President Donald Trump’s “cavalier approach” to the Iran war is “recklessly endangering hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Middle East.”
That’s the opinion of two veteran Middle East hands revealed in a New York Times opinion piece. Jeffrey Feltman was the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon from 2004 to 2008, while Mara Karlin served as the Levant director for the Pentagon in 2006 and 2007.
They believe Trump’s inaction at the start of the Iran conflict is contradicting a key piece of his State of the Union message, wherein he opined, “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens.”
His conduct since then has put many in danger, Feltman and Karlin contend.
The Trump administration, despite weeks of war talk, did not give sufficient warning to its embassies so that preparations for evacuation could be made, the authors claim. Such a lack of care is “bewildering."
Instead of clear-eyed instructions, there was “disarray and confusion” when the Iran attacks began, leaving U.S. diplomats and their families — not to mention American civilians — on their own.
It was not hard to foresee, the authors contend, that Iran would retaliate against the Gulf states, Israel and soft targets like airports and hotels.
Even when evacuation orders finally arrived, they were lacking in details on how or even whether the U.S. would assist in evacuations. As for allies in the region, the U.S. provided “minimal” information to help them could protect their citizens. American civilians in the Middle East did not even receive that, they claim.
At the same time, the authors argue it seems clear the United States was not expecting the scale of the Iranian response, one that has largely shut down air travel across the region and targeted sites in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar, among other countries.
The authors pointed to their own experience with a crisis in the Middle East as an example of the way things were done in a prior administration.
In 2006, they were the U.S.ambassador in Lebanon and the Pentagon’s Levant director when Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization went to war against Israel. “We responded quickly, organizing what was then the largest noncombatant evacuation of Americans in U.S. history," they explained.
Such actions “were daunting,” but things moved quickly. The State Department, Pentagon and three military commands worked on evacuations, and consular officers activated a communications network. There was also coordination with Israel on evacuation routes. All told, nearly 15,000 American citizens were moved to safety, the authors claim.
That can-do activity is in sharp contrast to now. “The U.S. Embassy in Beirut is one of several in the region that have simply closed their doors, suspending consular operations at a time they are most needed," the authors said. It was three days after the Iran war started that the Trump administration urged American citizens to evacuate, all on their own using commercial transport that was “mostly unavailable.”
“So much of this was avoidable,” the authors explained, adding that such negligence appears “willful, perhaps intentional, ignorance.” Granted, many more people needed to be evacuated from the Iran conflict than during the Lebanon crisis. “But that makes the lack of planning even more bewildering," they noted.
The authors concluded with a callback to the State of the Union, which now appears to ring hollow. “When the administration began planning this war, it should have also planned to protect Americans — the ‘first duty of the American government,’ as the president said.”