Washington | US President Donald Trump says the United States is winning the war with Iran even as thousands of additional American troops deploy to the Middle East. He has pilloried other countries for not helping the US, only to say later he does not need their assistance. He has twice delayed deadlines for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has both threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s energy plants if the vital waterway remains largely shuttered and said the US was “not affected” by the closure. At one point this month, Trump said one of his predecessors — who, he strongly suggested, was a Democrat — privately told him he wished he had taken similar action against Iran. Representatives for every living former president quickly denied that such a conversation happened. As the war entered its second month on Saturday, Trump’s penchant for embellishments, exaggerations and falsehoods is being tested in an environment where the stakes are much higher than an isolated political fight. A president who has long embraced bluster and salesmanship to shape narratives and focus attention is confronting the unpredictability of war. Leon Panetta, who served Democratic presidents as defence secretary, CIA director and White House chief of staff, said he has ‘seen enough wars where truth becomes the first casualty.’ ‘It’s not the first administration that has not told the truth about war,’ he said. ‘But the president has made it kind of a very standard approach to almost any question to in one way or another kind of lie about what’s really happening and basically describe everything as fine and that we’re winning the war.’ Michael Rubin, a historian at the American Enterprise Institute who worked as a staff adviser on Iran and Iraq at the Pentagon from 2002 to 2004, said Trump is ‘the first president of any party in recent history that hasn’t self-constrained to live within rhetorical boundaries.’ ‘So of course it creates a great deal of confusion,’ he said. The zigs-zags are the point To his critics, Trump’s style is a sign that doesn’t have a coherent long-term strategy. But for Trump, the zigs and zags seem like the point, a method that keeps his opponents — and pretty much everyone else — always on their heels. The approach was clear this week in the hours before he announced the second delay of the deadline for Iran to reopen the strait. Asked what he would do about the deadline, Trump said he did not know and that he had a day before he had to decide. ‘In Trump time, a day, you know what it is, that’s an eternity,’ the Republican president said to laughter from members of his Cabinet. But investors are unimpressed, with US stocks closing out their worst week since the war began. To some on Capitol Hill, the freewheeling is more frustrating than amusing. Rep Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lamented that Trump is ‘going back and forth and constantly contradicting himself.’ ‘The administration is winging it,’ he said. ‘So how can you trust what the president says?’ Republicans were not willing to go that far, but their concern was apparent heading into a two-week break from Washington. Sen John Kennedy of Louisiana said his constituents ‘support what the president has done.’ ‘But most of my people are also equally or even more so concerned about cost of living,’ he said. Republican Rep Chip Roy of Texas, who sits on the House Budget Committee and is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said his constituents
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