Donald Trump gave a failed April Fool's speech. It was no joke. Obviously Trump is lost and cannot find a way out of the mess he created,

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech. His messed up "speech" raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran. By Tom Nichols. Americans have been waiting for Donald Trump to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. 

Echo opinion about Donald Trump's failed April Fool's Day stupidity speech about Iran. 

Published by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic magazine. 

For weeks, Donald Trump offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, might as well have been a sick April Fool's joke, His (so called) speech was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. (IOW, Trump was a "Fool", for trying when he is not capable of explaining anything, much less trying to describe a reason to go to war.)

Trump’s critics (including me) castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation about the war to the American people. But, given his April Fool's performance  his address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation about why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began, instead, in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. 

Trump then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. 

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

But, back to the war Trump illegally launched: What is America fighting for❓ Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. 

Instead, Trump simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. 🙄Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. 

After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, he said that  these goals would be accomplished in two to three weeks. 

How he will do all of this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the important Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq took longer than the current war, he said. (BTW, the outcomes of all three of those wars were disasters. Korea war is still not settled, Vietnam collapsed, Iraq was based on a lie, to destroy "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist.)

Trump He also lied when he waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. 

Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

Trump also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. 

And, Trump assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks they should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) 

America might be unstoppable, but Donald Trump is obviously at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

Maybe the only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If Donald Trump meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or (the failed) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

Donald Trump is looking like he is lost and downtrodden. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have not yet explained why the American military must be put in harm's way in Iraq

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder have become reliable prophets in predicting how Donald Trump continues to pursue the dismantling of American democracy.  Cox Richardson compared Donald Trump's demonic intentions to the actions of Adolf Hitler, as she published in November 2024 in the Milwaukee Independent:  "Adolf Hitler’s, on January 30, 1933, took an oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and in three months he dismantled that constitution. By March, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it."

This echo opinion published in The New Yorker describes the evil result of that and other dire predictions about Donald Trump.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

(Donald Trump has no idea what the five letter  one syllable word means.)

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home. By David Remnick editor of The New Yorker magazine.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were soon over heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” 

(Hmmm, turns out the Rumsfeld decisions cost Americans 2,400 military lives in his failed Afghanistan war and another 4,400 were killed in the Iraq disaster. Donald Rumsfeld died on June 29, 2021 in Taos, New Mexico.) With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces. But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. 

Donald Trump's need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shit-posting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained? 

Donald Trump's cult advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (aka "Whiskey Pete") who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” 

Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.” 

Carr’s saber rattling threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975, book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.” 

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all Donald Trump's cult of men followed his lead: they just blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. 

Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦








Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and his Republican cult adminisration obviously jealous about President Obama and his popularity

"Trump supporters say, 'We suffered 8 years under Barack Obama.'
What❓ Let’s take a look.👀

• On the day Obama took office, the Dow closed at 7,949 points. Eight years later, the Dow had almost tripled.
• General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. Obama pushed through a controversial, $80 billion bailout to save the car industry. The U.S. car industry survived, started making money again, and the entire $80 billion was paid back, with interest.
• While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11.
• Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.
• He drew down the number of troops from 180,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000, and increased funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
• He launched a program called Opening Doors which, since 2010, has led to a 47 percent decline in the number of homeless veterans. 
• He set a record 73 straight months of private-sector job growth.
• Due to Obama’s regulatory policies, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 12%, production of renewable energy more than doubled, and our dependence on foreign oil was cut in half.
• He signed The Lilly Ledbetter Act, making it easier for women to sue employers for unequal pay.
• His Omnibus Public Lands Management Act designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, creating thousands of miles of trails and protecting over 1,000 miles of rivers.
• He reduced the federal deficit from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2016.
• For all the inadequacies of the Affordable Care Act, we seem to have forgotten that, before the ACA, you could be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition and kids could not stay on their parents’ policies up to age 26.
• Obama approved a $14.5 billion system to rebuild the levees in New Orleans.

All this, even as our own Mitch McConnell famously asserted that his singular mission would be to block anything President Obama tried to do.

While Obama failed on his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that prison’s population decreased from 242 to around 50.

He expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research, supporting ground breaking advancement in areas like spinal injury treatment and cancer.

Credit card companies can no longer charge hidden fees or raise interest rates without advance notice.

Most years, Obama threw a 4th of July party for military families. 

He held babies, played games with children, served barbecue, and led the singing of “Happy Birthday” to his daughter Malia, who was born on July 4.

Welfare spending is down: for every 100 poor families, just 24 receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996.

Obama comforted families and communities following more than a dozen mass shootings. After Sandy Hook, he said, “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.”

President Obama is a 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet,

He never took away anyone’s guns........
He sang Amazing Grace, spontaneously, at the altar.
He was the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms without personal or political scandal.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
President Obama was not perfect, as no man and no president is, and you can certainly disagree with his political ideologies. 

