Topix Underground

"...But as this now becomes the seventh country he’s bombed since being back in office for one year, cui bono? — who benefits? — seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer.

With this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over again that the easiest answer is the truest one. There’s no four-dimensional chess here. There’s just him, and what we know he’s like.

This president appears to have grown his enormous and excited new appetite for military intervention during this term in office just because he thinks war is easy and exciting.

It earns him not only close attention but even occasionally plaudits from Very Serious People who are professionally inclined to believe that there’s some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war.

It gets him a ton of attention. He gets to do it unilaterally — naturally, there’s no question that he would seek a declaration of war from Congress or even an authorization for the use of military force. It’s something he gets to do on his own say so in a baseball hat from home. It’s exciting, it’s controversial, it’s all about him, and — not for nothing — it’s the world’s greatest change of subject.

The airstrikes were launched on Saturday, a weekday and a school day in Iran. The internet’s off there. The government hasn’t advised its own people what to do, as American airstrikes hit multiple cities.

Donald Trump, as a private citizen, repeatedly said — in 2011, in 2012 and in 2013 — that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects, in order to get re-elected.

Trump was wrong about that. Obama didn’t start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should do it. He said so. He said it would get Obama re-elected.  We know what Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U.S. president starting a war with Iran.

And now, facing domestic political disaster in this year’s elections, he’s done it himself..."