Tag Archives: Russia

Political Rants

Grifting.

I’ve been reading the Washington Post edition of the Mueller Report, basically the same as all of the other versions, and I have to say that it is both an interesting and a sickening document. Much as it has been discussed on cable news, you never get the full story without reading it yourself, and there’s a lot in there that never makes it to your television. I’m taking it slow, splitting time with another book that I can’t put down (Visions of Freedom by Piero Gleijeses), but my biggest take away is, well, just what a grifter Donald Trump is, and the same goes for the people he surrounds himself with.

I haven’t written about this scandal very much on this blog, as not to superfluously comment on material that is being handled much more competently elsewhere, but I basically fall into the non Russia-obsessed segment. Sure, there’s a lot in the report about Russian hacking and influence campaigns, but that is something states do in their efforts to advance their perceived national interest. I’m not saying it’s right – I’m saying it’s common practice. If it were up to me, we would regulate campaigns a lot more tightly than we do now. I’m also of the opinion that there isn’t enough brain power in the Trump clown car to effectively pull off any sophisticated kind of collusion with a foreign power. I think the Russians and other foreign governments – UAE, Saudi, Israel – inserted themselves into the 2016 election in hopes of affecting the outcome in some way. And clearly, the Trump team was glad for the help. So there was a confluence of interests, that’s probably about it.

Not a three-dimensional chess master

Something tells me Trump’s biggest problem coming out of this scandal will be his own financial misconduct over the years and that of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Again, they’re not the brightest bulbs on the porch, so they would have been very poor at concealing, say, money laundering in any sophisticated way, resorting to clumsy attempts at stonewalling. The Democrats should move forward with the investigation if only to keep the president on his back foot. And no, I don’t think Trump is playing three-dimensional chess. I think he’s a dunce, and it pains me to see people ascribing more wits to Donald Trump than is indicated by what comes out of his festering gob. This phenomenon is not limited to Trump. People tend to think of creatures like Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Henry Kissinger as mad geniuses; the fact is, they are massive fuck-ups whose policies invariably result in catastrophic failure, even when viewed through the distorted lens of their own harebrained objectives.

God help us if (or when) we get reactionary leaders that are actually competent at what they attempt to do. Up to now, the only thing that has saved us has been their ignorance and ineptitude.

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

The politics of out.

Well, I was half prepared to do a post on General Flynn this week, but with the advent of Trump’s apparently unilateral decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria and the nearly apoplectic response, it seems more appropriate to concentrate on the broader matter of our foreign policy and how it plays out in what passes for our national conversation.

Look at the shiny, shiny thing.I think it’s worth saying at the outset that I have no idea of what our military’s mission is in Syria. I keep hearing that it’s essentially the same as the one we’re pursuing in Afghanistan – training and equipping a local force to fight the war for us – but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It is, in fact, a formula for another unending deployment, one that has the support of most of the foreign policy voices in the media. Much of the criticism of Trump’s abrupt decision has been from a right militarist perspective, though one that is broadly shared, much like the criticism of his Korea policy. The only argument that has merit, in my view, is that we will be leaving the Syrian Kurds twisting in the wind – something we have done to the Kurds in past decades as well (ask Kissinger). Maybe that is worth keeping 2,000 plus U.S. troops in Syria, if protecting Kurdish fighters is in fact what they’re doing, but as always, we are pondering policy stacked on top of bad policy decades in the making.

The foreign policy talking heads that populate Morning Joe and other shows see this withdrawal as great news for Russia (aka Putin) and emboldening ISIS, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. No mention of the fact that the government we stood up in Iraq is now busily executing thousands Sunnis they breezily accuse of being in league with the Islamic State. That is next-generation ISIS in the making, folks, as that is the process the produced the first generation. These movements do not come out of nowhere. Al Qaeda was spawned by our intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as was the Taliban. Hezbollah was the product of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. ISIS grew out of Sunni Iraqis who found themselves on the wrong side of the U.S. occupation and subsequent Shia-dominated central government. On and on.

The fact is, we need to change the political calculus around getting out of conflicts. We can discuss the best way to do that – by applying more diplomatic and economic pressure on actors like Turkey, etc., but we need to be able to end these wars. Trump is doing it for all the wrong reasons, in a haphazard and asinine way, but he’s doing it. That after helping to wreck Syria beyond repair. We just should never have been there in the first place … and we need to stop doing this shit.

luv u,

jp