Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell called it the “Pottery Barn Rule.” You break it, you own it. President W owned Operation Iraqi Freedom because he broke it, learning too late that beating Saddam Hussein did not mean that democracy would fill the necessarily void. Trump never learned the lesson.

From the outset, Trump has been careful to declare limits around the U.S. attack, saying he wanted to overthrow the current regime, but telling Iranians it was up to them to seize the opportunity to write their country’s next chapter. His communication strategy has reinforced those limits by creating a bit of distance — at least in imagery — between the president and the fighting.

At the same time, however, Trump has adopted expansive rhetoric about the reasoning for his intervention that recalled the justifications used for earlier U.S. forays into the Middle East.

Employing his trademark gross exaggerations and vagaries, Trump seeks to simultaneously take credit for winning, regardless of what follows, while taking no responsibility for what follows.

“We’re undertaking this massive operation not merely to ensure security for our own time and place, but for our children and their children, just as our ancestors have done for us many, many years ago. This is the duty and the burden of a free people.”

Weird how that duty and burden never applied to Ukraine, but I digress.

“I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment to be brave,” Trump said. “I made a promise to you, and I fulfilled that promise. The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help.”

Trump did make a promise, about 40,000 deaths ago, to be there for the Iranian people who opposed the revolutionary Islamic regime, but now dumps the consequences on the people of Iran to clean up the mess he left behind. The vague “we’ll be there to help” provides little comfort and even less commitment. As usual, no one can pinpoint what it is Trump is talking about. Has he thought this through? Has he established actual goals to be achieved by starting this war, or has he broken Iran and is now refusing to buy it?

Richard Haass, who was the director of policy planning at Powell’s State Department in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, said Trump was “calling for regime change, but is not assuming the responsibility for it.”

“It gives him an off-ramp, not having to see it through. So if it happens, he gets credit for it, if it doesn’t happen, he doesn’t get the blame for it,” said Haass, who is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

As of now, three United States servicepeople have died, and five more have been wounded. Trump says there will be more.

Sadly there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.

No doubt he’s right about that, but this cavalier statement from a fellow who dodged the draft with bone spurs and talks tough with other people’s lives saying “that’s the way it is” ignores the salient point. Why? To what end? Will they die for something or for nothing? Has Trump put in the real effort of thinking through what he started and taking responsibility for where it ends before putting American lives at risk?

During a closed-door briefing with congressional staff Sunday, some aides said the administration provided no intelligence on an imminent or preemptive threat posed by Iran, according to people in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing.

When asked directly about potential threats, one briefer said Iran was prepared to retaliate against the United States, but such warnings fall short of the traditional tests for a legal basis to launch a preemptive attack on a country or decapitate its political and military leadership.

Bush said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not. Trump said Iran posed an imminent threat. It did not. That doesn’t make Iran any less of a roque nation or Khamenei any less of a murderer, but it does mean that Trump had ample opportunity to plan ahead and think this through rather than blindly leap into big bangs and regime decapitation without any plan for what came after other than shifting the responsibility off him and onto the people of Iran.

One of Trump’s primary claims was that he would be the peace president, ending foreign wars.* Unsurprisingly, it was just talk, saying whatever would get him elected. But here we are, or as Trump puts it, “that’s the way it is.” Whatever comes of this war is on Trump, no matter how hard he tries to slough it off. He broke it. Now he owns it, even if he has no idea what to do with it.

*Another campaign promise, of course, was to release the Epstein files. That hasn’t worked out as expected either. A cynic might argue that this invasion of Iran is a distraction from the Epstein files, the missing pages of which implicate Trump. Can anyone be so cynical as to believe that Trump would start a war just to district the attention of Americans from allegations of his sexual abuse of girls?