But to say we suffered❓

If that’s the argument, if this is how we suffered for 8 years under Barack Obama, I have one wish:
may we be so fortunate as to suffer 8 more."

by Teri Carter, Lexington Herald-Leader

New Year message to Donald Trump: "This Week" ABC News transcript with Martha Raddatz and General McChryrstal

"....Donald Trump....went too far in injecting politics into his visit with the troops in Iraq. Retired four star Army general Stanley McChrystal is one of those critics. He served as the top commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan until 2010 and he's the author of a new book, "Leaders: Myth and Reality." Martha Raddatz sat down with him this week for his take on the commander-in-chief.

General Stanley A. McChrystal

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described McChrystal as "perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met."

RADDATZ:  You saw Donald Trump there this week talking to troops, not only in Iraq, but in -- in Germany. And the speech clearly took a political turn. He was talking about the border wall, he was disparaging Democrats. What did you think when you saw that?

GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL (RET.), Former Commander, International Security Assistance Force 

When leaders visit soldiers, young women and men out in potentially harm's way, there's a sacred interaction that occurs.

You have to provide for them leadership. You're showing that you are there. You're also listening to their problems. You don't use that as a time to tout your politics or your personal opinions.

You use it as a time to reassure them that what they are doing is appreciated by people. So, I think it's very important that we understand the role and a responsibility that leaders have, which is -- sometimes transcends what we want to do in the moment.

RADDATZ: And you also saw some of those troops coming forward with red "Make America Great" hats.

MCCHRYSTAL: Sure.

RADDATZ: The military rules prohibit active-duty personnel from engaging in partisan political activities and prohibit military personnel from showing any political leanings while in uniform.

Did they violate that?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think they violated the spirit of it.

And I think it's unfortunate, because, if the U.S. military becomes politicized, it will be something we're not happy with.

RADDATZ: As we talk here today, Syria's military is poised to enter the Kurdish-held town of Manbij. What do you think is going to happen there without U.S. troops?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think there's every likelihood that the Kurds come up in a very difficult position.

We leveraged Kurdish military prowess and capabilities to help deal with ISIS. And I think we did that well. I also think we created a relationship and an expectation with them that was natural. They thought that we would help protect them.

I think now there's every likelihood that Bashar al-Assad's forces will do whatever damage they can to the Kurds to try to remind the Kurds that they are in an area in which they are very, very vulnerable.

RADDATZ: Outside of the Kurds, what difference does it make, does it really make, if those 2,000 U.S. forces leave?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah.

You never know until we see how things play out. My sense is that we have a tumultuous regime -- or region now that has a Russian presence, which had been out for about 30 years after the 1973 war, and now Russia's back, and they're back in an influential way.

Iran has increased influence across the region now. If you pull American influence out, you're likely to have greater instability. And, of course, it will be much more difficult for the United States to try to push events in any direction.

There is an argument that says we just pull up our stuff, go home, let the region run itself. That has not done well for the last 50 or 60 years.

RADDATZ: And I take it you don't believe ISIS is defeated?

MCCHRYSTAL: I don't believe ISIS is defeated. I think ISIS is as much an idea as it is a number of ISIS fighters.

There's a lot of intelligence that says there are actually more ISIS fighters around the world now than there were a couple of years ago. Doesn't mean we didn't do well against ISIS in Iraq and in much of Syria.

But ISIS is an idea. And as long as the fertile ground exists, the causes that cause people to flock to a movement as extreme as ISIS exist, you're going to have it flare back up again.

RADDATZ: In Afghanistan, the president has ordered them to start looking at drawing down half of those troops there. Do you see that as a problem?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think the great mistake in the president's leaked guidance is that, just when we were starting to sit down with the Taliban, just when we were starting to begin negotiations, he basically traded away the biggest leverage point we have.

If you tell the Taliban that we are absolutely leaving on date certain, cutting down, weakening ourselves, their incentives to try to cut a deal drop dramatically.

And, of course, I was worried about the confidence of the Afghan people, because, at the end of the day, that's what determines who wins in Afghanistan. And I think we probably rocked them. We rocked them and their belief that we are allies that can be counted on.

RADDATZ: But, at the same time, this is what President Trump campaigned on. They had to have a pretty good idea he wanted to get out of there.

MCCHRYSTAL: Yes, I think so. There's -- it's not a -- it's not a big surprise.

And I think the first thing we have to do is navigate from where we are, not from where we wish we were.

RADDATZ: Jim Mattis' last day as defense secretary is this Monday. You saw his very public rebuke of President Trump.

What do you think Americans should make of a resignation of someone like Jim Mattis?

MCCHRYSTAL: I would guess that Secretary Mattis took a long time agonizing over writing a letter that was as direct about his feelings as that particular letter was.

He knew it would be very public and it would make a very strong statement that was much broader than the Syria issue. It was about America's role in the world.

