Strange Khargo

Donald Trump's Toy Story War

Reports that 2,000 troops of the 82d Airborne’s “Immediate Response” Brigade are being sent, well, somewhere in the Persian Gulf as we speak offers us a window into Donald Trumps’ state of mind, not that the world is begging for any more of those right now. He was obviously picturing a movie where he gets to slap his palm on a desk, look around sternly at the assembled brass, and say “That’s it, gentlemen. I’m ordering the 82d Airborne to Iran.”

This is obviously a cool way to behave that only Presidents get to cosplay in what John Le Carre called the theater of the real. What those luckless paratroopers are supposed to do when they get wherever they’re going, let alone why, can’t be conjectured. That’s because conjecture requires at least some agreed-on understanding of the situation and the stakes, which Trump doesn’t have and the poor bastards aboard the planes don’t either. POTUS doesn’t care a whit about such marginal jottings, but their non-materialization is probably making the poor bastards feel a tad glum.

Remarkably or maybe not, the United States has now spent over a quarter of a century (and counting) militarily embroiled in the Gulf without the Pentagon or the White House ever formulating a coherent precis of what’s going on, including what our goals may be. Did we just get lost on the way to Greenland, which at least is our traditional bitter enemy in this dog-bites-penguin hemisphere?

Granted, those crickets you hear chirping what sounds like “What now?” could be making all sorts of cogent if unintelligible points, as crickets will. But they’re doing so at a black site whose one billboard reads No Intelligent Human Voices Allowed Beyond This Point Without Proper G.I. Joe Escort.

The sign is difficult to decipher because it was written in 2002 in some subliterate factotum’s wayward notion of Esperanto. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld trained him or her well. Okay, probably not her.

Who can complain, though? This is how we’ve always done things when we haven’t known what we’re doing. So far, or possibly soon, it’s worked or not worked pretty well or badly, depending on which griot-geared cricket who’s learned a smattering of broken English you ask. But Trump has added a bold new level of utter incoherence to the landscape. The special brand of three-dementianal chess he plays involves stuffing all the rooks, knights, pawns and whatnot inside a pinata and handing out baseball bats.

It says a lot that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who’s never let having journalists gruesomely chainsawed on his orders mar his fashion sense – the guy’s fancy-Dan bespoke cufflinks, finest specimens of human molars with frightened eyes added for laughs, just hate the sight of blood – seems to be the only stray rook in sight, ya shoulda looked under the carpet, Jared, who actually knows what he wants. This is to prolong the Iran war until the regime in Teheran falls, which – given the mullahs’ long-displayed reluctance to mistake banana peels for clerical footwear – amounts to wanting it prolonged it forever. Since Trump has never been known to balk at any formula that pairs “forever” with his name, MBS is doubtless hoping he’ll be as susceptible as usual.

Amid the murk, one tiny claim I can make with confidence is that this is one butterfingered misuse of the 82d’s Immediate Response brigade. If Trump wasn’t a butterfingers, he wouldn’t have fingers at all, but as Leslie Nielsen used to say in Airplane!, that isn’t important right now. Liberals tend to be, let’s say restrained in their curiosity as to things military, which is too bad. You learn a lot and sometimes it’s fun. But to my knowledge, this brigade’s particular brief – to be equipped and ready to deploy anywhere for any purpose in count-‘em 18 hours – makes it unique among regular U.S. infantry units, as opposed to specialized but smaller outfits like the Rangers or Delta Force. The Marines have had a roughly similar role since forever, and guess what? They’re on their way to somewhere near the Strait of Hormuz too – 4,500 of them. So far.

Just for argument’s sake, let’s suppose the United States has genuine interests at stake in parts of the world where Benjamin Netanyahu’s name if often mistaken for that of a refreshing drink. What if a genuine, unmistakable crisis erupts – China saying “Fuck it” and plowing the fuck into Taiwan, just to grab a random example out of this-here wet paper bag I have handy – and we could use some sort of military force trained for overnight retaliation?

“Jared, don’t I have some sort of Immediate Response biscotti, frittata, bridge game, brigade sitting around at one of those bases? The ones whose names I can’t remember now that I’ve had them unrenamed?” “Um, yes, Dad, but they’re somewhere near the Strait of Hormuz. On the plus side, they’re learning to fish with grenades.” ‘Well, what about the Miami Marlins? Dammit, that’s not even a football team. The Marines.” “They’re all somewhere near the Strait of Hormuz too. They’ve always known how to fish with grenades. They learned before grenades existed.”

“Jesus fuck! Don’t I have some sort of mindless, robotic, Terminator II-type killing machine near at hand I can send somewhere near the Strait of Hormuz at the drop of a hat? This MAGA cap I’m wearing, for instance? Even if they’re hopelessly unqualified for whatever the task is? I seem to remember –” “That would be me, Dad. But surely –” “Damn it, stop calling me Shirley. And stop calling me Dad, you pathetic excuse for an action figure. You reject from Toy Story III.”

It’s said that feeling nostalgia for Trump’s first term is a mug’s game, and maybe so. But he did show a marked aversion to getting us entangled in mindless foreign wars. For all its sins, the MAGA base shares this antipathy, and that’s why they’re so puzzled – if not worse – about what’s become of their Donald. But maybe he’s just never found a war stupid enough to entrance him until now.