As President Donald Trump has navigated the war he launched against Iran, he’s offered all manner of conflicting justifications and made no shortage of false assertions. When Israel escalated the war by striking Iran’s South Pars oil facilities, for example, Trump said he was ignorant of the attack — a claim that was quickly disputed. Now after threatening to strike Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t opened within 48 hours, Trump says he’s suspending such actions due to “constructive conversations” with the regime. But according to Iran, “There was no direct or indirect contact with Trump.”This, says Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker, raises troubling questions about how Americans are being informed about the war. “The unsettling reality is that with this president,” tweeted Baker, “Americans in wartime are in the unprecedented position of having to suspect that the enemy’s version of events is more likely to be true than our own. We have become Baghdad Bob.”For those who can’t remember the early days of a different Middle Eastern boondoggle way back in 2003, “Baghdad Bob” refers to Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi Minister of Information during the American invasion of Iraq. Earning the nickname due to the comically inaccurate nature of his daily televised briefings, al-Sahhaf famously made statements like, “Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on. Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Don’t believe those liars,” even as Iraqi forces were fleeing Americans entering the city.Now as Trump makes disputed claims about negotiations with Iran, nobody is buying it. “I’d approach this cautiously, with a grain of salt,” Sky News reporter Yalda Hakim was told by a source from Israeli intelligence. “It’s early Monday morning in the U.S., the start of the trading week. Markets opened higher, largely as expected following the weekend reports on the negotiations and the latest statement by Donald Trump. … The Iranians are already denying it.”And as Sky News International Affairs Editor Dominic Waghorn explained, “He is currently distracting from that with a torrent of falsehoods. The nuclear threat that he said was obliterated was then imminent. The regime has been changed. Iran’s leadership is unable to communicate. All self evidently untrue.”“It’s the ol’ ‘productive talks’ routine to evade the self imposed deadline,” said political scientist Ian Bremmer.As foreign affairs reporter Daniel DePetris explained, Trump’s disputed claims of seemingly nonexistent negotiations are only going to make ending the war harder: “Even a straight-up ceasefire, untied to the nuclear file, will be tough because (a) Trump has burned Iran numerous times before and (b) there is no guarantee the Iranians will actually allow traffic in the Strait of Hormuz to go back to pre-war levels. Which means any truce could fall apart quickly.”
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