I personally think it was valuable. I think maybe it causes the American people to take pause and say, wait a minute, if we have someone who is as selfless and as committed as Jim Mattis resigns his position, walking away from all the responsibility he feels for every service member in our forces, and he does so in a public way like that, we ought to stop and say, OK, why did he do it?

We ought to ask what kind of commander in chief he had that Jim Mattis that, you know, the good Marine, felt he had to walk away.

RADDATZ: So, if someone was asked to be secretary of defense right now who you knew, what would you say to that person?

MCCHRYSTAL: I would ask them to look in the mirror and ask them if they can get comfortable enough with President Trump's approach to governance, how he conducts himself, with his values and with his world view, to be truly loyal to him as a commander in chief and going forward.

And we're all instinctively loyal. But the reality is, if there's too much of a disconnect, then I would tell him, I think it's -- it would be a bad foundation upon which to try to build a successful partnership with that job.

RADDATZ: If you were asked to join the Trump administration, what would you say?

MCCHRYSTAL: I would say no.

I think it's important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it.

RADDATZ: You think he's a liar?

MCCHRYSTAL: I don't think he tells the truth.

RADDATZ: Is Trump immoral, in your view?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think he is.

RADDATZ: What would you say to those Americans, then -- and there are a lot of them -- who support Donald Trump, who say, I like what he's doing, he's shaking things up, I don't care about this other stuff?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, I would say everyone has to make their own judgment. I can't tell any supporter of one politician or another that they are wrong.

But what I would ask every American to do is, again, stand in front of that mirror and say, what are we about? Am I really willing to throw away or ignore some of the things that people do that are -- are pretty unacceptable, normally, just because they accomplish certain other things that we might like?

If we want to be governed by someone we wouldn't do a business deal with because their -- their background is so shady, if we're willing to do that, then that's in conflict with who I think we are. And so I think it's necessary at those times to take a stand.

RADDATZ: Our thanks to Stan McChrystal.

"He perfectly loved his country" ~ Senator John McCain

Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born diarist. One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl

Essay by Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic:

A decade ago, on one of his seemingly countless visits to Iraq, John McCain, who was generally immune to the charms of introspection—“Stop trying to get me on the couch, you shit,” he once said, smiling, when I tried to encourage him toward self-analysis—talked about the dominion of human cowardice, and the story of Anne Frank, in a way that I found startling.

We had been discussing the American war in Iraq, which he supported steadfastly, even after everything went sideways. 

McCain said the cause was just. The execution, at least until the troop surge of 2007, was a disgrace, but this didn’t move him off his principles. “I hated Saddam,” he said. “He ruled through murder. Didn’t we learn from Hitler that we can’t let that happen?” His hatred of Saddam Hussein, like his hatred for all dictators, burned hot; his contempt for Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s first defense secretary, was ice-cold. It was Rumsfeld’s arrogance and incompetence, McCain believed, that helped discredit the American invasion. “He was the worst,” McCain said.

I offered a qualified dissent in response. I supported the invasion for more or less the same reason McCain did—I wanted to see the Kurdish people, the preeminent victims of Saddam’s genocidal fury, suffer no more.

But unlike McCain, I had come to believe that the theory of the American case was no match for heartbreaking Middle East reality. I wasn’t sure that even the most perspicacious secretary of defense could successfully lead an effort to renovate a despotic Middle Eastern country. I suggested to McCain that this sort of grandiose undertaking was not necessarily a core competency of the United States. “But genocide!” he said. “Genocide!” His argument was not only concise, but morally superior. Not analytically superior, but morally, no doubt.

We spoke every so often about the Holocaust, and its supposed lessons (one lesson, he told me once, in a mainly, though not entirely, devilish way, was that Jews should be well armed). He said that, in the post-Holocaust world, all civilized people, and the governments of all civilized nations, should be intolerant of leaders who commit verified acts of genocide. That, he suggested, is the most salient lesson of all.

I told him then that he would most definitely pass the Anne Frank test. He was unfamiliar with the concept (mildly surprising, given that his best friend was Joe Lieberman). The Anne Frank test, something I learned from a Holocaust survivor almost 40 years ago, is actually a single question: Which non-Jewish friends would risk their lives to hide us should the Nazis ever return?

McCain laughed at the compliment. Then he became serious. “I like to think that in the toughest moments I’d do the right thing, but you never know until you’re tested.” I found this to be an absurd thing for him to say. Few men had been tested like John McCain; few men have passed these tests in the manner of John McCain. 

Of all the many stories of McCain’s heroism in Vietnamese captivity, the one I’ve always found most affecting is this one: When presented with the opportunity to be freed—he was the son of an important admiral, and his release would constitute a propaganda victory for the North Vietnamese—McCain demurred; it was not his turn (prisoners were generally released based on their time in captivity), and he would not skip to the head of the line. When he rejected the Vietnamese offer, he knew that intense torture would be his reward. And he did it anyway. His sense of honor would allow him to do nothing else.

