"Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success." Shane Harris in the Atlantic (Archive).
"...neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States."
"Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing."
"...they [intelligence] couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble."
In the end it's just another case of a lying liar lying again. Trying to impose his fantasy vision.
"The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone." is the conclusion.
The intelligence community should actually understand the president they are talking to and tailor their message to him. I'm not buying the idea that they're not complicity by willfully not knowing who they're talking to.
I get that people don't want to be responsible for everything, and you have to limit your responsibilities. But the "intelligence community" can't predict Trump's shenanigans? There has to be some complicity and enabling in there.
Trump convinced conservatives to overlook his obvious criminality and grifts, to wreck up the government. He understood the right's desire to wreck government, to prove it doesn't work, we don't need it. As we sink into a recession, as citizens are murdered by ICE, as ICE kidnaps citizens and humans, a nightmare has emerged. It's only the recession that annoys most people.
Clinton was right wing enough for me to consider him a republican, but things had swung so right that he was considered left with Bush and Reagan, which might be the natural swing after FDR in American political dialectic.
Trump is the Hoover that precedes a truly left wing president, who will replace him, if he doesn't somehow finagle the cancelation of elections. He's actively trying to squash the midterms that could lead to his impeachment and jailing. Guy in the park says no president is going to jail, and he might be right.
It seems like his running might have been all about avoiding the justice of accountability on the horizon. It is the enablers who allowed it all to happen. You can break the law sometimes, it's not quite as iron clad as people would like to make it seem. Enforcement is a real issue.
Trump seem to think he can open the Strait of Hormuz with angry tweeting. The success of taking out the Venezuelan president emboldened him. Those in the left are screaming about the Epstein files, he needed a distraction.
I see Trump similar to George W. Bush in that he takes the chaos inside him, and he inflicts it on the world. The article points out that Bush got bad intelligence. The intelligence issue for Trump is his own stupidity. Why does he need to be smarter, he's blundered into being president twice? He's a dyslexic genital obsessed real estate and reality TV star. His uncristianity doesn't matter to the Christian right. So many weird contradictions, I see why people don't like to pay attention to politics, curiouser and curiouser isn't interesting and politics is full of frustrations.
Whatever weird mojo and spells he can't on the American people, that's the interesting question. How did he really do that? And is that intelligence?
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