So Donald Trump needs to declare the neocons’ revisionist history inoperative. In fact, the way out of the bloody mess in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya—all of which are projects bearing Hillary’s support and even inspiration—is a rapprochement with Iran’s able and moderate statesman, President Hassan Rouhani, who has just received another wave of political reinforcement in the recent elections.
Someone needs to tutor The Donald on the great General Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to go to Korea and make peace immediately after the 1952 election, which is exactly what he did. Likewise, the GOP candidate should pledge to go to Tehran to “improve the deal,” and this time Trump even has the plane!
“Improving” the deal, of course, might be positioned as somehow strengthening Obama’s “bad deal” on the nuclear accord, but that would be a diplomatic fig leaf for domestic political consumption.
The far-broader purpose would be to bury the hatchet on decades of confrontation between the United States and Iran. In its place would come an agreement to secure Rouhani’s leadership role in the above-referenced Muslim-led ground campaign to extinguish ISIS and liberate the territories now controlled by the Islamic State.
Such an “I will go to Tehran” pledge by Trump could electrify the entire Mideast policy morass and pave the way for early U.S. extraction from its counterproductive and wholly unaffordable military and political intrusion.
The fact is, the Islamic State is on its last legs because of U.S. and Russian bombings, $40 oil and its own barbaric brutality. These forces are rapidly drying up the Islamic State’s financial resources, and without paychecks its “fighters” rapidly vanish.
Indeed, ISIS is now so financially desperate that its fighters are literally disappearing. That is, it is shooting its wounded and selling their organs on the black market.
Needless to say, no army of fighters has ever prevailed or even survived by harvesting its own flesh. And especially not when confronted by an opposing force of better-trained, better-equipped fighters motivated by an equal and opposite religious fanaticism.
PATH TO PEACE—A TRUMP-PUTIN-ROUHANI ALLIANCE
Accordingly, a Trump-Putin-Rouhani alliance could very readily celebrate the liberation of Raqqa and Mosul by July 4 next year. That could be accompanied by a history-reversing partition agreement to cancel the destructive Sikes-Picot boundaries of 1916.
The latter would be superseded by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish states, respectively, in their historic areas of Iraq, and a shrunken state of Alawites, Christians and other non-Sunni minorities in western Syria, with protectorates in the North for Kurds and the East for Sunnis.
At that point, a President Trump could stage his own “mission accomplished” pageant by bringing home every last American military personnel now stationed in the Middle East, either overtly or covertly and wearing boots on the ground or not.
And he could do so from the deck of an aircraft carrier that had been withdrawn from the Persian Gulf as part of the comprehensive peace deal with Putin and Rouhani. The Persian Gulf would be an American lake no more.
The Donald might even be positioned to collect his Nobel Peace Prize on the way home.
Before then, however, he would also be in a position to collect some giant domestic political plaudits that could be married with the defeat of ISIS and the winning of peace in the Middle East and Europe. To wit, Trump should promise to sign legislation day one permitting families of the victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudis for their losses.
Nothing could better bring closure to the vastly exaggerated domestic terrorist threat than the simultaneous eradication of the Islamic State by other Muslims, and by multihundred-billion-dollar lawsuits against the alleged 9/11 puppeteers hitting the headlines day after day.
Also, nothing would do more to provide political cover and impetus for the balance of the peace deal. That’s because the indigenous terrorist threat in Europe is not sponsored, supported or funded in any manner by the nations of the Shiite Crescent.
Instead, it is an extension of the mutant jihadism of radical Sunni and Wahhabi clerics—mostly based in Saudi Arabia and heavily funded by the cowardly, gluttonous oligarchs who surround the throne in Riyadh.
Needless to say, even the unspeakably corrupt and arrogant princes of the House of Saud would get the message when the 5th Fleet steams out of the Persian Gulf for the last time and the Trump/Putin/Rouhani alliance takes out the Saudis’ jihadist proxies in Syria and the Islamic State itself.
In short, the financial lifeblood of terrorism would dry up—whether the Saudi royals remained in Riyadh or decamped to Switzerland.
The essence of the great Peace Deal required to save the American economy is an end to procurement and R&D spending by the Pentagon and a drastic demobilization of the 2.3 million troops in the regular armed forces and national guards. And that can happen under the auspices of a global military “build-down” agreement and freeze on all further weapons exports.
Bankrupt governments in a world where NATO has been decommissioned, the jihadi terrorist threat quelled and the Middle East stabilized will absolutely be interested in a defense “build down” and global arms-reduction agreement.
And there is no one better qualified to lead a sweeping military cost “restructuring” deal among bankrupt nations than Donald Trump, who knows a thing or two about exactly that.
CHAPTER 22
In Praise of Ignorant Politicians—Unschooled in Beltway Delusions
THE IMPERIAL CITY DESERVES TO BE SACKED BY INSURGENT POLITICIANS of a very “ignorant” kind—that is, outsiders unschooled in its specious groupthink and destructive delusions of grandeur.
