192
   

monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

 
 
Builder
 
  -1  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:13 pm
And on the matter of Mattis, the pundits here again have a massive problem with memory retention. (or maybe just cognitive dissonance)

Headline from 2013; Obama's Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years

Quote:
Defense: What the president calls "my military" is being cleansed of any officer suspected of disloyalty to or disagreement with the administration on matters of policy or force structure, leaving the compliant and fearful.

We recognize President Obama is the commander-in-chief and that throughout history presidents from Lincoln to Truman have seen fit to remove military commanders they view as inadequate or insubordinate. Turnover in the military ranks is normal, and in these times of sequestration and budget cuts the numbers are expected to tick up as force levels shrink and missions change.

Yet what has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture.

We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.


source

0 Replies
 
revelette1
 
  2  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:31 pm
@edgarblythe,
Gosh, I truly hope Robert Reich is right. Would give a lot of faith back in our country.
izzythepush
 
  2  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:33 pm
@Lash,
Don't be ******* ridiculous.
coldjoint
 
  -4  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:34 pm
@revelette1,
Quote:
Would give a lot of faith back in our country.

Pretty silly to have faith in what you want to destroy, isn't it?
0 Replies
 
revelette1
 
  3  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:38 pm
@snood,
Quote:
So who to replace Mattis?
Lindsay Graham?
Tom Cotten?


Smile
Lash
 
  0  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:42 pm
@izzythepush,
I’m accurate. The centrist contingent here is parroting the Fox News narrative about trump’s decision to withdraw.
snood
 
  1  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 04:50 pm
@revelette1,
Who do you see as likely replacement for Mattis? Notice, I don't say 'good', but 'likely'.
InfraBlue
 
  6  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 05:11 pm
@Builder,
Builder wrote:

Quote:
You have noticed that too?


All The Time.

They bang on about Russian influence, while ignoring the fact that Israhell and Saudis (Jews in disguise) are pulling the strings and have been for decades.

Good on #45 for rocking their boat.

Jews in disguise? Wow, that's a new Jewish conspiracy theory on me.

45 is extremely pro-Israel. He's thumbed his nose at the Palestinians and past US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and planning to move the US' embassy there. In regard to Saudi Arabia, he's bending over backwards for them in regard to their murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
izzythepush
 
  2  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 05:29 pm
@Lash,
We don't get Fox News over here. I don't have a clue what they're on about.
coldjoint
 
  -4  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 05:31 pm
@izzythepush,
Quote:
We don't get Fox News over here.

Most likely censored by your government.
maporsche
 
  1  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:06 pm
There is absolutely nothing wrong or incongruent with

a) being happy/thrilled we are getting out of Syria
b) concerned that we may not be getting out the right way
c) concerned that we are leaving a void that we may need to deal with in the future
d) concerned with tweet-orders from the guy with impulse control issues


I’m still thinking that there is about a 30% chance that we actually leave. The policy enacted after this twitch-tweet may indeed be an orderly withdrawal.
0 Replies
 
revelette1
 
  3  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:11 pm
@izzythepush,
Lucky you, it's on in single doctor's waiting room I've been in lately, luckily, they don't do closed captioned.
revelette1
 
  2  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:13 pm
@snood,
Lord, I wouldn't have a clue. I doubt people are lining up for the thankless job.
0 Replies
 
nimh
 
  6  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:19 pm
@Lash,
Lash wrote:

I wonder if the FOX take is as schizophrenic as the one around here.


Bit rich to deride Dems/liberals/etc as "schizophrenic" because they have turned "pro-warmongering," when in the same timeframe you've gone from cheering on George Bush's Iraq war-mongerers to being A-OK with abandoning the Kurds to likely slaughter in the name of peace and non-interventionism.

You've done a 180 yourself -- and somehow managed to line up with the morally repugnant side both times round.
edgarblythe
 
  2  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:24 pm
Gonna buy five copies for my mother =

We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends
Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-syria-withdrawal-772177/?fbclid=IwAR26HUSGh5Qry90ELzQuIOoAKsEe_HUcH1uZ-t3Ek-3fk6AXSIXrigT4w6U

So we’re withdrawing troops from the Middle East.

GOOD!

What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half?

For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention.

It will be difficult for each of us to even begin to part with our share of honor in those achievements. This must be why all those talking heads on TV are going crazy.

Unless Donald Trump decides to reverse his decision to begin withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads.

“Today’s decision would cheer Moscow, ISIS, and Iran!” yelped Nicole Wallace, former George W. Bush communications director.

“Maybe Trump will bring Republicans and Democrats together,” said Bill Kristol, on MSNBC, that “liberal” channel that somehow seems to be populated round the clock by ex-neocons and Pentagon dropouts.

Kristol, who has rarely ever been in the ballpark of right about anything — he once told us Iraq was going to be a “two month war” — might actually be correct.

Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan will lay bare the real distinctions in American politics. Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor.

