December 24, 2018
Establishment Hysteria Over Syria Withdrawal:
POTUS Overthrow Advocated
POTUS Overthrow Advocated
In his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds,
19th century writer Charles Mackay astutely observed that:
“Men..... it has been well said, think in herds;
it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses
slowly... and one by one.”
It seems that the Western establishment have gone batshit crazy insofar as
the present occupier of the Oval Office & his Russian counterpart are concerned.
One can do no right, while everything the other does is inevitably viewed as aggression!
This past week has seen an absolutely amazing spectacle of left, right, & center prognosticators
joining forces to berate the decision to roll back the illegal occupation initiated by his predecessor!
This insanity is occurring against a backdrop of campaign promises to "end the stupid wars",
before initially going against his better judgment to ramp up troop numbers in Syria & Afghanistan
before initially going against his better judgment to ramp up troop numbers in Syria & Afghanistan
in deference to his generals advice to try to break the deadlock - it seems perpetual war is their goal!
Trump was elected not by Republicans per se, but a wide coalition opposed to 'politics as usual'.
His biggest mistake would be to kowtow to the ones who tried every trick in the book to subvert him.
My advice: Don't hold your breath waiting for DC swamp denizens to slowly come to their senses!!
(Pssst... Heads up: Three outstanding videos appear below... not to be missed!!)
His biggest mistake would be to kowtow to the ones who tried every trick in the book to subvert him.
My advice: Don't hold your breath waiting for DC swamp denizens to slowly come to their senses!!
(Pssst... Heads up: Three outstanding videos appear below... not to be missed!!)
I’ve been hard on President Trump recently. He’s deserved it. But, his decision to announce without any prearranged warning a complete pullout of all U.S. forces in Syria is something I can unreservedly applaud.
Whether he actually goes through with it or not is another story.
But even just his tweaking the D.C. establishment on this issue is enough for at least a golf clap. Nothing unites D.C. like the start of a new war or the threat of ending an old one.
And apparently Trump blind-sided nearly everyone on this. From the our NATO allies like France and the U.K. to his outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of them found out when Trump took the bully pulpit and informed the world.
This is the guy we elected. This is Loki-like behavior, not the weak-kneed appeaser that we’ve seen since Helsinki, tweeting like a madman trapped in a cage of his own making.
So, keep doing this Don and you might earn some trust.
The reality is that Turkey and Russia now set the terms of what’s happening in Syria going forward. Trump just acknowledged the U.S.’s untenable policy there is over.
In my latest piece for Strategic Culture, written before Trump’s Syria announcement, I talk about this weekend’s events leading up to Trump’s surprise announcement.
Trump just admitted that the Bolton/Dunford strategy of balkanizing Syria has failed and he’s done subsidizing it. Hopefully, this will lead to something better and a more coherent strategy to rescue U.S. foreign policy from the cesspit of neoconservativism Trump still deserves heaps of scorn for allowing to rule his administration.
If these things weren’t enough Turkish Prime Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said recently that Ankara was now willing to work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if he survives “democratic and credible” elections. This is rich coming from Turkey, but whatever.
The importance of this statement, however, cannot be overstated. Turkey was one of the major partners in the mission to destroy Syria. And now they have joined with Russia, Iran and China in negotiating the peace process.
They have gone from “Assad must go!” to “Assad can stay.” It is an admission that the US plan for balkanization of Syria will eventually fail and that their best bet is putting maximum pressure on the US to give up its regional plans.
Russia, of course, stands behind Turkey in this and themselves are now upping the costs on the US and the Israelis. Because, it is now Russian policy to assist Syrian Arab Army forces in proportional retaliation against Israeli aggression in Syrian territory, according to Elijah Magnier.
No longer will the Russians stand aside and allow Israel a free hand over bombing what it says are Hezbollah and Iranian targets within Syria. The SAA will now strike back with a proportional response.
An airport for an airport, as it were.
But for now, I’m taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. So too, is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump had to put something concrete on the table.
I’ve always said that there will be no resolution to the situation in Syria until the U.S. takes responsibility for some of its actions there and makes a move towards de-escalating it.
The U.S. had to act first. So, declare victory and get out of there.
Smart.
Trump’s track record of threatening, sanctioning, insulting and bullying has put him in a very bad place to negotiate the U.S.’s withdrawal from Central Asia. There is no reason why anyone should sign an agreement with him or believe a word that comes out of his mouth or that of his staff.