I pressed him on this point. “I’ve failed enough in my life to know that it’s always an option,” he said. “I like to think I would do what it takes, but fear will make you do terrible things.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m pretty sure you’d kill Nazis to defend Anne Frank,” I said.

He smiled. “It would be an honor and a privilege.”

John McCain possessed many sterling qualities; two of the most admirable were on display in this conversation. The first was his visceral antipathy for powerful men who abuse powerless people. A few years ago, I asked him about a fight he was then having with President Barack Obama. McCain wanted Obama to supply Ukraine with weapons it could deploy against Russian invaders. Obama, quite logically, believed that these weapons would be ineffective against the Russian juggernaut, and might actually provoke Vladimir Putin into even more aggressive action. McCain understood the possible ramifications of a decision to arm the Ukrainians. But his sense of honor—and his Hemingway-influenced romantic fatalism—led him to a different conclusion.

“When people want to fight for their freedom, we have to be there with them.” As one of his aides later explained, “He believes it’s better to die fighting than just die.”

I asked McCain, Is this the American way? “It should be,” he said. “It always should be.” (McCain’s amanuensis, his former chief of staff Mark Salter told me recently, when I asked him if McCain is more frustrated by Putin’s existence or by the fact that some Americans—I had in mind one American in particular—don’t seem to understand Putin’s nature, “There’s always a Putin somewhere in the world, and you’re meant to oppose them with all the skills God gave you.”)

The second quality on display in our conversation was self-doubt—or, at the very least, self-knowledge. It is almost impossible, in our era, for politicians to keep from becoming hollowed out (assuming they weren’t hollow to begin with). There is no reward in American politics for public displays of self-awareness or self-criticism. And yet, John McCain understood human nature, and his own nature, enough to state the plausible: that in moments of great testing, it is possible for any human, including the bravest human, to fail.

McCain, of course, failed in various ways, large and small. I think that many of his failures will be forgotten by history, except for the fact that he tended to catalogue them himself, and then recite them publicly.

Once, on a lightning-fast trip to Hungary (all of his trips seemed lightning-fast; as The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin recalls, McCain’s aides would refer to his overseas adventures as Bataan Death Marches), I raised the subject of imperfection—not his, but America’s. McCain was visiting Budapest to buttress the democratic opposition there, and to fire a warning shot at the country’s autocratically minded president. I asked him if it ever felt hypocritical to argue for a set of values that we live in America only aspirationally. “We get things wrong all the time,” he said. “It’s true. But the ideals are great, they’re perfect. They’re something to aim for.”

John McCain was far from perfect. But as his former campaign adviser Steve Schmidt said Saturday night, shortly after McCain died, “He perfectly loved this country.”

A man apparently devoid of any redeeming qualities currently occupies the Oval Office. It is important to remember that America is also capable of producing leaders like John McCain.

Christian persecution in the Middle East ~ Mosul

This chillingly accurate political cartoon graphic provides more information about Christian persecutions conducted by terrorist groups in the Middle East than any news reports could accurately describe.  Created by the Indianapolis Star (IndyStar) political commentator and cartoonist Gary Varvel.

Varvel looks at Christian persecution published in the IndyStar
Christians are under attack in Arab nations.  Recently, the terrorist group ISIS (the Caliphate) drove Christians from their homes in Mosul, Iraq, where they have ancestors who have inhabited the region for two millenia. "That sound of crickets chirping is the  world response," is Varvel's commentary. 

Here's how the journalist George J. Marlin described the dire situation in an article published in the National Review: 

Iraqi Christians Look to Reclaim Their Ancient Homes 

Baghdad’s expulsion of ISIS from the Nineveh Plains gives them hope, but they must act fast to return and regain possession.
It was the night of August 6, 2014. Fresh from their capture of Mosul, the terrorist ISIS fighters swept through the Nineveh Plains and overnight drove more than 12,000 Christian families from their homes and ancestral lands. The families fled, quite literally, with only the clothes on their backs.

In Kurdistan, they joined the approximately 15,000 Christians who had fled Mosul just weeks earlier. For the next three years, some 120,000 internally displaced persons, or IDPs, were housed, fed, and clothed by the Chaldean Archdiocese of Erbil. Led by Archbishop Bashar Warda, whose herculean efforts were made possible by the steadfast support of an array of faith-based agencies, the local Church was even able to open six new schools so the children would not be deprived of their education.
Now, three years later, there is a glimmer of hope. The Iraqi government recaptured Mosul and ISIS was expelled from the Nineveh Plains. Iraq’s long-suffering Christians, worn out by many months of living in make-shift conditions, now want to go home.
Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako of the Chaldean Catholic Church has urged the Christian IDPs to “return quickly to reclaim their lands before others seize them” and to avoid internal disputes. “We are the indigenous people of this country and its ancient civilizations, he added. “Our history is traced back to the oldest Christian Church in the world.”

