Tag Archives: John Bolton

Political Rants

Consequences had.

Elections have consequences, as they say, and few weeks have provided better evidence of that nostrum than this past one. The pullout from the Iran deal (JCPOA) is the most obvious example. Trump has been threatening this since his first Nuremberg rally on the campaign trail two years ago, and he made good on the threat, shredding what was the positive centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy legacy (the negative one being Libya). It feels very much like this is simple get back on Trump’s part – there’s no way in hell that he ever read even the preamble of the JCPOA; his drive to kill the deal was part of his determination to undo the previous eight years, and he put another nail in that coffin this week.

Trump signs off on another delusion.The Sharpie ink was barely dry on Trump’s memorandum to leave the JCPOA before Israel began threatening more action against Iran and Syria. Just the previous week, an official had threatened a decapitation raid on Syria if Assad would not stop hosting Iranians. Now they are firing missiles at “Iranian” targets in Syria supposedly to protect Israelis in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The Trump administration, of course, is reflexively supporting Israel in this, but it’s obvious what’s happening here. Netanyahu and his allies are turning up the heat on Iran in order to provoke a larger than usual response; this in the hopes of triggering a sizable American military attack on Iranian forces in Syria or on Iran itself.

Now that all of the pieces of this toxic policy are in place, the situation is deteriorating quite rapidly. Make no mistake – Trump has zero understanding of the geopolitical or regional issues surrounding the JCPOA. His determination to destroy the deal can be summed up in three words: Obama made it. Like the five-year-old he truly is, he is trying – and largely succeeding – to jump up and down on everything his predecessor accomplished over the previous eight years. But the people around Trump – Bolton, Pompeo, Haley, and others – are more ideologically driven on this issue. They are, in essence, driving Trump around like a little tin car. They have the same destination in view, but for different reasons – conflict and perhaps an effort towards regime change in Iran.

The question facing us now is, are we as a nation willing to go there? If we are not, then we need to stand up now and make our voices heard. We need to elect members of Congress who will work to prevent this odious war plan. And we need to do it before it’s too late.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Persian rug.

Trump and Macron had their meeting of the tiny minds this last week, and it doesn’t look good for the Iran nuclear deal (a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA). The French president appears to think he can save it by expanding it, but that’s not likely to happen; Iran may be less than a democracy, but its leaders have constituencies just the same as ours do, and I can’t think the Iranian people are going to be willing to trust this process a second time – not when they’ve checked every box, met every requirement, and continued to suffer as Trump calls them every name in the book and hires a National Security Advisor who gave a regime change address to the terrorist MEK last year.

There are also the other parties to the agreement to consider, two of whom (Russia and China) are adamant against changing the deal. As Juan Cole has pointed out, the Russians are calling bullshit on Trump’s vacuous claim that the U.S. gave Iran $150 billion as a kind of signing bonus. I heard some cat calls about this on Facebook when the deal was struck, and it’s frankly laughable. These were Iranian assets in U.S. banks, unilaterally frozen by the U.S. government as punishment for stepping out of line. Whatever you may think of the government of Iran, any capitalist should understand that they have every right to that money. (Good luck finding that kind of capitalist in Washington D.C.)

The unknown countryIt’s not hard to see why Trump is on the same page as practically every political leader in America in treating Iran like a muck room rug. Israel wants us to attack them. Saudi wants us to attack them. The UAE wants us to attack them. And the majority of Americans are under the spell of the propaganda campaign about the incomparable evils of Iran. We’ve been fed this with a fire hose since the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the “hostage crisis” – basically my entire adult life. It has been reinforced over the intervening decades, through the Iran-Iraq war years (recall the “hostages” in Lebanon), the confrontations in the 90s, their inclusion in the “Axis of Evil”, and so on. Trump is a product of the same smear campaign.

Scuttling this deal will likely make the current confrontation with Russia deteriorate even further. Worse than that, it sets us on a short path to the war John Bolton has wanted practically forever. That war would make the Iraq conflict seem like a folk dance, and could easily trigger a response from other world powers.

In short, let’s keep the JCPOA. If it’s a bad deal, it’s only bad for the Iranians. It gives us way more than we deserve.

Peace in Korea? Just a brief coda – I’m very hopeful about the prospect for peace on the Korean peninsula. When the dust settles a bit, I’ll return to this very important question.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Long division.

Some good news (or at least not bad news): The U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria obviously haven’t led to a terminal nuclear conflict; not yet, anyway. That said, this was another loathsome destructive exercise by three imperial powers intent on maintaining at least symbolic dominance over their erstwhile colonial possessions. We’ve heard all the flimsy justifications for this action – the need to enforce the prohibition on use of chemical weapons, the need to alleviate the suffering of innocents, etc. None of it holds any water.

While it’s good that a class of weapons is at least nominally banned, it’s hard to see a substantive difference between gassing people and blowing their legs off, or piercing their skulls with fragments of depleted uranium shell casings, or dropping white phosphorus on them, or enforcing a medieval siege that results in more than a million contracting cholera (i.e. biological warfare). And if Trump, May, and Macron are concerned with the suffering of innocents, they can start addressing it by not supporting Saudi war crimes in Yemen or Israeli executions of Palestinian protestors. Then there’s the legal question. I can’t speak for Britain or France, but Trump has no legal authorization to attack the government of Syria. It appears as though their argument on this issue is might makes right; that’s transparently illegitimate.

The result when every power pursues their own interests.Restraining a Trump administration powered by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is going to be difficult. It isn’t made any easier by internal divisions evident on the left. Clearly we don’t need to agree on everything to agree that American intervention in Syria is a bad idea and shouldn’t be done. There’s a natural tendency to turn conflicts of this type into a kind of zero-sum game between bad players and good players; this is not unique to the left, obviously. There are people on the left who support the rebellion in Syria and those who think it’s populated entirely by terrorists. Likewise, I’ve heard leftists essentially align themselves with the Assad regime and others call for its overthrow.

There are bad players on all sides of this conflict, obviously, and every power is pursuing their own interests. I don’t have to agree with Assad’s rapacious military assaults to agree that we shouldn’t attack his government, largely because American intervention has such a bloody history. (I would say it always fails, but that would entail the assumption that our military policies are intended to do our victims some good … which is never the case.) I’ve never been a fan of Vladimir Putin, but I understand Russia’s decision to intervene in the wake of previous regime-change efforts on the part of the U.S., all of which have resulted in failed states, hundreds of thousands of dead, and worsening political turmoil. I haven’t seen convincing evidence one way or the other with respect to who used chemical weapons two weeks ago, but the question is irrelevant – the solution to this conflict does not involve American military force. Period.

If the left (and center-left) can coalesce around the basic principle of non-intervention, grounded in solid legal, moral, and historical arguments, we will have a better chance at holding off the Bolton-Trump assault on the Middle East.

luv u,

jp