Tag Archives: Trump

Political Rants

Friends and enemies.

Our friends the Saudis are planning to execute a woman for being a dissident. It’s a little hard to imagine how you can be a woman in Saudi Arabia and NOT be considered a dissident, but there you have it. The method will be beheading, which, as I recall, Trump decried furiously during the 2016 campaign as an aberrant ISIS tactic drawn from the middle ages – no one has seen this in centuries! Actually, it’s the preferred method of execution in one of your favorite dictatorships, Mr. Trump. Still, it’s hard to blame the president for this relationship; we’ve been cozy with the Kingdom for decades, regardless of what they do, often bending our own foreign policy to suit their tastes (as long as it remains within the narrow limits of our own imperial policies).

New leaders, same old handshakeWhy? Is it just oil? Well, that’s a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract, cheap-to-process crude oil was famously described by our policymakers as a source of enormous strategic power and perhaps the greatest material prize in the history of the world. But it’s that “strategic power” that is the key, as I’ve mentioned previously in these pages. We didn’t need Saudi oil in the 1950s and we don’t need it today, but we do need to have influence and a potential veto over it to maintain our leverage over other nations.

So Saudi is our “friend”, despite the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, and Iran is our “enemy”. Iran is Saudi’s enemy for a range of reasons, not least among them the fact that Saudi has a sizable Shia minority which they fear may be emboldened by a strong Iran. So that puts the Kingdom on the side of the U.S. government and the Israelis (another “friend”). Both Israel and Saudi would love to see us send our troops into Iran … because that’s what friends are for? It sounds chaotic to describe in this brief fashion, but there is a cold imperial logic to this framework – one that opposes secular Arab nationalism, opposes Shia resistance in all of its forms, and supports the enrichment of key U.S. based industries; namely fossil fuels and military technologies, both heavily subsidized by American taxpayers.

So it should come as no surprise that Trump supports an extremist state that beheads its citizens and flies planes into our buildings. In this sense, he’s a real traditionalist.

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

Political Rants

Take a memo. Please.

The reverberations of Trump’s rampaging State of the Union speech had barely faded before he started tweeting like an arrested tween. His wild claims about the Nunes memo, reflective of the fevered rhetoric proffered daily by his favorite network, were contradicted by the content of the memo itself, a selective, shabby attempt to draw the public’s attention away from the Mueller investigation with an almost laughable claim of concern for Carter Page’s civil liberties. Why do major modern political scandals always turn on weak spindles like Page and – for Hillary Clinton – Weiner? Maybe that’s the only kind of spindle we’ve got.

Porter sighted with two notorious racists.This, again, feels like a big distraction from what the administration and the congressional majority are actually doing. If we’re obsessing over one or the other revealing memo, we’re not thinking about recent surveys – including one by CNBC – that indicate that the vast majority of large businesses have no intention of spending their tax savings on hiring people. That’s no big surprise, but it’s probably worth mentioning once in a while, right? After all, misguided workers who voted for Trump should be given the opportunity to understand that you can’t trust the rich to help anyone but themselves, and that tax cuts are a poor investment in job creation.

Still, the administration will trot out the handful of examples that seem to fit their narrative, even if they don’t. I’m sure they’ve crowed about AFLAC, even though practically none of their sales workforce is eligible for the bonuses they promised so loudly. This is what they do with immigration and other issues – they essentially hold up the exception and claim it’s the rule. Doesn’t matter … think about the memos! The last few days they have been pushing this story about the FBI agent texts suggesting Obama was “keeping tabs” on the Clinton email investigation – subgenius senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) is their wingman on this conspiracy theory. My guess is that they are using this to distract attention away from the fact that one of Trump’s chief aides is a serial spouse abuser who can’t get security clearance to save his life … and yet he STILL handles top secret, burn-after-read briefings for the President. In other words, they don’t want you to think about what an insufferable ass General Kelly is, not to put too fine a point on it.

Just another week in paradise. Is it November yet?

luv u,

jp