Smoke-filled skies loom over a destroyed tank on the south side of Baghdad. (photo: Carolyn Cole/LA Times)
Donald
Trump's Dangerous Team of Crackpots Will Spread Corruption and Start New Wars
in the Middle East
By Patrick Cockburn, The
Independent
19 November 16
Foreign policy advisor John Bolton proposes carving out a Sunni
state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. As a recipe for deepening the
conflict in the region, it could scarcely be bettered
Isis
is under pressure in Mosul and Raqqa, but
it is jubilant at the election of Donald Trump.
Abu
Omar Khorasani, an Isis leader in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying that “our
leaders were closely following the US election, but it was unexpected that the
Americans would dig their own graves.” He added that what he termed Trump’s
“hatred” towards Muslims would enable Isis to recruit thousands of
fighters.
The
Isis calculation is that, as happened after 9/11, the demonisation and
collective punishment of Muslims will propel a proportion of the Islamic
community into its ranks. Given that there are 1.6 billion Muslims – about 23
per cent of the world’s population – Isis and al-Qaeda-type
organisations need to win the loyalty of only a small proportion of the
Islamic community to remain a powerful force.
Blood-curdling
proposals for the persecution of Muslims played a central role in Trump’s
election campaign. At one moment, he promised to stop all Muslims from entering
the US, though this was later changed to “extreme vetting”. The use of torture
by water-boarding was approved and applauded, and Hillary Clinton was pilloried
for not speaking of “radical Islamic terrorism”.
Trump
and his aides may imagine
that much of this can be discarded as the overblown rhetoric of the campaign,
but Isis and al-Qaeda propagandists will make sure that Trump’s words are
endlessly repeated with all their original venom intact.
Nor
will this propaganda about the anti-Muslim bias of the new administration be so
far from the truth, going by the track record of many of the people in its
security and foreign policy team. Trump is reported to have offered the post of
National Security Adviser to General Michael Flynn, who was sacked by President
Obama as head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in 2014. Flynn notoriously
sees Islamic militancy not only as a danger, but as an existential threat to
the US. He tweeted earlier this year that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL”.
There
is an obsessive, self-righteous quality to Flynn’s approach that led him to
join chants of “lock her up” in reference to Hillary Clinton during election
rallies. Former associates complain of Flynn’s political tunnel vision that
could wreak havoc in the Middle East. His consulting company, the Flynn Intel
Group, appears to lobby for the Turkish government and Flynn recently wrote an
article calling for all-out US support for Turkey, who Washington has been
trying to stop launching a full scale invasion of Syria and Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, the Turkish president welcomed Trump’s election with enthusiasm
and sharply criticised protests against it in the US (something that would be
swiftly dealt with by police water cannon in Turkey).
A
striking feature of the aspirants for senior office under Trump is a level of
personal greed high even by the usual standards of Washington. Trump
famously campaigned under the slogan “Drain the Swamp” and castigated official
corruption, but it is turning out that the outflow pipe from swamp is the entry
point of the new administration.
One
grotesque example of this is Rudy Giuliani, who
exploited his fame as mayor of New York at the time of 9/11 to earn millions in
speaking fees and consultancy for foreign governments and companies.
Apparently, none were too dubious for him to turn down. In 2011 and 2012 he
reportedly made speeches defending the sinister Iranian cult-like movement, the
Mojahideen e-Khalq, that had been on the State Department’s list of terrorist
organisations.
Giuliani
is a swamp creature if ever there was one, yet this week he was publicly
turning down the post of Attorney General and was, at the time of writing,
being considered for the post of Secretary of State.
Isis
and al-Qaeda may underestimate the degree to which they will benefit from
Trump’s election, which came at a bleak moment in their fortunes. He and his
henchmen have already frightened and enraged hundreds of millions of Muslims
and vastly expanded the constituency to which the jihadis can appeal.
A
clampdown against them that, in practice, targets all Muslims plays straight
into their hands. What made 9/11 such a success for Osama bin Laden was not the
destruction of the Twin Towers, but the US military reaction that produced the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This could happen again.
There
are other potential long-term gains for the beleaguered Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
whatever the outcome of the siege of Mosul. The Taliban, al-Qaeda and Isis are
all militarised fanatical movements born out of the chaos of war in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and they are flourishing in similarly anarchic conditions in Syria,
Libya, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.
In
theory, Trump is a non-interventionist; opposed to US military involvement in
the Middle East and North Africa, he wants to bring the war in Syria to an end.
But he has simultaneously opposed the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme
and criticised Barack Obama for pulling the last US troops out of Iraq in 2011
(though in fact this was under an agreement signed by George W Bush).
But
Bush and Obama were both non-interventionists when first elected – until the
course of events, and the enthusiasm of the Washington foreign policy
establishment for foreign military ventures, changed all that.
The US
army and air force is today heavily engaged in Iraq and Syria and that is not
going to end with Obama’s departure. In contradiction to Trump’s
non-interventionism, leading members of his foreign policy team such as John
Bolton, the belligerent former US ambassador to the UN, has been advocating a
war with Iran since 2003. Bolton proposes carving out a Sunni state in northern
Iraq and eastern Syria, a plan in which every sentence betrays ignorance and
misjudgements about the forces in play on the ground. As a recipe for deepening
the conflict in the region, it could scarcely be bettered.
There
have always been crackpots in Washington, sometimes in high office, but the
number of dangerous people who have attached themselves to the incoming
administration may be higher today than at any time in American history.
For
instance, one adviser to the Trump national security transition team is, according
to Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef of The Daily Beast, one Clare Lopez, author
of a book called See No Sharia, which says that Islamists and
the Muslim Brotherhood in
particular have infiltrated the White House and the FBI, as well as the US
Departments of State, Justice, Defence and Homeland Security. Lopez believes
that terrorists caused the 2008 financial crash by short-selling stocks.
Optimists
have been saying this week that Trump is less ideological than he sounds and,
in any case, the US ship of state is more like an ocean liner than a speedboat
making it difficult to turn round. They add privately that not all the crooks
and crazies will get the jobs they want.
Unfortunately,
much the same could have been said of George W Bush when he came into office
before 9/11. It is precisely such arrogant but ill-informed opportunists
who can most easily be provoked by terrorism into a self-destructive
overreaction. Isis is having a good week.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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