I was afraid that my blog post about Russians placing
bounties on the heads of American soldiers would be misunderstood, and indeed
it appears that it was. Let me try to say this as clearly as I can. My post had
absolutely nothing to do with the Russians or with the Taliban and quite
obviously it did not constitute any sort of endorsement of the reports in the
media. My reaction concerned only Trump’s complete lack of understanding of his
responsibility as the commander-in-chief of American forces. I thought I made
clear the focus of my concern by my little remark about having served in the
military. I don’t care what foreign country we are talking about in what
geopolitical situation and with what level of evidentiary proof. The only
conceivable response by a commander-in-chief to such a suggestion has to be “if
it is true, I will take swift and strong action to defend my troops”.
Now, there may well be many who really do not care what
happens to American troops because America is as guilty of aggressive
involvement in other nation’s actions as any country in the world today. All
right, I can understand that. But dammit, if you accept the position as
commander of troops in battle, you take on the responsibility of defending your
troops, regardless of who you are and what nation you are a citizen of.
3 comments:
Or, as commander-in-chief, with access to the actual intelligence, perhaps it is as they said...that there is nothing to this story.
The post is correct. This is not that complicated. Intelligence reports come with estimates of confidence in their accuracy. This report, along with an estimate of its accuracy, should have been brought to Trump's attention. If it was not, that reflects a flaw in the flow of info to POTUS; if it was, then Trump should have, at a minimum, directed that it be investigated further with a view to possible responses in the field and/or to the Russians.
T's immediate response on Twitter was "I was never briefed about it." His press secretary doubled down on that, saying the reports were not "credible." Actually the context of the current Afghanistan situation makes the reports worth further investigation. It is not sufficient for some lower level analyst to decide on his or her own that the report is not credible, if indeed that is what happened.
In short, we need to know exactly what happened here, but the defensiveness of T's response on Twitter shows that he has a poor grasp of his responsibilities in this situation.
Kayleigh did concede that Trump was only up to "K" in the alphabet, but he expects the letters to go away by "R".
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