The real line is between a war party, and everyone else.

This is why Kristol is probably right. The Democrats’ plan until now was probably to impeach Trump in the House using at minimum some material from the Michael Cohen case involving campaign-finance violations.

That plan never had a chance to succeed in the Senate, but now, who knows? Troop withdrawals may push a collection of hawkish Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse and maybe even Mitch McConnell into another camp.

The departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — a standard-issue Pentagon toady who’s never met an unending failure of a military engagement he didn’t like and whose resignation letter is now being celebrated as inspirational literature on the order of the Gettysburg Address or a lost epic by Auden or Eliot — sounded an emergency bell for all these clowns. The letter by Mattis, Rubio said:

“Makes it abundantly clear we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries.”

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Talk like this is designed to give political cover to Republican fence-sitters on Trump. That wry smile on Kristol’s face is, I’d guess, connected to the knowledge that Trump put the Senate in play by even threatening to pull the plug on our Middle Eastern misadventures.

You’ll hear all sorts of arguments today about why the withdrawals are bad. You’ll hear Trump has no plan, which is true. He never does, at least not on policy.

But we don’t exactly have a plan for staying in the Middle East, either, beyond installing a permanent garrison in a dozen countries, spending assloads of money and making ourselves permanently despised in the region as civilian deaths pile up through drone-bombings and other “surgical” actions.

You’ll hear we’re abandoning allies and inviting massacres by the likes of Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If there was any evidence that our presence there would do anything but screw up the situation even more, I might consider that a real argument. At any rate, there are other solutions beyond committing American lives. We could take in more refugees, kick Turkey out of NATO, impose sanctions, etc.

As to the argument that we’re abandoning Syria to Russians — anyone who is interested in reducing Russian power should be cheering. If there’s any country in the world that equals us in its ability to botch an occupation and get run out on a bloody rail after squandering piles of treasure, it’s Russia. They may even be better at it than us. We can ask the Afghans about that on our way out of there.

The Afghan conflict became the longest military engagement in American history eight years ago. Despite myths to the contrary, Barack Obama did not enter office gung-ho to leave Afghanistan. He felt he needed to win there first, which, as anyone who’s read The Great Game knows, proved impossible. So we ended up staying throughout his presidency.

We were going to continue to stay there, and in other places, forever, because our occupations do not work, as everyone outside of Washington seems to understand.

TV talking heads will be unanimous on this subject, but the population, not so much. What polls we have suggest voters want out of the region in increasing numbers.

A Morning Consult/Politico poll from last year showed a plurality favored a troop decrease in Afghanistan, while only 5 percent wanted increases. Polls consistently show the public thinks our presence in Afghanistan has been a failure.

There’s less about how the public feels about Syria, but even there, the data doesn’t show overwhelming desire to put boots on the ground.

When Trump first ordered airstrikes in Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, 70 percent favored sanctions according to Politico, while 39 percent favored sending troops. A CBS poll around that time found 45 percent wanted either no involvement period, or airstrikes and no ground troops, versus 18 percent who wanted full military involvement.

Trump is a madman, a far-right extremist and an embarrassment, but that’s not why most people in Washington hate him. It’s his foreign-policy attitudes, particularly toward NATO, that have always most offended DC burghers.

You could see the Beltway beginning to lose its mind back in the Republican primary race, when then-candidate Trump belittled America’s commitment to Middle Eastern oil states.

“Every time there’s a little ruckus, we send those ships and those planes,” he said, early in his campaign. “We get nothing. Why? They’re making a billion a day. We get nothing.”

As he got closer to the nomination, he went after neoconservative theology more explicitly.

“I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” he said, in March of 2016. He went on: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up.”

Trump was wrong about a thousand other things, but this was true. I had done a story about how military contractors spent $72 million on what was supposed to be an Iraqi police academy and delivered a pile of rubble so unusable, pedestrians made it into a toilet.

The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction noted, “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate.”

SIGIR found we spent over $60 billion on Iraqi reconstruction and did not significantly improve life for Iraqis. The parallel body covering Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, concluded last year that at least $15.5 billion had been wasted in that country between 2008 and 2017, and this was likely only a “fraction” of financial leakage.

Trump, after sealing the nomination, upped the ante. In the summer of 2016 he said he wasn’t sure he’d send troops to defend NATO members that didn’t pay their bills. NATO members are supposed to kick in 2 percent of GDP for their own defense. At the time, only four NATO members (Estonia, Poland, the U.K. and the U.S.) were in compliance.

Politicians went insane. How dare he ask countries to pay for their own defense! Republican House member Adam Kinzinger, a popular guest in the last 24 hours, said in July 2016 that Trump’s comments were “utterly disastrous.”

“There’s no precedent,” said Thomas Wright, a “Europe scholar” from the Brookings Institute.

When the news came after Trump’s election that he’d only read his intelligence briefings once a week instead of every day as previous presidents had dutifully done, that was it. The gloves were off at that point.

