On Iran, Trump’s Supposedly ‘Unready’ Government Did Exactly The Right Thing - The Lid

Good read

Actually, Trump's own explanation of what happened shows just how unready this white house is to respond to a crisis. Because if you believe the POTUS when he said we were mere minutes away from launching a strike, and that late moment is when he finally decides to ask about potential deaths, and then decdes to call it forbeing disproportionate, it exposes a woefully inadequate staffing process.

Any professional staff would have generated several courses of action for the president to choose from. And of cours, the number of deaths and injured expected, both friendly and enemy military and civilians, is always an important consideration in evaluating courses of action. I know this from personal experience when I worked on the briefing to the president fir potential ways to respond tothe attack on the Khobar Towers facilityin Saudi Arabia. In fact, usually the number of causualties is one of, if not THE most important consideration in these types of responses.

And of course, a president would have issued his staff planning guidance up front about his feelings about the risk of casualties. It would have been one of the key pieces of information that drove the development of the COA in the first place.

So lets not confuse whether or not the end result was what people agree or disagree with. There is certainly a caseto be made that not conducting a particular strike because it would lead to a disproportionate number of deaths. But it is is absolutely true that for that realization to occur minutes before a strike, driven by a last minute question from the POTUS shows that the staff planning process and the white house decision making process is completely broken. And when the decisions being made can throw our country into another trillion dollar war, the people deserve a better process than a last minute "hey, I just thought of something--how manypeople will be killed" question by the POTUS.

Of course, the other possibility is that the president is completely lying to the American people about what actually happened and maybe he knew all along about the casualties, and just changed his mind. But rather than admit that, he chose to lie to the people in order to make himselflook like the grand, intelligent leader who overrode a bunch of incompetentgenerals and staffers who failed toeven discuss casualties prior tothe president asking. Having a president willingto lie about such important matters should worry any American.

Maybe it all went down exactly as the president said, and we have the most incompetent bunch of generals in the history of the US Military. Or maybe we have a president who will lie about anything tomake himself look good.

Iran is very vulnerable to sanctions.
They should continue until the Iranians choke or the people have enough and overthrow the mullahs. I think it is extremely unlikely this results in a negotiated settlement with the current regime, but it certainly curtails their ambitions to further unrest in the area.