When a well-known person denounces a specific group of people — claiming for instance they don’t deserve full citizenship, or they are a threat to the nation — the result can be a violent act against any person perceived to be in the targeted group. How do we know this?

Sadly, the answer emerges from the horrific mass murders in Europe in the 20th century and the role of mass media in speeding information to a large audience. We saw the awful outcome of this process in October 2018, when 11 Jews were murdered at a synagogue in Pittsburgh by a gunman who believed in conspiracy theories. In December 2019 another homicidal attack, also based on conspiracism, targeted a Kosher grocery in Jersey City, N.J. Our nation grieves. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the process of demonization and scapegoating that painted targets on the backs of the victims.

It’s too easy to blame the mass media, however. As consumers, we as a society take time to adjust to new forms of information dissemination and to learn how to judge them. An instructive and more benign example occurred in 1938, when Orson Welles produced a radio program based on the early science fiction book War of the Worlds, by the British author H.G. Wells. Some people hearing the radio play thought it was a live news broadcast and began calling police and other emergency forces, asking how to escape the attack from outer space. We laugh now about Welles’s hoax, but generations later, there are a lot of us on this planet who have yet to adjust to the internet as a new information source.

Scholars theorizing about how mass media information can lead to violence sometimes start with the genocide of the Armenian people, begun during the First World War in what is now Turkey. The scope of the murders during that genocide was enabled by the mass media network of the telegraph. This communications medium not only allowed false, derogatory, and inflammatory information to spread throughout a vast geographic area and to surface in newspaper articles, but it was also used to direct the killing machinery of the military seeking the expulsion or elimination of the targeted sector of the population.

In Germany in the 1920s, radio reports and newsreel films combined with newspapers to spread lies about Jews, leftists of all stripes, homosexuals, and other targets of Adolf Hitler’s venom.

In 1933, Hitler’s mass media propaganda coordinator, Joseph Goebbels, turned radio into the tool of the Nazi Party, to broaden its political base and identify its targets. According to Goebbels, “What the press has been in the 19th century, radio will be for the 20th century.” Radio broadcasts fueled the genocidal murders in Germany and more than a dozen other countries in Europe.

Television was the new media platform in the early 1950s when the egomaniacal and histrionic Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin used the congressional pulpit to investigate American citizens and their political affiliations. McCarthy held hearing on persons and organizations alleged to be a threat to the United States because of their participation in a range of political and cultural groups in which socialists and communists were said to be active — and sometimes held leadership positions. Protesters objecting to these hearings were physically attacked. In one famous incident, in May 1960, police used fire hoses to sweep angry students down the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, where a hearing was being held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC).

Today the new mass media platform is the internet, and any high-profile and popular figure can reach tens of millions of people. The technology is new, but the process of blaming scapegoats for societal problems remains the same. As in previous eras, people targeted by malicious verbal falsehoods end up vilified, injured, or killed.

The ringleaders of these sorts of attacks are called “demagogues.” They can be engaged in politics, religion, or entertainment — as long as they are known by a large segment of a population through mass media. Before World War II, the basis for this analysis emerged from what is called the “Frankfurt school” for social science research, which explains the December 5, 2016, headline for an article by Alex Ross in the New Yorkermagazine: “the Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming.” As Ross explains, several “Frankfurters” (as graduate students gleefully call them) moved to the United States, and in 1950, two of them, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote a study on The Authoritarian Personality. Ross explains how the authors “constructed a psychological and sociological profile of the ‘potentially fascistic . . . individual.’ The work was based on interviews with American subjects and the steady accumulation of racist, antidemocratic, paranoid, and irrational sentiments.”

Timothy Snyder is a professor at Yale University who was moved by the ascent of Donald Trump to write a booklet titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century. Snyder explains these processes are not new. “Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.” Snyder expanded these themes in his 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom.

As a journalist writing about inequality and human rights, I was enlisted by sociologists and other scholars studying the approach of the millennial year 2000. They wanted to know if any far-right movements in the United States were preparing for a possible conspiratorial “New World Order” coup. I ended up on the advisory board of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University and working with scholars in the American Sociological Association. In both venues, we discussed the process in which stories about an impending attack by evil forces leads to the mobilization of social and political movements using conspiracy theories identifying the alleged “enemy.”

Out of many discussions emerged the idea of “scripted violence.” This is violence sparked by a storyline or script used by a high-profile public figure identifying sinister threats by evil enemies of the “real” nation. This happens all over the world. The result is now called “stochastic terrorism” in academic studies.

A stochastic terrorist is a demagogue who uses the rhetoric of scripted violence (such as demonization or scapegoating) to imply that a target group is involved in a malevolent conspiracy to destroy the pure society. This type of rhetoric can prompt acts of stochastic terrorism, the process that leads many “lone wolf” terrorists to choose a specific target. There is typically no direct connection between the actual terrorist and the national leader who identifies the wrongly blamed culprits. Such acts of violence are unpredictable — yet the actual type or class of victim has been identified by the demagogic leader. The process itself was identified after World War II by scholars such as Hannah Arendt in her masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954).

In the United States today, there are white nationalist demagogues who defend racial inequality by claiming white people are the real “producers” of the wealth of the nation but are being dragged down by a heavy anchor of conspiratorial and “parasitic” nonwhite, or immigrant, “undeserving poor.” This caricature of political economy is called “producerism” by scholars. Matthew N. Lyons and I discussed the phenomenon in detail in our book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, published in 2000.

The producerist narrative is found in exclusionary racial and religious populist movements now taking over governments in nations around the world. Populism can appear anywhere on the political spectrum, as the scholar Margaret Canovan pointed out back in 1980; all it requires is the idea of a social or political movement defining itself as promoting the interests of “the people” against corrupt “elites.”

