John Roberts made headlines this morning. The reaction among Democratic partisans was understandable but I think missing a more important point. Manners of speaking and choice of language aren’t the problems. The problems are the Republican Party’s corruption, the president’s criminality, and the impotency of the United States Senate.

The chief justice of the US Supreme Court, who is presiding over Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, said both parties needed reminding they were presenting their cases for and against the president in “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

“It is appropriate at this point for me to admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel … to remember they are addressing the world greatest deliberative body. One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse.”

That got a lot of backs up, understandably. How can Roberts be talking about language conducive to civil discourse when we’re talking about the president’s crimes and the Republican Party’s effort to cover them up? But I tend to believe Chris Murphy.

The US senator from Connecticut was in the front row behind the House managers. He said in an early-morning Tweet everyone was getting “chippy and personal.” To be sure, Murphy is my senator, but he’s an honest broker too. He said: “I’m alarmed at how often the parties are directly addressing each other. Neither the managers nor the president’s lawyers are on trial. Trump is. Good for Roberts for stepping in gently.”

The Washington press corps is using Roberts’ admonishment to frame the opening day of the president’s impeachment trail. Both sides are fighting so hard and with so much rancor that even the chief justice had to step in. But while the press corps focuses on conflict, as it is wont to do, I was focused on the other bit. The Senate earned its reputation as a deliberative body because it deliberated, slowly and painfully, so much so its other, less charitable, reputation is being a place where bills go to die.

Deliberation isn’t what we saw Tuesday. Deliberation isn’t what we’ll see during the rest of the trial. Just as he rammed through one mirror-fogging judicial nominee after another without complaint from his conference, the Senate majority leader is stuffing a month’s worth of deliberation (at least) into three days. He is turning “the greatest deliberative body” into the world’s fastest kangaroo court. Roberts’ admonishment was met with howls of derision. It should have been met with howls of laughter.

Our sympathies should be with the Democrats. They were not asking the Senate to convict Trump (though they argued strenuously for his guilt). They were asking senators to behave normally by subpoenaing records, entering new evidence, and calling new witnesses. They were asking for transparency, accountability and due process. They were asking for normal things, things you see on “Law & Order.” But instead of behaving normally, instead of living up to their reputations, every single Republican (53 in all) voted down half a dozen and more amendments creating rules and conditions rising to the Senate’s title as “the world’s most deliberative body.”

But they did something else. Before they have determined whether the president is guilty of charges against him, they have decided to surrender their power to even ask the question. The US Constitution gives the Senate, and only the Senate, the sole power to prosecute a president. By voting against normal and ordinary due process, however, every Senate Republican has said they have no such power. They have muzzled themselves. They have neutered their institution. They have created anti-democratic and anti-republican grounds for future presidents to declare themselves untouchable.

Why not allow due process, then come to a conclusion, even if that conclusion is not guilty? Why not allow due process? One answer is that due process would reveal the president’s guilt to the American people. The solution is getting the trial over with as fast as possible to allow memories to fade before Election Day. But there’s a better way of understanding this.

Due process is the quintessential American way. But due process, for Trump and his GOP, is getting in the way. In other words, it’s the problem.

There’s a word for individuals who not only flout the rules but attack their legitimacy. There’s a word for individuals who not only break democratic norms but undermine the institutions enforcing them. That word isn’t republican. Nor is it Republican.

It’s fascist.

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: 22 January 2020
Word Count: 750
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Someone needs to invent an expression to describe the experience of being surprised by the surprise of others. Maybe the Germans have a long word for what I’m feeling. To me, it seems pretty clear Mitch McConnell does not care about the Constitution. He does not care about the rule of law. He does not care about the common good or commitments to a democratic covenant. These are nice things to pay lip-service to. These are impediments to get around. The point of politics is power. Power is all.

That the Senate majority leader is doing everything possible to create procedural conditions with which to expedite Donald Trump’s acquittal should not be surprising. It should be expected, especially by serious and sober intellectuals engaging in public affairs. And yet, on this opening day of the Senate’s impeachment trial, these same people seem to be downright shocked — shocked! — to witness McConnell’s cold-blooded and cynical moves to protect the most criminal president of our lifetimes.

