“For people who have been arguing from the start that this war was a mistake, that this war was an unnecessary risk to U.S. service members, it was an unnecessary use of U.S. military power and a waste of U.S. military resources—this is just the exclamation point on that argument,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at the think tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for restraint in U.S. foreign policy.
She says the incident makes walking away from the war now, at least in the immediate term, “essentially impossible politically for Trump”.
That’s because, she says, the U.S. president needs something else to further underline his claims of victory and “this is not it”.
“It was sort of inevitable,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at think tank Defense Priorities.
It was only “a matter of time before there was some incident like this”, she says.
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