When authoritarianism is mixed with right-wing populist rhetoric and producerism, it can lead to the crafting of fascist social movements. Professor Roger Griffin, one of the leading theorists of right-wing social and political movements, considers “populist ultra-nationalism” to be a core building block of fascism. The experience of the 1930s in Europe demonstrated how nasty demonizing rhetoric that targets a specific religion or race (or any identifiable characteristic) can lead to violence by people who have consumed a steady diet of conspiracy theories fed to them by high-profile leaders.

The process is simple. Well-known political or religious leaders suggest there is a subversive conspiracy dragging down a once-great nation. The conspiracy is linked to people with a particular identifiable race, religion, class, or gender identity. Therefore “we” must crush “them” before they can crush “us.”

In late 2015, I wrote a preelection article, for which I interviewed Professor Paul Bookbinder of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Bookbinder studies German civil society during the Weimar Republic period, prior to World War II, as the country eroded into fascism.

“Right now, our society is facing some of the same tensions as seen in the Weimar Republic,” warned Bookbinder. “People didn’t take seriously the threat to democracy when they could have; and when they did see the dangers, it was too late.”

Chip Berlet, an independent scholar and investigative journalist, specializes in the study of extreme right-wing movements in the United States. His book, Trumping Democracy: From Reagan to Alt-Right, was published by Routledge.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 January 2020
Word Count: 1,516
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The Republicans, as they say, told on themselves Monday. Well, Joni Ernst did.

The Iowa senator, who’s up for reelection, explained without meaning to that the Senate’s impeachment trial is now a concerted effort to do what the Ukrainians wouldn’t: create a fake rationale for a fake investigation into fake corruption by Joe Biden.

“Iowa caucuses, folks, Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening,” Ernst told reporters in the Capitol. “And I’m really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus-goers. Will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point? Not certain about that.”

“This discussion today” came courtesy of the president’s attorneys, who didn’t bother defending their client so much as put the former vice president on trial. Senators saw, perhaps for the first time, an edited video in which Joe Biden says he threatened to hold up a billion-dollar loan to force Ukraine to get rid of its prosecutor-general.

Missing from the clip, however, is the fact that Biden threatened to hold up the loan to goose Ukraine into get rid of a corrupt senior government official who was too soft on corruption related to the natural gas firm his own son worked for, Burisma. Missing is the fact that Biden wasn’t working for himself, or his son, but for the United States government, the European Union and anti-corruption agencies around the world. Missing is the fact that “corruption” in Ukraine is a byword for being in Russian pay.

Such context, however, undermines the GOP’s bid to smear Biden. Here’s Ted Cruz:

We just saw video, I’d encourage every news outlet here to show it, of Joe Biden bragging how he told the president of Ukraine that he was gonna cut off a billion dollars, gonna cut off a billion dollars in foreign aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor. And in Joe Biden’s own words, “Son of a bitch, they fired the guy.”

The legal issue before this Senate is whether a president has the authority to investigate corruption. The House managers built their entire case on the proposition that investigating Burisma corruption, that investigating the Bidens for corruption was baseless and a sham. … That proposition is absurd.

What’s Cruz is saying is absurd. It’s a fire hose of lies.

But it’s more than that. It’s malevolence.

He’s trying to hurt us.

The conventional wisdom among liberal critics, myself included, is that the president and his confederates are trying to convince everyone that everyone else is as amoral as Trump is. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said, while watching the Senate trial that, “This is the core of Trumpism: this nihilistic cynicism and projection that everyone is equally corrupt, everyone acts like Trump.” I made that case myself last week in “A GOP Ensnared in ‘the Russian Story.’” I think we need to go a step further, however.

Think about it. The president’s defense yesterday was rooted in a Kremlin lie — that it wasn’t the Russians that attacked our sovereignty in 2016 but instead the Ukrainians, and that it wasn’t Donald Trump who corrupted the will of the people but instead Joe Biden, who was in league with foreign agents in a conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton.

Up is down, right is left, wrong is right. Everything is upside down and backward.

That’s why Chris Hayes later on added: “The aggressive disingenuousness really starts to strain one’s sanity.” To which Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, replied: “It really does. I’ve had a number of times when I just have to tune out. Listening to people lie from a position of power becomes enervating over time.”

Hayes and Marshall are a political junkie’s political junkie, but even they shrink away from engagement when lies pile up faster than fact-checkers can keep pace. Why aren’t we talking more often about how a malicious system of lies makes us feel? Who benefits when even political junkies turn away from things making them feel insane?

Lying is one thing. Systemic lying is another. There’s more at work here.

Moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote, in his 2006 book On Truth, that lies “are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to impose his will on us” (all italics mine). “Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality. So they are intended, in a very real sense, to make us crazy.”

Lies, in other words, don’t just deceive.

They injure.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2020
Word Count: 771
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“YES!” he yelled, thrusting his fist in the air. “We get to live in the mayor’s house!” My son’s reaction when I told his two sisters and him that I was running for mayor of our town became the laugh line of my campaign. But in real time, I had to burst his bubble. “Oh Seamus,” I said, smiling, “the mayor just lives in his own house. There is no ‘mayor’s house.’ If we win, we’ll keep living in our house and it will become the mayor’s house.”

Seamus’ reaction was indicative of his boundless confidence in his mother and his seven-year-old’s ignorance of how the world actually works. But I held his reaction close when I was feeling less than sure of myself, when I was headed to my third campaign event of any day as the Green Party candidate and found myself eating popcorn for dinner at 9:30 at night, listening to my kids breathe in their sleep instead of reading them bedtime stories.

I’ll cut to the chase: I lost. I am not the mayor of New London, Connecticut.

On Tuesday, November 7th, when the polls opened at six in the morning, it was cold and clear. It rained hard through the middle of the day. When those polls closed at eight that night, it was warmer and humid, but no longer raining. I was outside all day, rain or (not quite) shine, moving between the three polling stations with my friends and our signs and our cards that explained how to “Write In Frida for Mayor.”

