DRIFTING INTO WAR
84 Days of Trump
By Jack Random
The eleventh week of the Trump presidency brought a dramatic
turn of events that have yet to play out.
On Thursday Trump ordered the bombing of a Syrian air base in retaliation
for the apparent use of chemical weapons by the regime of Syrian President and
Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.
Russia denied that Assad was responsible and condemned Trump’s action.
In a single day all the alliances shifted. Trump’s harshest critics, Senators
Lindsey Graham and John McCain, assumed the roles of the president’s
cheerleaders, urging him on to a deeper commitment and greater acts of
war. After eleven painful weeks of
ignoring the assassinations of political opponents, the suppression of dissent
and acts of aggression, Trump finally stood up to Vladimir Putin. Or did he?
It must be noted that the Russian military was forewarned
before the attack and the base was back in operation within twenty-four
hours. Trump desperately needed to
do something in opposition to Putin to counteract the daily drumbeat of
collusion with Russia to win the White House.
Was this an elaborate charade or was it a real change in
policy? If Trump has taken a stand
against Putin, will his former ally retaliate? The plot thickens.
This is the twelfth installment of the Trump Diaries.
DAY 78:
BEAUTIFUL DESTRUCTION
April 7, 2017
Neil Gorsuch is confirmed to take
his seat on the bench of the Supreme Court. His harshest critics say he is to the right of Antonin
Scalia, the man he is replacing.
Respectfully, no one is the right of Antonin Scalia. The real damage begins with the next
Trump appointee – or the next Pence appointee.
Armed with cruise missiles, a
missile defense system, anti-aircraft guns, torpedoes and artillery, the
Russian warship Admiral Grigorovich sails to the site of the battleship that
launched the missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Beleaguered Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev states that
Moscow and Washington are on the verge of military confrontation.
MSNBC anchor Brian Williams –
the same “journalist” who fictionalized an account of coming under fire in Iraq
– proclaims the launching of American missiles beautiful. Fareed Zakaria of CNN declares that
Donald Trump “became president of the United States” by his action. Neocon Elliot Abrams states that
Trump’s presidency begins now.
Former Defense Secretary William Cohen declares the president a man of
action.
Across the board the mainstream
media that Trump has so often demeaned has heaped praise on the commander for
bombing an airbase and placing us at odds with Russia in the center of a civil
war. This is why presidents yield
to the drums of war. The media
cannot get enough. It clamors for
more and the people wave the flag and send their children to far away lands to
serve as pawns in the cause of geopolitical chess games.
Here we go again.
Entertaining Chinese president
Xi Jingping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump proclaims “tremendous progress” in
China-American relations. Translation: Trump beat him by three strokes on the
front nine before retiring to watch the Masters golf tournament.
DAY 79: BASKING IN THE GLOW
April 8, 2017
Trump is in seclusion at
Mar-a-Lago, basking in the glow of positive reviews from talking heads and
media pundits. He takes issue with
those critics who claim that the strikes did little real damage. He didn’t even bomb the runway.
Trump needs to learn: On good days you only read the good
reviews. On bad days you don’t
read at all.
The critics are correct that
Trump’s bombing did not have an impact on the conflict in Syria except to
incite the Russians and inform Assad that we will not tolerate anything he
wishes to do. We have not yet advanced
a clear policy.
What the attack did accomplish
was that it changed the topic from Russian collusion to Russian
retaliation. It is a risky
maneuver with unpredictable consequences.
DAY 80: REGIME CHANGE & 18 HOLES
April 9, 2017
On the final day of the Masters
Golf Championship, Trump plays golf at the West Palm Beach golf club.
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley
declares a policy of regime change in Syria – a policy her boss has yet to
articulate. The ambassador seems
to be writing her own script. This
is not the first time she has given speeches or made statements that conflict
with those of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or Secretary of Defense James
Mattis. One wonders if she ever
communicates with her boss. Her
words reflect the president’s policies like a carnival mirror reflects reality.
