;
The rest of the world would clean up had we stayed in The Paris Accord: Staying in Paris Agreement Would Have Cost Families
And:
From a very dear friend and fellow memo reader: "Your cartoons are misplaced. They should be at the end. After reading this long report, I need something to cheer me.
All bad news.....and no significant ideas on how to solve any of the issues. Patience, you tell me...but, it's too late for that. The attack on Trump by the military leadership needs attention, as in declaring all of them, traitors. The electorate is watching and listening to these Benedict Arnolds, and so is the world. Way too much talk and no actions.
And then there are the really serious issues; Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Iran, etc., etc., etc.
Next you'll report that there is no Santa Claus. Geez! M------"
My response: "Who Is Santa Claus? "
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I attended a presentation last night by a man who is involved in reviving the Jewish Community in Poland, specifically Krakow. It was interesting and he was an outstanding speaker.During the Q and A I asked him about the Polish government and he said they are right wing and very nationalistic, anti-immigration etc. He said Poland was following the current trend in world governments.
I understand that many of my liberal friends cannot stand Trump and believe he wants to be a dictator. I do not ask my Trump hating friends to defend themselves because I suspect many cannot do so rationally and I do not wish to rile them more since Trump already does a good job.
What I do believe is freedom, democracy, capitalism are good and, yes, they heighten/elevate expectations. The also have produced positive results for millions, more than communism, socialism, fascism and slavery. Consequently, when democracy, capitalism and freedom fail to produce and or meet expectations, some even unrealistic, people become exceedingly discouraged and disappointed because they feel they have been cheated and/or let down.
In truth, they fail not because there is something inherently wrong but because of those who do not implement the dictates of democracy as intended.
Would we elect a president who pledged to make America bad? Would we vote into office a president who wanted America to come in second or even lower? There is nothing inherently evil about nationalism, patriotism if appropriately restrained, measured, employed in moderation.
It seems to me, when America has failed it is because of poor/dishonest leadership, because politicians did not do their job appropriately , were unwilling to put nation above self. We are "enjoying" such a period now.
From the day Trump took office there were those who wanted to impeach him, who set about to bring him down, to break his legs before he had a chance to run with the ball.
In support of this view, I am re-posting an op ed which I believe is very revealing. (See 1 below.) I believe the true fascists among us are those who believe their calling is to overturn the people's wishes, to impeach a duly elected president they set up because he pledged to "drain the swamp," so to speak, shearing and clipping their wings and de-flowering their power.
It is evident, at times, even most times, Trump is his own worst and biggest enemy. He cannot help avoiding being crude, being boorish, being un-presidential. It is hard for most to see Trump through a prism that separates his speech from his actions. I consistently preach, watch what he does and pay less attention to what he says. We all know he stretches the truth, we all know he is narcissistic and needs to place himself in the center of the ring and indulges in self adulation.
We also should know he is not a crafty politician. He is impatient, he wants to get things done. In that regard, his achievements have been remarkable considering the roadblocks thrown in his path by those who hate him, fear his ability to break their hold on the pot of "gold."
The true enemies are not the deplorables. The true enemies of our way of life, of our freedoms, of our democracy and of capitalist system are those in the article I have posted. Unless we pursue them and try them for their illegal behaviour, in just ways according to the rule of law, our republic remains at grave risk.
Therefore, what we are witnessing is an outrageous effort by a pusillanimous lying coward, supported an equally deranged Speaker, to diminish the influence of another branch of government based on trumped up and petty charges. This was not the intent of the founding fathers nor are these treasonous like efforts calculated to better serve the health and welfare of our republic. They are simply the out sized efforts of a petty misdirected Solon whose party is unwilling to accept the decision of of the ballot box.
In the process which borders on a Gulagian effort they have run roughshod over the legal rights and precedence upon which our nation was founded to the detriment and survival of our fragile Republic.
It will be up to The Senate to end this tragedy. Stay tuned. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Another important repeat: Yes, Trump has a foreign policy. (See 2 below.)
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Will there be Palestinian elections? (See 2 below.)
And:
For the want of a nail. (See 3a below.)
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Dick
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1)The Military-Intelligence Complex
Many retired high-ranking military officers have gone beyond legitimately articulating why President Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to smear him personally or speak openly of removing their commander-in-chief from office. And the media and the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment are with them every step of the way.
Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.
We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters.
An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.
About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president.
Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency. And the list of such futile and fabricated attempts to abort Trump is indeed now quite monotonous: the efforts to sue three states on false charges of tampered voting machines, the attempt to subvert the voting of the Electoral College, the invocation of the ossified Logan Act, the melodramas concerning the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment, the Mueller’s Dream Team and all-star 22-month failed effort to find collusion and obstruction, the personal psychodramas of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and the Trump tax returns, the desperate efforts to tar Trump as a “white supremacist,” followed by cries of “Recession! Recession!,” and now, of course, “Ukraine! Ukraine!”
Perhaps these efforts were best summed up by an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who on September 5, 2018, outlined how officials within the Trump Administration took it upon themselves in the midst of the Mueller investigation to obstruct and impede the workings of the seemingly oblivious cuckold Trump: “The dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations . . . I would know. I am one of them.”
The Normalization of the Coup?
Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers.
In unprecedented fashion, some have not just disagreed with the commander in chief, but have declared that he is unfit for office and by implication thus should be obstructed and perhaps even removed.
Efforts such as these were recently praised by former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who announced to a gathering of former intelligence bureaucrats, “Thank God for the deep state.”
Donald Trump had been in office less than a month when the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had decided on their own to withhold information from the recently inaugurated president of the United States: “In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said.”
What would one call that? Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?
Most of the major intelligence heads in the Obama Administration—James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper—either leaked classified information aimed at harming candidate and then President Trump, later declared him a veritable traitor and Russian asset, or earlier took measures to monitor his campaign or administration’s communications.
In the coming months, the investigations of Michael Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, and the department’s own criminal investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham, may well detail one of the most extensive efforts in our history by the American intelligence agencies and their enablers in the executive branch to subvert a campaign, disrupt a presidential transition, and to abort a presidency.
Just 10 days after Trump was inaugurated, Washington insider lawyer Rosa Brooks—a former adviser in the Obama Administration to Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh and a former special counsel to the president at George Soros’s Open Society Institute—in Foreign Policy offered formal advice about removing Trump in an article titled, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.”
Brooks needed just over a week to conclude that the elected president had to go by means other than an election. After rejecting the first option of the usual constitutional remedy of waiting until the 2020 election (“But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a long time to wait.”), Brooks offered her three fallback strategies to depose Trump:
1) Immediate impeachment. “If impeachment seems like a fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment,” she wrote. “Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’”). Brooks did not elaborate on what “anything” might be.
2) Declaring Trump mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment. “In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution,” she wrote. Brooks did not mention that what non-U.S. citizens abroad may feel about removing Trump as mentally unfit is of no constitutional importance. Yet she was also prescient—given the later McCabe-Rosenstein comical aborted palace coup of ridding the country of a supposedly “sick” Trump.
3) A military coup, which Brooks wrote, “is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America.” If not a “coup,” then “at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” Notice the cheap praeteritio: claim that such an idea should have been previously “unthinkable” as a means to demonstrate just how thinkable it now should be.
In the months and years that followed, Brooks again proved either vatic or had foreknowledge of the sort of “resistance” that would follow.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers to change the rules of the game. They will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.
In early March 2017, Evelyn Farkas, an outgoing Obama-appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed in a weird revelation on MSNBC how departing Obama Administration officials scrambled to leak and undermine the six-week-old Trump Administration. “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill . . .‘Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration . . . The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence . . . That’s why you have the leaking.”
In other words, a Pentagon official was illegally leaking documents, apparently classified, in order both to defame the president as a Russian asset and to thwart any investigation of such internal and likely illegal resistance.
The New Retired Military
At various times, an entire pantheon of retired generals and intelligence directors has gone to Twitter or progressive cable channels like CNN and MSNBC to declare the president of the United States either a Russian asset and thus a traitor, or unfit for office, or in some other way to call for his removal before the election of 2020—for some, seemingly in violation of the code of military conduct that forbids even retired officers from defaming the commander-in-chief.
None cited any felonious conduct on Trump’s part; all were infuriated either by presidential comportment and tone or policies with which they disagreed.
Retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey for the past three years has leveled a number of ad hominem charges against the elected president. He essentially called the president a threat to American national security on grounds that his loyalties were more to Vladimir Putin than to his own country. McCaffrey later called the president “stupid” and “cruel” for recalibrating the presence of trip-wire troops in-between Kurdish and Turkish forces. He recently equated Trump’s cancellation of the White House subscriptions of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (“This is Mussolini”).
When a retired military officer decides and announces that the current president is the equivalent of a fascist, mass-murdering dictator who seized power and defied constitutional norms, then what is the signal conveyed to other military officers?
