Adam Weinstein writes:

In between playing five hours of golf on Saturday and getting booed at a baseball game on Sunday, President Donald Trump caught up on his other favorite sport: playing military. American service members in Syria cornered and killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the titular leader of ISIS, as Trump spectated; the following morning, in advance of the Sunday talk shows, he gave a triumphant press conference about the operation. Skeptical reporters came away from Trump’s endzone dance with some key insights: He’d overshared sensitive information that could endanger future operations against “high-value targets”; he’d concocted details about Baghdadi’s “whimpering, crying and screaming” death that he could not have possibly witnessed; he offered no long-term vision or strategy for how to achieve stability, much less peace, in the Middle East, even as experts noted that decapitating the leadership of a networked insurgent group and its ideology, now as in 2011, was “mostly strategically irrelevant.”

Trump’s oratory may be devoid of cogent reasoning, but one can discern hints of his worldview in the ersatz word salads he tosses out. The main ingredient on Sunday was “oil.” In his speech and in extended answers to reporters’ questions, Trump mentioned oil an incredible 22 times; by contrast, he mentioned Baghdadi only 18 times.

This is not a new obsession for Trump. “He has a short notebook of old pledges, and this was one of the most frequently repeated pledges during the campaign: that we were going to take the oil,” former CIA analyst and Middle East hand Bruce Riedel told The New York Times last weekend. “And now he actually is in a position where he can quote, ‘take some oil’.” [Continue reading…]