That’s right: I wasn’t just running as a third-party candidate in a Democratic town, but as one not even on the ballot. The state had lost my paperwork. The Green Party hired a lawyer and sued, but the judge ruled against us and declined to order the secretary of state to put my name on the ballot. That setback made an uphill campaign into an Everest. I embraced the climb. Being a pacifist and an activist means that lost causes are par for the course for me and, as a Catholic, I believe hard work is its own reward.

The campaign season started in earnest (for me, anyway) after Labor Day, as I tried to balance work, family, and this new experience, this job-and-a-half running for mayor. Oh, yeah, and there was my mother, the peace activist Elizabeth McAlister. She was then in pre-trial detention for a Plowshares action at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in coastal Georgia.

Throughout the campaign, I asked New Londoners the same questions over and over: What do you love about New London? What frustrates you about our town? What’s the one concrete change that would improve your life? The answers were varied and often inspiring.

Unexpectedly, I found myself back in school on a crash course, discovering what’s wonderful (and not so wonderful) about my chosen hometown in the age of climate change and Donald Trump! I even learned a few things along the way. What follows is just a partial list.

Celebrity matters, even though it shouldn’t While I was in Georgia for one of my mom’s hearings, I spent time with the actor and peace activist Martin Sheen. Standing near the church where supporters of my mom were ladling out dinner, we shot a low-tech political ad. It promptly went low-key viral and signaled to the pols in New London that something different might be happening. I know Martin Sheen is famous and I love him as an actor and a person, but I wasn’t prepared for how excited people would be about a 45-second clip of the two of us. As far as I can tell, it didn’t get more people to vote for me, but boy was it a conversation starter!

Cultivate a constituency The political scene in New London is more than well established. It’s written in concrete: Go Democrat or go home! In our town of 27,000, set along the confluence of the Thames River and Long Island Sound, only about 16,000 of us are registered to vote and only 3,000 to 4,000 of us turn out for off-year local elections. Before this election, there were about 70 Greens. Our party’s strategy was to bring out new voters, a great thought, but I had no idea how hard that would prove to be.

I felt strongly that environmental and climate-change issues should be reframed as relevant to the poor and working class of New London. So when, for instance, I talked about creating a more walkable city, I was careful to emphasize not just that such a goal would be an environmental plus, but that it would aid the working poor, too. After all, they walk out of necessity, so safer sidewalks and a city infrastructure that takes walkers into account — including people in wheelchairs or with limited sight and hearing — would be a good investment for all.

The same was true when it came to planting more trees. A better urban canopy wouldn’t just make our local world look better or absorb more carbon dioxide, but slow street traffic and make life better for otherwise unwilling pedestrians.

I had hoped we would increase the local Green Party membership from 70 to 100, which didn’t happen, but we did add a handful of new members and reengaged some older ones. Call it the most modest of successes.

Be nice and make your points We ran an issue-focused campaign. I’m going to live in New London for a long time and so are my opponents. I generally avoided taking pot shots at them, cultivating instead what I thought of as a spirit of gentle disruption. Here’s an example: most of the town government department heads the current mayor hired live outside New London (something that goes against the city’s charter). The incumbent claimed he did so “to get the best,” which sounded as if he felt there was no one in town good enough to run our departments.

At debates and forums, I pushed back hard on that issue, insisting that I would hire locally, not just because the charter says we should, but because not doing so sends a message to our kids that we aren’t good enough. Such hiring practices also weaken our tax base, since some of the highest-paying jobs in our community go to people who don’t even pay property taxes here. It took time to learn how to be critical without being cranky and offer creative solutions to decades of short-sighted, reactive decision-making by a relatively unaccountable leadership.

I also wanted to demonstrate that someone who wasn’t a middle-aged white man could make a splash by running for mayor in our town. At 45, I’m no longer a young person. I even have a head full of white hair. But my two opponents were 20 years older, had grown up just blocks apart in the same New London neighborhood, and went to high school together. Long time friends and rivals, they could argue over who said what at a city council meeting a decade ago (and they did).

They took shots at each other over a past they shared. In one debate, the Republican even condemned the Democrat for driving a Tahoe while he drove a Prius. Never mind that the Tahoe was the official city-owned mayor’s car. “I walked here,” I said, “and I’m driving home with the three members of my family in a 2002 Honda Odyssey. We’re happy to give you a ride to further decrease our carbon footprint.” Everyone laughed and no one took us up on the offer.

Do what you can In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore out her shoes as she campaigned to be the youngest member of the House of Representatives. She even tweeted photos of the bottoms of those shoes with the line, “I knocked on doors until the rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle.”

I didn’t wear out my shoes, but I do respect the hustle, AOC, I do!  Still, I did what I could. When invited to run by the local chapter of the Green Party, I said I would do so to promote issues and amplify voices that weren’t getting a reasonable hearing, but that I couldn’t run a 24/7 campaign, not with a job and young kids to take care of. I held as fast as I could to that commitment, but thinking back on the — by conservative count — 14 public meetings, eight house parties, four television appearances (three of them hour-long), three public debates with the other mayoral candidates, and daily check-ins with my campaign manager, party chair, and fellow Green Party candidates, I still feel exhausted.

What I can’t document is just what it meant to continually make myself visible in my community and connect with my neighbors. That, without a doubt, was the most rewarding and beautiful part of the experience. Handing out candy to trick or treaters, I ended up chatting with four high school football players who remembered my visit to their school earlier that week and told me their moms were voting for me. I was so happy, I dumped the rest of our candy in their bags.

I was walking to work one morning, balancing a birthday cake in one hand and trying to text with the other when a garbage truck pulled up next to me and the driver called out, “I hope you win! Nobody cares about sanitation!” We chatted for a few minutes as I assured him that I knew the funds for his department had been cut in recent years and that the Green Party platform supported more money for public works, while emphasizing recycling and composting. He cheered, toot-tooted his horn, and we both continued with our day.

And by the way, no one told me how much fun it would be to knock on doors and chat with strangers, each conversation offering me a yet more complex map of my community.

