I don’t like the direction Tucker is going lately, but I give him huge credit for one thing: he went to the White House and tried to stop the war before it started.
The war began on my birthday.
During the week leading up to it, I went to my office at the Pentagon because the signs were impossible to ignore. You don’t position two aircraft carriers in the region and pull Navy and Coast Guard assets out of the Gulf for no reason.
Everyone… people at the Pentagon, friends in Washington, other journalists, and my own family… kept telling me to come home early for my birthday.
I stayed.
That week, the Pentagon press room was empty. It was just me and
@AlexIngersoll. That’s it. The old press corps had self deported and the new corps didn’t show up.
I didn’t want to leave because it was crystal clear that something big was about to happen.
The night before my birthday, I finally gave up and drove home.
I woke up to the news.
Every U.S. Navy officer learns the famous line attributed to Commodore Stephen Decatur:
“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”
That quote means different things to different people. To me, it has always carried a simple lesson: maintain situational awareness, speak your mind, and raise the alarm BEFORE the big decision is made.
One thing we know about Trump is that he pays attention to feedback from his base.
If every Republican who is now turning on Trump had shown a modicum of situational awareness the week before the strike, and spoken up then, maybe, just maybe, the strikes would have been postponed.
But only a tiny handful of people did which basically gave the White House the green light.
And at the time, nearly everyone told us we were overreacting.
Here’s the other part people should remember: those of us warning about the strike beforehand generally expected the outcome to be worse than it actually was.
I opposed the war at the beginning. More recently, I’ve moved to a cautiously, optimistically neutral position.
But even at my most pessimistic, I wanted the United States to win. One hundred percent.
Maybe history will judge the Iran war as a colossal mistake.
Maybe history will conclude it was absolutely necessary.
None of us knows yet. History gets to make that judgment.
But this part should not be controversial:
The time to yell, scream, question assumptions, and warn people is BEFORE a major decision is made, not after.
I largely dismiss the people who accuse me of being “too pro-Trump” because I’ve said the obvious: the Navy has performed exceptionally well.
But I don’t dismiss their criticism merely because I disagree with it.
I dismiss much of it because many of those same people didn’t give a damn the week before the shooting started. They were too busy repeating whatever political talking points already occupied their feeds to notice what was happening in front of them.
So no, I don’t agree with Tucker’s recent turn.
But I listen to him.
Because when the warning signs appeared, he didn’t just notice them.
He acted.
He went to the White House and tried to stop the war before it began.
That matters.
P.S. we weren’t alone.
@JesseKellyDC and
@mercoglianos were wide awake that week. A few others too, I have to check my notes.
"I said to Trump, you know, 4 days before the war started, if you do this, you know, the United States will be kicked out of the Gulf. The American Empire will begin to collapse. Your legacy will be destroyed along with your party. I said this to Trump to his face in the Oval Office days before the war began, and he looked at me and said, 'Yes, you're right. But in the end, we all die anyway, so it doesn't matter.' That's exactly what he said. 'In the end, we all die anyway.'"
Tucker Carlson, in an interview released yesterday with NPR