So, the two years he’s been in office have seen an administration with few cards to play throw them down on the table for all the world to see and still try to bluff their way to winning the pot.
It’s all so unbelievably amateurish and sad.
The best move here is to stop the bleeding, end the destruction of what’s left of U.S. foreign policy credibility and bring the troops home before the next financial crisis leaves them even more vulnerable than they were before.
I’ve always argued that we wouldn’t have WWIII with the Russians over Syria or Ukraine unless a massive mistake was made. Trump’s staff maneuvered him into a position where the probabilities of that mistake happening rose to an unacceptable level which culminated in the downing of that IL-20 reconnaissance plane over Syria.
Putin took control of the situation there and Erdogan used the gift handed to him by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman perfectly. Now, Trump is talking about handing over Cleric Fetullah Gulen as well as a Syria withdrawal.
On this point I agree with Bernard at Moon of Alabama that Trump decided to choose keeping Turkey in NATO rather than allowing it to jump to the alliance of China, Russia and Iran formally.
And it looks like he finally had enough of trying to appease his generals who have been bleeding him dry since he took office.
Martin SIEFF | 22.12.2018
Woodrow Wilson Goes to Europe: One Hundred Years of Delusional American Madness
We are now in the dubious position of “celebrating” – if that is the word – the 100th anniversary of US President Woodrow Wilson’s departure on December 4, 1918 on the liner SS George Washington for the Versailles Peace Conference where he was confident he would dictate his brilliant solutions that would end war in the world for all time.
Historians and psychiatrists – including Dr. Sigmund Freud himself who co-authored a book on Wilson – have endlessly debated whether Wilson was sane and just deluded or raving mad. Freud clearly inclined to the latter view. And he had ample evidence to support him. What is most alarming is that, as Henry Kissinger – significantly not born an American at all – points out, all US presidents either share Wilson’s ridiculous messianic fantasies or feel they must pretend to.
During the supposed dark age of the Cold War from 1945 to 1989, the recognition that the Soviet Union was at least as militarily powerful as the United States imposed the disciplines of realism and restraint on US policymakers. But since the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union peacefully disassembled, that restraint has vanished.
Every US president since then really believes that the United States is unique in history and fated to remake the entire world in its own image. History is over, American triumph over the whole world is ensured. And since that globalist vision is inevitable, flawless, perfect and virtuous, it follows that every bombing campaign, every war, every imposition of economic sanctions, the toppling of every government and the destruction of every society that dares to disagree is divinely approved.
Half a century ago, I thought as an impressionable teenager back in my native Ireland that the fiasco of the Vietnam War was smashing forever that extraordinary American combination of innocence, arrogance and ignorance of trying to remake Southeast Asia in the image of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s fantasies of Texas.
I was of course wrong: The tale of the 21st century has been a descent of successive, equally manic, ignorant and crazed US presidents into one needless, wretched, nation-smashing bungle after another.
The unimaginably ignorant and stupid George W. Bush – also from Texas – went charging into Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashing a new cycle of endless wars.
In late 2008, I attended a diplomatic dinner at the State Department to launch then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s pride and joy – yet another Israeli-Palestinian “peace initiative” that everyone knew had not the slightest chance of getting anywhere.
Every veteran US, Arab, European and Israeli diplomat who attended the dinner recognized this. Yet all of them politely pretended to be impressed and enthusiastic while Rice, who clearly believed every absurd word she uttered, gave her presentation. In her childish enthusiasm she seemed to be more like a teenage cheerleader at American college football games. She had not the slightest doubt that she would succeed in a few weeks where generations and even centuries of diplomats and leaders from all over the world had failed. How American!
Barack Obama was cut from the same mold. He was farcically offered – and typically accepted – the Nobel Peace Prize after only one year in office and just compounded the damage.
Obama casually approved the destabilization and destruction of Ukraine, the collapse of US-Russia superpower relations to levels unimagined since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the destruction of Libya, Syria and Yemen. He even blithely approved an unprecedented $1.5 trillion nuclear weapons expansion program guaranteeing a ruinous arms race for decades to come. Yet he really believed he was a great force for peace. The bubble of his vanity and complacent self-regard was as impenetrable as Woodrow Wilson’s.