Retired General Stanley McChrystal—removed from command by the Obama Administration for inter alia allegedly referring to the vice president as “Bite Me”—called the president “immoral and dishonest.” Former CIA director Michael Hayden—a four-star Air Force general formerly smeared by the Left for defending supposed “torture” at Guantanamo—compared Trump’s policies to Nazism, when he tweeted a picture of Birkenau to illustrate the administration’s use of detention facilities at the border—a plan inaugurated by the Obama Administration—to deal with tens of thousands of illegal entrants.
One can disagree with Trump’s decision to pull a small contingent of tripwire troops back from the frontlines in Syria as Kurds (our current friends, but not our long-standing legal allies) and Turks (our long-standing legal allies, but not our current friends) fight each other, or see the logic of not putting even small numbers of U.S. troops in the middle of a Syrian quagmire.
The choice is a bad/worse dilemma, one that involves the likelihood either of not defending de facto allies or getting into a shooting scenario against de jure allies. So why would retired General John Allen instead attack the commander-in-chief in moral terms rather than merely criticize the president’s strategic or operational judgment: “There is blood on Trump’s hands for abandoning our Kurdish allies”?
Again, when our best and brightest former generals and admirals inform the nation that the current elected president, with whom they disagree on both Middle East and border security policies, is “immoral” and “cruel” or deserves bloodguilt, or is the equivalent of a fascist dictator or similar to those who set up Nazi death camps, is not the obvious inference that someone must put an end to the supposed fascistic/Nazi takeover of the government?
Apparently so.
In the eeriest series of comments, retired Admiral William McRaven has all but declared Trump a subversive traitor. Apparently in reference to fellow military also working in resistance to the president, Raven remarked, “The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within.”
In a New York Times op-ed, the decorated retired admiral went further, mostly due to his own disagreements with Trump’s foreign policy, especially toward the Turkish-Kurd standoff in Syria, and his dislike of the president’s style and behavior. Indeed, McRaven seemed to call for Trump to be removed before the 2020 election, “[I]t is time for a new person in the Oval Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.” (Emphasis added.)
Let us be clear about what McRaven wrote. We are just one year away from a constitutionally mandated election. Yet McRaven now wants a “new person” in the Oval Office and he wants it “the sooner, the better.” And he insists our collective fate as a constitutional republic depends on Trump’s preferable “sooner” removal.
What exactly is the admiral referring to? Impeachment? Invocation of the 25th Amendment? Or the last of Rosa Brooks’ proposals: a forced removal by the military?
Note again, the common thread in all these complaints is not demonstrable high crimes and misdemeanors but rather sharp policy disagreements with the president about the Middle East, or the president’s own retaliatory and sometimes crass pushbacks, usually against prior ad hominem attacks both from serving and retired military officers, or false claims that Trump was a veritable asset, something refuted by Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35-million-dollar investigation of “collusion.”
An Honorable “Seven Days in May”?
Note that the Left seems either amused or supportive of the current furor of our retired officers and intelligence heads (in a way they were not with General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor)—a phenomenon that began during the Iraq War when an array of retired officers was canonized by the media and past Pentagon critics for declaring the Bush Iraq War variously stupid, immoral, or doomed to failure.
Apparently, an ascendant progressive view is that our armed forces, CIA, FBI, and NSA are protectors of civil liberties and progressive values, and therefore are to be lauded for almost any rhetorical attacks on the president deemed necessary to remind the country of the danger that Trump supposedly poses.
Gone are the old days when Hollywood’s “Dr. Strangelove” warned us of supposed Curtis LeMay-reactionaries, or the 1964 political melodrama, “Seven Days in May,” that envisioned a future right-wing military coup against an idealistic president in the mold of Adlai Stevenson.
Instead, the military in the present age—or at least its Beltway incarnation—has been recalibrated by the Left as a kindred progressive Washington institution, perhaps because of its necessary ability to enact change by fiat, whether in regard to issues regarding diversity, feminism, global warming, or transgenderism—all without the mess, delay, and acrimony of legislative and executive bickering.
In the past, when retired generals rarely and inappropriately weighed in on the allegedly improper, stupid, or immoral drift of a contemporary progressive president, they were met by a progressive firestorm as potential insurrectionaries. General Douglas MacArthur was roundly hated by the Left for his often boisterous and improper attacks on President Truman’s decision not to expand the war in Korea.
Again, today there has arisen a quite different—and far more dangerous—calculus in which the media canonizes rather than audits retired officers who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal.