Over a thousand families initially returned to their newly repaired homes on the Nineveh Plains. However, 13,000 Christian-owned homes await repair or rebuilding. And the revamping of the basic infrastructure of the nine Christian towns and villages on the Plains requires major funding — well beyond the ability of faith-based groups to deliver. Meanwhile, the overall situation is far from stable and secure. The threat of renewed violence hangs over the land.
Baghdad may tout its defeat of ISIS, but the group’s Sunni co-religionists still feel like second-class citizens in Iraq, as their devastated cities get scant help from the government. That situation is made worse by the growing influence of Shiite Iran, thousands of whose fighters have joined Iraq’s security forces. There are also reports that ISIS militants are going underground, preparing for guerrilla warfare, suicide attacks, and car bombs.
Christians and other religious minorities count on Western governments not only to help fund the reconstruction but also to insist that both Baghdad and Kurdistan guarantee security.
Christians are at risk — yet again — of becoming collateral damage of the Sunni–Shiite battle for control of Iraq and the larger region.The issues affecting the region are complex and constantly evolving. 
Christians and other religious minorities count on the Western governments — and the U.S. in particular —not only to help fund the reconstruction of the Nineveh Plains but also to use their power and influence to get both Baghdad and Kurdistan to guarantee the security of all minorities and to ensure their equality of citizenship, including their property rights and freedom of worship.

The West must help because, if a significant number of Christians do not return to the Nineveh Plains very soon, and the power vacuum persists into 2018, the hopes for an enduring renaissance of Christianity in Iraq may be dashed forever.

Studying history can mentor leadership ~ an Atlantic echo

The Iraq War and the Inevitability of Ignorance 

The focus is on the 1 percent who serve

By James Fallows in The Atlantic : an essay about leadership, and responsibility and the consequences of decision making, with a presidential focus. 

There’s a specific reason it is so hard to be president—in normal circumstances—and why most incumbents look decades older when they leave the job than when they began. The reason is that the only choices normal presidents get to make are the impossible ones—decisions that are not simply very close calls on the merits, but that are guaranteed to lead to tragedy and bitterness whichever way they go.

Take Barack Obama’s famed choice not to back up his “red line” promise in Syria, which was a focus of Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Obama Doctrine” Atlantic cover story two years ago. The option Obama chose—not intervening in Syria—meant death and suffering for countless thousands of people. 

(Unfortunately, IMO) ...the option President Obama rejected—ie, intervening—would have meant death and suffering for countless thousands of the same people or others. 

Agree or disagree on the Syria outcome, any such decision is intellectually demanding and morally draining. Normal presidents have to make them, one after another, all day long. (

Why don’t presidents get any easier choices? 

Because someone else has made all of those before they get to the president. Obama’s decision to approve the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound turned out to be a tactical and political success. When he made it, he had to weigh the possibility that it could end in world-publicized failure—like Jimmy Carter’s decision to attempt a rescue of American hostages in Iran, which ended in chaos, and which Carter later contended was what sealed his fate in his re-election run.

A special category of impossible decision, which I was introduced to in the two years I worked for Jimmy Carter in the White House and have borne in mind ever since, turns on the inevitability of ignorance. To be clear, I don’t mean “stupidity.” 

People in the government and military are overall smarter than press portrayals might suggest. Instead I mean really registering the uncomfortable fact that you cannot know enough about the big choices you are going to make, before you have to make them.

Sometimes that is because of deadline rush: The clock is ticking, and you have to act now. (To give a famous example: In 1980 U.S. radar erroneously indicated that the Soviets had launched a nuclear-missile attack, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, had to decide at 3 a.m. whether to wake the president to consider retaliation. Before the world was rushed toward possible nuclear obliteration, the warning was revealed as a false alarm before Brzezinski could place the call.) 

Most of the time it is because the important variables are simply unknowable, and a president or other decision-maker has to go on judgment, experience, hunch.
This point sounds obvious, because we deal with its analogues in daily-life decisions big and small. No one who decides to get married can know what his or her spouse will be like 20 years in the future, or whether the partners will grow closer together or further apart. Taking a job—or offering one—is based at least as much on hope as on firm knowledge. You make an investment, you buy a house, you plan a vacation knowing that you can’t possibly foresee all the pitfalls or opportunities.

But this routine truism takes on life-or-death consequences in the choices that presidents must make, as commander in chief and as head of U.S. diplomatic and strategic efforts. The question of deciding about the unknowable looms large in my mind, as I think back 15 years to the run-up to the Iraq war, and think ahead to future such choices future presidents will weigh.

There’s a long list of books I wish presidents would have read before coming to office—before, because normal presidents barely have time to think once they get there. 

