Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back

by David Stockman

  Yes, it was David Petraeus and his congressional sponsors like the rabid warmongers Senators McCain and Graham who did exactly that.

  The only reason that there was even a debate about the proper anti-ISIS strategy during this Aspen confab was because the War Party in its wisdom left behind in Sunni lands 2,300 Humvees, 74,000 machine guns, 40 Abrams tanks, and countless more accouterments of war with what was, in fact, a Shiite militia wearing Iraqi uniforms—uniforms they instantly shed when it came to defending Sunni towns against the descending hordes of ISIS.

  Needless to say, the War Party learns nothing and never quits. Thus, its debate team of ISIS eradicators had yet another scheme. By their lights, “containment” of ISIS in its pitiful desert redoubts is not enough. Channeling Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign slogan, they claimed that America can settle for no less than “victory” over ISIS.

  Yes, and that is to be accomplished with no American boots on the ground. The eradication is to be carried on by the Sunnis themselves.

  WHERE’S THE SUNNI WALDO?

  Say what?

  Would that be the Sunni nation of Turkey, equipped as it is with NATO’s best 1,000 planes, 5,000 tanks and a professional military of 500,000? Well, that all depends on what Sultan Erdogan intends to do now that he has made himself dictator.

  Besides, there are complications due to the Kurdish issue and the obsession of the Sultan with liquidating the Syrian Kurdish allies of his own insurgent population of 15 million Kurds before getting around to vanquishing the Sunni caliphate.

  Indeed, most of the cross-border bombing campaigns carried out by Turkey in the past year have really been a thinly disguised cover to make war on the Kurdish enclaves of northern Syria and Iraq.

  Why? The better to stir up anti-Kurdish venom among the Turkish populace. Nothing could better serve Erdogan’s evident plan to extend his current emergency powers to rule by decree or to eventually amend the nation’s constitution to make himself presidential dictator for life.

  The next Sunni candidate, of course, is the real irony. The only great Sunni tribe that has shown itself willing and able to fight ISIS is the Kurds. But Kurdistan—a nation of 30 million—doesn’t even have an army because it was the one large tribe that came back from Versailles empty-handed and without a nation of its own.

  So its people remained scattered among hostile Shiite governments in Iraq and Iran, and bombed and prosecuted by a newly installed dictatorship in Ankara. The only boots the Kurds will be leaving on the ground are the ones felled by the Turkish air force.

  Likewise, to the south is the 88-million-strong Sunni nation of Egypt. But it goes without saying that General al-Sisi, its newly legitimized dictator by way of Washington’s renewed $1.5 billion flow of aid and weapons, will not be sending his army to the Upper Euphrates. He needs the entirety of his 469,000-man military to keep the population of Egypt subdued.

  In the case of the vast Sunni population of Saudi Arabia (about 25 million), the prospects of raising an anti-ISIS fighting force under the auspices of the government in Riyadh are between slim and none. The House of Saud knows full well that if it sends its army to Syria it will defect to the Sunni jihadists’ side in short order.

  So whence cometh the Sunni boots on the ground that will be needed to eradicate the purported 20,000 ISIS fighters? After all, we have already demonstrated what happened last time Washington got itself busy identifying, recruiting, vetting, training and deploying the proverbial “moderate” Syrian rebels who, purportedly, want to take back their country from the jihadists.

  To wit, after years of jabbering and a half-billion dollars spent, Washington was finally able to field a force of 60 soldiers, but within days of deployment its commander and deputy were captured by the Nusra Front, several members were killed and the balance defected or disappeared into the rubble of the former Syrian state.

  Yes, this is beyond pathetic. But here’s the thing. The opposing side in the Aspen Strategy Group debate was at least sober enough to advocate “containment” rather than indulging in the juvenile game of Where’s the Sunni Waldo.

  But they never did say how long the United States would have to “contain” ISIS by bombing the 81,000 square miles it controls, or whether this would constitute taking it back to the Stone Age or merely recognizing that it was already essentially there.

