It seems my friend, Sally, and I wake up each morning asking the same question: “What has he done now?”

The answer last Saturday was starting a war with Iran.

Sally is in her 90s. A native of Pennsylvania, she owns a home in Fairhope, Alabama, where she spends the winter. Spring, summer, and early fall finds her in Canada on Campobello Island, N.B., which is where I first met her years ago.

She called last week.

“I’m surprised a Canadian would talk to an American right now,” she began.

“Depends on the American,” I replied.

Sally is beside herself about the war into which Trump has taken her country. So am I.

I’m also upset that our prime minister, Mark Carney, so quickly appeared in support of it. Why didn’t he channel his inner Jean Chrétien, who immediately gave a flat “no” when George W. Bush wanted to drag Canada into his war against Iraq?

If he is remembered for nothing else, Chrétien will be remembered, and thanked, for that.

The situations are not dissimilar. Bush argued that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Turns out there weren’t any.

Trump says Iran, with its nuclear program, was planning on striking first.

But, as recently as June, Trump boasted that the U.S. had successfully disabled Iran’s nuclear program.

And strike where first? Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “there is no imminent threat to the U.S. by the Iranians.”

There may have been to Israel, of course. But who is leading whom into yet another war in the Middle East?

The clue may be in something Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “We (Israel) are the junior partner here.”

Or maybe Trump gave it all away when he said, “I’m really good at war. I love war, in a certain way, but only when we win.”

And what will winning mean here? Regime change?

Certainly that would be desirable in Iran, which for the last 47 years has lived under one of the most despotic, cruel, and evil regimes in contemporary times. Certainly, the death of its leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not to be regretted.

But what are the plans to replace him? Well, says the guy who “is good at war,” that will be in the hands of the Iranian people. In essence, he’s saying we will just bomb the hell out of you, and you take it from there.

Bombing the hell out of them means, among a lot of other deaths and destruction, taking the lives of 100-plus little girls at an elementary school.

Meanwhile, this war, announced at 2:30 a.m. by Trump wearing a white ball cap with “USA” emblazoned across the front, has spread across the Middle East.

American lives have already been lost. In his announcement, Trump regretted that would happen but explained that’s the nature of war. Excluding, of course, for families suffering congenital bone spurs.

Carney initially endorsed the strikes, and that stunned me. He said he wasn’t informed or asked to participate.

He has acknowledged “it appears these actions are inconsistent with international law.”

He needn’t have felt left out. Congress was not informed either.

Two-time UK Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s advice to a new parliamentarian, worried that he had not yet made his maiden speech, was undoubtedly well-considered: “It’s better that people wonder why you didn’t speak than why you did.”

© Peterborough Examiner