To give one example from my imagined list: the late David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace is for me a useful starting point for thinking about strains within the modern Middle East. 

Fromkin'sbook argues, in essence, that the way the Ottoman Empire was carved up at the end of World War I essentially set the stage for conflicts in the region ever since. In that way it is a strategic counterpart to John Maynard Keynes’s famous The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just after the conclusion of the Versailles agreements, which argues that the brutal economic terms dealt out to the defeated Germans practically guaranteed future trouble there.

Also high up on my “wish they’d read” list is Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by two Harvard professors (and one-time mentors of mine), Ernest May and Richard Neustadt. In this book, May and Neustadt reverse the chestnut attributed to an earlier Harvard professor, George Santayana, that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Instead they caution against over-remembering, or imagining that a choice faced now can ever be exactly like one faced before.

The most famous and frightening example is Lyndon Johnson’s, involving Vietnam. Johnson “learned” so thoroughly the error of Neville Chamberlain, and others who tried to appease (rather than confront) the Nazis, that he thought the only risk in Vietnam was in delaying before confronting communists there. A complication in Johnson’s case, as this book and all other accounts of Vietnam make clear, is that he was worried both about the reality of waiting too long to draw a line against Communist expansion, and perhaps even more about appearing to be weak and Chamberlain-like.

Because of the disaster Johnson’s decisions caused—the disaster for Vietnam, for its neighbors, for tens of thousands of Americans, all as vividly depicted in last year’s Ken Burns / Lynn Novick documentary—most American politicians, regardless of party, “learned” to avoid entanglement in Asian-jungle guerrilla wars. 

Thus in the late 1970s, as the post-Vietnam war Khmer Rouge genocide slaughtered millions of people in Cambodia, the U.S. kept its distance. It had given up the international moral standing, and had nothing like the internal political stomach, to go right back into another war in the neighborhood where it had so recently met defeat.

From its Vietnam trauma, the United States also codified a crass political lesson that Richard Nixon had applied during the war. Just before Nixon took office, American troop levels in Vietnam were steadily on the way up, as were weekly death tolls, and monthly draft calls. The death-and-draft combination was the trigger for domestic protests. Callously but accurately, Nixon believed that he could drain the will to the protest if he ended the draft calls. 

Thus began the shift to the volunteer army—and what I called, in an Atlantic cover story three years ago, the “Chickenhawk Nation” phenomenon, in which the country is always at war but the vast majority of Americans are spared direct cost or exposure. (From the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago until now, the total number of Americans who served at any point in Iraq or Afghanistan comes to just 1 percent of the U.S. population.) ...

May and Neustadt had a modest, practical ambition for their advice to study history, but to study it cautiously. “Marginal improvement in performance is worth seeking,” they wrote. “Indeed, we doubt that there is any other kind. Decisions come one at a time, and we would be satisfied to see a slight upturn in the average. This might produce much more improvement [than big dramatic changes] measured by results.”

My expectation is more modest still: I fear but expect that the U.S. is fated to lurch from one over-“learning” to its opposite, and continue making a steadily shifting range of errors.

The decision to invade Iraq was itself clearly one of those. The elder George Bush fought a quick and victorious war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991. But he stopped short of continuing the war into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power—and so his son learned from that “failure” that he had to finish the job of eliminating Saddam. (As did a group of the younger George Bush’s most influential advisors: Dick Cheney, who had been secretary of defense during the original Gulf war, and returned as George W. Bush’s vice president. Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the first time around, and secretary of state the second. Paul Wolfowitz was undersecretary of defense during the first war, and deputy secretary of defense during the second. And so on.)

Two of the writers who were most eloquent in making their case for the war—Christopher Hitchens, who then wrote for the Atlantic among other places, and Michael Kelly, who was then our editor-in-chief—based much of their case on the evils Saddam Hussein had gotten away with after the original Gulf War. (Hitchens died of cancer in 2011; Kelly was killed in Iraq, as an embedded reporter in the war’s early stage.) Then Barack Obama, who had become president in large part because he opposed the Iraq war — which gave him his opening against the vastly better known and more experienced Hillary Clinton— learned from Iraq about the dangers of intervention in Syria. 

And on through whatever cycles the future holds.

Is there escape from the cycles? In a fundamental sense, of course not, no. But I’ll offer the “lesson” I learned—50 years ago, in a classroom with Professor May; 40 years ago, when I watched Jimmy Carter weigh his choices; 15 years ago, in warning about the risks of invading Iraq. 

It involves a cast of mind, and a type of imagination.

As the Bush administration moved onto a war footing soon after the 9/11 attacks, no one could know the future risks and opportunities. But, at the suggestion of my friend and then-editor Cullen Murphy, I began reporting on what the range of possibilities might be. Starting in the spring of 2002, when the Bush team was supposedly still months away from a decision about the war, it was clear to us that the choice had been made. I interviewed dozens of historians, military planners, specialists in post-war occupations, and people from the region to try to foresee the likely pitfalls.