But, even as I expect the worst from a fascist Republican Party, I don’t feel hopeless. The same people expressing shock also claim democracy is doomed if the president is exonerated for cheating. He will surely cheat again! Yes, indeed, that’s what lying, thieving, philandering sadists do. But that doesn’t mean the end of our democracy. That’s merely more of the same. As Jerry Nadler put it, Trump “welcomed” foreign interference in 2016 and he “demanded” it for 2020. Undermining the will of the people is treasonous, but that’s nothing compared to Vladimir Putin’s approval.

We could be entering a period of authoritarian democracy, similar to what’s happening in nations like Russia, Turkey, Hungary and the Philippines. We could see a return of a variation of apartheid, in which popular democracy isn’t popular but instead enjoyed legally by whites only. But those extremes would require deep structural change — like amending the US Constitution and abandoning federalism. A reelected Donald Trump would be a disaster with years of painful consequences, but the republic will live on.

Anyway, cheating doesn’t mean winning for the president — or for the Senate Republicans. So far the Democrats are focusing on why Trump should be removed. But I’d expect them to quickly shift focus to the corrupt process of the Senate trial. The more the Democrats highlight its fundamental unfairness — no new witnesses, no new evidence, presentations jammed into 12-hour slots lasting well into early morning hours — the more they draw attention to McConnell, especially members of his conference seeking reelection. The more the Democrats highlight corruption, the more ammunition Democratic challengers have in knocking off GOP incumbents.

Focusing on the Republican Party’s corruption does something else. It creates a true oppositional binary. As long as the Democrats focus on why the president is guilty, the Washington press corps will report proceedings as a fight between equally powerful and equally legitimate political parties. However, accusing McConnell of unfairness forces him to explain why he’s fair, which, of course, he can’t do. He’s already on his heels defending an indefensible president. The Democrats could tip him right over.

This, I think, is the Democrats best move. They should be otherwise prepared to lose the trial over Trump. They should not be, as some pundits have urged, demanding Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rule in their favor, forcing the Republicans to call witnesses, etc. The Democrats can say Roberts could choose not to play by McConnell’s corrupt rules. That would highlight Roberts’ corruption. (The high court, as Samuel Moyn said, is not and will not be a friend to equality and justice.) But liberals shouldn’t want him to interfere in constitutional combat. Liberals should accept that democratic institutions won’t save the republic. Only politics will.

This is probably what most shocks serious and sober intellectuals engaging in public affairs — that even the United States Constitution itself can’t stop a criminal president abetted by a major political party with help of a global right-wing media apparatus. If the Constitution and all the institutions built up around it can’t stop Trump, surely our democracy is doomed. That, however, is putting too much faith in institutions and not enough faith in people, especially people willing to fight for a more equitable America.

Uncritical faith in democratic institutions, even the United States Constitution itself, actually gives a fascist Republican Party an advantage it deeply desires. Fascists hate institutions getting in their way. They love institutions serving them. Corrupt institutions accelerate the trend toward authoritarian democracy. Preserving them enables that trend. Asking John Roberts to interfere is to legitimize an institution — the US Senate — bent on undermining the power of the people to set things right.

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: 21 January 2020
Word Count: 777
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There’s a gun rally going on in Richmond, Virginia, today. It’s not about guns. Thousands, I suppose maybe tens of thousands, of Americans have gathered in defense of the Second Amendment. It’s not about the right to bear arms or self-defense.

The rally is about the freedom of some Americans to carry lethal weaponry in civil society for the purpose of intimidating humans being “deserving” of intimidation. More importantly, the rally is a representation of the bifurcated nature of our moral and legal system in which white men are protected by the law while everyone else is punished. There is one set of rules and norms for “us.” There is one set for “them.”

They are separate, and unequal.

There is ample documentary evidence to underscore my point. Hop on Twitter to see gangs walking around the former capital of the Confederacy wearing combat fatigues and carrying semi-automatic rifles, some of which are the same AR-15s used in one mass murder after another. The truth is obvious. Virtually all of them are white men.

That the rally is occurring on Martin Luther King Jr. Day is no accident. Indeed, it is appropriate given that the point is intimidating human beings “deserving” of intimidation. King and his allies fought to democratize America fully. They struggled to complete a 100-year process of liberalization that began with the Emancipation Proclamation.

