Tag Archives: George H.W. Bush

Political Rants

Bad pennies.

You’ve heard me mention this before (if you’ve been following this blog long enough), but our former president George W. Bush was a big believer in accountability for the powerless; for the powerful, not so much. It’s up to us to apply that principle to those in power, no matter how lofty their position. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see war criminal Elliott Abrams ascend to high office once again. Bush’s father H.W. pardoned this creature, giving him a new lease on life as a decision maker – a lease he has exercised more than once in the years since his heyday during the Reagan administration.

He was pardoned, but not his hairAbrams 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.

This is like getting the old band back together, frankly. Bolton, Bush Jr.’s asinine United Nations Ambassador, now Abrams. Where the hell are Secord and Poindexter? (For that matter, where is Abrams’ hair? Is it still in jail for his crimes?) For all his incoherent rhetoric about breaking longtime Republican orthodoxy regarding foreign interventions like Afghanistan and Syria, Trump is assembling a cadre of proven war criminals who are working on a new conflict, most likely with Iran, though it’s possible they will attempt a warm-up with an attack on Venezuela first. People like Bolton, Abrams, and Pompeo have found in Trump the perfect vehicle to achieve their interventionist aims. He’s a kind of Trojan Horse through which neocons can climb back into the driver’s seat and take us over the cliff, once again.

All I can say is, resist. These people have been discredited multiple times and they keep coming back. The only way we can stop them is by resisting, voting, speaking up.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Empire redux.

There were some hair-on-fire moments on talk television this week about Trump acting as a Russian “agent” or “asset” or something similar. I have my own thoughts on this issue, which I’ve shared previously on this blog, but what I find kind of interesting about this discourse is the degree to which it reveals the state of mainstream opinion on national security issues. Mind you, I don’t mean popular opinion; rather, “articulate” opinion of the kind you find on Morning Joe and other similar platforms. The ability of the American imperial project to repackage itself in such a way as to appeal to another generation of gullible subjects has always fascinated me, and we’re seeing it play out again on screens large and small all across the nation.

One of the points of outrage regarding Trump came from a newspaper piece that reported on the president floating the idea of pulling the U.S. out of NATO. The reaction went beyond just the usual tropes about NATO’s vital mission of keeping the peace in Europe since the end of the last war and how Russia is dedicated to pushing it back and splitting it up. Some commentators suggested that the idea of ending NATO is something so outlandish and outside of the mainstream that it simply had to come from Russia. Of course, unless these people are all younger than they look, they might all recall that at the end of the cold war many Americans questioned whether NATO still had a mission. People can disagree on that, but it isn’t outlandish to raise the question, particularly in that context.

NATO expansion since 1945

What’s more, it doesn’t take a Putin apologist to suggest that the Russian government has a more than defensible reason to be suspicious of the NATO expansion that has taken place over the past three decades. For one thing, Russia was promised by the U.S. – George H.W. Bush specifically – that NATO would not expand one inch to the east. That was a lie, of course. Why would Russians care about that? The biggest reason is that they have been invaded by foreign alliances three times in the last century, the last time at the cost of 20 million lives. When the Soviet Union ceased to be a thing, I’m sure their expectation was that NATO would go away. It didn’t, and like any hammer looking for something to do, it sees everything as a nail.

As Trump prepares another generation of phony missile defense weapons, one can only hope that these aren’t coffin nails.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Warever.

John Bolton and Mike Pompeo made the rounds of every American president’s favorite region this past week, on behalf of their grizzly leader. The press story was that they were explaining the administration’s plan for withdrawal from Syria; really, this will be a much more gradual process than the president promised over the holidays to howls of protest from the national security talking heads. Of course, it’s a case of Trump doing a potentially positive thing in a really ham-handed fashion and for all the wrong reasons. So naturally he had to walk it back. Not the promise of “The Wall”, you understand … just the more recent promise of total withdrawal from Syria. And partial withdrawal Afghanistan.

Only ever right for the wrong reasons.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.

In essence, we are trapped in the box that was constructed in the wake of the Vietnam war. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” that George H.W. Bush declared cured in 1991 had two major components. One was a quite reasonable public distaste for foreign wars and military interventions, developed quite independently of articulate elite opinion, which almost universally supported the aims of our murderous adventure in Indochina. The second piece was a reluctance on the part of elected officials to institute conscription. Draft registration has been in effect since it was reestablished in 1980, but no draft has been declared since the end of the Vietnam War and none is likely to be. The reason is simple: politicians are unwilling to ask for that level of sacrifice from the American public. There’s no conscription because that would make presidents, senators, and congressmembers unpopular – period.

That’s what drives these endless wars. We are not compelled to fight, and our wars are financed on the U.S. Treasury’s credit card, so we don’t have to pay extra taxes, either.  So if you’re wondering why we still have our all-volunteer army in Afghanistan, that’s basically why. Start drafting people (or even taxing people) and it would be over in six months, tops.

luv u,

jp