President Trump made an impulsive decision to launch military action against Iran, driven by the belief that he could personally succeed where others had failed, without any realistic or well-developed plan to achieve that goal, according to Representative Adam Smith of Washington State.
Speaking on MSNBC, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee offered a frank assessment of what he described as a fundamentally flawed decision-making process at the highest levels of the executive branch.
Smith argued that the war did not emerge from a careful strategic review or a clear-eyed evaluation of the costs and risks involved.
Instead, he said, the president saw an opportunity to claim a major foreign policy victory and acted on that instinct without sufficiently considering what would happen if the initial strikes failed to produce an Iranian collapse.
That failure of foresight, Smith said, has produced exactly the kind of prolonged and costly conflict that experienced analysts predicted from the beginning.
In his words, Representative Smith said, “I think the truth of it is he made an impulse decision, thinking he could be the guy who would bring down the Iranian regime. He took that shot, he took that chance. But if nuclear weapons was what this was about, then we were in a stronger position before this war started to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon than we are now.
“The costs that had been incurred, 13 service members killed, hundreds wounded, thousands of civilians killed, the global economy in freefall, gas prices, fertilizer, all of that had happened and we hadn’t gotten any closer to accomplishing our goals,” he said.
Smith acknowledged that there are legitimate concerns about Iran’s nuclear program but insisted that the administration’s approach has made addressing those concerns harder, not easier….See More
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