Tom Nichols

My biggest fear is that the steel man case about how can you abandon the Iranian people?

Sorry, I have two old wars on my mind.

How can you abandon the Iranian people at a time like this?

My answer is the way Trump does things and the way it's looking right now, this is going to be, as you and others have pointed out, this is a moral peril not seen since the Hungarian revolution.

We're telling people to go out there and oppose their government and risk getting killed.

If we're going to do that, we'd better be there.

to answer that steel man argument.

So the argument is because we screwed up and baited the Iranian people into thinking we were going to do this, we have now maneuvered ourselves into a corner where on the fly, pretty much by the seat of our pants, we're going to do this because of a situation of our own creation.

It's kind of like the argument that the administration was making that we had to go because the Iranians were kind of forward leaning and were about to hit us

Turns out that wasn't true.

But the reason we were worried that they were going to hit us is because we had amassed a giant armada packed into a pretty convenient set of target packages around Iran.

This is the kind of killing your parents and then claiming you're an orphan problem.

If we want to do this, state it clearly, go to the American people.

We had a State of the Union just before this.

And it was a carnival.

It was a variety show.

It was embarrassing.

No explanation to the American people that their sons or daughters may be killed.

No discussion with Congress, not even bullying of Congress to say, look, I'm going to have to do things and you're going to have to get on board, which is what previous presidents did.

No after explanation.