Had any of the current generals said anything similar about President Obama in the fashion they now routinely attack Trump, their public careers would have been ruined. There would have been Adam Schiff-like progressive congressional inquiries about the current status of the code of military conduct as it pertains, not to quite legitimate political editorialization, but rather to “contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State . . . ”
Attacking Trump in “contemptuous” fashion is not speaking truth to power but a confirmation of the existing status quo of the media, progressive orthodoxy, and the general Washington bipartisan bureaucracy.
The result is that many retired high-ranking officers have made the necessary adjustments. Many have gone well beyond legitimately articulating why Trump may be wrong on foreign policy, and now feel free to malign, insult, and even dream of removing their commander-in-chief, on the grounds that Trump is sui generis, that the media will applaud their efforts, and that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment will canonize their deep-state bravery.
Perhaps.
But the danger is that half the country will conclude that too many retired generals and admirals are going the way of past CIA and FBI directors—no longer just esteemed professionals, op-ed writers, and astute analysts, but political activists who feel entitled to challenge the very legitimacy of an elected president—a development that is ruinous both for the reputation of a hallowed military and of the country in general.
So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers, as retirees, analysts, and business-people, to change the rules of the game. Again fine. But they will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.
Indeed, the damage is well underway
1a)
1b)
Mark S. Zaid, the attorney representing the so-called “whistleblower” in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, tweeted in 2017 that the “coup has started,” adding that “impeachment will follow ultimately.”
was referring to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who refused to defend President Trump’s executive order barring travel to the U.S. from terror-prone countries that had been identified as such under the Obama administration. Yates later claimed that there was no constitutional basis for defending the order in court, but the order (later amended twice) was upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court due to the president’s wide prerogatives over immigration.
Zaid is representing the so-called whistleblower as an attorney for the small Compass Rose Legal Group. The firm’s founder, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed that his law firm is also representing “multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.”
The Whistleblower Needs to Publicly Testify
On January 30, 2017, Mark S. Zaid tweeted: That was less than ten days after Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to President Trump at the inauguration. How convenient that Zaid is now representing the whistleblower. I have an extraordinary number of friends who tell me the whistleblower no longer matters. They […]
The post The Whistleblower Needs to Publicly Testify appeared first on The Resurgent.
Read in browser »1b)
‘Whistleblower’ Attorney Mark S. Zaid Tweeted: ‘Coup Has Started’
By Jim Hayek
Mark S. Zaid, the attorney representing the so-called “whistleblower” in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, tweeted in 2017 that the “coup has started,” adding that “impeachment will follow ultimately.”
was referring to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who refused to defend President Trump’s executive order barring travel to the U.S. from terror-prone countries that had been identified as such under the Obama administration. Yates later claimed that there was no constitutional basis for defending the order in court, but the order (later amended twice) was upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court due to the president’s wide prerogatives over immigration.
Yates was at the center of a network of “Deep State” operatives committed to bringing down President Trump — what Breitbart News called, the same day as Zaid posted his tweet, the “coup of the bureaucrats.”
The so-called “whistleblower” is a CIA operative, identified by RealClearInvestigations as Eric Ciaramella, who not only worked with former Vice President Joe Biden but also interacted with one of the key Democratic operatives responsible for bringing Ukraine into the 2016 election and crafting the false “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory.
As Breitbart News’ Aaron Klein has reported:
Zaid is representing the so-called whistleblower as an attorney for the small Compass Rose Legal Group. The firm’s founder, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed that his law firm is also representing “multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.”
Breitbart News reported that a search of Bakaj’s Twitter account finds rabid anti-Trump posts such as repeated advocacy for Trump cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to remove Trump as president over claimed competency issues.
Zaid’s New York Times oped was written with John N. Tye. The two in 2017 co-foundedWhistleblower Aid, a small nonprofit that blasted advertisements around D.C. actively seeking whistleblowers during the Trump administration.
In addition, Klein has reported, Zaid’s firm offered discounted rates for whistleblowers seeking legal representation — in return for providing dirt on the Trump administration.
President Trump has taken to calling the impeachment effort a “coup” attempt — using rhetoric that left-wing critics have called “extremely dangerous.”
It turns out that Trump’s opponents have used that language themselves — as a rallying cry.
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2) The Trump Doctrine: Deterrence without Intervention?
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign sought to overturn 75 years of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy, especially as it applied to the Middle East.
From 1946 to 1989, the Cold War logic was to use both surrogates and U.S. expeditionary forces to stop the spread of Communist insurrections and coups — without confronting the nuclear-armed USSR directly unless it became a matter of perceived Western survival, as it did with the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crises.