That’s why Donald Trump’s challenge to the Beltway’s permanent bipartisan ruling class is so welcome. He is largely ignorant of the neocon and war hawk catechisms and sophistries propounded by establishment joints like the Council on Foreign Relations.
But owing to his overweening self-confidence, he doesn’t hesitate to lob foreign policy audibles, as it were, from the presidential campaign’s line of scrimmage.
It is these unpredictable outbursts of truth and common sense, not his bombast, bad manners and alleged bigotry, that has the Acela Corridor in high dudgeon. The Donald’s establishment betters are deathly afraid that he might confirm to the unwashed electorate of Flyover America what it already suspects.
Namely, it suspects that Washington’s hype-interventionism and ungodly expensive imperial footprint all around the globe has nothing at all to do with their security and safety, even as it saddles them with massive public debts and the threat of jihadist blowback to the homeland.
The fact is that most of Trump’s wild pitches—the Mexican wall, the Muslim ban, waterboarding—are basically excesses of campaign rhetoric that would likely get fashioned into something far more palatable if he were ever in a position to govern. His evolution, and even flip-flopping, on these hot button issues on the campaign trail says as much.
By contrast, the fundamental consensus of our bipartisan rulers is a mortal threat to peace, prosperity and democratic rule.
THE FOLLY OF CURRENT NATO PROVOCATIONS ON RUSSIA’S DOORSTEP
Worse still, the Beltway consensus is so entombed in groupthink that the machinery grinds forward from one folly to the next with hardly a peep of dissent. Nothing could better illustrate that deleterious dynamic, in fact, than the NATO warships recently trolling around the Black Sea.
For crying out loud, the very thought that Washington is sending lethally armed destroyers into the Black Sea is an outrage. That Eurasian backwater harbors no threat whatsoever to the security and safety of the citizens of America—or, for that matter, to those of Germany, France, Poland or the rest of NATO, either.
The shrunken remnants of the Russian Navy—home ported at Sevastopol on the Crimea, as it has been since Catherine the Great—could not even uncork the Dardanelles with war-making intent. Not in the face of the vast NATO armada implacably positioned on the Mediterranean side of the outlet.
So what is possibly the point of rattling seaborne cruise missile batteries on Russia’s shoreline? It assumes a military threat that’s nonexistent and a hostile intent in Moscow that is purely an artifact of NATO propaganda.
In truth, these reckless Black Sea naval maneuvers amount to a rank provocation. With one glance at the map, even the much-maligned high school–educated voters who have rallied to Trump’s cause could tell you that much.
The same can be said for the 31,000 NATO troops recently conducting exercises in Poland and the Baltic republics right alongside the border with Russia. These are not isolated cases of tactical excess or even far-fetched exercises in “deterrence.” Instead, they directly manifest Imperial Washington’s hegemonic raison d’état.
Indeed, these utterly pointless maneuvers on Russia’s doorsteps are just a further extension of the same imperial arrogance that stupidly initiated a fight with Putin’s Russia in the first place by igniting a Ukrainian civil war on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.
IMPERIAL WASHINGTON’S HISTORICAL IGNORANCE ON THE UKRAINE FAR EXCEEDS THE DONALD’S
Washington not only sponsored and funded the overthrow of Ukraine’s constitutionally elected government, but did so for the most superficial and historically ignorant reason imaginable. To wit, it objected to the decision of Ukraine’s prior government to align itself economically and politically with its historic hegemon in Moscow.
So what?
There is nothing at stake in the Ukraine that matters. During the last 700 years, as I indicated in Chapter 20, it has been a meandering set of borders in search of a country. In fact, the intervals in which the Ukraine existed as an independent nation have been few and far between.
Invariably, its rulers, petty potentates and corrupt politicians made deals with or surrendered to every outside power that came along. These included the Lithuanians, Turks, Poles, Austrians, czars and commissars, among others.
Indeed, in modern times Ukraine functioned as an integral part of Mother Russia, serving as its breadbasket and iron and steel crucible under czars and commissars alike. As we noted previously, Crimea itself actually became Russian territory in 1783, when Catherine the Great purchased it from the Turks; and it remained so until the mid-1950s, when in a fit of drunken stupor the newly ascendant Khrushchev gifted it to his Ukrainian compatriots.
Given this history, the idea that Ukraine should be actively and aggressively induced to join NATO was just plain nuts. You might wonder what bantam brains actually came up with the scheme.
Then again, that is only until you recall that NATO itself has been a vestigial organ since 1991. It’s now in the business of self-preservation and concocting missions, not securing the peace of anyone, anywhere on the planet.
The Ukraine intervention has already caused NATO, the IMF and Washington to pony up more than $40 billion of aid, which has gone straight down the proverbial rat hole. The part that wasn’t stolen by the thieving oligarchs Washington installed in Kiev has been used to prosecute a horrific civil war that has killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians caught in the cross fire and destroyed what is left of the Ukrainian economy.