Peace begins at home I’m glad I threw my hat in the political ring in 2019. The whole process felt like a personal balm in a national political landscape that was pitted, mired, and aflame. My stump speech — yes, I had one! — began with these lines: “At a time when the national news is almost uniformly, massively bad, the New London Green Party is collecting, conveying, and amplifying your good ideas, hopes, and visions for our small and dynamic, diverse and youthful, historic and struggling city!”

And honestly we did just that.

I can look at the dates of each of the debates and recall that while we were talking about immigration, the climate crisis and economic development, representation and equity, and how systemic racism plays out in local power struggles, the nation as a whole was mired in a kind of political hell.

Our first debate was held in an elementary school gym. I was nervous, overprepared, and my microphone gave me trouble. My kids were playing in the hallway, while more than 150 people crowded the auditorium. I answered one question in Spanish, said I would reject the $124,000 mayoral salary because one-third of the people in our community were living below the poverty line, and insisted that the police should not cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, in apprehending people in our community without documents.

In the last 18 years, war has seldom been out of the headlines. That very day in the New York Times, for instance, one headline was: “U.S. Disputes Finding That Airstrikes on Afghan Drug Labs Killed 30 Civilians.” And war wasn’t far from our community either. During the debate, moderated by the publisher of our local newspaper, I was asked with a gotcha edge, “Are you a pacifist and how will that impact your relationship with Electric Boat?” (Electric Boat, part of General Dynamics, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors, makes submarines for the Navy in New London.)

I responded calmly: “I am a pacifist. I believe war is a failure of the imagination, that it is never necessary.” I then went on to talk about what a bad civic neighbor General Dynamics is. The saying goes, I commented, that “Boeing makes planes, Raytheon makes missiles, General Dynamics makes money” — and I reminded the audience that New London sees very little of that money, in part because the company is too busy paying its top execs so much of it. It also receives millions of dollars in federal and state subsidies for workforce training and infrastructure, even when orchestrating stock buybacks to enrich its shareholders. Generally, I championed a future New London divested from militarism.

“Don’t go against General Dynamics,” a man cautioned me after one of the debates, “they are all we got.” This is the game that corporations play against communities like New London and the military-industrial complex is even better at it than the Amazons and the Ubers.

They are all we’ve got? Really? How sad is that? What do we want as a community? How do we want to be known? We used to be known as the Whaling City, a brutal, dirty business if ever there was one. Now, our town struggles. So many of our kids qualify for reduced lunch that the district offers free lunch to all schoolchildren. But here’s another reality: the majority of those with good-paying jobs at General Dynamics in New London don’t live here. So if that’s all we got, we got problems!

The second debate was held in the basement conference room of our library and in that one (I was less nervous) we were asked about climate change. I responded that, as a mother of three kids who deserve a decent future on this planet of ours, climate change was what kept me up at night. As the mayor of a coastal town, I added, my strategy would be to build for a resilient future.

Under my administration, there would be more planning and less zoning. As a town on the water at a time when sea levels are already rising, we won’t be able to pump and dump our way out of even the five-inch rise in water levels predicted to occur in the next 15 years, which means every new pebble of development needs to be organized through a climate-change lens. Parking lots — in other words, stretches of land covered in asphalt? Not when we need to absorb runoff, rather than have it cascading down Garfield Avenue or flooding Broad Street.

Worldwide, climate change hits poor people harder and New London will be no exception. While the poor here tend to live further from the water’s edge, the dollar-chasing, asphalt-covered businesses along some of our key commercial streets create ideal sites for increasingly regular inland flooding. The elderly living in high rises are vulnerable to extended power outages when that happens and, as a food-importing community, our food supply is vulnerable, too. All of this hits poor people harder. With that in mind, I added that, as mayor, I would work to make New London greener, more resilient, and smarter about climate change. There’s no techno-fix for the predicament our fossil-fuelized global system has left us in, but we have to deal.

One irony struck me that night, as my opponents labored through their climate-change answers: our debate happened the day after an Ohio Democratic presidential debate during which not a single question was asked about climate change. And that night it rained so hard that a restaurant three blocks from the river’s edge had water pouring in the back door and out the front one.

The third debate, held at a senior center, was less formal than the other two and moderated by an attorney who gave us each 20 minutes to use as we wanted. That night, I pointed out that, of the dozen or so departments in the city’s governing structure, only two were run by women, but that I was excited and impressed by how many women were competing for the board of education and city council. (Thirteen women, myself included, ran for public office that election season.)

Asked (as I often was) about my inexperience in politics, I talked about the toolbox of skills I had amassed in an active life (as well as a life as an activist), including community organizing, consensus building, and deep listening, not to speak of a sense of deep accountability I feel for my community. You don’t have to be a lawyer or have a master’s in business administration (my two opponents) to work effectively with New London’s communities. In fact, professional expertise and ego can sometimes get in the way of representing community interests and truly grasping, no less meeting, community needs.

In the end, on that rainy election day in November, 394 people voted for me. It may not sound like much after all those months of effort, but that was more than 10% of the vote. As a write-in candidate, people had to know me, truly want to vote for me, remember the writing-in process, and then do it correctly. So each of those 394 votes felt hard won indeed.

People keep asking me if I’m going to run again. Who knows? The next election isn’t for four years, which feels like a lifetime from now and, believe me (given our world), I have plenty to do in the meantime.

Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and writes the “Little Insurrections” column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.

Copyright ©2020 Frida Berrigan — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2020
Word Count: 2,908
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Turkey is in a historically critical phase concerning its present and its future. Much of the debate is focused on one crucial question: Can Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidate power around his person and cadres loyal to him or will he face increasing difficulties ensuring control over key institutions?

Given the apparent lack of exit strategy for him as Turkey’s “system crisis” deepens, the question seems intractable. The situation is one of unprecedented limbo for Turkey and its political class.

What adds to the dilemma is the type of balance between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its minor partner the National Movement Party (MHP) on the one hand and the opposition bloc on the other.