But for many Americans, democracy isn’t for “them.” Democracy is for “us.” Equality isn’t an ideal to aspire to. Equality is a transgression worthy of punishment. People demanding things they don’t deserve get what’s coming to them. In the distant past, it was enslavement. In the near past, it was mass incarceration. On MLK Day 2020, it is the feeling of terror in knowing the state might not protect them from white violence.

The irony is King was a gun owner. He owned lots of guns. “An arsenal” is how a visitor put it. King came from a conservative black tradition in the Jim Crow South borne of practical need. If a white man pointed a gun at you, you pointed one back.

King is remembered now for his faith, liberal values and commitment to nonviolent protest. But that commitment arose from a context, and that context was a fierce debate between opposing camps in the civil-rights movement. One camp favored nonviolence. One favored armed resistance. King and others made a pragmatic choice.

Why pragmatic? Because armed resistance was a good way for black activists to get killed. (Chicago police, after all, murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton. The Black Panthers broke from King’s movement. They advocated armed resistance.) More importantly, choosing armed resistance was accepting “the demise of civil society, to admit that we have no better solutions, and that we are little better than our past,” wrote Simon Balto in 2013. Balto’s essay for the Washington Spectator, back when I was its managing editor, was so powerful and so moving, I have never forgotten it.

At the time, some white liberals argued the Trayvon Martins of the world are going to be accused of carrying guns even if they are not, so they may as well carry one for self-defense. But that idea was missing something huge, Simon Balto wrote. “There is no salvation, no endgame, in the proposition,” he said. “It leads nowhere but a society of seemingly infinite arms and limitless danger. Much of black America recognizes this.

There’s a reason that, in spite of the fraught and often racist history of gun control, African Americans still overwhelmingly support it. It is because black communities know terribly well the burden of life in a society premised around fear, and in which the state vacates or fails in its responsibility to keep its citizens safe. That is, after all, a significant thread of our country’s racial history — one that’s been weaving for many generations now. … To accept that idea would be a monstrous, awful thing.

King chose nonviolent protest, but it must be said armed resistance was resisting something, primarily a state unwilling or unable to protect black people from white violence. Today’s gun-rally participants say they are resisting too. They are not. The state not only protects white people from violence, but it protects white people’s “freedom” to commit violence. That’s what so-called Stand Your Ground laws are.

Gun-rights advocates say they are resisting the tyranny of the state, but that rhetoric masks a simpler and truer purpose. If “gun control is Jim Crow,” they are the victims. If they are the victims, who is doing the victimizing? A state that’s no longer the exclusive preserve of white men, a state fully and faithfully committed to King’s dream. Equality isn’t an American ideal to aspire to. Equality is a transgression worthy of punishment.

It’s no surprise a gun rally is happening on MLK Day.

It’s no surprise, because that’s the point.

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: 20 January 2020
Word Count: 812
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“Put simply, Erdogan is growing into a key player amid the geopolitical changes in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, as Turkey is acquiring regional superpower status,” wrote Angelos Stangos in the Greek Kathimerini newspaper referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Worse,” Stangos added, “that is all creating the impression that, in the eyes of the West — the United States and the European Union (perhaps for different reasons) — Greece belongs to the Middle East and not Europe.”

This observation underlines a remarkable weakness in the set-up of the January 19 Berlin Conference on the Libyan conflict. In a monumental error, the German government declined to invite Tunisia, which borders Libya and has a massive stake in seeing the conflict resolved, and Greece, which is a key player in the quagmire developing in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Libya’s crisis has been compounded by an agreement between Ankara and the UN-backed Government of National Accord, led by Fayez al-Sarraj in Tripoli, which has Erdogan’s fingerprints all over it. The international community’s inability to understand Erdogan’s intentions hangs over the gathering in Berlin, eroding hopes for a solution to the conflict.

Germany’s diplomatic move is clouded by a simple fact: By inviting the Turkish side, the European Union, in general terms, is welcoming a fait accompli signed by Ankara, by its sending jihadist mercenaries onto Libyan soil.

This has emboldened Erdogan, who raised the stakes by declaring that Turkish troops would be sent to Libya. Once this is done — and Erdogan is a man of his word — the European Union would lose more influence in Libya, with the threat of jihadism rising, and Erdogan may feel much more comfortable making new demands, gaining more political territory.

