The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” reacted to the growing number of U.S. casualties in its war with Iran and the likelihood of a return to all-out conflict between the two countries, with one panelist calling the war a “catastrophic miscalculation” on the part of President Trump.
“We bumble along, because there’s not much of a choice to do anything else,” Joe Scarborough said Monday. “The president tried to get an MOU that Iran would accept. The terms were worse for the United States than Kaiser Wilhelm II had to sign at the end of World War I at Versailles.”
“We were giving half a trillion dollars to the Iranians,” he added. “We all know the president took sanctions off of Iran and allowed them to sell oil in a way they hadn’t since 1979. It didn’t change their behavior at all. In fact, things got even worse.”
“What is the next move?” Scarborough then mused. “It’s a question we’ve been asking since the middle of March, and the answer is no more clear: There is no easy answer.” That sentiment was echoed by “Morning Joe” panelist and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
“[There is] a term that’s used in chess where every move you make makes your situation worse,” he said. “I fear this may be one of those situations.” Ignatius went on to draw a parallel between the current conflict in Iran and the 20-year-long War in Afghanistan.
“I’ve begun to wonder if this isn’t a little bit like what Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda did to the United States,” he admitted. “Their strategy was to draw us deeper and deeper. They wanted the war to continue. They wanted us to invade Afghanistan. They wanted to draw us into a field of conflict where over time they would just stretch us out.”
“That’s one fear I have,” Ignatius concluded. “In this moment, the choices that President Trump faces are pretty much all bad.”
Fellow “Morning Joe” panelist and New York Times opinion columnist David French, meanwhile, described the ongoing Iranian conflict as one of “mutual miscalculation after mutual miscalculation.”
“This war begins with a catastrophic miscalculation by the Trump administration [thinking] that this could be like Venezuela 2.0. The prospects of that were never, never good at all, and then when that didn’t work out, it was obvious they didn’t have another plan,” he explained. “I’m wondering about the Iranian government here, if there is a miscalculation on their part.”
“They could have wrapped both arms around that Memorandum of Understanding and emerged from the conflict in a stronger position than when it began strategically. A clear loss for the U.S.,” French continued, “But now again, they’re continuing to close the Strait [of Hormuz]. They’re continuing to keep it closed. That’s fundamental to any deal to end the war, and now they’re taking serious damage along with us.”
“Nobody has a foot on the brake here at all,” he ultimately noted.