DAY 81: THE CRY OF PATRIOTISM
April 10, 2017
A CBS polls finds that 57% of
those polled support the bombing of a Syrian airbase. They do not support military intervention to affect regime
change.
Maybe the American people have
learned something from our disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither the media nor the government
seems to have learned much of anything.
Once the cry of patriotism goes forth and the bombs begin to fall, those
who should lead line up behind the warmongers and call for blood.
Neil Gorsuch is sworn in as a
justice of the Supreme Court.
DAY 82: TILLERSON GOES TO MOSCOW
April 11, 2017
Rex Tillerson arrives in Moscow
and checks into his hotel with two teams of security experts to scan the room
for bugs. The French foreign
minister reports that Tillerson on his recent visit to Europe expressed the
opinion that American voters have no reason to care about what happens in
Ukraine.
The Secretary of State is
playing both sides against the middle.
The only one who has any idea what to expect may be Vladimir Putin and
he’s not talking. There are no
official meetings scheduled between the old friends.
France and Britain join the
United States in demanding United Nations Security Council support for an
international investigation of the chemical attack in Syria.
As the aircraft carrier USS Carl
Vinson arrives off the coast of North Korea the little dictator Kim Jong Un
warns that any military aggression by the Trump administration will be answered
with nuclear retaliation.
The Washington
Post reports that a federal judge issued a FISA warrant to monitor Trump
advisor Carter Page way back in July.
The walls are closing in on Page.
He’ll talk if he gets the chance.
DAY 83: THE SUFFERING OF BABIES
April 12, 2017
Putin welcomes
Tillerson by announcing on state television that Russian-American relations
have deteriorated. After Tillerson
meets with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for three hours, Putin yields to a
face-to-face meeting with his old friend and partner in the oil exploitation
business. [1]
Russia
continues to proclaim Bashar al-Assad’s innocence and accuses Trump of acting
irrationally and defying international law.
Either this is
an elaborate charade or Trump is teasing a new cold war. I suspect he has no idea what he’s
doing. After all the hype, neither
does Tillerson.
Trump explains
that his policy or non-policy has not changed. He has no intention of escalating our engagement in Syria
despite the fact that he has done exactly that. He simply could not endure the images of babies and children
suffering. Now that the world
understands what moves our president, you can be sure the White House is being
inundated with images of suffering infants and toddlers in all parts of the
world – Yemen, Somalia, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Chad, Congo, Sudan, Libya,
Myanmar, Ukraine, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico – many of them as the
result of our policies, drone strikes or bombing campaigns. [2, 3]
This is the
president whose proposed budget cuts foreign aid to a skeleton. The childhood misery index will rise as
a direct result and the suffering will be chronicled and delivered to the
president’s eyes. Who do you bomb
for starvation and disease?
When the dust
settles nothing but the politics have changed. Nine Syrian military personnel are dead, a Syrian airfield
suffered minor damage and Russia will have to replace a dozen or so fighter
jets but nothing of substance has changed. We will allow Assad to continue as Syria’s president. We will soon resume coordinated actions
with the Russian military. More
children and babies will suffer and die.
It is not within our power to end this carnage alone and it is beyond
the reach of our leader to negotiate an end with others.
Trump tells reporters
at a news conference with the head of NATO that American-Russian relations have
reached an “all time low.” By that
he means big league. Apparently
the president has never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In a
wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump reveals he will not
accuse China of currency manipulation. [4] He seems to believe he has an
understanding with President Xi Jinping: Trump will give China a favorable
trade deal if the Chinese help with the North Korea problem.
DAY 84: MOTHER OF ALL BOMBS
April 13, 2017
The US
military drops the mother of all bombs – the largest non-nuclear bomb in our
arsenal – on a cave complex said to shelter Islamic State fighters in
Afghanistan.