Some may argue that Erdogan’s manoeuvre will not work in Libya, that it is one step too far for the international community to tolerate. There is likely some truth to that. How Turkey will be able to send troops to a distant country across the Mediterranean is a big question. Whether or not the large-scale opposition to the move at home will bring new momentum against him is another one.

However, these questions may be hiding Erdogan’s long-term strategy: The Turkish leader calculates that, as long as his divisive policies within the European Union are successful, general confusion in Berlin, Rome and London continues, the broken chain of decision making in Washington remains unrepaired and international “legalistic” support for the Tripoli-based government persists, he will be given enough time to put a foothold in Libya, making Turkey’s military presence there permanent.

This will give him a bargaining chip in the country and, ultimately, see him emerge as the leader who forges control of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, maintaining the “balance of terror,” to use a Cold War term, in North Africa.

Stangos hits on the core of the dilemma facing the European Union — especially France, Italy and Greece in its southern flank.

First, for Erdogan, the agenda is to expand on a blend of Islamism and radical nationalism beyond Turkey’s borders. Second, what Germany represses in its collective unconscious is that Turkey’s foreign policy is nearly entirely militarised and it is no longer interested in diplomatic tactics.

As noted by Unal Cevikozn, a former diplomat and an MP with Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party: “Turkey, with its weakening attention on diplomacy and peaceful resolution of conflicts, also loses its soft power capacity. It would not be unfair to suggest that this new approach of Turkey in the region is perceived like ‘gunboat diplomacy’.”

Any hope that Ankara will make a U-turn and give up on its deal with Tripoli without serious concessions from the European Union or accept to sit at the table with Cyprus on East Med energy talks is nothing but a pipe dream.

What Athens faces deep anxiety about is how determined Ankara is to escalate the conflict in the Aegean and Eastern Med to its breaking point. The Greek Defence Ministry’s general staff said Turkish military aircraft violated Greece’s airspace 4,811 times in 2019, the largest number in one calendar year since 1987. Turkish Navy warships have increasingly violated Greece’s national waters as well. The number of violations increased from 133 in 2010 to 299 in 2015 to a staggering 2,032 in 2019.

The crisis encompassing the Eastern Med and Libya reveals an unsettling fact: There is a deadly game being played. Irrational adventurism is seeing jihadists deployed to a conflict zone and a mighty power, Turkey, is seeking to trigger a military confrontation with Greece.

The choice will be whether or not the world acts together to deter militaristic expansion. Perhaps it is time for US and EU warships to intensely patrol the hot waters of the Mediterranean.

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: 20 January 2020
Word Count: 788
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Robert Hyde is a businessman and former Marine who’s running against Democrat Jahana Hayes for the 5th Congressional seat in Connecticut. He’s the newest entry of the dramatis personae of the Trump-Ukraine saga. Text messages released by the House suggest Hyde was stalking Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine.

Lev Parnas, who turned over the messages, says he never took Hyde seriously. In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Parnas maligned Hyde’s character, saying he never saw him when he was not drunk. Parnas is one of Rudy Giuliani’s goons. In one way or another, he has been at the center of the president’s conspiracy to smear Joe Biden and rewrite the history of 2016 so that Ukraine, not Russia, is the enemy. Parnas is now under indictment for violating campaign-finance laws. He’s coming forward with what he knows about Donald Trump in an apparent bid for leniency.

Parnas has corroborated with direct material evidence what we already know about Trump’s conspiracy. But we shouldn’t be gullible. When Parnas says he never took Hyde seriously, bear in mind there are few if any moral or legal barriers to this president’s desires. Given his record, it seems plausible, at least, for Trump to have permitted, at least, a goon like Robert Hyde to stalk an ambassador who’s getting in the way of extorting Ukraine’s president in order to defraud the American people.

For his part, Hyde denies having stalked Yovanovitch. On Eric Bolling’s program airing on TV stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, Hyde said he barely knew Parnas. He said they were exchanging “colorful” messages while “smoking a couple of cigars somewhere out in the world.” He told Bolling: “I thought we were playing. I didn’t know he was so serious.” Bolling asked: Did you track Yovanovitch? “Absolutely not,” he said. “Are you kidding me? I’m a little landscaper from fucking Connecticut.”