Continue reading here:
December 23, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Friends,
My intention this morning was to begin a short series on what the Holy Feast of Christmas means, and must mean, for us…and I still intend to write about that. But a couple of very good friends, one of whom is a neighbor who stopped me in the local Food Lion the other days, have inquired about the recent decision by President Trump to pull our 2,200 troops out of the cauldron of the Syrian “civil war” (AKA, terrorist rebellion): could I offer some additional information and background on what just happened. I told my friend that I had written an installment in this series that very day, December 21, for MY CORNER: https://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/12/december-21-2018-my-corner-by-boyd.html
In that column I made reference to five other installments which went into some detail on the background of the Syrian civil war…and why we should never have been there. But the idea of providing a short, accessible summary about what just happened this past week kept popping up as something that might be very useful to my friends and readers.
So this morning, without a lot of my commentary I want to pass on several items that I think will place what just happened into some context and perhaps give you ample background to begin to understand what President Trump did. And, hopefully will offer perspective on why the near totality of the Foreign Policy Establishment, and the political Deep State elites in Washington—All Democrats and most Republicans in Congress (and on Fox News)—are beside themselves, upset, angry that our president is fulfilling his promise regarding Syria, and even calling for a “military coup against the president” [why, I ask, aren’t such pundits being arrested for proposing treason?].
Various politicians---from Republicans like uber-globalist Senators Lindsey Graham and Ben Sasse, plus oodles of Democrats, ALL UNITED [what does THAT tell you about the globalist nature of the Deep State cliques who not only control the US of A, but wish to control the rest of the world as well?]—have harshly condemned President Trump for his Syria decision, and even more so for the fact his Secretary of Defense General James Mattis has resigned. Mattis, too, like the globalists in Washington—now twenty-six years after the fall of world Communism—wanted to continue to send American boys to die in foreign civil wars in jungles and deserts where we have no business being, so that the fruits of American egalitarianism and (pseudo) democracy could be inflicted on those downtrodden states….not to mention expanding control of the American financial global elites who would control their economies, their oil, and just about everything else…oh, yes, all in the name of “democracy.”
Why, just think of all the benefits we could inflict, say, on Syria: transgendered Mullahs, same sex bathrooms replacing Shar’ia law in those madrassa Islamic centers of learning, free abortions for those downtrodden Muslim women, wonderful commercials everywhere on Syrian TV for Viagra and Preparation-H, with same sex partners showing them all how it is done, and “democratic” elections with maybe Karl Rove parachuted in to instruct them how to manipulate votes. Maybe we could even encourage a few million Mexicans to move there to bolster whichever side the new “Demo-Republicrat” globalist alliance supports? And, why not get George Soros involved, too, if he is not already involved?
Is this not, in sum, what we’ve been fighting for? Not so much against ISIS (the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and the Russians have done almost all the fighting and defeating of ISIS), but for one more desert outpost of “American democracy and equality”?
And that, in reality, is why everyone from the Establishment left to the Establishment “conservative movement” are all so upset, and why they now talk of…actually…a “military coup” against President Trump. The resignation of Mattis was just a pretext, the nail to hang their frenzied and putrid ideological hat on. And it is that same unrestrained fervor, that vicious anger still over the results of 2016, their resentment that “THAT MAN sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” that same Deep State lunacy that has even a few of them, get this, “contemplating suicide”! [Let me wish they carry through with that threat—the Dark Lord of Hell awaits them with open arms.]
So, here, first, is a brief account of those unleashed reactions from the devilish denizens of the Deep State: you must read these to begin to comprehend the quasi-religious madness these folks exhibit. And, once again, I ask: can there ever be any kind of “peace” with these votaries of the Dark Lord? Second, Andrew McCarthy responds to a vitriolic anti/Never-Trump piece by National Review’s David French. McCarthy is not ordinarily thought of as a staunch Trump loyalist and the magazine he writes for is and has been an outpost of Establishment Never-Trumpism, but he does make some good arguments about Syria, and why we should not be there and why we should get out.
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Establishment Meltdown Over Mattis Resignation: They Talk of Impeaching President Trump, Coups and Suicide
December 20, 2018
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The Syria Fairy Tale Lives!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/syria-troop-withdrawal-middle-east-policy/
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY December 22, 2018 6:30 AM
Americans will no longer support Washington’s incoherent Middle East adventurism.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor on Trump’s Withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Syria
Interview with The Saker. Russian-Israeli relations and the conflict in Syria
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