A poll by one of the few reliable pollsters, Ankara-based Metropoll, indicated that the AKP-MHP alliance has 51% favourability while the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party does not draw more than 25% favourability. Its nationalist opposition partner, the Iyi party, has fallen below the critical 10% threshold needed to enter parliament and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party polls just above that level at 11%.

Discontent among the voters, because of economic hardships, brews beneath the surface. Those who oppose moves to send troops to Libya are slightly more than 50% of the public. The controversial Canal Istanbul project is another issue that doesn’t seem to convince large numbers of voters in the massive Greater Istanbul Municipality area.

Yet, as pointed out by Metropoll director Ozer Sencar to Ahval News, the “concerned voter” bloc within the AKP is not convinced by what the opposition offers as a political alternative.

This snapshot is good news for Erdogan. It gives him time to construct a future in his favour but, as Canal Istanbul, Libya and East Med examples show, the “plunge first, think later” mindset, seems to hardly stir the bureaucracy in Ankara and a sense of despair gains ground.

Turkey’s main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, voiced such “deep establishment concerns” in a meeting with journalists recently. Kilicdaroglu has a deeply rooted background as a bureaucrat in Turkish state apparatus; thus his remarks have particular pertinence.

For the first time, he said, “Turkey’s dependency on Russia is increasing. We are dependent in energy up to 60% to Russia. This is wrong. More important, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin began shaping Turkey’s foreign policy. Especially in Syria and Libya, Putin’s words have the final say.”

In another part of the meeting, Kilicdaroglu is said to have raised alarm over Erdogan’s steady attempts to take full control of the Turkish judiciary and persistent restructuring of Turkish Armed Forces.

The stalemate in the balance of power between the government and the opposition blocs in Turkey, coupled with a toothless parliament, creates a dangerous vacuum that may lead to a crash unless Erdogan pays attention to the calls for a return to responsible policies and abandons his bellicose moves in the region.

A report by the RAND Corporation shed light on the minefield-like crossroads where Turkey finds itself. Based partly on the Pentagon’s insider assessments, it warned: “Turkey’s assertive foreign policy moves include support for political Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood — a group viewed as terrorists by Gulf monarchies and Egypt — and its bid to claim a share of the Eastern Mediterranean hydrocarbon wealth.”

Equally important, the 243-page report argues that mid-rank officers in the Turkish Armed Forces are “deeply worried” about purges that have taken place since the botched coup in 2016 and that this may lead to another disruptive attempt. Erdogan is aware of this, it adds.

RAND outlines four scenarios ranging from a Turkey remaining somewhat part of the Western alliance to a full-scale “de-anchoring” of its previous alliances and moving towards Russia and China but leaves a question mark on Erdogan’s map towards 2023 — the year of the centennial of the Turkish Republic.

What is clear is that his assertive, adventurist, crisis-oriented policies have begun to accumulate negative energy beneath Ankara’s political fault lines.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2020
Word Count: 660
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I argued last week the Senate Republicans neutered themselves when they voted down amendments creating procedures worthy of “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

All 53 decided against issuing new subpoenas, entering to new evidence and calling for new witnesses. They decided against accountability, transparency and due process.

As a consequence, they created a kangaroo court mocking separation of powers. As a result, they revealed themselves, as one Twitter follower put it, to be “a party of moral relativism, ethical nihilism and legal sophism.” Or, to put it more simply, fascism.

Neutering themselves was the price for loyalty to a president facing the prospect of removal from office. That probably felt like a good trade-off, even for “moderate” senators in bluish-reddish states facing reelection this year. At the very least, standing with Donald Trump, and acquitting him, meant their heads would not be on pikes.

But loyalty to a lying, thieving, philandering sadist was always risky. Turns out the White House knew the Republicans’ carefully planned rationales for defending a criminal president would blow up. The administration knew it was a matter of time before a book by a former Trump official would make fools and knaves of them all.

What’s done is done, though.

Any dog will tell you once neutered, there’s no going back.

The New York Times reported the contents of a forthcoming book by John Bolton. In it, the former head of the National Security Council says yup, Trump totally bribed Ukraine to gain advantage at home. He withheld hundreds of millions to aid that country’s war against Russia in exchange for investigations into Trump’s top domestic rival.

Importantly, Trump’s bribery demanded Ukrainian officials turn over “all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Mrs. [Hillary] Clinton in Ukraine,” per the Times. This is new. More in a moment.

Copies of Bolton’s manuscript had been sent to the White House for standard vetting of classified information. But here’s the thing: the president’s press office didn’t know about the existence of Bolton’s manuscript until it was too late, according to Axios.

While it’s plausible incompetence is creating headaches for the GOP, it’s equally plausible corrupt motives are in play. Given everything we know about how hard this White House worked to cover up Trump’s bribery, it stands to reason it work just as hard to ensure no one saw Bolton’s book until the Republicans acquitted the president.

Why are the Senate Republicans putting their political lives on the line for a president so ready to betray them? I don’t know. Perhaps the Republicans don’t either. For their own sake, they’d better figure it out. The drip-drip-drip of bad news will continue through Election Day. It’s shrewd to fear a party leader threatening to put your head on a pike. At what point, however, does avoiding such a fate end up causing it?

Republicans like Lindsey Graham have nothing to fear, however. The South Carolina senator has threatened, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to open an investigation into Joe Biden and his only living son. Ukraine is awash in corruption, but even that was too much for Ukraine. Not so for Lindsey Graham.

Which brings me back to the Times report.

Up to now, our understanding has been the president held up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a public announcement of sham investigations. State Department officials testified the announcement was the deliverable. Whether it actually investigated was beside the point. But Bolton says Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, wanted Ukraine to turn over “all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to” Biden and Clinton. That new detail is meaningful for two reasons.

