It took more than a week of growing pressure, but it appears Trump has blinked on the policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. border. That hasn’t stopped them from using these people as hostages in an effort to pass draconian revisions to the country’s immigration laws. More than 2,300 minors, including many under 5 years old, remain in detention facilities across the country, under separate administrative jurisdiction than the entities that are holding their immigrant parents. Very little has changed, in effect, for these families that have been dismembered by this bigoted administration, acting out the fever-dreams of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and would-be school shooter Steven Miller (a.k.a. worst speechwriter in the history of the profession) in an effort to seem “tough” on those dark foreigners their constituents love to hate.
As reported by Chris Hayes and commented on by the folks at The Majority Report, more than 90% of the adults with children caught crossing the border are being charged with a federal misdemeanor. So for a “crime” equivalent in the federal government’s eyes to transporting water hyacinths (title 18, section 46) or improperly using the image of Smokey the Bear (section 711), you can have your children taken away. That sounds fair, right? Still, to hear many Republican legislators or garden-variety Trump supporters describe it, a substantial number of these people are either (1) human traffickers posing as families, or (2) crisis actors deliberately trying to make Trump look bad. The first one is hilarious. In what world does a human trafficker bring just one kid across the border, let alone in a manner likely to get them arrested? Pretty bad business model for someone trying to profit off of human misery. (Claim #2 is just too ridiculous to comment on.)
My substandard Congressional representative, the fragrant Claudia Tenney, made a statement about this matter that parrots the administration, right down to the invocation of MS13, a Los Angeles-born gang whose terror is forcing many of the people she denounces into refugee status in the first place. No surprises there. For Trump and his GOP allies, like Tenney, this is really just a test of zero-tolerance policy moving forward. If we swallow this, what else can they put on our plates? It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to guess where they might go next. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, give or take a few hundred thousand. If Trump and company choose to go “zero-tolerance” on them, we will end up with that “deportation force” he was threatening to establish during the campaign. Very likely, this is just the beginning, particularly as the White House is ranging around for ways to light a fire under their base in advance of the mid-term elections.
Collectively (and individually), we have to decide how much of this thuggish behavior we’re willing to tolerate before we ALL stand in the street. Stay tuned.
luv u,
jp
As Bruce Cumings and others have pointed out for many years, the South Korean military is essentially under the command of U.S. generals. That is, in the event of a war, South Korean commanders would take orders directly from our military. Add to that the fact that the U.S., South Korea, and North Korea have technically been in a state of war since 1950, and you have a sense of how this works. Think about it – what does it say about South Korea’s sovereignty that they are not in control of their military? Recall, too, that the country was under the rule of generals and assorted dictators into the 1980s, all backed by the U.S. So when a president threatens the sanctity of “military exercises”, essentially admitting that they are, in fact, war games and, as such, “provocative,” as Trump accurately described them, national security reporters and consultants on every network start spinning like crazy.
This transparent political ploy prompted some complaints among talking heads that this was in some way unprecedented. Nothing could be further from the truth. The national anthem, the flag, all of these superficial patriotic symbols have been used for political purposes pretty much my entire life through. Nixon rolled out the flag all the time, as did Reagan. The now-sainted George H.W. Bush made the pledge of allegiance a kind of litmus test for patriotism during the 1988 election. And protests like flag-burning become a major culture-war issue from time to time, particularly when the Republicans are in power and they have little else to complain about (because they’re getting their way).
I have to think that, within the confines of their fondest fevered dreams, Putin and his allies may think the United States would be easier to deal with if our form of government was more like theirs – namely, a relatively bald-faced oligopoly. Trump brings us a hell of a lot closer to that anti-ideal than we have been in decades. He is acting in a dictatorial fashion, treating the Justice Department like it was his own personal legal team. He is denigrating the FBI in a way that would make a sixties radical (or throw-back, like me) blush. He is cutting deals with foreign governments and the centers of private wealth that give them their marching orders, all to enhance the Trump brand and fill its coffers. There’s nothing in this that Putin would find disagreeable.
Bolton appears to have leveraged the fact that our credibility is shot in order to foment this crisis. The world doesn’t need reminding that in Libya, we talked Qaddafi out of his nuclear arsenal, then supported an uprising against him that ended with this murder. They don’t need reminding that both Iraq and Afghanistan, non nuclear states, were both invaded by us and are still under the partial control of our military. So, they know that we are liable to attack if you don’t have nuclear weapons … or if the U.S. manages to talk you into relinquishing your arsenal. What lessons would you draw from this kind of behavior?
The Sharpie ink was barely dry on Trump’s memorandum to leave the JCPOA before Israel began threatening more action against Iran and Syria. Just the previous week, an official had threatened a decapitation raid on Syria if Assad would not stop hosting Iranians. Now they are firing missiles at “Iranian” targets in Syria supposedly to protect Israelis in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The Trump administration, of course, is reflexively supporting Israel in this, but it’s obvious what’s happening here. Netanyahu and his allies are turning up the heat on Iran in order to provoke a larger than usual response; this in the hopes of triggering a sizable American military attack on Iranian forces in Syria or on Iran itself.
It’s a war that Bibi doesn’t want to fight, and with good reason. Sure, they have undeclared nuclear weapons – hundreds of them – but those are pretty much useless beyond their value as an end-of-the-world threat. The fact is, Israel can’t win a conventional war with Iran, and they know it. Iran would be a difficult adversary, as well as a vast territory to subdue and occupy – it has “strategic depth”, as Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has pointed out. But honestly, when was the last time Israel won an actual war? 1973? Don’t say Lebanon – sure, they drove the PLO out of Beirut (at an enormous cost to the population), but by no means did that end positively for them. Their armed forces have suffered from too much colonial population control – thugging the Palestinians, in essence. But they still want to overthrow the Iranian regime. That’s where we come in.
It’s not hard to see why Trump is on the same page as practically every political leader in America in treating Iran like a muck room rug. Israel wants us to attack them. Saudi wants us to attack them. The UAE wants us to attack them. And the majority of Americans are under the spell of the propaganda campaign about the incomparable evils of Iran. We’ve been fed this with a fire hose since the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the “hostage crisis” – basically my entire adult life. It has been reinforced over the intervening decades, through the Iran-Iraq war years (recall the “hostages” in Lebanon), the confrontations in the 90s, their inclusion in the “Axis of Evil”, and so on. Trump is a product of the same smear campaign.
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.
Threats are being exchanged, partly via Twitter, and this is becoming a very volatile situation. A situation like this makes clear why the Democratic/Liberal approach of blaming everything on Russia is short-sighted and foolish. Trump is now under pressure to be “tougher” on Russia, and it seems he is willing to move in that direction. So in a sense both major political groupings are either pushing for war or indifferent, and that’s a dangerous state of affairs, particularly with this venal, unstable, insecure president. Oh, and did I mention that Monday was John Bolton’s first day on the job as National Security Advisor? Jesus.