After 157 days of Iran war failure, Trump must quit war or quit presidency

 After 157 days of Iran war failure, Trump must quit war or quit presidency

President Trump is flailing around like every world leader in history who launched a criminal war of choice he can't win but can’t quit. Like every losing criminal war predecessor, he’s becoming more and more unhinged searching for a magic bullet, make that a magic missile, that will turn his inevitable defeat into his cherished victory.

He fantasizes Iran has been destroyed and is begging to surrender in Trump’s terms. He threatens massive destruction one day, then calls off that destruction a day later for two reasons: he doesn’t have the firepower to inflict it, and knows Iran will inflict even worse damage to US Gulf State bases and Middle East energy infrastructure cratering the world economy. Thousands more Iranians may die and hundreds more US service casualties may pile up to no avail.

Iran won, the US has lost. Deservedly so. Iran did nothing to deserve Trump’s dastardly attack.

Except for a dwindling number of ‘destroy Iran dead enders’, Trump’s war cabinet must be apoplectic over Trump’s delusional descent into endless war madness. Neither VP Vance nor Secretary of State Rubio were keen on Trump’s cockamamie war but bowed to his hubris fueled by the power behind the push for war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On this war day 157 of Trump’s disastrous, failed war edging the world economy toward the fiscal cliff, Trump still has 900 days to ensure that happens. On his own he appears incapable of admitting defeat or simply resigning the presidency to allow Vance to begin negotiations to end the war on Iran’s sensible terms. We can only hope Trump’s was council will conduct an intervention. Instruct Trump to quit the war or quit the presidency. If not they should threaten resignation en mass to paralyze the government to fulfill the prophesy Bob Dylan once famously sang.... “Even the President of the United States sometimes has to stand naked.”

Walr Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL

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Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings

 Many top military leaders opposed atomic bombings

 

Every year the four day period August 6 – 9 brings to mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. This year marks the 81th anniversary of those horrific acts.  We may be closer to nukes fired in anger at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis 64 tears ago. Major wars in Ukraine and Iran could both devolve into nuclear war. U.S. withdrawal from several nuclear treaties and planning to spend a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear stockpile add to nuclear anxiety. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight in January, the closest it's been set to nuclear winter in the entire nuclear age.

I learned of the atomic bombings 75 years ago at age 6 and have been haunted by them ever since. For the first decade or so afterward I swallowed whole the US fairytale that the military and political elite were unified in dropping the bombs to prevent a U.S. invasion and its estimate of a million U.S. casualties. A little research disabused me of that false narrative designed to justify the unjustifiable. 

Few if any reputable historians buy that version today. They point to a number of top military leaders who opposed the nuclear attacks, for good reasons. Most prominent was U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall who argued not using the Bomb would strengthen America’s prestige and position in post war Asia. He even advocated for inviting the Russians to view our July 16, 1945 test. Navy Secretary and later Defense Secretary James Forrestal argued the bombings would impede our post WWII relations with the Soviet Union. Fleet Admiral William Leahy, senior US military officer on active duty in WWII, called the proposed bombings “barbaric”. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy told Truman that neither invasion nor atomic bombings were necessary. Japan would surrender if we avoided terminology ‘Unconditional Surrender’ since any surrender would amount to that without saying so. Allowing Hirohito to remain Emperor would bolster that view. McCloy even advocated telling Japanese leaders we had the Bomb as additional incentive to quit the war.

Tho not involved in the Bomb decision process, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was furious we dropped them, telling Secretary of War Harry Stimson shortly after the attacks “I voiced my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of “face.” Japanese leaders never admitted US atomic bombings motivated their surrender.  More likely it was the massive Russian invasion of Manchuria the day of the Nagasaki bombing that more motivated the Japanese surrender. 

Ike, McCloy, Leahy, Forristall, Marshall and others were right; Truman and his supporters were wrong. Eighty-one years on America is still the only country to explode nukes in anger. Current senseless wars in Ukraine and Iran, refusal to maintain critically needed nuclear agreements, routinely threatening imagined enemies with “all military options are on the table”, spending a trillion dollars to build bigger and better nukes, all bode ill we’ll make another 81 years nuclear attack free.

Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glan Ellyn IL