That logic led to major conflicts like Vietnam and Korea, limited wars in the Middle East and Balkans, interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and occasional nation-building in conquered lands. Tens of thousands of Americans died, trillions of dollars were spent, and the Soviet Union and most of its satellites vanished. “We won the Cold War” was more or less true.
Such preemptory American interventions still continued over the next 30 years of the post–Cold War “new world order.” Now the threat was not Russian nukes but confronting new enemies such as radical Islam and a rogue’s gallery of petty but troublesome nuts, freaks, and dictators — Granada’s Hudson Austin, an unhinged Moammar Qaddafi of Libya, Hezbollah’s terrorists in Lebanon, Nicaraguan Communist Daniel Ortega, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, the gang leader Mohamed Aidid of Somalia, the former Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, arch terrorist Osama bin Laden, the macabre al-Qaeda and ISIS, and on and on.
These put-downs, some successful and some not so much, were apparently viewed by the post–Cold War establishment as our versions of the late Roman Republic and Empire policies of mowing the lawn, with an occasional weeding out of regional nationalists and insurrectionists like Jugurtha, Mithridates, Vercingetorix, Ariovistus, Boudicca, and the like. The theory was that occasionally knocking flat a charismatic brute discouraged all others like him from trying to emulate his revolt and upend the international order. Having one or two legions always on the move often meant that most others could stay in their barracks. And it kept the peace, or so the U.S., like Rome, more or less believed.
But the problem with American policy after the Cold War and the end of the Soviet nuclear threat was that the U.S. was not really comfortable as an imperial global watchdog, we no longer had a near monopoly on the world economy that subsidized these expensive interventions, and many of these thugs did not necessarily pose a direct threat to American interests — perhaps ISIS, an oil-rich Middle East dictator, and radical Islamists excepted. What started as a quick, successful take-out of a monster sometimes ended up as a long-drawn out “occupation” in which all U.S. assets of firepower, mobility, and air support were nullified in the dismal street fighting of a Fallujah or a Mogadishu.
The bad guys were bothersome and even on occasion genocidal, and their removal sometimes improved the lot of those of the ground — but not always. When things got messy — such as in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia — it was not clear whether the American use of force resulted in tactical success leading to strategic advantage. Often preemptive insertion of troops either did not further U.S. deterrence or actually undermined it — as in the case of the “Arab Spring” bombing in Libya.
At home, in a consistent pattern, the most vociferous advocates of preemptory war usually claimed prescient brilliance, as when the American military rapidly dislodged the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. But then came the occupation and post-war anarchy. As American dead mounted, the mission mysteriously creeped into nation-building. Sometimes, in the post-invasion chaos, the once noble liberated victims became the opportunistic victimizers. Depressed, some of the original architects of preemption blamed those who had listened to them. The establishment’s calling card became, “My weeks-long brilliant theoretical preemption was ruined by your actual botched decade-long occupation.” In extremis, few kept their support; most abandoned it.
Into this dilemma charged Donald Trump, who tried to square the old circle by boasting that he would “bomb the s*** out of ISIS” (and he mostly did that). Yet he also pledged to avoid optional wars in the Middle East — given that they did not pencil out to the Manhattan developer as a cost-benefit profit for America. We had become the world’s largest large oil producer anyway without worrying very much about how many barrels of oil a post-Qaddafi Libya or the Iranian theocrats pumped each day, and our rivals, like China and Russia, would soon find out that their involvement in the Middle East would likely not pencil out.
Trump started well enough. He backed down the provocative North Koreans and Iranians with tougher sanctions, while refusing to use kinetic force to reply to their rather pathetic provocations. He bombed ISIS but yanked American “trip wire” troops out of the Kurdish-Turkish battle zones in Syria, and he green-lighted the military’s killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He ratcheted up sanctions against Russia and armed Putin’s enemies without committing to defend any of the old republics of the Soviet Union. He increased the defense budget and boomed the economy but did not use such newly acquired power other than against ISIS.
Rarely has such an empowered military relied so much on economic sanctions. And rarely have leftist pacifist advocates of using sanctions and boycotts so damned Trump’s reluctance to launch missiles and drop bombs — the only common denominator being that whatever the orange man is for, they are against.
Trump’s apparent theory is that time is on his side. The Palestinians are cut off from U.S. funds; their U.N. surrogates are orphaned from the U.S. The U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights are not going back to Syria. It is up to the West Bank and Gaza to change the Middle East dynamic, since their Gulf paymasters could care less about them, given the Palestinians’ romance with an Iran that is slowly going broke.