Turns out the little landscaper from fucking Connecticut spent considerable time in Trump’s entourage and on Trump’s properties. He was prolific on Twitter, posting pictures of himself with well-known Republicans, including Giuliani, Parnas and the president. Emilie Munson is a reporter for Hearst Connecticut Media covering the 5th Congressional race. She asked about the selfies. Hyde was coy, but later sent Munson even more photos of himself with Giuliani, Parnas and Igor Fruman (Parnas’ partner, also under indictment). For two goons saying they barely knew each other, there happens to be lots of photographic evidence suggesting they knew each other.

It turns out the little landscaper from fucking Connecticut has a record of stalking. Eliza Fawcett led a team of reporters from the Hartford Courant to reveal today a Republican consultant won a temporary protective order against Hyde in late May of last year from a Superior Court judge of the District of Columbia for “demonstrating an inveterate pattern of monitoring, tracking and surveilling her location.”

According to Fawcett and her team, court documents show Hyde “kept close tabs” on the woman’s “personal and professional whereabouts” and “would surprise her with unsettling visits” at business events. Over a period of months, Hyde sent her “various forms of social media, text messages and emails,” the woman alleged, “with the intent of instilling fear.” Hyde also contacted her clients. The woman, whom the Courant did not identify for her safety, “became a dysfunctional disaster” who suffered from “extreme and prolonged fear, harm, continued emotional distress,” per court papers.

From January to April, Hyde stopped contacting the woman. It was during this time, he contacted Lev Parnas via Whatsapp about Yovanovitch. “If you want her out, they need to make contact with security forces.” “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.” “Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money … what I was told.” “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in [sic] that.”

On his return, he ambushed the woman on April 1. He waited for her to finish dinner at the Trump Hotel in Washington. In May, she canceled a trip to Trump’s Doral resort in Miami knowing Hyde would be there. Also in May — and this is somewhat curious — the Republican National Committee called “to tell me they believe I am in danger.” By the end of the month, the woman had won a temporary protective order against Hyde.

It’s one thing to say he wasn’t serious about stalking Yovanovitch. It’s another to say he’s wasn’t serious while having done that very thing back home. Criminals, it turns out, will “joke” about committing crimes before the moment they commit them.

As for Trump, no one is saying he knew about Hyde stalking Yovanovitch, but Lev Parnas is saying the president was aware of everything he was doing to smear Biden and defraud the American people. The president might not have said yes to stalking. But he might not have said no either. After all, Trump said in his phone call with Ukraine’s president, Marie Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.”

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: 17 January 2020
Word Count: 837
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A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We’re talking about a long, skinny territory — a geographic gerrymander — that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless, save for the law of the gun. But that old West was lawless for want of government. This one is lawless because of it.

The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. Predictably, the Endangered Species Act is among the fallen. So are the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, laws restricting air and water pollution, and measures protecting wildlife, landscapes, Native American sacred sites, and even caves and fossils.

The new Wild West of the border wall is an authoritarian dreamscape where the boss man faces no limits and no obligations. It’s as though Marshall Wyatt Earp, reborn as an orange-haired easterner with no knowledge of the actual West, were back in charge, deciding who’s in and who’s out, what goes and what stays.

Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. The environmental analyses and impact statements NEPA requires might not force the government to evaluate whether a palisade of 30-foot-high metal posts — bollards in border wall terminology — were really a better way to control drug smuggling than upgrading inspection facilities at ports of entry, where, by all accounts, the vast majority of illegal substances enter the country. They would, however, require those wall builders to figure out in advance a slew of other gnarly questions like: How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?

The questions get big, fast. One that might look easy but isn’t concerns the flashfloods that stream down desert washes. The uprights of the border wall are to be spaced only four inches apart, which means they’ll catch flood debris the way a colander catches spaghetti.

Let’s get specific. The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge abuts the border in the far southeastern corner of Arizona. Black Draw, a gulch running through the middle of the refuge, is normally as dry as a hot sidewalk. When thunderstorms burst over the vast San Bernardino Valley, however, the floodwaters can surge more than 20 feet high.  Imagine a wall of chocolate water sweeping up tree trunks, uprooted bushes, the occasional dead cow, and fence posts snarled in wire. Imagine what happens when that torrent meets a barrier built like a strainer. The junk catches and creates a dam. Water backs up, and pressure builds. If the wall were built like the Hoover Dam, it might hold, but it won’t be and it won’t.

