President Donald Trump got a tongue-lashing over his war in Iran by conservative-leaning columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post on Monday.
This comes after Boot warned months before how unprepared the administration was to wage a real war — a warning he believes is now validated.
"On May 23, President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war with Iran was almost finalized and would be 'announced shortly,'" wrote Boot. Flash forward to the present day, and there is not even a hint that is happening. "Last week, an Iranian drone attack heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport. On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed for all but a trickle of traffic."
Meanwhile, he noted, the few whispers of a possible deal were immediately shut down as Trump got scared off by right-wing commentators slamming it as too similar to former President Barack Obama's multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran.
"Because Trump doesn’t want to militarily escalate, and he doesn’t want to make costly concessions, he is sticking with the status quo for now, while retreating at times into the realm of fantasy," wrote Boot, saying that he's spending much of his time posting about how great his "victory" has been and how no one's giving him credit. "This is obviously wishful thinking. Trump is simply trying to avoid the grim reality that there is no easy way out of a conflict he should never have entered in the first place. All the options are bad, and Trump has no one but himself to blame."
His only choices, Boot continued, are to keep shedding American blood and allow the world's oil market to remain choked off, or make unfavorable concessions to the Iranian mullahs just to get the world back to a state they were in under Obama's nuclear deal.
Ultimately, he said, this will likely be a TACO situation, and he has only himself to blame. "Let’s just hope this chastening experience will make him think twice before launching any more wars of choice. Few military operations work out as neatly as his intervention in Venezuela, and none in the Middle East."