Monday evening open thread—OH MY GOD WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS??

Just because I'm still reeling in incredulity, and need to set down a record of what has occurred on this Day of the Epiphany, AD 2020, I'm going to interrupt Trevor's excellent takedown of white privileged Berniestans and try to work this out for myself.

The morning saw this tweet:

#BREAKING US army tells Iraq it is preparing to "move out": official letter pic.twitter.com/cCB6aDMybw

— AFP news agency (@AFP) January 6, 2020

Well! Needless to say I was ready to rush and write a post about this, but decided to wait until further news confirmed it.

Sure enough, we got this confirmation. The actual letter.

NEW: 100s of US-led forces are being moved out of a base in Baghdad’s Green Zone to elsewhere in Iraq, such as Taji base, & to Kuwait (but still in theatre of ops), a coalition source says, explaining letter below👇. It’s to “thin out” troops in Baghdad. “We’re not leaving Iraq” pic.twitter.com/dZiguFwL2G

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) January 6, 2020

Well, as the kids say: HOLY SHIT.

As our own RationalLeft pointed out, the language in the letter left lots of wiggle room. But a reading of it certainly lent to the conclusion that the US was going to turn tail and leave Iraq at the insistence of a sovereign nation's government.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple in these our latter days.

The secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held a presser to go into a few details of the Soleimani assassination. JCS Chairman Gen. Milley went back into the briefing room with this blockbuster:

NEW: Gen. Milley just came back to talk to reporters, after briefing us minutes ago, to correct the record on the Iraq memo making the rounds:

"That letter is a draft, it was a mistake, it should not have been released."

— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) January 6, 2020

And SecDef Mike Esper had this word salad:

.@EsperDoD on Iraq: “We are re-positioning forces throughout the region number one. Beyond that with regard to the letter which I’ve read once. I can’t tell you the veracity of that letter and I can tell you what I’ve read. That letter is inconsistent of where we are right now.”

— Ryan Browne (@rabrowne75) January 6, 2020

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post summed up the debacle thusly:

unbelievable. three stooges drag us into war

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) January 6, 2020

So, there you have it, folks. Iranian tanks will soon be rolling up our tree-lined streets because this crew is so incompetent that a minor military power like Iran could, in all likelihood, storm South Beach.

And this, children, is why I reconsidered my rash decision to quit drinking.