In 2014, a flood in Black Draw swept vehicle barriers aside, scattering pieces downstream. Local ranchers have shown me the pictures. You could say the desert was making a point about how wet it could be. In fact, there’s no mystery about what will happen when such a flood hits a top-heavy palisade. If a NEPA document were to evaluate the border wall, the passage discussing this eventuality might require its writer to invent a term for what a wall becomes when it lies flat on the ground.

On the other hand, if you leave gaps for floods to pass through, then smugglers and — for Donald Trump and his base — people of unacceptably dark skin color might come the other way. Not that they necessarily would. As local residents I talked to attest, active patrols, remote sensing, and improved coordination among law enforcement agencies have reduced illegal crossings in the San Bernardino Valley almost to zero, something current government officials don’t point out but a NEPA document would.

With NEPA out of the picture, the responsible parties only have to claim that they’ll figure out a solution later and, when “later” comes, maybe they’ll have conveniently moved on to other jobs.

Pittsburgh on the border Meanwhile, there’s another question that won’t have to be dealt with: How much water will the wall’s construction require? The answer matters in an area where water’s scarce. Again, the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge offers a useful vantage point for considering the question.

To get to the refuge, you drive east from the town of Douglas along the Geronimo Trail, an unpaved two-lane country road that earns its name honestly.  Nineteenth-century Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. military in the mountains on the horizon just ahead of you. Shortly before you reach the refuge, you top a low rise overlooking what the local assessor initially mistook for a new industrial park.  It was as if a section of Pittsburgh or Youngstown had suddenly sprouted from the desert, with enough mesquite and creosote bush scraped away to accommodate a concrete-batching plant, office trailers, and a massive staging area and machinery yard.

Stacks of steel bollards stand taller than houses, covering the space of a neighborhood. A grid of steel rails for laying out those bollards and welding them into pre-fab wall sections occupies another acre or two, beyond which stacks of completed sections cover yet more acres. In front of those stacks, a few scraps of wall stand vertical but disjointed, like shrines to a metal god — probably practice erections, if you’ll pardon the phrase. Scattered through the site are forklifts, graders, loaders, bulldozers, excavators, pickup trucks, flatbeds, and cranes. Generators and floodlights on wheeled rigs are parked at the margins, ready to illuminate round-the-clock shifts. Close to the batching tower, which may rival the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas as the tallest structure in Cochise County, cement trucks cluster like a litter of puppies.

And more steel keeps arriving. An approaching cloud of dust on the Geronimo Trail signals a line of incoming semis loaded with still more bollards. They pass newly posted signs that say: “Be Aware: Equipment Has the Right of Way” and “Risk Takers Are Accident Makers.”

These details, however, are prelude to the main event. If you look toward Mexico, a half-mile of wall already stands in place, undulating with the hills. Think of it as a dark, linear Steelhenge, a monolith screening the shimmering Sonoran mountains to the south. You can see where the next sections will be raised. Construction has already reached the refuge.

Where the deer and the antelope better not play The surface and subsurface flow of water from nearly the entire San Bernardino Valley converges at the refuge, creating an oasis in the heart of the desert. If this were the Sahara, caravansaries would have stopped by its green pools for thousands of years. As it is, Apaches, Yaquis, Tohono O’odham, and their predecessors have used its waters since time out of mind, as did the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who later strove to take the land from them and from each other. The ponds lie half-hidden amid jungles of reeds.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge is modest as refuges go — only 2,369 acres — but it was once part of the sprawling, 73,240-acre Slaughter Ranch, two-thirds of which lay in Mexico. Next to the refuge, the ranch headquarters, now a historic site, has its own big pond. From that pond or any of those on the refuge, a major-league slugger could knock a baseball out of the country.

Contractors building the wall have drilled three wells along the border and leased a fourth. Tanker trucks constantly shuttle between the wells and the concrete plant. Nobody is saying how much water wall construction will consume. The foundation for the wall will be — what? A yard wide and seven-feet deep? Ten-feet deep? Sorry, that’s privileged information, not for public consumption.

