‘Messy,’ ‘Hasty’ and ‘Impulsive’: A Bumper Car Presidency Keeps Even Allies on Edge – The New York Times Newsroom (The New York Times) / Jan 8 2020
WASHINGTON — If even the Pentagon does not know whether it is coming or going in Iraq, it might be hard to blame the rest of the world for being a little confused about President Donald Trump’s strategy for the Middle East.
As Iranian missiles fell early Wednesday on two bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are stationed in retaliation for the drone strike last week that killed Iran’s most powerful general, the administration scrambled to explain its mission and goals in the region amid a chaotic brew of conflicting statements, crossed signals and mixed messages.
The president who promised to bring troops home from the Middle East is now dispatching more instead. The Pentagon sent a letter saying it was withdrawing from Iraq, only to disavow it as a mistake. The State Department talked about “de-escalation” while Trump beat the war drums describing all the ways he would devastate Iran if it harmed more Americans. And even then, the president was forced to back off his threat to target Iranian cultural sites after his own defense secretary publicly said doing that was a war crime.
Likewise, the administration’s explanation for authorizing last week’s strike has varied depending on the moment. At first, officials emphasized that Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite security and intelligence forces, was eliminated to prevent an “imminent” attack that could take hundreds of American lives. But in the last day or so, Trump and others focused more on retribution for Soleimani’s past attacks on Americans.
“The messaging has just been horrible,” said David Lapan, a former Department of Homeland Security spokesman early in the Trump administration who is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It’s just been all over the map. At a time when you have something so serious, you need clear communication and instead what we got was contradictory, confusing communication from an administration that already has a trust deficit.”
With Trump, so much of his presidency is situational — he careens like a bumper car from one crisis to another, many of them self-created, rarely pausing to set a straight-ahead course but never lacking for energy and always willing to ram into other vehicles. No matter how much aides try to impose an orderly process, he still prefers seat-of-the-pants governance, leaving advisers scrambling to adjust.
Trump has long said that he likes to be unpredictable and sees that as a strength, meaning he can take enemies by surprise, as he did in taking out perhaps the second-most important figure in Iran, one with much American blood on his hands. But it leaves allies guessing just as much as adversaries, making it a challenge to build support for Trump’s decisions.
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