He did it again. Trump flapped his jaw and violated the UN charter without even blinking. This past week, he was sitting in the White House with the Pakistani leader, chatting with reporters, and out came this:
“We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in, literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do that—I don’t want to go that route.”
I don’t have a lot of Afghan friends or acquaintances, but the one I have any regular contact with was appalled by this, and rightfully so. This, of course, isn’t the first time Trump has casually tossed out the notion of blowing some country sky-high, whether it was North Korea or Iran or Venezuela. But I believe this is the first time he has made this careless threat against an allied (if invaded and occupied) nation. The man is just a total sociopath, and one in possession of nuclear launch codes. It’s a sobering thought.
Of course, what’s interesting about this utterance is more in what it says about the power of the presidency than about the madness of this president, and in this respect Trump is almost performing a public service. When he says he has “plans,” he’s likely talking about actual contingency plans the Pentagon has presented to him – I’m certain they have contingency plans to reduce every nation on Earth to rubble. That is the underlying threat that makes every President a potential mass murderer (or an actual one, in many cases). The part about “winning” by destroying is largely self-inflation and imperial hubris, but it’s not that different from the kind of arrogance we’ve seen from America’s leaders in the past, as well as its military commanders. “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” as one U.S. unnamed U.S. major famously said of the bombing of Ben Tre in Vietnam in 1968. The formula still applies.
Since the dawn of the atomic age, our government has consciously chosen the path of greatest risk, not because it meant greater safety and security for the people of the world, but because to do so conformed to the logic of global empire. And because Trump says the quiet parts out loud, we can see this madness on full display. Yes, I am grateful that he apparently doesn’t think the mass killing of Afghans is a good way forward. What bothers me is that such a policy remains an option for this … or any president.
luv u,
jp
Abrams was an essential player in Reagan’s war on Central American peasantry throughout the 1980s. He worked to cover up the hideous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador at the end of 1981, then went on to flak for that murderous government for the balance of his tenure. He defended the mass murderer Rios Montt in Guatemala during that period under the banner of anti-communism – a position he has proudly owned up to ever since, even though the former Guatemalan dictator was posthumously convicted of genocide in his home country (and the United States was called out by the court for supporting him). He was convicted as part of the Iran-Contra prosecution, then pardoned by pappy Bush so that he could soldier on into junior’s administration and make a mess of our policy toward Haiti, Israel Palestine, and everything else he could get his greasy hands on.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The U.S. presidency has evolved to a point of foreign policy cravenness that pulling all troops out of any conflict, no matter how pointless or long-winded, is simply not an option. And before someone reminds me, yes, we do still have troops in Europe, Japan, and South Korea after more than 70 years. It’s basically the same dynamic. Pull the troops out and they’ll say you’re weak. No president, particularly not the current one, can willingly swallow that accusation. And so it continues – occupations stretching out to the vanishing point, burning up uncounted billions of defense dollars (and I really mean uncounted) and staking our young people out in hopeless situations that no application of military power can solve.