the microphones to explain the move, Trump praised America\u2019s intelligence operations \u2014 yes, the same intelligence he routinely dismisses \u2014 and said that if Americans are threatened \u201cwe have all those targets already fully identified, and I am ready and prepared to take whatever action is necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

That can\u2019t be true, of course. If, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said, Suleimani had prepared \u201cimminent\u201d attacks targeting Americans, forcing the president\u2019s hand, it has to be just as true that Iran is capable of changing targets. And it\u2019s not only Americans who are endangered, but American allies. The world is rattled, as it should be.<\/p>\n

What we do know is that Trump has rejected the strategy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who both determined it was more dangerous to kill Suleimani than to leave him alive, knowing that Iran would retaliate. If it\u2019s any consolation, I guess we\u2019ll find out eventually who was right.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Trump sees it: As an official from the State Department, talking on background, told reporters, \u201cThis was an act of de-escalation.\u201d<\/p>\n

This strategy is known in the craft, as I just learned, as \u201cdeterrence by escalation.\u201d But you\u2019re hard-pressed to find experts who think it will work that way. The State Department has suggested all American civilians leave Iraq immediately while the Pentagon is apparently sending an additional 3,500 troops there. Does that sound like anyone expects de-escalation?<\/p>\n

As cited in a Vox piece, Lindsey Cohn, a professor at the Naval War College, says \u201cDeterrence by escalation usually doesn\u2019t work. It\u2019s a classic form of underestimating the adversary. Iran can\u2019t win a conventional war with the U.S., but it can certainly impose costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a theory among the more cynical Trump critics that the basis for this escalation can be found in Trump\u2019s remarks dating back to 2011 and 2012 in which he predicted on multiple occasions that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran as a way to help him win re-election. Meanwhile, Trump has been impeached in the months before his re-election bid. Anyone see a link here? As they like to say on Twitter, with Trump, there\u2019s always a tweet.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see how a war in Iran would help him, any more than it could have helped Bill Clinton when, amid his impeachment process, America bombed Iraq and Clinton was accused of wagging the dog. Clinton was impeached two days later. And Trump is still Trump and, yes, protected by his GOP enablers.<\/p>\n

And, personally, I\u2019m much less interested in Trump\u2019s motivation for bringing us to this crisis point than I am in hoping \u2014 OK, very much against hope \u2014 that Trump can successfully find a way out.<\/p>\n

Mike Littwin runs Sundays in the Aspen Times. A former columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, he currently writes for ColoradoIndependent.com.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s begin with the obvious. Two things: Donald Trump has put us onto the path of a possible catastrophe, and Donald Trump is the one now charged with heading off this very real chance of catastrophe. God help us. This would be the same Donald Trump who can\u2019t be trusted to tell the truth about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2452887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 22:40:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2452887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2452887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2452887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2452887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}