“You are creating a Frankenstein.”
—Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to President George H. W. Bush, 1989.
The president of the United States has now gone completely mad. Donald Trump was pretty much on the brink of insanity for some time, but this flimsy house of cards he’s shoddily erected over the initial years of his colossally inept presidency is tumbling daily as more and more people from the gutted State Department bury him in impeachment hearings. His unhinged press conferences, erratic tweets and these Nuremberg-esque rallies have become a surreal insight into the deranged paranoia that the leader of the free world has entered in. He is fucked. And he knows it. The only thing that stands between Trump and official ignominy is Rudy Giuliani, who will soon join his last “fixer lawyer” in prison.
This leads us to what transpired in Syria last week, which has caused even many Republicans to see the light.
In one seventy-two hour run of the most bizarrely dangerous foreign policy that has come from the executive branch in my lifetime, Trump green-lit the massacre of America’s only true ally against ISIS and Iran in the Middle East, the Kurdish forces, which were heretofore assisted with U.S. aid, weapons, and military presence. This knee-jerk lunacy, done without alerting the Pentagon or our intelligence agencies, handed Syria over to the Russians and Iran and invited the Turks to run rough-shod over miles of real estate that American lives were sacrificed to hold for half a decade. Then when he was publicly and privately eviscerated by GOP hawks in his administration, the Pentagon, and Congress, most of which are normally seen carrying buckets of his water, he spastically tried to reverse course by tweeting craziness about destroying the Turkish economy and then drafting what could only be described as a letter written by a middle school bully trying to cover his ass. When none of these absurd tactics worked, the president blithely told the world that the U.S. doesn’t give a crap what happens in the Middle East anymore and to let the rest of them “play in the sand”, summarily dispatching his secretary of state and vice president to secure a deal to turn Kurdish land over to its sworn enemy and send them scrambling into oblivion. When it was done he called it “a great day for civilization.”
This has been the Trump Doctrine: Cause an international crisis, like taking North Korea to the brink of war on Twitter, then capitulating with a deal that give a tyrant the store and claim victory. It’s like the game Risk for the mentally challenged.
When piled on top of Trump’s abjectly stupid decision to pull out of the Iran anti-nukes treaty with nary a backup plan, the downright pathetic defense of the Saudi government’s murder of an American journalist, and the unnecessary violence-trigger of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, abandoning Syria to ISIS, Russia and Iran will soon be remembered in the annals of history as the second greatest terrorist sponsorship against America.
However, this wouldn’t be the first time a Republican administration fostered anti-American sentiments through bungled foreign policy. That one ended up causing the deaths of hundreds of our citizens on 9/11.
It is worth noting.
During of the decade between 1979 and 1989, the CIA ran among many half-assed maneuvers in the Middle East something called Operation Cyclone, a covert venture to arm and finance the Mujahideen, an Afghani fighting force that attempted to thwart its country’s invasion by the USSR. By the early 1980s this turned overt, becoming a proud function of what would become known as the Reagan Doctrine – illegal proxy wars fighting off communist uprisings globally. It was just a new-fangled sad repeat of the “domino effect” catastrophes in Korea in the 50s and Viet Nam in the 60s and early 70s that Reagan thought went well and would eventually lead to his Iran-Contra crime that should have cost him his presidency. Reagan, we now know was suffering early stages of dementia, convinced these duped warriors that part of America’s interest in Afghanistan went beyond the ousting of communists from its region. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz sold a dream of a democratized Afghanistan to stabilize the region, promised aid to their refugees that fled to neighboring Pakistan, and the continuation of defense funds to assist in what was then considered burgeoning radical Arab factions.
Of course, this was complete bullshit, as America, then under President George H.W. Bush, would dismissively abandon all interest in Afghanistan and its people around the region, which was beginning to boil over. These funds were handed instead to Pakistan to ironically fight the very same Mujahideen and Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein to combat Iran. The fallout from this bait and switch led to the complete destabilization of Afghanistan and caused the fractured segments of the Mujahideen to form the Taliban and al Queda. You may have heard of them.
Does any of this sound familiar to what the president just did to the Kurds in Syria?
Not to Trump. And why would it? You could barely jam into the Grand Canyon what Trump doesn’t know about anything. Shit, when all of the above was transpiring Donald Trump was blowing daddy’s money paying whores to drip candle wax on his balls and selling off parts of NYC to Arabs to use that money to buy weapons to kill Americans. He was also unaware that the country he was running for the past two years had promised the Kurdish fighters cover as they jailed thousands of captured ISIS fighters. As a result, our only defense against ISIS and Iran in the region has been sold out by Donald Trump as their women and children are being slaughtered on the Internet by the Turkish Army.
This is much worse than the Reagan/Bush fuckups of yesteryear, in that it is random, erratic and done with no support from our intelligence community or the Pentagon. Moreover, American troops are already there and in harm’s way. This presidency, as Trump promised, is a one-man operation, one that has resulted in a shadow foreign policy he’s been running through the state department, the department of justice and his private attorney. It was only a matter of time before it unraveled before congress and the American people. Trump’s best defense is to yell at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, scream again about fake news and dispatch his chief of staff to admit to the current impeachment charges of using foreign influence for political gain. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy,” shouted Mick Mulvaney in front of cameras. “We do that all the time with foreign policy. Get over it.” Then he pulled a Trump and blamed a misquote, even though he was on camera saying it.
It’s over for Trump. He will be a sad footnote in a long series of American bungles. But what about us? What kind of fallout will the next generation suffer by the sins of this one? We can only hope it is only a 9/11 and not worse. His buddy in North Korea has other ideas too.
The President is a terrorist.
Not even I saw that coming.