North Korea is squeezed by toughed-up sanctions. They can conduct missile tests, threaten, and cajole, but ultimately their people will be eating grass if they don’t wish to deal. And if they do launch a missile toward the U.S., they are convinced that Trump will launch a lot more against them.
Iran wants a confrontation before the election to undermine the Trump Electoral College base of support. So Trump is apparently willing to overlook such petty slights as the downing of the American drone by Iranian forces. But the Iranians must know that if they start targeting U.S. ships, or attacking NATO allied vessels and planes, Trump will likely restore deterrence by one-off, disproportionate air and missile attacks against Iranian naval and air bases — without intervening on the ground and without worrying that Iranian oil will go off the market entirely.
So there is a sort of Trump doctrine that grew in part out of Trump’s campaign promises and in part from the strategic assessment in 2016-17 by then national-security adviser H.R. McMaster, outlining a new “principled realism.” The net result is not to nation-build, preempt, or worry much about changing fetid countries to look like us, but to disproportionately respond when attacked or threatened, and in a manner that causes real damage, without the insertion of U.S. ground troops, in the fashion of the past 75 years.
Balance in achieving deterrence is the key. If Trump’s protestations that he does not wish to take enemy lives or conduct endless wars for no profit encourage enemy adventurism, then he will have to respond forcefully when American forces are attacked — but in a way that is not open-ended. And that usually means not through the use of ground troops that involve wars that, in Trump’s mind, create bad optics and poor ratings back home.
There are three ways of losing deterrence. One is to bluster, boast, and threaten and then do little — as with Barack Obama’s bombast about red lines in Syria.
A second is to reach out and appease a thug who has no intention of seeing outreach as anything other than laxity to be exploited. The Obama administration’s Russian reset combined the worst elements of this strategy: alternately courting and lecturing Putin, while doing nothing as he invaded former republics and returned to the Middle East. With Recep Erdogan, Trump is in danger of following the disastrous Obama model. More than most dictators, Erdogan views magnanimity with contempt and as a sign of weakness, rather than a gesture to be reciprocated in kind.
A third way of losing deterrence is to get bogged down in a quagmire that encourages other would-be terrorists, revolutionaries, and psychopaths to try instigating more of the same. Afghanistan and the Iraq, from 2003 to 2006, are good examples of gridlock. The Libya project of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Hillary Clinton is a perfect case of hasty bombing followed by embarrassed indifference to the resulting chaos, and then withdrawal after the loss of four Americans. When Ronald Reagan inserted Marines into Lebanon, saw them blown up, and then yanked them, almost everyone concluded that Hezbollah and Iran had a free hand to do whatever they wanted. And they mostly did.
There is one final paradox related to the dilemma of maintaining deterrence without invading hostile countries. Trump apparently believes that a booming economy, a well-funded muscular military, and plenty of U.S.-produced oil and gas give America enormous power and a range of choices that recent presidents lacked.
The result would be that when forced to respond to an attack on an American asset or ally, the U.S. could do so disproportionately, destructively, and without any red line, promise, or virtue-signaling about what it might do next — given its unique ability to hit abroad without being hit at home, and with a well-oiled economy that has no need to beg the Saudis to be nice, or to urge the Iranians to pump more, or to get the Venezuelans back into the exporting business.
Add up all these paradoxes, and I suppose we could call the Trump administration’s idea of deterrence without preemptive intervention as either “Live and let live” — or, more macabrely, “Live — and let die.” Either way, the paradox is to maintain critical deterrence against American enemies to prevent a war, but without Pavlovian interventions, and without being baited into optional military action that is antithetical to the national mood that got Trump elected.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump.
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3) Palestinian elections are looking likely, and may be spectacularly bad for Abbas
In contrast to years past, officials are optimistic that vote actually could be held in February; if so, there could be major gains for Hamas as Fatah support dwindles
The Palestinian Authority could be heading toward its first parliamentary and presidential elections in 14 years, something that until recently was not seen even as a remote possibility, certainly not during Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s lifetime.
Since the 2005 Palestinian presidential elections and parliamentary elections a year later, talk of another vote that has popped up now and again has proved to be nothing but hollow slogans used by rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas to posture against each other.
This time, though, sources in the West Bank and Gaza say that all signs indicate that Palestinian elections — first for parliament and then for the presidency — may actually take place as early as February 2020, after Abbas announced plans for a vote at the UN General Assembly in September.