“The open disdain Trump has shown for the agencies is unprecedented,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official for both George W. Bush and Obama.

All that followed, through today, has to be understood through this prism.

Trump dumped on basically every segment of the political establishment en route to Washington, running on a classic authoritarian strategy — bash the elites, pose as a populist.

However fake he was, there were portions of the political establishment that deserved abuse, the Pentagon most of all.

The Department of Defense has been a money pit for decades. It has trillions in expenditures it can’t account for, refused an audit for nearly 30 years and then failed this year (as in failed completely, zero-point-zero, not producing any coherent numbers) when one was finally funded.

We have brave and able soldiers, but their leaders are utter tools who’ve left a legacy of massacres and botched interventions around the world.

NATO? That’s an organization whose mission stopped making sense the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. We should long ago have repurposed our defense plan to focus on terrorism, cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, commercial espionage, financial security, and other threats.

Instead, we continued after the Soviet collapse to maintain a global military alliance fattened with increasingly useless carriers and fighter jets, designed to fight archaic forms of war.

NATO persisted mainly as a PR mechanism for a) justifying continued obscene defense spending levels and b) giving a patina of internationalism to America’s essentially unilateral military adventures.

We’d go into a place like Afghanistan with no real plan for leaving, and a few member nations like Estonia and France and Turkey would send troops to get shot at with us. But it was always basically Team America: World Police with supporting actors. No wonder so few of the member countries paid their dues.

Incidentally, this isn’t exactly a secret. Long before Trump, this is what Barney Frank was saying in 2010: “I think the time has come to reexamine NATO. NATO has become an excuse for other people to get America to do things.”

This has all been a giant, bloody, expensive farce, and it’s long since time we ended it.

We’ll see a lot of hand-wringing today from people who called themselves anti-war in 2002 and 2003, but now pray that the “adults in the room” keep “boots on the ground” to preserve “credibility.”

Part of this is because it’s Trump, but a bigger part is that we’ve successfully brainwashed big chunks of the population into thinking it’s normal for a country to exist in a state of permanent war, fighting in seven countries at once, spending half of all discretionary funding on defense.

It’s not. It’s insane. And we’ll never be a healthy society, or truly respected abroad, until we stop accepting it as normal.

Incidentally, I doubt Trump really follows through on this withdrawal plan. But until he changes (what passes for) his mind, watch what happens in Washington.

We’re about to have a very graphic demonstration of the near-total uniformity of the political class when it comes to the military and its role. The war party is ready for a coming-out party.
Lash
 
  1  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:35 pm
@nimh,
You support prolonged war now, as well?

Many people change their minds about various things. To me, it’s a badge of honor to be open-minded that you could be wrong about something. I don’t feel bad at all that I began to value human life more—and began to recognize that the carnage my country caused so far away was killing a lot of innocent people.

I also began to understand the connection between my country’s constant warring and the terrorism it bred.

I began to hate war and the disconnect many people in safer Western countries have to the horror we’re perpetrating around the world.

I did change my thinking about war, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

Funny to see you champion what you used to criticize —along with the crowd.

Ending a genocidal war is now repugnant to you. Noted.


lmur
 
  5  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:41 pm
@coldjoint,
coldjoint wrote:

Quote:
We don't get Fox News over here.

Most likely censored by your government.

Murdoch himself took Fox News off the airwaves in the UK because he realised its toxicity was harmful in his attempt to take control of Britih Sky Broadcasting. He's a principled guy!
coldjoint
 
  -4  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:42 pm
Nobody wants to say the problem is Islam. Not our government, not the media, our academics, and not Muslims, which is a gimme. I will.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  0  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 06:55 pm
People from around the world have been asking for an end to the Syrian genocide for 7 years.

I think it’s time. How many children starve to death every day?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2018/02/international-open-letter-calls-syrian-genocide-180227155538993.html
Lash
 
  1  
Fri 21 Dec, 2018 07:06 pm
From Jeremy Scahill

1. I support withdrawing US troops from all these wars, overt and covert.
2. Trump is an unstable authoritarian who cannot be trusted.
3. “Mattis was an adult” is bullshit. He’s a hawkish war criminal.
4. It’s very telling that the war party in DC is furious.
5. This is an opportunity for progressive forces to assert an alternative vision for US foreign policy.
6. Trump is a crooked charlatan. But these withdrawals would represent a dent in the armor of the bipartisan war machine.
7. This chaos presents opportunity.
8. There is a real possibility Trump will withdraw forces from Afghanistan and use Erik Prince’s forces. This must be opposed ferociously.
9. One consequence of major drawdowns could be a dramatic uptick in covert actions and air strikes. Obama embraced that model.
10. For those who somehow think this is Trump opposing the war machine, I point you to his massive escalation of drone strikes, his easing of rules for killing civilians, his use of ground troops in Yemen and Somalia and his use of criminal weaponry like the MOAB in Afghanistan.
————————
 

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