Indeed, it was the neocon meddlers from Washington who crushed Ukraine’s last semblance of civil governance when they enabled ultra-nationalists and crypto-Nazis to gain government positions after the February 2014 putsch. In one fell swoop, that inexcusable stupidity reopened Ukraine’s blood-soaked modern history.
That includes Stalin’s re-population of the eastern Donbas region with “reliable” Russian workers after his genocidal liquidation of the kulaks in the early 1930s. It also encompasses the large-scale collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists in the West with the Nazi Wehrmacht as it laid waste to Poles, Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables” on its way to Stalingrad in 1944.
And then there was the equal and opposite spree of barbaric revenge as the victorious Red Army marched back through Ukraine on its way to Berlin.
What Beltway lame brains did not understand that Washington’s triggering of “regime change” in Kiev would reopen this entire bloody history of sectarian and political strife?
Moreover, once they had opened Pandora’s box, why was it so hard to see that an outright partition of Ukraine with autonomy for the Donbas and Crimea, or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had originated, would have been a perfectly reasonable resolution?
Certainly that would have been far preferable to dragging all of Europe into the lunacy of the current anti-Putin sanctions and embroiling the Ukrainian factions in a suicidal civil war.
After all, the artificial country of Czechoslovakia, created on a political whim at Versailles, was peacefully and inconsequentially devolved into its separate Czech and Slovakian nations a few years ago. The same is true of Yugoslavia—a polyglot federation that has now devolved into six nations.
In that instance, the partition was partially owing to American bombers that forcibly separated Kosovo from its Serbian parent. And even then, this Washington-sanctioned partition ended up in the hands of a criminal mafia in Kosovo that makes Putin appear sainted by comparison.
In short, the current spate of NATO saber-rattling exercises on Russia’s borders is living proof that Washington is in thrall to a permanent ruling class of educated fools and power-obsessed apparatchiks.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that the Imperial City continues to squander scarce fiscal resources on the obsolete machinery of NATO and the bloated Cold War military establishments of its members that have no legitimate purpose?
WAR PARTY HARRUMPHING AT TRUMP’S COMMON SENSE
No wonder Trump’s establishment betters scolded and harrumphed when he had the temerity to suggest that NATO was too expensive and possibly obsolete.
But of course it is!
Its mission ended 25 years ago when Boris Yeltsin mounted a Soviet tank, vodka flask in hand, and stood down the Red Army. The very geopolitical earth parted right there and then.
Two years earlier, as we previously explained, Bush the Elder and his able secretary of state, James Baker, had promised Gorbachev that in return for acquiescing in the reunification of Germany, NATO would not be expanded “by a single inch.”
Time and again that promise has been betrayed for no good reason except imperial aggrandizement. Now a military alliance that had no purpose other than to contain 50,000 Soviet tanks on the central front—which were long ago melted for scrap and parts—has been joined by the likes of Albania, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria too.
Has the ascension of these microstates added to the security and safety of the citizens of Lincoln NE or Springfield MA?
No, it hasn’t. It has actually subtracted from national security by threatening Russia, which is a third-rate power with a GDP no larger than that of the New York MSA and an annual defense budget amounting to less than 30 days of Pentagon spending.
As to the necessity of the current naval maneuvers, even the leaders of Bulgaria—a nation cheek by jowl with Russia’s Black Sea fleet—have demurred, pointing out the obvious.
To wit, the Black Sea is a place for sailboats and vacationers, not NATO warships.
In fact, that point is so obvious that it is no wonder the Beltway elites are frothing at the mouth about Donald Trump. He just might mobilize the country against the threadbare predicates of their ruinous rule.
As its prime minister, Boiko Borisov, observed about the Black Sea,
it should be a place for holidays and tourists, not war . . . I always say that I want the Black Sea to see sailboats, yachts, large boats with tourists and not become an arena of military action… [T]o deploy destroyers, aircraft carriers near [the resort cities of] Bourgas or Varna during the tourist season is unacceptable.
That’s the beginning of good sense. Disbanding NATO would be the next rational step forward. And while it lasts, getting them to pay a fair share, as Trump has so sensibly suggested, shouldn’t even be debatable.
CHAPTER 23
Hillary Clinton—Class President of a Failed Generation
HILLARY CLINTON HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT THE HEAD OF HER CLASS. THAT includes being among the leading edge of the 80-million-strong baby boom generation that first started arriving in 1946–47.
She did everything they did: got out for Barry Goldwater in high school; got upwardly mobile to Wellesley and social liberation during college; got “Clean for Gene” and manned the antiwar barricades in the late 1960s; got to Washington to uplift the world in the 1970s; got down to the pursuit of power and position in the 1980s; joined the ruling class in the 1990s; and has helped make a stupendous mess of things ever since.
The baby boom generation, which started with so much promise when it came of age in the 1960s, has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America into a bloody imperial hegemon abroad and a bankrupt spy state at home where financialization and the 1% thrive, half the population lives off the state and real Main Street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land.
Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s president. She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the 1960s, and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent years in power.
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