You’ve heard me mention this before (if you’ve been following this blog long enough), but our former president George W. Bush was a big believer in accountability for the powerless; for the powerful, not so much. It’s up to us to apply that principle to those in power, no matter how lofty their position. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see war criminal Elliott Abrams ascend to high office once again. Bush’s father H.W. pardoned this creature, giving him a new lease on life as a decision maker – a lease he has exercised more than once in the years since his heyday during the Reagan administration.
Abrams was an essential player in Reagan’s war on Central American peasantry throughout the 1980s. He worked to cover up the hideous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador at the end of 1981, then went on to flak for that murderous government for the balance of his tenure. He defended the mass murderer Rios Montt in Guatemala during that period under the banner of anti-communism – a position he has proudly owned up to ever since, even though the former Guatemalan dictator was posthumously convicted of genocide in his home country (and the United States was called out by the court for supporting him). He was convicted as part of the Iran-Contra prosecution, then pardoned by pappy Bush so that he could soldier on into junior’s administration and make a mess of our policy toward Haiti, Israel Palestine, and everything else he could get his greasy hands on.
This is like getting the old band back together, frankly. Bolton, Bush Jr.’s asinine United Nations Ambassador, now Abrams. Where the hell are Secord and Poindexter? (For that matter, where is Abrams’ hair? Is it still in jail for his crimes?) For all his incoherent rhetoric about breaking longtime Republican orthodoxy regarding foreign interventions like Afghanistan and Syria, Trump is assembling a cadre of proven war criminals who are working on a new conflict, most likely with Iran, though it’s possible they will attempt a warm-up with an attack on Venezuela first. People like Bolton, Abrams, and Pompeo have found in Trump the perfect vehicle to achieve their interventionist aims. He’s a kind of Trojan Horse through which neocons can climb back into the driver’s seat and take us over the cliff, once again.
All I can say is, resist. These people have been discredited multiple times and they keep coming back. The only way we can stop them is by resisting, voting, speaking up.
luv u,
jp
What emerges is the same bipartisan consensus that has driven bad foreign policy decisions through administrations of both parties for as long as I’ve been alive (and, in truth, longer). It feels to me very much like the assholes vs. the fuckers, and while I certainly don’t want the fuckers running everything, it’s hard to support the assholes and maintain my self-respect. Now, before someone accuses me of Jimmy Dore-like animus toward strategic voting (note: I always vote strategically, specifically to avert the avoidable and wholly predictable disaster that’s unfolding right now), I do have a slight preference for the assholes. But what we need is a radically new approach to national security and international relations – one that would make all of those pundits shake their heads.
“A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our land,” he tells us, referring to a year ago, then jumped right in with the anecdotes and the guests of honor. “We always will pull through together, always.” Runs through a litany of lifesavers, mostly from disasters of our own making, through climate change, gun violence, etc. “The state of our union is strong because our people are strong. And together we are building a safe and strong and proud America.” Platitude.
Think it strange that the U.S. would be against a lessening of tension? Well, it’s not just a Trump thing. There’s a deep imperial institutional bias against ending that conflict, and it manifests itself in a host of different ways. Just Wednesday of this week I saw an NBC story about the North Korean woman who allegedly blew up a South Korean airliner; she is out of jail, living in exile as a defector in South Korea. The bombing was decades ago – so why did the network decide to dredge this story up now and hang it around the father of the current North Korean leader’s neck? I would say that NBC is about as close to the core of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as any institution can be. With a lot of positive stories coming out about the glimmer of North/South detente in Korea, it’s no surprise that this old chestnut would bob up to the surface.
Endless war in an of itself is now an invariant reality of modern U.S. foreign policy, regardless of which major party holds the reins of power. The broad political consensus has built a nearly unassailable war machine – not in the sense that it is impervious to military defeat, but rather that it is designed to run on and on regardless of what the American people have to say about it. The killing machine is well insulated from the voting, tax paying public – there’s no conscription, no war tax, no apparent sacrifice associated with these extended deployments except with respect to the volunteer soldiers who are sent to fight, be grievously wounded, and even die. The beauty of this political creation is that it appears to defy gravity; only a herculean effort on the part of the American people could stand a chance of ending these wars.
And clearly, there is a solid, institutional consensus on American foreign policy. It’s a relatively small box that contains, on one end, the Obama approach, then the center-left liberal interventionist school (Clinton, Samantha Power, etc.), followed by the center-right establishment Republicans (James Baker, Kissinger, etc.), the hot-head interventionists (McCain, Graham, Cotton), and the neocons (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Elliot Abrams, etc.). In terms of blowing things up and killing people, there isn’t a lot of distance between any of these groupings, and they all share a common imperial worldview. The encouraging development for the Morning Joe crew is the notion that Trump has now put himself in that box.
I didn’t want to let the week go by without saying something about the hundred-plus killed in a coalition raid in Mosul. Civilian deaths have been on the rise in that conflict since our military began its air assault on the more densely populated western side of Mosul. Well, that’s predictable enough. We are fighting the legacy of the previous decade’s catastrophic policy, which was itself a response to another previous decade’s catastrophic policy, and so on. ISIS or ISIL is Al Qaeda in Iraq 2.0, drawing on ex Baathist military personnel for many of its cadres, as well as disaffected Sunni youth, targeted by both the U.S. and the Baghdad government. The destruction/”liberation” of Mosul will not change the fundamental problems that prompted these people to turn, in desperation, to the extremists they once fought against.
First, the $400 million is not our money; it is Iran’s money. It represents funds paid by the Iranian people for arms sold to the despotic Shah before his overthrow; the arms were never delivered, and with the application of sanctions, the money was frozen, like the proceeds from oil sales. As a component of the nuclear deal, the United States and its partners agreed to free up this money while keeping the bulk of the sanctions in place. Once the agreement was settled, the administration apparently reserved delivery of these funds – the $400 million in cash, since Iran still can’t use the international banking system – as some surety that the prisoner release (negotiated as a side agreement) would actually happen.
Empire means more than never having to say you’re sorry. It mostly means never even contemplating the concept of “sorry” – an imperial value not lost on the likes of NPR, whose Morning Edition host 
So, after six years of being compelled to drink the fragrant golden beverage of Obama’s national security policy – drones, bombs, domestic spying, whistleblower-persecution and all – we are now to be treated to even more acrid delicacies offered up by Clinton, the next generation. I guess this is an indication of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, though it remains to be seen how the GOP will outflank the Democrats on the crazytown side. This is truly a race to the bottom. That’s the power of this lesser of two evils electoral philosophy.