We’ve entered a presidential transition, sort of. Sure, one candidate is crying foul and trying to foment a coup d’etat in the most ham-fisted way imaginable, but inasmuch as our short-attention-span culture has already all but normalized this insane behavior, we can consider ourselves well into the process of transition. And no, I don’t mean the the current president is transitioning to some new identity. I mean that he is in the process of being replaced by his general election opponent, who won the November election kind of hands down, despite all the noise.
Given that Biden is busily appointing members of his executive team – some okay, others pretty bad – this seems like a good time to make our policy preferences known to the President-Elect. Everyone’s getting their two cents in, whether it comes in the form of suggesting new policy directions or pushing potential nominees forward. I personally think people on the left should pick an issue or two and start shouting about it, figuratively speaking (or literally, if you prefer), so that Biden can hear us loud and clear. We will all have our preferences as to what demand should come first, what second, etc. I can tell you where I would like to start: STOP THE DAMN WAR.
As of October of 2021, we will have been engaged in this insane war on terror for twenty years. Obama indicated that he would stop it, and he didn’t. Trump said he would stop it, and he hasn’t. Biden is making some similar noises, but I think we can guess that the same political pressures that were brought to bear on his two predecessors will be applied to him as well. The longer we wait, the harder it gets – the conflict has metastasized to encompass other nations, from Iraq to Somalia to Yemen to Libya to Syria, and with each new “front” comes new bogus justifications for why we can’t leave now, new sets of facts on the ground, new twists and turns in the logic of imperialism. Enough. We need to get out now – that’s what Biden should hear from us.
There’s no question but that Trump has made the process of forging an agreement with other nations more fraught with difficulty. Who will sign on to a treaty with us when they know it may be ripped up by the current president’s successor? Nevertheless, I think we need to act on the knowledge that most Americans are sick of the war in Afghanistan, load our troops onto trucks and planes and head for the border. If we don’t, it will just never end.
That’s my ask. What’s yours?
Omar is the perfect target for Trump. She’s a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from Somalia, and a Muslim who, like many Somali women, wears a headscarf. The orange-faced jackass has attacked all of those things separately on many occasions – by attacking Omar, he gets more bang for the buck. Would that he were the only one so eager to jump on her over an anti-AIPAC tweet. Democratic leadership really showed their ass this week, following up on their shameful support of Trump’s Venezuela policy from the previous week. A really poor performance. Still, Trump and Kevin McCarthy both get extra credit for crying antisemitism when their own track records on bigotry are unambiguously offensive. Both McCarthy and Trump made George Soros the bête noir of the mid-term campaign last year. Not subtle.
Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North’s leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our joint exercises with Seoul, which amounts to a massive mock-invasion of North Korea. Given our troubled history with Pyongyang (and the memory of a war that cost 3 million Korean lives), you might think we would try to err on the side of diplomacy. North Korea wants direct bilateral talks with us because we are their principal adversary. They are not a direct threat to us, but they can do a lot of damage to Seoul, so for the sake of all those people we should ratchet down this conflict now.