President clarifies that the strike on a sovereign ally was not his decision; the ally was Qatar.

On Tuesday afternoon, after Israel bombed downtown Doha, the President of the United States went to the cameras and explained the chronology. The chronology, as he laid it out, went like this. He was informed about the strike. He was not consulted about the strike. Once informed, he had immediately picked up the phone and rushed to inform the government of Qatar.

Hon. Look. The Qataris had a different chronology. The Qatari prime minister came out the same evening and said, on camera, that the warning from the Americans had been concurrent. The warning and the strike had arrived at the same time. By the time the phone was answered in Doha, the missiles were already in the air over the meeting house. The informing, in other words, did not function as a warning. It functioned as narration.

The President of the United States sits at the top of the Western alliance system. The hosts at Al-Udeid Air Base, which is in Qatar, host one of the most significant forward American military presences anywhere on earth. CENTCOM works out of that base. The American flag flies there. The Hamas political office that was bombed exists in Qatar because we asked Qatar to host it, so that the channel for ceasefire talks would have somewhere to be.

We bombed our own channel. Our other ally bombed our channel. Our other ally did not tell us. We then narrated the bombing of our channel to our channel.

You ever notice how the art of the deal requires being in the room when the deal is being broken.

Funny how that works.