Yes we will no we won’t yes we will wait what time is it again?

The Post reports on the childish chaos of Trump Playing War all day and then telling the world that he’s a Big Boy and he can Change His Mind.

The plans had been drawn, the targets set, and a single word from the commander in chief would have activated the U.S. military to strike a foreign adversary. But President Trump was having second thoughts.

After giving his top Pentagon officials permission to prepare for U.S. military strikes against Iran, Trump convened his top advisers in the Oval Office on Thursday evening and began asking crucial questions just minutes before the operation was set to commence, according to officials familiar with the episode.

Cool that he asks crucial questions, but the trouble is, the questions had already been asked and answered. This isn’t somebody marshaling all the reasons on both sides and then making a judgement, this is somebody playing dress-up.

What are the potential risks, he asked. How many people could be killed? What could go wrong?

Trump had already been briefed in detail on such questions earlier in the day, including a Pentagon estimate of up to 150 Iranian casualties.

But hey, why not ask them all over again at the last minute, so that you can tell dramatic stories about yourself the next day? I mean why not?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing he’d gone ahead. I’m wishing he weren’t a childish idiot with no clue what he’s doing.

“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die,” Trump wrote Friday on Twitter, embellishing several of the events in question. “150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.”

The whole thing is so that he could get that “sir” in there. He’s so excited that he gets to tell us that generals call him sir. (I bet they swallow quite a lot of vomit as they do it, too.)

Trump’s reversal was the culmination of 24 frenzied and frenetic hours marked by public inconsistencies, congressional bewilderment and palpable concern among national security experts that the administration might inadvertently stumble into the kind of bloody Middle East conflict that the president had campaigned so vigorously against.

Simply because the president’s brain might as well be cream of wheat for all the use it is.

The administration’s debate over how to respond to the drone attack played out over the course of four meetings at the White House on Thursday beginning at 7 a.m. Trump was supportive of military action throughout the day as Pentagon officials, lawmakers and national security officials made their cases for or against escalation, making his sudden change of mind all the more striking to those inside the administration.

He just loves surprises!

He didn’t bother to tell Congress that strikes were planned.

Later in the afternoon, the Pentagon was gearing up to announce a strike. Around 6 p.m., defense officials including Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist huddled with Shanahan in his office overlooking the Potomac River.

That’s when Trump started to ask key questions, as he huddled in the Oval Office with top advisers, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

The president was especially interested in the number of potential casualties, noting that Iran’s downing of a drone hadn’t killed any Americans. He was told again that as many as 150 Iranians could be killed.

“I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘You know what? They shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it. And here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead.’ ” Trump said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Friday. “And I didn’t like it . . . I didn’t think it was proportionate.”

Light goes on in trumpian brain. “Ohhhhhh, people will be killed. Well why didn’t somebody say so?!”

Trump’s decision to call off the strikes, citing the potential casualties, came as a surprise to Pentagon officials who had spent the late afternoon gearing up for the operation. Some Defense Department officials had privately expressed concerns because they saw it as a major escalation, officials said.

Trump’s cancellation at about 7 p.m. came about two hours before the strikes were supposed to occur.

Whatever. Two hours, two seconds, who cares – hey is there any ice cream left?

Trump told advisers Friday morning that he was glad he didn’t go forward with the strikes.

He also claimed on Twitter that new sanctions had been imposed on Iran on Thursday night. But officials said later Friday that no new measures had been imposed.

The whipsaw approach left some in Congress concerned that the president didn’t have a clear strategy for managing relations with Iran.

Ya think?

 

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