  THE ISLAMIC STATE THAT ISN’T

  Notwithstanding that Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and Raqqa were once respectable centers of civilization and commerce, the truth is there is next to nothing left there after years, even decades, of U.S.-instigated warfare.

  So the so-called Islamic State is no state at all—it’s just a backwater dystopia that is utterly incapable of ever mounting a military threat to America’s security.

  Indeed, now that oil is down to $40 per barrel and most of the motley array of Syrian oil wells have been decimated, the Islamic State has apparently discovered a new method of revenue raising. As we previously indicated, they are reportedly harvesting and selling the body parts of their wounded.

  Stated differently, the blood-thirsty fanatics who run the Islamic State are killing the commerce, the population and even the flocks and fields on which these quasi-subsistence villages once depended. For crying out loud, according to General John Allen himself, the whole joint was being run on revenue of less than $1 billion per year; and now that its oil revenues are going dry, its funds are down to a small fraction of even that.

  Don’t these Washington geniuses know that when it comes to recruiting even soldiers of Allah, the rule of “no ticky, no washy” applies, and in spades?

  And what kind of crackpots really think that as abhorrent as ISIS is—that a real state with a modern military capability can finance itself on the slave trade of young women, the body parts of the wounded, hostage taking and punitive taxation of a nearly starving population in its shrunken areas of control?

  This is nuts! The War Party’s futile effort to “contain” ISIS by relentless droning and bombing of the unfortunate towns and villages caught up in it snare is accomplishing only one thing—and it amounts to a monumental self-inflicted setback.

  Namely, it provides horrific, living-color video proof that the crusaders are still visiting mayhem on the innocent and Allah-fearing peoples of the putative caliphate. And it is the overpowering magnet that brings new recruits to join the fight against the Great Satan in Washington.

  A BETTER WAY FORWARD

  As we have indicated, the way to stop ISIS is to ground the bombers and drones; send home the spotters, trainers and other infrastructure of intervention; forget about who controls the oil—it will be produced by someone; and recognize that American has no dog in the 1,300-year-old fight between Sunnis and Shiites.

  Indeed, the elephant in the room during the Aspen debate was the Shiite Crescent—that is, the 100 million Shiite citizens of Iran; the rump of Iraq in Bagdad and the South; the Alawite/Shiite minority of the Assad regime in Syria; and the Hezbollah/Shiite fighters who represent 40% of Lebanon and constitute its largest political party.

  All of them have been condemned to the sword as apostates by the ISIS caliphate, and at the end of the day they are the one force that can keep the latter bottled up in its miserable territories until its bloody regime collapses of its own inhumanity.

  Alas, when it comes to the Shiite Crescent—a group of Islamic nations no better or worse than the brutal tyranny of Egypt or the gluttonous obscenity of the Persian Gulf sheikdoms—the War Party cannot see straight.

  The Aspen Strategy Group, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Flournoy and the rest are utterly clueless as to why the Iranian regime has been so hostile to the American Imperium’s plans for a better world.

  So we must reiterate. The CIA did overthrow Iran’s elected government in 1953 for the sin of nationalizing the nation’s oil fields. Washington did stand 100% behind the shah’s 25-year reign of plunder and helped him organize and operate the brutal SAVAK.

  The neocons of th
e Reagan White House did tilt toward Iraq after its unprovoked attack on Iran, and they went so far as to use the CIA’s spy satellites to act as spotters for Saddam’s chemical-weapons attacks.

  And their successors in the administration of Bush the Elder did identify the Iranian Republic as the new enemy to replace the fallen Soviets, thereby keeping the military-industrial complex and CIA surveillance state alive and funded at its accustomed levels.

  Likewise, they did induce Bush the Younger to identify Iran as part of the axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union address. That is, they proclaimed Iran among the nations slated for the cleansing force of a Washington-orchestrated “regime change” and that its leaders, like Saddam, would be disposed of at the end of a hangman’s rope.