Tuesday saw Palestinian Authority Central Elections Commission chief Hanna Nasser visit Gaza for the third time in as many weeks, for a meeting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Nasser reportedly presented top Hamas officials with a memo by Abbas detailing various clarifications regarding the elections.
Fatah and Hamas officials sound increasingly optimistic that the vote will take place, though there are still quite a few hurdles to clear before Palestinians head to the polls, including one posed by Israel itself.
When Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza in a military coup in 2006, it essentially split the Palestinian Authority in two. Gaza and Ramallah are two completely separate political entities and one of the most immediate issues that must be addressed is the question of who will head a joint body to adjudicate the election in both Palestinian territories.
Other pressing issues include the elections to the Palestinian National Council — the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization; who will supervise the integrity of the elections; and the timeline of the presidential election once the parliamentary one has concluded.
Hamas had originally demanded that both elections be held on the same day but it later relented, agreeing to Fatah’s suggestion that the presidential elections be set for three months after the parliamentary one, providing that an actual date be set.
Hamas, it seems, is willing to take quite a few risks and make more than a few concessions to make sure elections take place.
Hamas’s relatively conciliatory position on the elections has taken Fatah and Abbas by surprise. According to Palestinian sources, the plan to promote elections came from Abbas’s office but was designed to embarrass Hamas.
Abbas and his advisers believed that once he issued a call for parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Hamas would refuse, thus allowing Abbas to state that elections will be held only in the West Bank — where Fatah believes it has an actual chance of winning.
After Haniyeh’s announced that he welcomed the initiative, Fatah upped the stakes and Abbas demanded that the parliamentary elections be based on party slates and not geographical representation.
Hamas again surprised Fatah and agreed, for one main reason: The Islamic terrorist group believes that it can win in the West Bank, potentially by a landslide, given the dwindling support Fatah has among Palestinians there. The terror group also points to the fact that it managed to get Qatari aid funds into Gaza and secure infrastructure improvements without needing to agree to an actual ceasefire with Israel.
Moreover, Hamas knows that even if it doesn’t trounce Fatah in the West Bank, Abbas will face tough challenges from rivals within his party, plus those he ousted from the movement.
Two prominent Palestinian figures who are sure to challenge Abbas by presenting their own slates are deposed Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan, who was expelled from the Palestinian Authority in 2011 after falling out with Abbas, and former Tanzim armed wing commander Marwan Barghouti, a convicted murderer currently serving five life sentences in Israel.
According to Palestinian sources, a combination of Hamas and slates presented by Dahlan’s and Barghouti’s supporters could bring about Fatah’s collapse in the West Bank.
Barghouti has made it no secret that he plans to challenge Abbas for the presidency. The identity of Hamas’s candidate, however, remains unknown.
When Qatari envoy Mohammed Al-Emadi last visited Gaza and met with Hamas MPs, he reportedly advised them to adopt the “Tunisian model,” whereby any candidate they endorse should not be a Hamas official but rather a senior Palestinian official who will prove amiable to the organization and its needs.
Several potential candidates were discussed at the meeting, including Barghouti. A scenario in which Hamas endorses the jailed Fatah strongman for president is not far-fetched, especially if it becomes clear that Barghouti is the one most likely to defeat Abbas.
As for Abbas, the aging Palestinian president has repeatedly said he would not run in the next presidential elections. The 84-year-old is in no hurry to exit politics, but if his chances of winning prove slim, he will likely announce his retirement or, alternatively, move to cancel the vote.
Israel’s East Jerusalem dilemma
A scenario in which the Palestinian elections are canceled at the last minute — or even earlier — is also possible, especially in light of the uncertainty surrounding Israel’s position on the issue.
In 2006 Israel sought to block the Palestinian parliamentary elections and it was only after the White House pressured then-prime minister Ariel Sharon that he agreed to allow them to take place, in East Jerusalem as well. At the time, senior Palestinian officials implored Israel to oppose allowing the PA to hold elections in East Jerusalem to prevent a potential Hamas victory, as was eventually the case.
It is unclear what the current Israeli government or a future one will do if it has to decide whether to allow Palestinian elections in East Jerusalem.
Agreeing to a vote in East Jerusalem may be perceived as Israel waiving its sovereignty over that part of the city. On the other hand, the international community will undoubtedly pressure Israel on the matter and will find a technical mechanism to prevent any sign of Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem, so as to secure Israel’s consent.
The result could be Hamas in control of the parliament, and a Hamas-backed radical in the PA president’s office.