The result, which was in our November, 2002 issue (and which we put online three months earlier, in hopes of affecting the debate) was called “The Fifty-First State?” Its central argument was: The “war” part of the undertaking would be the easy part, and deceptively so. The hard part would begin when U.S. troops had reached Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down—and would last for months, and years, and decades, all of which should be taken into consideration in weighing the choice for war.

It conceivably might have gone better in Iraq, and very well could have, if not for a series of disastrously arrogant and incompetent mistakes by members of the Bush team. 

Fallows wrote, "I won’t go into details here: I laid them out in several articles, including this, this, and this, and eventually a book. But the premise of most people I interviewed before the war, who mostly had either a military background or extensive experience in the Middle East, was that this would be very hard, and would hold a myriad of bad surprises, and was almost certain to go worse than its proponents were saying. Therefore, they said, the United States should do everything possible to avoid invading unless it had absolutely no choice. Wars should be only of necessity. This would be folly, they said, and a war of choice."

The way I thought of the difference between those confidently urging on the war, and those carefully cautioning against it, was: cast of mind. The majority of people I spoke with expressed a bias against military actions that could never be undone, and whose consequences could last for generations. I also thought of it as a capacity for tragic imagination, of envisioning what could go wrong as vividly as one might dream of what could go right. (“Mission Accomplished!”) ~ MaineWriter: Certainly, a wrong minded bravado, the mission has yet to "be accomplished.

Any cast of mind has its biases and blind spots. 

But Fallows writes about being impressed, in thinking about the history he has lived through and the histories read, by how frequently people with personal experience of war have been cautious about launching future wars. 

This does not make them pacifists: Harry Truman, artillery veteran of World War I, decided to drop the atomic bomb. But Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell (in most of his career other than the Iraq-war salesmanship at the United Nations)—these were former commanding generals, cautious about committing troops to war. They had a tragic imagination of where that could lead and what it might mean.

What lesson do we end with? Inevitably any of them from the past will mismatch our future choices. The reasons not to invade Iraq 15 years ago are different from the risks to consider in launching a strike on North Korea or on Iran, or provoking China in some dispute in the East China Sea. The value of tragic imagination remains: for leaders considering war or peace, for the media in stoking or questioning pro-war fever, for the 99 percent of the public in considering the causes for which the military 1 percent will be asked to kill, and die.

Maine needs new gubernatorial leadership

Democrat Adam Cote to run for governor in Maine as a political outsider and military leader.  

He said, "I learned leadership through 20 years as a soldier in places like Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan and 16 years in the private sector, as both a small businessman and a renewable energy attorney.”

Indeed, we support Adam Cote for Maine's new governor.

"There's an opportunity for Maine to reclaim "Dirigo", the state's "I lead" mission. 

Adam Cote is the candidate who can fulfill the state's motto.

In fact, the right candidate who will put Maine and the nation's governor's on to the path to a progressive renaissance is the Sanford native, Major Adam Cote, who is a war veteran and public policy leader. In the gubernatorial campaign launched by Major Adam Cote, the state of Maine has leadership potential to revive our international stature as a progressive state; plus forge a strong alliance with our international shared heritage with Canada, and the state's industrious Franco-American culture.

This is what Adam Cote believes about healthcare:

"For many Americans, and many Mainers, ObamaCare was the first step in providing health care for those who weren’t fortunate enough to have it.  (But)...Now, President Trump is trying to take us backward with his own health care plan."

In fact, we found out just how far backward the TrumpCare (AHCA) would take Americans, with the release of the the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score. 

A jaw-dropping 23 million Americans, 101,000 of those Mainers, would lose healthcare coverage under the bill. 

It will hit rural Mainers, who make up over 60 percent of the population, and Mainers with pre-existing conditions especially hard. Scarily, 548,200 Mainers with pre-existing conditions are at risk of losing their coverage, including 61,200 children.

Mainers should not have to choose between health insurance and affording basic needs. And they won’t have to if enough of us speak up and tell the Senate to vote down this Republican bill.
TrumpCare leaves a lot up to each of the states, which means that the governor of Maine will play a huge role in health care. And Governor LePage has already kept thousands of Mainers from being able to access coverage by not setting up a health care exchange like most other states.

Look, ObamaCare isn’t perfect, but Democrats in Congress have been working to fix it. They’ve just introduced new legislation that would give Mainers the option to buy health insurance from the same exchange as Congress members. That would help Mainers in rural areas who have a limited number of plans to choose from.

While President Trump and Governor LePage are actively working to limit the availability of affordable health care, I know what is at stake and am ready to fight for all Mainers to have access.

When Adam Cote filed his paperwork to run for the office of Governor of Maine, he said he wants to “turn the page from the dead-end politics of division.”