  So they don’t like us—profoundly so. Yet the leaders in Tehran have had the good sense to bend over and accept Obama’s humiliating deal to exchange a nonexistent nuclear-weapons program and 15 years of an international nuclear-inspection proctology for the right to re-enter world commerce and the community of nations.

  Even then, they will fight and contain ISIS because their survival depends upon it.

  ASPEN WAR GAMES AND THE GHOST OF GENERAL WESTMORELAND

  None of these realities penetrated last summer’s Aspen war games, nor Hillary’s war cabinet in waiting.

  Indeed, as General Allen droned on during that occasion—and, yes, the man was droning profusely—about the scores of godforsaken Syrian border towns that have been allegedly liberated from ISIS, the police forces that have been stood up, the fresh recruits that have joined the so-called Iraqi Army, the thousands of ISIS fighters who have been sent to a better world, the thousands of teachers and medics who have been put into the field, I closed my eyes.

  I then did hear the voice of General William C. Westmoreland echoing over the decades. We are winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, he intoned; we are Vietnamizing the conflict; the strategic hamlet program has become a swell success; we are building schools and clinics in the rice paddies; the body count of dead Viet Cong is swelling by the day.

  It was all one giant tapestry of BS, of course, which temporarily camouflaged the catastrophe of LBJ’s war and the genocidal destruction that it inflicted on an innocent people.

  Still, General Allen’s completely bogus progress report reminded me why I was a peacenik way back then; of how profoundly Hillary and her War Party have betrayed the cause; and why even an untutored and often-uncouth showman like Donald Trump cannot possibly do worse than the pretentious armchair warriors of the Aspen Strategy Group.

  CHAPTER 26

  In Praise of the Iran Nuke Deal—A Chance for Peace If We Can Keep It

  NEAR THE END OF HIS TERM IN OFFICE, BARACK OBAMA FINALLY STOOD up to the War Party. That could mark a decisive turning point in rolling back Washington’s destructive interventionism and imperial pretensions in the Middle East and, indeed, around the world.

  Yet this chance for peace is fragile. If Donald Trump is elected, it is to be hoped that he will prove to be sensible enough to jettison his campaign rhetoric about Obama’s “horrible” nuclear deal, and, instead, board a plane for Tehran as outlined in Chapter 21.

  The fact is, there is nothing “horrible,” deficient or weak at all about the Iranian nuclear agreement. To the contrary, it is a decisive refutation of the War Party’s hoary claim that Iran is hell-bent upon obtaining nuclear weapons.

  As we explained earlier, this deafening but untruthful narrative was long ago debunked by the 2007 National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). These authoritative findings were issued by the nation’s 16 top intelligence agencies in November 2007, and they held that what had possibly been a small-scale Iranian weapons-research effort was abandoned in 2003 and never restarted.

  That NIE verdict has been reiterated several times since then, and has now been revalidated by the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), as well.

  WMD 2.0

  As we previously recalled, even the Great Decider ultimately threw on the towel. In his memoir he confessed that it would have been hard to explain to the American public why he was launching another war to eliminate an alleged Iranian WMD threat when his own intelligence agencies had just concluded it did not even exist!

  Indeed, the war drums about Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program were then being beaten loudly by the very same crowd—Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Feith and the like—that had falsified the WMD claims against Saddam Hussein.

  And, as we also described previously, they had resorted to the same kind of falsified intelligence that the first time around had generated the infamous “curveball” pictures of Saddam’s alleged biological-weapons labs that turned out to be pasteurized-milk plants.

  This time it was a bunch of falsified drawings and nuclear weapons plans mysteriously found on a laptop computer that had been turned over by a Iranian dissident group called the MEK. The latter, ironically, had long been allied with Saddam Hussein and had been on the State Department terrorist list from 1997 to 2012.

  So it needs to be shouted from the rafters that all the arm waving and screeching against this deal by the GOP warmongers and the Israeli lobby is grounded in a Big Lie. The whole Iran-is-after-the-bomb narrative is just WMD 2.0.

