The Trump administration’s magically evolving explanations for commencing the most massive unwarranted American military operation in two decades are now officially FUBAR.
As reported by Aaron Blake for CNN, the first story, spun by Marco Rubio, was that Israel was going to launch an imminent attack on Iran, which we knew that Iran would blame on us. So to forestall that indignity, we (the U.S.) bombed Iran first. With help from Israel.
Never mind how that makes absolutely no logical sense. That was, in fact, the initial spin.
But the new story, which Trump just blurted out, is that we somehow knew Iran was going to attack first, so we just had to do something to pre-empt that.
As reported by Aaron Blake for CNN:
The Trump administration’s stated justifications for going to war with Iran were already a jumbled and self-contradictory mess.
But on Tuesday, Trump made it even worse — laying waste to the administration’s confusing explanation from Monday.
Just a day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that Iran posed an imminent threat — because it would respond to imminent attacks from Israel by striking US forces — Trump went with an entirely different explanation: that Iran was going to launch preemptive strikes against the US on its own.
“It was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” the president said.
The reality, of course, is that both of these explanations are garbage. The planning for this joint operation occurred months ago. There was never any “imminent threat.”
As Blake points out:
The question now will be what intelligence backs up Trump’s assertion. If it doesn’t exist, it raises the prospect that the US went to war basically on Trump’s premonition.
And the administration is now on at least its fourth different explanation for why Iran posed an imminent threat in less than 10 days, including the two most recent versions that directly contradict one another.
It says something pretty disturbing that the administration can’t even settle on the reason why they threw American troops into harm’s way.
They are obviously making it up as they go along.