Republicans must wake up and pay attention to Battle for Mosul

While the "pop" news media wastes time reporting on every salacious nuance of the Donald Trump "dumping" campaign to destroy the Republican party, the world is on edge watching the outcome of the Iraq Battle for Mosul. Where are the Republicans who should be focused on this important international news? They're cowards for not standing up to support our international leadership.

CNN Reports: Battle for Mosul: Iraqi forces inflict 'heavy losses' on ISIS By Nick Paton Walsh, Max Blau, Madison Park and Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN Mon October 17, 2016
Near Mosul, Iraq (CNN): Iraq's military says it inflicted "heavy losses of life and equipment" on ISIS in a district southeast of Mosul, as Iraqi-led forces close in on the city in the long-awaited battle to recapture it from the terror group.

Iraq military engaged in Battle of Mosul

Hours after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the beginning of the offensive, Iraq's military said it had inflicted losses and made advances in the Hamdaniya district.

Announcing the offensive in a televised statement early Monday morning, al-Abadi said "the victory bell has rung" in the massive mission to retake the key city, Iraq's second largest, and free more than 1 million residents from the "brutality and terrorism of ISIS."

Iraqi forces gathered in the area of al-Shourah, some 45 kms south of Mosul, as they advance towards the city to retake it from the Islamic State (IS) group jihadists, on October 17, 2016.
"God willing, we will meet soon on the ground of Mosul where we all celebrate the liberation and your freedom," said Haider Al_Abadi.

Haider Al Abadi, Iraqi politician who has been Prime Minister of Iraq since September 2014

The battle for Mosul -- the largest city under ISIS control and the terror group's last remaining stronghold in Iraq -- represents "a decisive moment in the campaign" to defeat ISIS, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said. 

As Peshmerga and ISIS forces exchanged fire Monday, CNN's Nick Paton Walsh heard airstrikes from above coming from some of the nearly 90 coalition and Iraqi planes involved in the operation. "I've just seen a loud airstrike go in right in front of us here," CNN's Nick Paton Walsh said. "That kind of explosive power only happens from some kind of a coalition device."

East of Mosul, CNN 's Hamdi Alkhshali witnessed that at least 45 Kurdish armored vehicles had stormed the village of Kermlesh.
Fighters exchanged heavy machine gunfire and fired artillery and rockets into the nearby villages -- nine of which have been liberated.

Diverse coalition
Before the city was seized by ISIS in 2014, forming part of its self-declared caliphate across stretches of Iraq and Syria, Mosul was inhabited by more than 2 million people. Only about 1 million residents remain today.

Throughout the past year, Iraq's government and its allies prepared for the major offensive to drive ISIS from the northern city, after the humiliating capitulation that resulted in its loss in 2014.

A diverse coalition of as many as 100,000 troops may be involved in the offensive, mostly made up of Iraqi government troops and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters -- although not all will be involved in the assault on the city, securing positions behind the frontlines instead.

Only Iraqi army troops and members of the national police force will enter the city of Mosul, according to Abadi.

The Iraqi-led forces include the Popular Mobilization Units, which plan to target ISIS tunnels and trenches south of Mosul with thermobaric missiles.

In addition, thousands of Kurdish forces have dug in from other directions in the desert surrounding Mosul.

Peshmerga forces stand guard at Kargali village during an operation to liberate Mosul, Iraq.

The Pentagon, lent advisers and air support, recently announced the deployment of 600 additional American troops to aid in Mosul's capture, bringing the number of US personnel to 4,847.

About 3,600 coalition forces from other nations will also be deployed in support of the operation.

Fighters closing in on the city face entrenched ISIS forces, already bombarded from the ground and the air, who are digging in for what could be group's final stand in its last major Iraqi stronghold.

US military officials estimate there are up to 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul. ISIS supporters put the number at 7,000.

ISIS militants took measures to combat the effectiveness of airstrikes. Plumes of black smoke rose from oil-filled trenches on fire outside northeastern Mosul, an attempt by ISIS to obscure its fighters' positions during airstrikes, military sources said.

Even still, though, one airstrike hit one of Mosul's main bridges.
Unfortunately, the battle may last weeks or even months, if the operation to retake Ramadi is any indicator.

Iraqi forces have recaptured much of the territory lost to the group, including the cities of Tikrit and Falluja.

What happens next?
As Iraqi-led forces approach the city, Mosul's remaining residents still remain in the clutches of an organization known for exploiting civilians as human shields. 

Airdropped leaflets declaring "it's victory time" told residents to tape up their windows, disconnect gas cylinders, and stay indoors.

As fighting begins, the UN refugee agency says remaining residents fleeing could create "one of the largest man-made displacement crises of recent times."
Where are the Republicans who self righteously say to veterans, "thank you for your service"? They should be focused on this Mosul battle and supporting the military advisers, and covert operations in the Middle East to help rid the world and humanity of evil ISIS.