Donald Trump has a gift for taking an already dangerous situation and making it utterly morally vulgar. What should have been handled with discipline, restraint, and the grave seriousness that war demands has instead been dragged into the sewer of his usual instincts. Bluster, obscenity, deadline theatrics, and self-worship masquerading as leadership. In any functioning political culture, the spectacle of a president speaking about war the way a drunken extortionist speaks about a neighbourhood shakedown would be treated as a national disgrace. In Trump’s America, though, it passes off as strength! That is the most nauseating part of the present crisis. Not merely that the United States is once again involved in a volatile military confrontation in West Asia, but that the man speaking for the most heavily armed state on earth sounds like someone too emotionally stunted, intellectually vacuous and morally bankrupt to be trusted with a municipal loudspeaker, let alone a war machine. Every statement from him lands with the crudity of a threat barked across a casino floor. Every deadline sounds like a tantrum, and every boast carries the odour of a man who thinks history is a reality show and mass violence just another backdrop for personal branding!

The rescue operation that is now being celebrated with such indecent triumphalism may well have happened broadly as described. A U.S. aircraft was downed, a rescue mission was mounted, and one airman was recovered. Nobody disputes that a difficult operation took place. What demands suspicion is not the event itself but the slimy, self-serving mythology now being wrapped around it. Because beneath the chest thumping lies something far less flattering. The mission appears to have been messy, hazardous and deeply embarrassing in ways the administration is plainly trying to bury beneath patriotic theatre. Aircraft were lost or rendered unusable, helicopters took fire, and sensitive equipment had to be (or were) destroyed on the ground. Men were left in danger while commanders scrambled to improvise their way out of a........

© Mathrubhumi English