Anyway, the foundation just in this area will run for scores of miles, farther than you can see, and consume enough concrete to build a small town — and concrete requires water. Lots of it.

How much will the pumping deplete local aquifers? Nobody knows because, absent NEPA, nobody has had to figure it out. There’s been no modeling, no serious testing, no reliable calculations. Still, local ranchers would like to know the answer. They depend on wells and water tanks scattered through the desert scrub where their cattle drink.

Good luck to them. And good luck, as well, to the critters for which the refuge is supposed to provide… well, refuge.

I could print a list of the unusual fish, frogs, snails, snakes, and other living things that are found here and almost nowhere else on Earth, not to mention the rare plants, the itinerant mammals (some also rare), and the hundreds of species of birds that use this place. In the desert, reliable water is a kind of miracle that attracts and creates other miracles.

San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, you might say, is a cluster of miracles. There are too many to list. And a long list of weird names would take up a lot of space and sound pinheaded. I care a lot about those creatures, but I don’t want to sound like that.

To be honest, I’m almost afraid to learn the names of some of the refuge’s creatures because then it would only hurt all the more if they decline to extinction. The wall will certainly nudge, or maybe shove, many of them in that direction. Nevertheless, I have to mention two of them. Their names suggest a kind of taxonomic poetry, a nature music. They aren’t necessarily the rarest, but they sound the best: Yaqui topminnow. Chiricahua leopard frog. The words fall on the ears like melodies, evoking the mystery of tender life in a harsh land. As members of a species, you and I are as common as coal. In the big biological scheme of things, creatures like these are rubies and sapphires.

Forget policy, follow the metaphor It’s impossible to understand the wall, at least in the San Bernardino Valley, in terms of policy. As one rancher put it to me over coffee at the Gadsden Hotel, “This [wall] may be needed someplace, but it isn’t needed here.”

If Trump’s wall were really about policy, its advantages and disadvantages would be weighed against other strategies requiring different kinds of investment. But this is the new Wild West, where rational judgment, laws, and procedures only get in the way.

The truth of the wall lies in metaphor. If Chiricahua leopard frog conveys a kind of poetic resonance to people like me, then for millions of others chanting “Build the Wall!” is like hitting a big bass drum. Everybody understands wall! Even if the structure doesn’t actually work in physical space, it works in your mind. It stands between you and everything bad you can imagine. The core truth that unites Trump and his supporters is that he hates who we hate — and the border wall stands for keeping out those unwanted people and all they represent.

This is why the wall can’t coexist with NEPA. Impact statements don’t do imagery. If you really want to crack down on drug smuggling, for example, you’d concentrate your efforts at established ports of entry, where billions of dollars of goods and millions of people cross from one country to the other every day. The bulk of the fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, and other hard drugs entering the U.S. is reportedly concealed among legitimate imports in railroad cars and trucks of every description. Or they get stashed in secret compartments in buses, vans, cars, and pickup trucks. (The U.S. mail is another major conduit.) Currently, it’s estimated that more than $4 billion in new scanners, inspection lanes, and the people to staff them are needed. Making that investment would have infinitely more impact on drug flow than using the same money to install bollards where they aren’t needed and won’t last. There are better ways to handle people, too, but let’s not get distracted from the real story.

Expenditures on wall construction in Fiscal Year 2019 ran to approximately $10 billion. Only a third of that amount was actually appropriated by Congress for border security structures. Delivering the rest of the money required masterful circumventions of constitutional intent.

Here’s one of them: each year Congress appropriates so-called 2808 funds to the Department of Defense for construction projects on military bases, including schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructure. Such expenditures are restricted to military property and the international border with Mexico isn’t — or wasn’t — a military base. For the Trumpistas, however, not a problem.

In 1907, President Teddy Roosevelt reserved a 60-foot easement from the public domain along the southern border to keep it “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico.” Since then, the “Roosevelt easement” has been administered by the Bureau of Land Management, but last year the Trump administration transferred the easement to the Department of Defense, which obligingly assigned it as a real-estate asset to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Voila! Now, the Roosevelt Easement is part of a military base and a tendril of Fort Bliss officially extends into Arizona, New Mexico, and California — but not Texas. (The Lone Star State reserved its public land for itself when it entered the union, so no Roosevelt Easement there.) Technically, border wall construction within the easement now constitutes an improvement to Fort Bliss, enhancing military preparedness, yadda, yadda, yadda. There’s more to it than that, including the president’s formal declaration of a national emergency last February, which enabled certain other steps, but you get the idea. Where there’s a will, there’s an imperial way.