This does not
appear to be an administration that wants to withdraw from America’s long war
in Afghanistan. The eleven-ton
bomb had never been deployed. Now
it has. It is time to recognize
that all that talk by candidate Trump about not getting entangled in foreign
wars was just that. If you give a
man with an insecurity complex access to weapons of mass destruction, you
cannot be surprised when he uses them.
The White
House declines to take responsibility for the decision to drop the massive
bomb, apparently yielding strategic decisions in Afghanistan and elsewhere to
the military. What could go
wrong?
For those who
were somewhat surprised by the presence of ISIS in Afghanistan as I was,
reports refer to ISIS-K or ISIS affiliates. ISIS-K refers to ISIS Khurasan: a province traversing the
Afghan and Pakistani border. The
peripheral group consists largely of Taliban defectors who have joined the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. [5]
The group is
capable of isolated attacks but it is not considered strategically viable. ISIS Khurasan is at odds with our
enemy, the Taliban, making it exactly the kind of engagement Trump the
candidate wanted to avoid. We are
attacking the enemy of our enemy.
Note that Russia recently made overtures of an alliance with the
Taliban. Destroying an enemy of
the Taliban may ultimately work to Russia’s favor.
The situation
is clear as mud and the one thing candidate Trump got right was: We would be wise to stay out of
it. I didn’t believe him then and
I don’t believe him now. Trump has
no strategy, no philosophy and no guiding principles. He loved the adulation his bombing of Syria engendered so he
thought he’d try another in Afghanistan.
TRUMP: What have you got for me, General?
GENERAL: MOAB. The Massive Ordnance Air Blast. We call it the mother of all bombs.
TRUMP: Bigger than the bunker buster?
GENERAL: Bigger. Much bigger.
TRUMP: Where can we drop it?
GENERAL: It has to be rural – preferably
isolated. We’ve got our eyes on
these caves in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan.
TRUMP: Is that where we lost bin Laden?
GENERAL: I’m not sure, sir.
TRUMP: I like it.
GENERAL: Would you like cover, sir?
TRUMP: How’s that?
GENERAL: If things go wrong, we can assign
blame. If everything goes well you
get the credit.
TRUMP: You can do that?
GENERAL: Yes, sir.
TRUMP: Drop it, General. And make sure we have pictures. The people love pictures. Big league.
GENERAL: Yes, sir.
Recall that
Trump the candidate speculated that we should use whatever weapons we
have. He refused to rule out the
first use of nuclear weapons and all but welcomed a new arms race. The only promise the president has kept
thus far is the promise to be unpredictable. When unpredictable includes the possibility of nuclear annihilation
it is not a good thing.
Dropping the
mother of all bombs may be a warning and a challenge to our enemies. If Putin takes the challenge, he
already has an answer: the father of all bombs. [6] The Aviation Thermobaric
Bomb of Increased Power reportedly has four times the destructive force as
MOAB. It has replaced smaller
nuclear bombs in the Russian arsenal of weaponry.
If Putin finds
an opportunity to deploy the father of all bombs, he will challenge Trump to
take the next step: tactical nuclear weapons.
Jazz.
1. “Putin
says trust erodes under Trump, Moscow icily receives Tillerson” by Yeganeh
Torbati and Vladimir Soldatkin.
Reuters, April 12, 2017.
2. “It
had a big impact on me – story behind Trump’s whirlwind missile response” by
Luke Harding. The Guardian, April
7, 2017.
3. “10
Conflicts to Watch in 2017” by Jean-Marie Guehenno. Foreign Policy, January 5, 2017.
4. “Trump
Says Dollar ‘Getting Too Strong,’ Won’t Label China a Currency Manipulator” by
Gerard Baker, Carol E. Lee and Michael C. Bender. Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2017.
5. “What
Happened to ISIS’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Province?” by Arif Fasik. The Diplomat, February 2, 2016.
6. “Russia unveils the ‘father of all
bombs’” by Luke Harding. The Guardian,
September 11, 2007.
JACK RANDOM IS THE
AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES, GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION, PAWNS TO PLAYERS
AND OTHER WORKS (CROW DOG PRESS).
