The Duce, unchained

Trump was not out to stop any imminent attack. That's just a lie.

The guy was just doing the same sort of thing he's been doing, organizing hostile actions in the region that certainly might have cost American lives, for many years.

The guy's a general and that's was his job.

There was no specific and imminent threat at all.

Cable TV reports are increasingly taking the line Trump stunned nearly everybody in our own government with the decision to kill Suleimani just days before doing it.

Nobody thinks his threats to attack 52 new targets, some of them cultural and hence protected by international law, reflect any vetting or planning occurring anywhere but in Trump's ass.

This below from Pompeo is as close to an admission as you could wish that Trump simply ignored the law and the constitution when he ignored the gang of eight.

Bozo is now an authoritarian ruler de facto and has the entire American military under his personal control.

He's ignoring every institutional or legal restraint aimed at imposing intelligence and discipline on the use of all that military power.

And the Republican Party still has his back, even at the cost of trashing the constitutional order as well as the post-war world order - and the immediate risk of a very stupid, bloody, and costly war.

Think of Trump's second term.

Pompeo snaps at CNN’s Tapper during grilling over claim ‘world is safer’ after killing Suleimani

In a long interview where Pompeo insisted that Suleimani was planning an attack — without presenting any evidence — Tapper pressed the White House administration official on what happens next.

“When you are talking about the attacks are imminent, days or weeks?” Tapper asked.

“If you are an American in the region, days or weeks is not relevant. We have to prepared and be ready. We took a bad guy off of the battlefield and we made the right decision and there are less risks today to the American forces in the region as a result of it,” Pompeo recited back. 

“And I am proud of the effort that President Trump undertook and the execution of the military was phenomenal and the work by the diplomats was very fair and powerful and effective.”

OK, so David Frum (on CNN's Reliable Sources) and Tucker Carlson (on Fox) are alarmed and saying so.

Carlson's Friday night show was very harshly critical of the neocon wars all the way back to Afghanistan and especially fierce about Bolton and the other hawks who have wanted a war of regime change in Iran for decades.

It appears Trump really intended his attack to move the Iranians to stop their hostile diplomatic and military activities throughout the region, and did not at all intend and does not want war with Iran.

He appears genuinely alarmed at the prospect of retaliation and escalation to war.

He is a boob who was talked and perhaps even deceived into this, some suggest, by Iran hawks like Pompeo and Graham and Jared and others, some high military leaders, who have his ear.

War would have been and always has been their goal; getting the president to bungle into it is one way to achieve it.

No doubt they would also have counseled him to ignore the law and the gang of eight, ignore the congress, ignore the allies and the coalition, and anyone else who might have talked him off the ledge, and even lied to him about the efficacy or legal merits of the lie of imminent danger.

If indeed that is how it all went down.

They are the true enemies of the state, of the constitutional order, of the rule of law, of legitimate government, in all this.

They conspired with each other to push their patsy Trump into an illegal and unconstitutional attack with the purpose of unconstitutionally denying congress its role in deciding whether to go to war and getting us there in a way and at a pace that would utterly escape congressional control.

Not that Trump isn't an enemy of the state.

But he is just a boob, while they are canny conspirators.

And the US military is in his hands.

Nor, of course, should we underestimate the potency in his mind of the wag the dog aspect.

He has already pushed impeachment off the top of the news desks of the world, and some of his henchmen are already claiming the impeachment process needs to be abandoned or summarily stopped for the sake of national unity in the face of the Iranian threat.