New York Times columnist Bret Stephens dropped the hammer on Donald Trump for “betraying” conservatives like himself who were encouraged that he took on Iran — only to capitulate when his war stalled out because he miscalculated the enemy.
To make his point about the president’s lack of courage, Stephens brought up the way the president avoided the Vietnam War by getting a doctor to diagnose him with bonespurs, purportedly making him unable to serve and fight.
With the headline reading, “Iran Found Trump’s Bonespur,” he jumped right in with, “War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.”
“I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered,” he continued before adding, “But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.”
Pointedly writing that the Iranian leadership, “took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur,” he noted, “Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests.”
According to the conservative columnist, Trump’s deal is leading to his “worst betrayal.”
“We believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests,” he insisted. “This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office.”
After writing, “This is a debacle,” he predicted, “It gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.”