SPINELESS MEN AROUND DONALD TRUMP 

By Mahmud Jega

The recent CNN report, saying both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially opposed the idea of the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran, reminded me of Cyrus Vance, US President Jimmy Carter’s first Secretary of State in 1977-80.

Vance had tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate the release of US hostages held by revolutionary Iranian students at the US Embassy in Tehran. He opposed the push by the hawkish National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski for a military solution. In April 1980, while Vance was recuperating in Florida, Carter and his National Security Council approved Operation Eagle Claw, a military operation to free the hostages.

Vance’s deputy Warren Christopher, who was at the meeting, did not inform him. When Vance heard of it, he immediately resigned, but decided not to announce it until after the operation, lest he tipped off the Iranians.

The operation failed when three of the eight military aircrafts failed to make it to the staging point in Iran’s Dasht e-Kavir desert, and one helicopter collided with a military transport plane as they took off, spreading wreckage in the desert, which at the time Ayatollah Sadiq Khalkhali poked with a stick.

Vance was not the first US Secretary of State to resign over a war decision. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State Lewis Cass resigned over the decision to launch the American Civil War. And in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned to protest American moves to get involved in World War 1.

Here now come the spineless men. Although both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed misgivings about Trump’s plan to go to war in Iran, they caved in to his desire and became public promoters of the senseless, illegal and ultimately unwinnable war which has led to much loss of Iranian lives, untold property damage across the Middle East, created tension of historic proportions, created a huge spike in oil prices and threatens to send the world economy into a spiral.

That’s the price of having spineless yes-men around Presidents.