On this edition of America First, the President of the United States tweeted that we're "locked and loaded" to go to war with Iran and we're just waiting for Saudi Arabia to tell us what to do. This really is not an exaggeration. "Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked," Donald Trump said on the Tweet Machine. "There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!"

Yes, we are waiting for word from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman—the guy who allegedly orders journalists critical of him chopped up and thrown in an oven in the backyard of one of his ambassadors, who leads the regime that is helping to perpetuate a human-rights catastrophe in Yemen using American-made weapons, the same regime that just happens to be spending a fortune at Trump's hotels. If the crown prince gives us the go-ahead, we're bombing Iran! America First.

I'm old enough to remember when the president pushed out his bloodthirsty warmonger of a national security adviser, John Bolton, because Donald Trump is a non-interventionist who won't subjugate America's interests to those of its allies, or whatever. Turns out the current American regime is only willing to strain our alliances with democratic members of NATO. With authoritarian states, we've got an unbreakable bond. Unless the bond is just with people who put money in our president's pocket. These are the kinds of questions we have to ask ourselves during The Great American Heist.

It's not yet entirely clear that Iran was responsible for the attack on Saudi oil facilities, according to The New York Times. The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen—one side in a proxy war between the Saudis and Iranians over who will control the region—have claimed responsibility, but U.S. officials dispute whether the group has the capability to carry out this kind of attack on its own. Either way, you can't expect the American president to wait for actual confirmation that something is true before he yells about it and possibly takes action.

Smoke billows last week from Saudi Aramco’s oil processing plants in Abqaiq and Khurais, which Trump administration officials say were attacked with drones and cruise missiles. Gallo Images Getty Images

Certainly, he wouldn't wait for a silly little thing like a declaration of war—you know, an authority allotted to Congress as part of the Constitution’s separation of powers, a measure meant to stop a renegade executive from unilaterally jumping into an armed conflict against a nation of 80 million people. There is no goddamned way that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force—which should be repealed in the first place—applies to Iran. And for the record, Trump's predecessor liked an expansion of executive power as much as anybody—and he was a constitutional-law professor. It was Barack Obama who radically expanded the drone war and got our military operating in secret all over Africa.

This is where we remind ourselves that Iran is not Afghanistan, or even Iraq. It would likely make for a far more formidable opponent and, God forbid we tried it, another impossible occupation even once we "won." Or maybe we'll just bomb their country, a drive-by like Trump ordered in Syria—in concert with France and the UK—earlier in his term. That would totally solve the problem, definitely would not get us sucked into another conflict, and most importantly, would make our president look tough. Or maybe this is all just bluster to begin with. After all, the last time Trump was set to retaliate after Iran shot down a U.S. drone—Iran said it was in their airspace, while the U.S. said it was in international waters—he called off the strike at the last second with a story he thought made him look Very Presidential.

We’re in good hands. Alex Wong Getty Images

Oh, that's another element here: we're considering getting into armed conflict with Iran under a commander-in-chief who is completely insane. (Immediately after tweeting we are "locked and loaded," the president had a further message: "PLENTY OF OIL!") Trump also believes reality itself is malleable and the truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. Tensions re-escalated in the first place because Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal, the terms of which Iran was complying with, and slapped them with crippling sanctions to...get another deal?



You would think that, having just marked the 18th anniversary of September 11—a reminder we're now poised to send kids to Afghanistan who were not born when the attacks happened—we'd be a little more worried about getting pulled into another quagmire of death and suffering. You would think that, at this point, we would be re-evaluating our strategy in the region, including our unbreakable bond with Saudi Arabia. And yet you could flip on Fox News this morning and find a Democratic senator from a solid-blue state mongering the war.

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just two dudes hanging out, gassing up another american war in the middle east (maybe!) pic.twitter.com/EaDkwJk2Hf — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 16, 2019

How many times are we going to do this? What is the best-case scenario if we enter armed conflict with Iran, which has missiles that can reach deep into Europe and a standing army of well over half a million people? Will we just bomb them and run? Will we try to topple the regime? Who will rise to power in the vaccuum? What would victory even look like? Can anyone tell us what it will look like in the multiple armed conflicts we're already engaged in nearby? Have we learned fucking anything? How many American kids have to die in the sand and rock before we learn the United States cannot win when it starts blowing things up in the Middle East?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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