One, Trump’s conspiracy theory in which the Ukrainians, not the Russians, undermined our sovereignty in 2016 is not just a conspiracy theory. It is a willful and knowing effort on the part of the president and his confederates to erase the past and replace it with a “new history” in which Trump is the original victim and ultimate hero in a battle with evil Democrats in league with evil Ukrainians attacking the US of A.

Two, Graham, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is positioned to receive “all materials they had about the Russia investigation that related to” Biden and Clinton. He is positioned, in other words, to deepen and widen the force of the president’s lies using the power of an investigation by the United States Senate.

The Republicans neutered themselves.

For nothing.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 January 2020
Word Count: 758
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Russia’s appointment of a new government drew the attention of many in the Middle East eager to see how the country’s foreign policy could shift. It soon became clear there would be few changes in that department because Moscow country reappointed as foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, a tough diplomat who has headed the ministry since 2004.

Days before the reshuffle January 21, Lavrov gave an indication that Russia would push its ambitious foreign policy, saying Russia would position itself as an important actor in foreign affairs.

“The world is clearly continuing to tremor,” he said during an annual news conference on Moscow’s policy abroad. “The key destabilising factor is the aggressive stance of a number of Western countries, most of all our American colleagues.”

Russia’s assertive foreign policy, the Kremlin has realised, is an effective way to invigorate Russians’ sense of patriotism and uphold public support for Russian President Vladimir Putin at home, even as much-needed funds continue to be diverted away from social programmes.

Domestically, Lavrov is the second most popular member of Russia’s cabinet, behind Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, but how much sway he has over the country’s foreign policy is unclear.

Many diplomats and experts say Putin is the sole mastermind of Moscow’s foreign policy and defence initiatives. That said, Lavrov is clearly the president’s most trusted aide and lieutenant in foreign policy, giving him serious influence over the country’s policies in countries such as Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.

Russia has been a major player in the Middle East at least since 2015, when it intervened militarily in Syria. By reversing the course of the Syrian civil war in favour of an old client, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Moscow’s message to other leaders and rulers in the Middle East was that it is a reliable partner. The intervention in Syria allowed Moscow to position itself as a valuable interlocutor to all parties to the region’s conflicts.

Rapprochement with Israel, however, was the most dramatic recent turnaround in Moscow’s diplomatic relations. Russia’s emergence as a major presence in Syria meant that the Israelis had no choice but to maintain good relations with Moscow. Some Israeli officials are hoping that Moscow will help them deal with the biggest threat their country faces from Syria: Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah.

However, Israel’s expectations could push Moscow too far. Russia, after all, is Tehran’s ally in Syria despite differences that emerged between the two countries. Whatever disagreements Russians and Iranians may have on the ground in Syria, which include their support of rival factions in the Assad regime, they have succeeded in reducing them.

Going forward, Russia will do its best to maintain good terms with everyone, including Iran and its regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as Turkey and the Kurds, with Assad’s regime and its opponents.

The logic is simple: Russia sees no advantage in playing the role of regional policeman and sees every advantage in pursuing geopolitical and commercial gains without taking unwarranted risks.

This strategy contrasts with that of the United States which, as the dominant power in the Middle East, bears the cost of maintaining order and defending its strategic allies against security threats posed by Iranian expansionism or extremists from terror groups.

However, while the United States maintains dominance, particularly in the Arab Gulf region, Russia has strengthened ties with Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

In October 2017, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became the first Saudi monarch to visit Moscow, a decade after Putin’s official visit to Riyadh. Then, at the opening of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz rubbed shoulders with Putin, another sign of close personal ties between the countries’ leaders.

For Moscow, the Arab Gulf is an opportunity and a lucrative defence market that can absorb Russian-made gear.

At the same time, upgraded relations between Moscow and Riyadh do not change the fact that Iran remains Russia’s partner of choice. Although the two countries’ interests are sometimes misaligned, Russia’s diplomatic, defence and trade ties with Tehran are better than at any point in history.

Still, one should not forget that Russia’s and Iran’s victory in Syria has led to a divergence of interests. While Russia wants to see Syria return to the status quo and reap the benefits of peace and reconstruction, Iran has been exploiting Syria as a platform for its expansionist aspirations and its campaign against Israel.

Riyadh, as a result, knows that its strategic interests lie in upgrading its relationship with Moscow. In addition to their stake in the outcome of the Syrian conflict and rivalry with Iran, the Saudis have a growing interest in coordinating oil production with Russia at a time when both are grappling with a surge in US energy production.

Russia’s return to North Africa is also significant, given the United States’ disengagement from the region. The relationship between Moscow and Cairo, interrupted in the 1970s with the latter’s pivot towards the United States, underwent a significant upgrade after the 2013 revolution in Egypt and the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Criticised in the West for human rights abuses, Sisi found in Putin a key partner who can help him buttress domestic standing and prop up leverage vis-a-vis Cairo’s traditional ally, Washington. Egypt has also emerged as an important customer for Russian arms.

The relationship between Cairo and Moscow goes way beyond that to include the two countries’ influence in other parts of the Arab region, particularly Libya. There, Russia and Egypt have worked together in supporting the eastern-based Libyan National Army, led by Field-Marshal Khalifa Haftar, in Libya’s civil war. However, divisions within Libya have multiplied and drawn in international players, including Turkey, France and Italy.

Moscow seems to be hoping to have a say in negotiations about the conflict and eventually re-establish commercial opportunities derailed by the ouster of former leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Despite the challenges Russia faces on the international arena and in the Middle East, Putin and Lavrov as a team have achieved a string of victories in the past year. Washington’s confused agenda provided an opening for Moscow to expand its clout in Syria, while Turkey purchased a sophisticated new air-defence missile system from Russia despite objections from the White House.

Last October, Putin fashioned a pact with Turkey to establish a buffer zone along Syria’s border, further raising Moscow’s profile as a power broker in the Middle East while weakening the United States’ influence.

These victories will encourage Russia to stay the course and stick to foreign policy fundamentals that have allowed it to grow into a diplomatic powerhouse. Lavrov’s experience and energy will further Russia’s defiant position and the geopolitical muscle it exercises within the UN Security Council.

