A President Held Hostage
They've got him surrounded
13
February, 2018
As
Vice President Mike Pence made a fool both of himself and the country
he is supposed to be representing at the Olympic Games by refusing to
stand for the athletes of any nation
other than the US, back at home the Washington
Postwas
reporting on a President Trump who appears to have nothing in common
either with Pence or with the White House staff. The piece, entitled
“Trump’s
favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still
retain his trust?” tells
a story that pits a President inclined to challenge the War Party
against a Praetorian Guard determined to nullify his electoral
mandate to keep out of foreign wars and put “America first”:
“Although
Trump has given the military broad latitude on the battlefield, he
also has raised pointed questions about the wisdom of the wars being
fought by the United States. Last year, after a delegation of Iraqi
leaders visited him in the Oval Office, Trump jokingly referred to
them as ‘the most accomplished group of thieves he’d ever met,’
according to one former U.S. official.”
Truer
words were never spoken, but of course this leak is designed to
embarrass Trump and put him at odds with those very thieves. Mattis
was presumably horrified by this truism, since the General is an even
bigger thief, having successfully manipulated Congress into
appropriating 15.5
percent more
money for the military than Trump asked. The Post piece
goes on to detail the President’s many heresies:
“He
has repeatedly pressed Mattis and McMaster in stark terms to explain
why US troops are in Somalia. ‘Can’t we just pull out?’ he has
asked, according to US officials.
“Last
summer, Trump was weighing plans to send more soldiers to Afghanistan
and was contemplating the military’s request for more-aggressive
measures to target Islamic State affiliates in North Africa. In a
meeting with his top national security aides, the president grew
frustrated.
‘You guys want me to send troops everywhere,’ Trump
said, according to officials in the Situation Room meeting. ‘What’s
the justification?’”
Oh,
the shocked silence in that room must have lasted for what seemed
like forever. Then Mattis came up with the same old bullshit:
“‘Sir,
we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,’
Mattis replied.”
Trump
didn’t fall for it: “The response angered Trump, who insisted
that Mattis could make the same argument about almost any country on
the planet.” And the President wasn’t alone in his skepticism:
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed Trump’s concerns, asking
whether winning was even possible in a place such as Afghanistan or
Somalia.”
Here’s
the scary part, which concludes the piece:
“It
was Mattis who made the argument that would, for the moment at least,
sway Trump to embrace the status quo – which has held for the past
two presidents.
“‘Unfortunately,
sir, you have no choice,’ Mattis told Trump, according to
officials. ‘You will be a wartime president.’”
Really?
Why is that? And which war is Mattis specifically referring to?
Afghanistan? We’re largely out of Iraq. Syria – the latest
addition to our interventionist folly? We aren’t told, but in my
view it’s not any foreign war Mattis is referring to, but –
perhaps unconsciously – he’s referencing the war at home, i.e.
the one being conducted by his own government against the President
of the United States.
We
read about it every day in the media: the Russia-gate hoax is still
being flogged, despite growing evidence of its utter falsity. Robert
Mueller is still on the prowl, looking for a pretext to take Trump
down. The media, a longtime adjunct of the national security
bureaucracy, is openly working in tandem with the intelligence
services to take out Trump – and if you want to know why, just
re-read the reporting on Trump’s reluctance to go along with the
War Party’s murderous agenda.
So
once they take him down, who will be Trump’s replacement? It’ll
be Mike Pence, of course, the same person doing everything in his
power to destroy the possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula –
quite against Trump’s expressed hope that “we
can make a deal”
with North Korea.
The
War Party cannot tolerate a President who questions the most basic
premises of the American Empire: “You guys want me to send troops
everywhere!” Of course they do. However, Trump was elected to carry
out a very different mandate: to start putting America first. He
railed against regime change. And now the regime-changers want to
carry out a change of regime against him.
Just
look at the reporting
by James Risen in The
Intercept:
the FBI/CIA/NSA cabal paid a Russian operative $100,000 as a down
payment on a total of a million to get compromising material on
Trump. Isn’t this kind of thing only supposed to happen in places
like Tadjikistan? Oh, it was all done under the pretext of getting
back our stolen cyber-war tools, but really – how valuable are they
if the Russians already have them? Sure, we could find out what was
stolen – we still don’t know – but the long involved process
described by Risen is really about getting rid of Trump. That’s all
they really care about right now, and they’ll stop at nothing –
including, I believe, assassination – to pull it off.
There’s
too much money riding on the continued existence and expansion of our
worldwide empire to let Trump ruin their scam. Too many careers are
based on it, too much prestige is at stake, too many “allies” are
dependent on the largesse it affords them. They’re boxing him in,
despite his noninterventionist instincts, and they’re compiling
“dossiers,” and they’re mobilizing all their forces for the
final assault on the Oval Office. In an important sense, Trump is
being held hostage: they have limited his policy options in every
important sphere of the national security/foreign policy realm,
The
“swamp” Trump talks about is an international miasma, and swamp
creatures of diverse nationalities are crawling out of the muck,
their claws aimed straight for the presidential throat.
The
War Party plays for keeps. The question is: does Donald Trump? We
shall see.
NOTES
IN THE MARGIN
You
can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately
provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking
out loud.
I’ve
written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is
the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement,
with an Introduction by Prof. George
W. Carey,
a Foreword by
Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott
Richert and David
Gordon (ISI
Books,
2008).
You
can buy An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus
Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
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