This has gone viral and has been shared by the Obama bros, among others, but it's not a real quote from the NYT article. It combines various sentences and presents them as a single quote. Regardless of your opinion on the strike, context matters. Here's an accurate version: 1/
(And, FWIW, based on the the NYT authors' track record on the topic, it's fair to view their presentation of the issue with a little skepticism) 2/
The "quote" above conflates two different decisions. According to the article, after Iran's militias killed an American, the Pentagon presented Trump with several options. Soleimani was the most extreme. *At that point,* Trump chose the middle option—hitting the militias. 3/
Then—after Iran's militias stormed our embassy—Trump chose the Soleimani option. There wasn't a single briefing and an "oh shit" moment, as the "quote" above implies. 4/
The article does say that officials were alarmed about retaliation—and based on the authors' history referenced above, I'd be curious to hear more context about those statements—but those concerns were not expressed in the context in which @KBAndersen presented them. 5/
In short, the "quote" that @KBAndersen shared was not an actual quote from the article (which he curiously did not share). And regardless of how you view the strike/the content of that NYT article, there's way more context than his random compilation of sentences implies. /fin
