@RestIsPolitics after a couple of so-and-so episodes, this Las one was very good indeed. The part on the death of Henry Novak absolutely spot on, for me at least.
Some of our friends and readers are asking why I haven't written a follow-up to my piece on this administration's failures of strategy in Iran:
https://t.co/pzWJvMysz9
The honest answer is that the fundamentals, which is what my article is about, haven't changed. I could write about it again and again, but the fallen tree is lying there in the muck for everyone to see.
The administration can show you a great pile of Iranian wreckage. It keeps a tidy ledger of everything it has broken (while a steady flow of leaks reveals how Iran is reassmenbling it). But wreckage tells you nothing about whether a strategy exists. You can destroy a great deal and accomplish nothing.
What the White House cannot tell you, still, is what it wants the region and the world to look like once the war is done (and despite legal dodges to avoid Congressional power, the war is not done) and how the war and, now, negotiations will make that happen. That is the whole of the matter.
Questions about the presidents intent for future of the regime, loose nuclear material, the Strait, and energy markets should have been answered before the campaign plan was written. The purpose of strategy is to design military action around objectives, not to vamp around a shifting and hazy array of aims after military action has begun.
The administration resembles a man who set out on a long road with great energy and no notion of where he means to arrive. As someone who toiled alongside our servicemembers with our British and Danish allies in Afghanistan, that sure feels familiar.
Success in war is measured by whether your efforts bought you a better end and a better peace.
I am still waiting, with my fellow Americans, to hear what that is.
@JohnRentoul@PaddyBriggs@MrTCHarris Wasn't it a catastrophic mistake? If it was, since when telling as it is, is a bad idea? It seems very patronising going round the obvious.
@RoryStewartUK@RestIsPolitics what about: Starmer stays on as PM. Burnham is brought in as sidekick in charge of fixing the policy and crucially communication. Without risking the by-election and the mess of the change of the leader soap opera.
@RoryStewartUK@RestIsPolitics what about: Starmer stays on as PM. Burnham is brought in as sidekick in charge of fixing the policy and crucially communication. Without risking the by-election and the mess of the change of the leader soap opera.
Imagining explaining to the Founding Fathers that the president imposed tariffs without an act of Congress and then removed them at the request of the King of England