Political leaders: Stand up and be counted
By Isi Leibler - Candidly Speaking
There is an ever-increasing likelihood that we may be forced into a third election. This would be an abominable reflection on Israel’s political leaders and could have disastrous consequences.
If the reason for this demoralizing situation were attributable to ideological differences, that would be at least partially understandable. But the reality is that the country today is more united on basic foreign policy and defense issues than at any time since the failed Oslo Accords, nearly three decades ago. Aside from a reaction against coercion by the haredi politicians, there has been no meaningful debate during the past two elections on any issue other than personalities.
There is a consensus among most Israelis, who wish ultimately to separate themselves from the Palestinians but currently oppose a Palestinian state which would become a terrorist entity and launching pad for the Iranians. There is also a broad consensus that the major settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley should be annexed to the Jewish state.
Despite minor differences, Likud, Blue and White, and Yisrael Beytenu share these objectives and with the exception of the extreme Left, the smaller parties, like most Israelis, also support a unity government.
The only reason we have ongoing governmental paralysis is simply due to the burning personal ambition of the leaders of the two large parties to head the government and their inability to reach a compromise.
History will surely judge our leaders adversely for behaving in such an irresponsible manner at this critical time.
We are told by politicians and defense officials alike that there are serious threats of military confrontation on two fronts.
The first term of the Trump administration is drawing to a close and, from being blessed with the most pro-Israel US administration, in a little over a year we could have a reverse situation. If one of the current leading contenders of the Democratic Party becomes president, we might face the most hostile US administration we have ever encountered – one that would make even the hostility of the European nations pale by comparison.
Although there has been considerable concern over the manner in which Trump abandoned the Kurds, he still remains publicly committed to backing Israel. Besides, his evangelical allies who represent his base would terminate their support of him if he acted otherwise.
Due to the current impasse in Israel, Trump has been forced to suspend the release of his peace plan. Although most analysts predict it will contain some recommendations that will displease Israel, overall it is likely to be a positive step forward and will take account of Israel’s security requirements and may even include recommendations endorsing Israel’s determination to annex the major settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. It is highly unlikely that Israel will ever have a more opportune time to pursue a sustainable regional settlement with its neighbors. But alas, this opportunity will be lost if our political leaders cannot get their act together.
There is little doubt that under normal circumstances, many Israelis, including those who dislike him personally, would prefer the politically experienced Benjamin Netanyahu to the political neophyte Benjamin Gantz to lead the nation over the next 12 months. Aside from Netanyahu’s friendship with the US president, he enjoys a unique relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and other Asian, Latin American and African leaders. On a purely practical level, one would assume that it would be in Gantz’s interest to have 12 months to work with Netanyahu at the helm of a national unity government so that he would be far more equipped to assume the role of prime minister.
The demand of Blue and White that Netanyahu abandon his right-wing bloc of 55 MKs is disingenuous. All those who voted for this bloc effectively also voted for Netanyahu. Likud therefore has every right to insist on retaining the bloc because to do otherwise would be political suicide for it. The right-wing bloc is really no different from the composition of Blue and White, which comprises three distinctly different groups that only joined together for political expediency, with their sole common agenda being the ousting of Netanyahu. At least the right-wing bloc of 55 can agree on their preferred candidate for prime minister. That cannot be said for the Blue and White MKs, many of whom are not overly enamored with their candidate, Gantz.
The legal issues facing Netanyahu may drag on in the courts for a year or more. Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit should determine whether he proposes to indict the prime minister as soon as possible and this could have an influence on the formation of the next government. But even now, weeks after the hearing in which Netanyahu’s lawyer submitted evidence to rebut the allegations against him, Mendelblit appears unlikely to make a decision before the time allotted for forming a new government expires.
During these stressful times, when the prime minister will be obliged to make critical decisions, it will be very problematic if his mind is distracted with defending himself in court and facing an ongoing flow of scandalous leaks and rumors promoted by the media. Irrespective of whether he makes the right call, many will allege he was motivated by personal interests rather than the national interest.
If we are faced with new elections, a government will not be formed before April at the earliest, when the US will be in full election mode. There is every possibility that Trump would simply delay the release of his peace plan with no guarantee that he would be re-elected or that he would revert to the plan after the election. Should that happen, we may miss a heaven-sent opportunity of possibly annexing the major settlement blocs and securing American support of our security requirements. That would be a self-inflicted disaster.
It is therefore incumbent on both Netanyahu and Gantz to stand up and be accountable to the nation. They must act responsibly, suspend their personal ambitions and reach a compromise that will achieve a unity government able to move forward to serve the country that elected them.
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