Before this shooting

Now he doesn't have to explain himself

Folks are gonna tell you about how other countries control the press and determine what it can and cannot say. They are gonna tell you that in America, we don't do that, we have a "free" press.
This administration will tell you (ad nauseum) that we are winning the war in Iran, and how much the world respects us and fears us because of how decisive we have been...
I won't say it's all lies, but I will let you judge for yourself.
In the now six weeks we were actively at it with Iran, we lost 39 confirmed aircraft to the conflict, 5 crewed aircraft shot down in the air (4 F-15E Strike Eagles and an A-10 Warthog), up to 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones destroyed, an E-3 Sentry AWACS totaled, and an F-35, the crown jewel of our fifth-generation air fleet, took the first known combat hit to a plane of its kind in history. We lost another 10 aircraft to damage significant enough to pull them from operations. And 20% of those losses, including 3 F-15Es, weren't even Iran. We shot them down ourselves, with friendly fire from Kuwaiti air defenses.
We have launched so many missiles that we are putting our readiness in jeopardy if we had to enter a major conflict anywhere else in the world right now, and remember, this one wasn't supposed to be major. We fired over 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles at roughly $3.5 million each, that's nearly 30% of our entire supply. We burned through nearly half our Patriot interceptors and half our THAAD interceptors, the backbone of our missile defense architecture. We fired nearly half of our combined ATACMS and Precision Strike Missile inventory. Experts at CSIS have stated plainly that replenishing those stockpiles to pre-war levels will take one to four years, and rebuilding to the levels needed for a major Pacific conflict will take longer still. To cover those gaps, the Pentagon pulled Patriot and THAAD systems from South Korea and redirected assets from Europe, weakening deterrence on both of those fronts simultaneously.
And here is the spicy part that you are not hearing anywhere else. Iran, the weak and "defenseless" Iran, has forced the great United States of America to abandon and evacuate military bases we held in the Middle East, because Iran either rendered them all but uninhabitable or because we could not defend them from Iran's attacks. At least 11 American bases or installations were damaged or effectively taken offline. Thousands of sailors were evacuated back to the United States, some arriving in Norfolk with a suitcase and nothing else, the Navy not yet able to tell them when or if they're going back. And you have heard precious little about the injuries our service members suffered as a result, because the Pentagon has been actively suppressing those numbers, scrubbing wounded troops from the casualty rolls without explanation. Official count: 13 killed, somewhere north of 380 wounded, though independent reporting puts the injured number well above 520, with the Intercept documenting what a defense official called a "casualty cover-up."
That's right, friend. The great America, with the most advanced and powerful military in the entire world, designed to fight a war on two or more fronts simultaneously, has been driven off our own military bases and installations by an adversary this administration insists we aren't even technically at war with. Trump has openly admitted he's calling it a "military operation" instead of a war specifically to avoid the constitutional requirement to get congressional approval.
And if we had to defend two fronts today... we could not.
Meanwhile Trump is telling us that NATO has abandoned us, not understanding NATO is a defensive pact, not one that activates when we go off and (what did he call this, an "excursion"?) attack countries that haven't attacked any NATO member. Israel, by the way, is not a NATO member. And now NATO also knows that if called upon, we may not have the resources, or the willpower of this administration, to come to the aid of actual NATO members should they need us. Whether that's Russia deciding now is the time to push deeper into the EU, or China deciding now is the time to take Taiwan by force, the US could not be the deterrent we have always prided ourselves on being.
Hell, we can't even keep a waterway clear, and we're too cautious to keep ships in the Strait to keep it from being mined.
Iran was supposed to be an easy target, and six weeks in we have accomplished nothing but making them hate us more and proving to them and the world that our word cannot be trusted. While we stand here claiming complete and total victory, our aircraft are being shot down, we are being forced to evacuate and abandon military bases across the Middle East, and we have zero plan to actually "win" anything, and even less of a plan on how to get out of it and save face without the entire world laughing at our weakness and inefficiency.
We claim to be in peace talks and ceasefire talks while at the same time firing missiles and assassinating people, along with Israel doing the same, while violating international law by seizing private commercial vessels and firing on them with military assets as if they were combatants.
Even if you don't think that's a bad idea, how are you going to feel when China, or Russia, or North Korea start doing that to our vessels? It will be bad then, right? Because it's us being hit. Our loved ones. Our citizens.
That's why we have international law and order, to make sure other countries don't do the same things to us. So when that happens (and I have a feeling we are not far from that day), remember how great it felt to do it to someone else.
There are reasons we make rules like this, and we as a country, this administration, at least, have decided to ignore them at our own peril, while simultaneously degrading our ability to hold our own in any real long-term conflict because we wanted to "look mighty." Every Tomahawk we fired will cost us $3.5 million to replace, and at the current replacement rate it'll take years just to get back to where we were. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the direct cost of this "military operation" at somewhere between $38 and $47 billion for the first two months alone, and that doesn't include long-term veterans' care for the hundreds of wounded, or the economic drag from a closed Strait of Hormuz that at its peak was moving a fifth of the world's oil.
I'm not a military planner or strategist, but I understand how our military is designed, what we are supposed to be capable of, and how badly we have put ourselves out of position if something goes sideways right now.
And I have a pretty good idea of how much this will have cost us in dollars, reputation, morale, and position in the world when we walk away without that "dust" that our Commander in Chief is so worried about.
And if we don't... I also know this: we can't afford to pay the cost we would have to pay to physically take it.