Today’s edition of quick hits.
* The president sure is an unreliable narrator: “On Thursday morning, Trump threatened to strike Iran ‘very hard’ and announced plans to seize Kharg Island, the linchpin of Iran’s oil export infrastructure, and ‘assume total control’ of its oil and gas markets. By Thursday afternoon, he canceled the planned strikes and said ‘discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved.’”
* MS NOW put together a list of previous instances in which Trump has publicly delayed or canceled planned military action in Iran, and the list is not short.
* A heartbreaking milestone: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable. That is just what happened on Thursday. The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I.”
* Yet another strain on relations between the White House and New Delhi: “Three Indian sailors were killed in a U.S. operation to enforce its blockade of Iran, an Indian official said Thursday, the first reported deaths from the American effort to starve its foe of petrodollars and force it to make a deal to end the war.”
* On Capitol Hill: “The House of Representatives on Thursday rejected a last-minute attempt to extend a controversial warrantless-surveillance law, as Democrats protested President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily place Bill Pulte, a mortgage agency director and MAGA loyalist, atop the U.S. intelligence community. The vote failed 218-198, with 19 Republicans joining nearly all Democrats in opposing the bill.”