'Planes were in the air'—the U.S. almost went to war on Thursday, then Trump called it off

Attribution: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brian M. Wilbur

The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group

Jun 21, 2019 5:32am PDT by Mark Sumner, Daily Kos Staff

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Thursday evening ended in victory. If, that is, it can be counted as a victory that Donald Trump called off the war he had just launched before missiles actually hit their targets. For the moment it seems that a full-on conflict hasn’t been initiated, and no one is dead. Barely.According to The New York Times, Trump approved a series of strikes on Iran, and those actions were already far enough along that ships were moving into position and aircraft were headed to targets … when Trump gave the order to stop. It doesn’t appear that any aircraft were lost to carrier landings, and no helicopters went down for simply being helicopters, so Trump’s feint—originally aimed at hitting Iranian missile batteries and radar installations—didn’t immediately bring with it a list of causalities. But it did inject an enormous increase in confusion and a situation that’s already fraught with potential disaster.According to the Times, it wasn’t clear if there was new information, a decision to move to a different strategy, or if Trump simply “changed his mind.” Whatever it was, it seems to have caught military and congressional leaders who had already been briefed on the pending strikes as much by surprise as it did the air crews who turned their planes back from targets.The Washington Post notes that U.S. Central Command has made no comments on the almost-strike. However, it appears that not only had U.S. forces been ordered to carry out a strike, Iran was aware of that order and was expecting to be hit at any moment. That anticipation didn’t require a great deal of sleuthing, as the U.S. issued warnings to commercial aviation on Thursday evening that caused multiple carriers to cancel international flights over the Persian Gulf pending military action.Whatever Trump’s reason for standing down, for the moment at least, the United States and Iran have not gone to war. During the 2016 campaign, Trump frequently proclaimed his admiration for the idea of surprise in military actions. Apparently that includes surprising his own military.Meanwhile, the U.S. Central Command has released the flight path of the drone shot down by Iran to show that it did not cross into Iranian airspace. On the other hand, Iran is showing pieces of drone they claim fell on their territory.

In a map attached to a tweet, U.S. Central Command showed the flight path of the RQ-4A Global Hawk that was shot down by an Iranian missile. The path does not appear to cross the line presented as the boundary of Iranian territorial waters, but the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz and the complexities of the coastline shows that the drone took a flight path that had it at times hooking into the twists and turns of the boundaries, staying just outside Iranian territory—by an apparent whisker. Various sources have given a cost for the fallen drone ranging from $130 million to as high as $240 million.On the other hand, Iranian officials have been displaying what appears to be parts of an aircraft, claiming they are fragments of a debris field from where the drone fell within Iran. Whether the pieces are from the drone, or whether they were recovered from the site that Iran claims, can’t be verified.On Thursday afternoon, Trump gave a briefing to congressional leaders to tell them he was planning retaliation for the drone shoot down. Following that meeting, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pulled Democrats into a closed session. “We know that the high-tension wires are up there,” said Pelosi, “and we must do everything we can not to escalate the situation, but also to make sure that our personnel in the region are safe.”The strike was apparently scheduled for the pre-dawn hours of Friday. The extent of the operation, in terms of what planes, ships, and forces were involved, or how many targets were scheduled to be hit in this first strike, is unclear. As is the reason that the operation was suspended.

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