Trumps last-minute delay: Why he was never going to obliterate Iran in the first place

Ive been telling anyone who would listen – yes. I can get rather tiresome – that would not bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.

Even after he said he would and it would never recover, I knew that he would never go through with it. That was the last thing he wanted to do.

So I was confident he would find some kind of last-minute off-ramp.

And, of course, he didnt want to be seen as backing off his increasingly dire threats.

I got the White House email at 6:32 Tuesday night. There it was, another delay, after a series of earlier delays. He would give the Iranians two more weeks.

I started posting like crazy, beating television by a couple of minutes, and newspapers by more. But thats just because my phone happened to be right there. If Id gone to the fridge for a moment, I would have come back to my laptop and discovered that the world had changed. 

I knew in my gut, having covered Trump for 35 years, that he did not want to go down in history as the man who wiped out an ancient civilization. His heart was never in that. It was bluster as a negotiating tactic. 

Still, he had boxed himself into a corner. Former allies in conservative media were denouncing him. “This is a brazen pre-admission of genocide against the Iranian people, which would obviously be a war crime. Madness,” Piers Morgan declared..

Some Republican lawmakers said he had gone too far. Even the said “the threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified.” 

No American president had ever uttered such words.

So I figured the only card that Trump had left to play was delay. And thats precisely what he did. At the request of Pakistan, which has been the intermediary in the so-called talks, the president agreed to a pause in the hostilities.    

That is, according to the statement I received, “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives…”

Its a shaky cease-fire, to be sure, with Iran launching missiles at Israel minutes  after it was announced, and Israel saying its ground invasion of Lebanon, after rocket fire from Iranian proxy Hezbollah, isnt covered.

By yesterday, in fact, as The AP confirmed, Irans state media said it had closed  Hormuz again, citing the Israeli attacks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a posting that the Trump administration “must choose between a ceasefire or continued war via Israel, and “it cannot have both.”

We learned from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that talked Trump into the war by saying it would be quick and topple the regime. Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, called that “farcical.” Marco Rubio said it was BS. JD Vance was against the war.

And thats a fascinating sidebar. Trump has been insulting Haberman, who published a biography of him in 2022, for no apparent reason. Yet he granted an hourlong Oval Office interview for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change,” from which the Times piece was excerpted.

As for the presidents current stance, well, he isnt being held back by murky details. He told Sky News this was a “complete victory,” not just in military terms but “in every other sense as well.”

Trump was on the phone with Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham shortly before she came on the air, and she quoted him as being “cautiously optimistic,” saying: “It sure looks like Iran blinked.”

What, peering through the fog of war, did Trump actually accomplish, other than sending the markets soaring by nearly 3 percent?

On yesterdays “Fox & Friends,” usually a Trump-friendly show, co-host Lawrence Jones said “we have not r