“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” — All the President’s Men

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, took to social media Tuesday night to share takeaways from a classified briefing the White House shared with him and other legislators about the Iran war.

“I obviously can’t disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are,” he noted, emphasizing that regime change in Iran is no longer in the cards. “They are going to spend hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars, get a whole bunch of Americans killed, and a hardline regime — probably a MORE anti-American hardline regime — will still be in charge.”

Murphy also said President Donald Trump’s administration no longer intends to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It favors eliminating missiles, boats and drone factories instead. “The question that stumped them: what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production,” Murphy shared. “They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, forever war.”

A final item from Murphy: He asserted that the White House had “NO PLAN” about how to secure the Strait of Hormuz for safe passage of tankers and other ships. Some 20% of the world’s petroleum supply transits the strait. As my colleague Javier Blas observed recently, Trump has days, not weeks, to solve that problem. If not, oil prices, which were about $71 a barrel before the war began and have settled in the low $90 range, will spike,........

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