Iman Zayat is the Managing Editor of The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 January 2020
Word Count: 1,123
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In December, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led his Conservative Party to a huge parliamentary majority, which gave him leeway to steer Brexit, controversial trade talks with the United States and almost any issue in whichever direction he chose.

On January 21, the British government was defeated in the House of Lords on an issue that revolves around moral crime and compassion rather than commerce and statutes.

The House of Lords vote was about Johnson’s decision to deny unaccompanied child refugees currently in Europe the right to be united with their families in the United Kingdom. They are a small number. Safe Passage, an NGO that supports child refugees, said 2,307 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in the United Kingdom in 2017-18. Just more than half were granted it or “another form of leave” to remain in Britain, said Safe Passage.

Alf Dubs, the opposition Labour Party peer who proposed the amendment to the Johnson government’s legislation, was a child refugee from the Nazi persecution of Jews. Dubs, who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1939 as a refugee from Prague, said the government’s defeat in the upper house was “based on humanitarian principles.”

As it happens, those “humanitarian principles” are likely to prove too weak to withstand the force of Johnson’s massive parliamentary majority. The lower house can insist on passing the law without the Dubs amendment and Brexit Britain, as per Johnson’s breezy rendering, will go on to be buccaneering and bold-faced about Europe, about trade deals and, yes, about vulnerable children.

In the week Britain considered its capacity for compassion, Norway faced a similar test. The country’s governing centre-right coalition lost a long-serving ally, the anti-immigration Progress Party. Progress withdrew from the government over a cabinet decision to repatriate a Norwegian woman from Syria so that one of her young children could receive medical treatment.

The 29-year-old mother, who is of Pakistani ethnicity, left Norway for Syria in 2013, lived in territory controlled by the Islamic State (ISIS) and married twice while in the caliphate, both times to ISIS fighters.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg explained the woman’s return to the country saying her sick child needed treatment and that’s “what is important.” Solberg summed up her government’s dilemma as follows: “to bring home a child with his mother or risk that a sick 5-year-old child might die.” She added: “To me, it was important that the boy came home to Norway.”

Note the word “home.” The child, who has never known Norway, is allowed to go “home” but the Norwegian born-and-bred mother’s return is controversial. Why?

“This woman has turned her back on us,” said Jon Engen-Helgheim, a Progress Party spokesman. “She hates all that we stand for. She joined a gruesome terror army and contributed to prosecution, decapitation, burnings and the murder of innocent women, children and adults. We do not want her kind in Norway and we certainly don’t want Norwegian authorities spending enormous resources getting them to Norway.”

There are two problems with that statement. Like it or not, the woman belongs to Norway and that’s where she should be tried. Second, it’s not as if she doesn’t face consequences in Norway for her apparent allegiance to ISIS. The Norwegian Security Police has charged the woman with “participation in a terrorist organisation” and she faces up to six years in prison.

The Progress Party spokesman’s words and the British government’s deeds prompt the question: Why are they behaving like this?

Much of the literary world has been marking the 70th anniversary of the death of George Orwell. Accordingly, it’s worth repeating a truth Orwell stated as he watched the horrors of fascism and hate towards “the other.” “Sometimes,” said Orwell, “the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”

Let us restate the obvious in searching for the answer to that question about Britain and Norway. Certain groups of people are being dehumanised and cast as the “other” because of fear. Because of that, the crime of hate is being normalised.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 January 2020
Word Count: 671
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On the third day of the Senate impeachment trial, the House Democrats connected the dots I have been longing for them to connect. House Manager Sylvia Garcia, of Texas, said the Trump-Ukraine scandal was about smearing a political opponent. More importantly, she said Donald Trump had been repeating a Kremlin lie — that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that attacked the United States in 2016. She went further to say he is aiding and abetting our geopolitical adversary. Trump is on Vladimir Putin’s side.

For anyone tuning in the first time, this probably seems extraordinary. You know, like, crazy! Well, that’s because it is. The president is involved in an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to a president’s rule and weaken Russia’s old enemy from the inside out. It’s just unbelievable! Yet everything we know about the Trump-Ukraine scandal, underscored by every witness testifying during impeachment hearings, points steadily in the Kremlin’s direction.

Garcia and the others explained in lengthy detail why allegations against Joe Biden are not only false on the facts but malign in intent. Biden, as vice president, did put pressure on Ukraine’s prosecutor general but not because Viktor Shokin was being too hard investigating a gas company Hunter Biden worked for. Biden was putting pressure on Shokin because he was being too soft. Biden did not threaten to suspend a billion-dollar loan to Ukraine in order to get Shokin off Burisma’s back. He made the threat in order to get Shokin on Burisma’s back. Shokin was later fired for corruption.

Garcia and the others also explained in lengthy detail why the president keeps repeating the same conspiracy theory about the Ukrainians, not the Russians, violating American sovereignty in 2016. The reason, they said, is because it works for the Russians, who want their enemies blamed for their crimes, and it works for Trump, who fears deeply being seen as a weak and illegitimate president. The conspiracy theory, as I have said before, makes Trump the original victim and the ultimate hero. By extorting Ukraine, he helped himself. By extorting Ukraine, he helped Russia.

“Our own president is helping our adversary,” Garcia said.

The facts are on the Democrats’ side. What do the Republicans have?

Lies. There’s no truth left.

US Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said on Twitter Thursday: “On this day in 2018, Joe Biden bragged that he would withhold $1 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine if they didn’t fire the prosecutor investigating his son and Burisma. If this is true, under the House Democrats’ logic, wouldn’t it be impeachable conduct?”

It’s not true. The House managers explained that. Blackburn is lying.

US Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, said on Twitter Thursday: “WOW, House managers make extended argument that Hunter Biden’s work w/ Burisma entirely appropriate & no conflict of interest w/ Joe Biden getting rid of prosecutor that had jurisdiction over Burisma. If we call witnesses, gonna need to hear from both Bidens.”