  Indeed, the War Party has been so shrill and unrelenting in promulgating this trumped-up story that the other side of the equation is hardly known to the American public. Yet as we documented in Chapter 20, the overwhelming weight of the evidence over more than three decades—including information obtained by the IAEA during the course of extensive investigations—is that Iran’s primary aim has been to obtain enrichment capacity for its civilian reactors.

  In fact, when its incipient weapons-research program was shut down in 2003, the Ayatollah Khamenei took a decisive step to remove all doubt inside the Iranian government. He issued a fatwa (ban) against the possession of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic.

  This anti-WMD edict was in keeping with a similar fatwa against biological and chemical weapons issued by his predecessor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the midst of Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. As we indicated in reviewing that episode, Saddam was then dropping those horrific weapons on Iranian battle forces with the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of Washington.

  So in the context of all of that history we now have a solemn international agreement that’s designed to ensure that the nuclear-weapons program that the CIA has never found and that the Iranians say they never had and that their supreme leader has forbidden—does, in fact, never happen.

  That’s not only a very good thing; it’s also an overwhelmingly sure thing by the light of any rational analysis.

  NOT EVEN HOUDINI COULD BREAK OUT OF THE NUKE AGREEMENT’S CONTAINMENT CHAINS

  After all, why would a nation purportedly motivated by a fiendish desire to get the bomb ever agree to a network of restrictions, controls, roadblocks and handcuffs from which not even Houdini could escape? All of this containment machinery would keep the Iranian regime many steps—nay, many miles—removed from anything even remotely resembling an A-bomb capability.

  In fact, the agreement is designed to virtually suffocate even the civilian nuclear industry that Iran has proclaimed to be its purpose all along. And needless to say, that is something that it is entitled to—including uranium-enrichment capabilities—as one of the 193 signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The latter, of course, is most definitely a nonexclusive club—since it includes every nation on the planet except India, Pakistan, South Sudan and Israel.

  Under any rational assessment of the agreement, therefore, suffocation of its incipient civilian nuclear-power industry is exactly what Iran has embraced. It has done so in the name of ending the wholly unnecessary confrontation with the West over its mythical nuclear-weapons program and to thereby gain relief from the sadistic regime of sanctions that have so drastically and unfairly punished its 77 million innocent citizens.
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br />   To wit, Iran will eliminate 98% of its existing stockpile of mostly low-enriched uranium and convert the limited number of centrifuges at its one truly hardened site (Fordow) to non-uranium research activities.

  Further, it will cut the number of centrifuges at its large Natanz facility from 20,000 to 5,060 units, and this absolutely minimal capacity will be restricted to three-decade-old, slow, inefficient first-generation technology. Not even research on more advanced enrichment technologies may be undertaken for the next eight years.

  Moreover, the centrifuges that it will be permitted to operate will be restricted to enriching uranium to only 3.67% purity, meaning that Iran will not be remotely capable of producing the 90% purity material needed for bomb making.

  It will also dismantle the core of its heavy water reactor at Arak, which would produce plutonium as a by-product. Although such waste material cannot be used to make a bomb without a reprocessing plant, which Iran does not have and could not likely get, Iran has agreed to replace the current core with an alternative non-weapons capable reactor technology.

  Finally, wrapped around all of these limited capacities for civilian enrichment will be a cradle-to-grave inspection regime covering its entire nuclear fuel cycle. This will put inspectors on the ground and sophisticated monitoring equipment in place at its uranium mines, milling plants, storage and transportation facilities, processing plants, centrifuge operations, civilian reactors, waste-handling and -processing stations and all the supporting services and equipment supply and maintenance activities along the entire route.

  In short, Iran has agreed to put what will be a tiny civilian nuclear-power and uranium-enrichment industry into a wholly transparent fishbowl. The inspection and monitoring system will be so exhaustive and intrusive that it will resemble the lockdown in a high-security federal prison, and, in fact, will make Iran’s entire sovereign territory subject to inspection demands “anytime and anywhere”—including its military facilities.