The House managers made no such defense. Hawley is lying.

US Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, told the Newshour’s Judy Woodruff Thursday “that so far most of what he’s heard is a defense of Joe Biden who Scott believes is ‘indefensible.’ Scott also said Democrats should have fought for documents in the court rather than pushing for a trial,” according to Yamiche Alcindor.

Again, the House managers made no such defense. Scott is lying.

But this kind of misrepresentation of reality isn’t benign. It is vicious. It is malign. It isn’t meant only to deceive. It is designed to harm — to injure — the republic. There are no other options for them. They have become fully ensnared in “the Russian story.”

On the second day of the impeachment trial, lead House manager Adam Schiff said:

The Russian storyline, the Russian narrative, the Russian propaganda, the Russian view they would like people around the world to believe is that every country is just the same, just the same corrupt system. There’s no difference.

It’s not a competition between autocracy and democracy. No, it’s just between autocrats and hypocrites. They make no bones about their loss of democracy. They just want the rest of the world to believe you can’t find it anywhere.

Why take to the streets in Moscow to demand something better if there’s nothing better anywhere else? That’s the Russian story.

The Republicans have more than lies on their side. They have fear. CBS News reported a Trump surrogate warned if they vote against him, “your head will be on a pike.”

They have nihilism, too.

They cannot believe the Democrats are right on the facts. They cannot believe the Democrats have the Constitution and morality on their side. The Republicans cannot trust their own eyes. They cannot believe the Democrats are acting in good faith.

They cannot believe, because they have no faith.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 January 2020
Word Count: 813
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In their defense of the president, the Republicans are focused almost entirely on the first article of impeachment in which Donald Trump is accused of abusing the power of his office for personal gain. The Republicans have said the allegation is baseless given there is no underlying crime. If there’s no crime, there’s no need for removal.

Impeachment and removal do not require law-breaking, and everyone who knows anything about legal precedent, constitutional law and American history knows this well. Involving a foreign government in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to informed consent to the governance of the president is a violation of the public trust. Impeachment and removal are the only constitutional remedies for a person who cheated to win in 2016 and plans to cheat again in 2020.

But there is an underlying crime in the first article. That crime came to light after the House voted to indict the president. It came to light after civil lawsuits pending during last year’s impeachment inquiry finally worked their way through the courts. As a result of those lawsuits, we know the president broke federal law when he held up over $400 million in military aid Ukraine needed badly in its war with Russia. As a result of those lawsuits, a nonpartisan government agency confirmed Trump’s law-breaking.

The Government Accountability Office did more than that. Its report found the president’s excuse for withholding the money was irrelevant. The White House said Trump blocked the funding in order to push Ukraine’s government into doing more about corruption. But that decision wasn’t Trump’s to make alone. The United States Congress appropriated the money. Trump had no say in how or why it was spent (other than vetoing or signing the appropriation in law, which he did). If anti-corruption were a legitimate reason for holding the aid, he first had to take it to the Congress.

That he held the money and didn’t go to the Congress means the president violated the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. (He did release the money eventually but only after public knowledge of what he was doing.) The ICA was passed in response to Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend on federal programs he didn’t like. The law affirmed perhaps the most important authority granted by the Constitution, which is the exclusive right of the Congress to wield “the power of the purse.” The Congress always had the right, but not until Nixon did a president challenge it. The ICA codified tradition into law.

My point here is less about Trump’s criminality than about the second article of impeachment in which the president is accused of obstructing the Congress. The White House has told every government agency involved in the Ukraine scandal to refuse cooperating with the Congress, even when lawfully subpoenaed. The result has been unprecedented obstruction of not only statutes, but the will of the people. Yet almost no one, not even the Washington press corps, is fully paying attention to that article. In light of Trump’s criminality, it may be the most consequential of the two.

If the Senate finds the president not guilty of obstructing the Congress, I don’t see why future presidents would feel constrained by the Congress when it comes to virtually anything, but specifically when it comes to how and why to spend public money. The Constitution grants the Congress the power of the purse. The Impoundment Control Act affirms that authority. But if the Senate finds Trump innocent of the obstruction charge, the Congress will have in effect surrendered its authority over the executive.

The current president wants to build a wall on the southern border. Thus far, the courts and the Congress have constrained him from redirecting money appropriated for things like the general welfare and national defense to building his campaign boondoggle. But if the Senate acquits Trump for obstruction, it will have declared any future president can obstruct. The executive will be free to spend public money as he sees fit. And if the executive can ignore the Congress, why not ignore the courts, too?

We often say the president’s impeachment trial is the height of a slow-motion constitutional crisis. It might be more accurate to say we haven’t seen anything yet.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2020
Word Count: 710
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In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment — only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.

After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner — I’m loathe to call it a “process” — by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.

The Goldilocks method Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.

Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.

In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I — and just about every new staff officer — was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).

Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.

I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance — far more than most commanders — to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.

Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should!

Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse–ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.

And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or — as in the recent decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Suleimani — Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Soon after President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure they presented him with — assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to such a future assassination — the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).

At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.

Bush, Obama, and the chaos machine’s tragic foundations The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.

Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the “original sin” of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, illegal domestic mass surveillance, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries — then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.

Barack Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.

It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief.” He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed — even killing American citizens without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show.” After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.

In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed in an American prison in that country — its taking of key Iraqi cities and smashing of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded.

Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.

The Trumpian perfect storm During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the “madman theory” for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

It didn’t work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.

So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North Korea, seizing Syrian oil fields, sending yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.

Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius” in the White House but to Iran’s long history of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”

In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.

If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.

The Rapture as foreign policy All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team — notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence — explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals (or 20% of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe that the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse.  

Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe necessary to usher in end-times.

Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role.

Danny Sjursen writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vets Chris Henriksen and Keegan Ryan Miller. 

Copyright ©2020 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2020
Word Count: 2,465
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