As it happens, however, the Pentagon’s money for funding wall construction across the foot of the San Bernardino refuge itself comes from a different pot: “284” funds, intended for counter-narcotics work. Diverting $2.5 billion of these monies to the border wall was, to say the least, a stretch, so a coalition of humanitarian and environmental groups sued. A district court found in their favor and issued an injunction, halting the use of the funds for construction. A rapid series of appeals went to the Supreme Court and the Supremes said, Hmmm, interesting question, which will take time for the lower courts to resolve; meanwhile, the injunction is lifted. And so funding again flowed like a flash flood. If the courts ultimately decide that the transfer of funds is really not okay, the wall may already have been built. Thank you, Supremes.

Dollars and nonsense I forgot to mention something: in addition to suspending more than 50 laws protecting lands, wildlife, and the public interest, the government has also waived many procurement laws and also buried a lot of contract information. This means you and I will have a hard time learning what anything actually costs, even though our tax dollars are paying for it.

Example: the barrier to be built along the edge of the San Bernardino refuge, cutting off its terrestrial wildlife from the Mexican half of its world and quite possibly draining the ponds where some of the planet’s rarest creatures survive, is part of a contract for 63 miles of border wall awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors (SWVC), a subsidiary of Kiewit, a Fortune 500 company with $9 billion in annual sales.

The original May 2019 contract awarded $646 million to SWVC, putting the cost of the refuge wall at $10.25 million per mile, a veritable steal. But you would need to know someone who can log into the relevant government database to discover that the fifth modification of the original contract, signed on August 29th, added another $653 million to the kitty. Now, those 63 miles are going to cost $1.3 billion, or almost $21 million per mile.

And by the way, did I mention that construction will include a power line and floodlights on 60-foot masts to illuminate the wall all night long, every night of the year? I have friends in the San Bernardino Valley who just about weep — and they aren’t weepy people — when they think about the lights on that wall blazing away in what used to be the immense, holy darkness of their formerly unblemished land.

I can get pretty choked up about it myself, but you can be sure that smugglers won’t. Here’s where things get truly weird: believe it or not, darkness is an ally of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Its people have night vision goggles and its drones and other sensors have infrared detectors. They don’t need light. Flood the border with light and, counter-intuitively, the CBP is blinded, losing an advantage. Whose idea was this? Nobody’s saying, but it seems to have come from, ahem, the highest level. Good thing NEPA doesn’t apply.

Let’s turn up the weirdness a little bit further: out in western Arizona, close to the California line, you come to the Barry M. Goldwater Range (BMGR). Here, young Air Force and Marine pilots learn to strafe and bomb. Migrants have been known to cross the international border at the BMGR but, according to court filings, over the past five years migrants have gotten in the way of only 195 of 255,732 air sorties – less than 0.1%.

An already existing pedestrian barrier along much of the range’s border possibly contributes to this low level of trespass — and the bombs and bullets may help, too. But the decisive factor is undoubtedly the range’s spectacular heat and aridity and the mortally long distances a migrant would have to walk to reach any possible pick-up or rendezvous spot. Nevertheless a second wall, backing up the first, is now slated for construction at BMGR, with a road sandwiched between the two walls, down which CBP patrols will race like hamsters on a flattened wheel.

Let’s just agree, as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford, Jr., did in a memorandum to then-acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, that double-walling the BMGR makes no sense in terms of policy. In terms of metaphor, however, double-walling a border where essentially nobody goes is perfectly logical. If the goal is to build miles of wall, costs and benefits be damned, you might as well build them where there’s nobody to get in the way. Build the wall!

And so it is indeed being built, at the cost of violating not just the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, but Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Organ Pipe National Monument, the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, the historic town center of Roma, Texas, and other sublime and exceptional places. One might ask why so much uniqueness and rarity lies along our southern border. The short answer is that the borderlands are the meeting place of biological communities as well as cultures. As Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña puts it, “The border is the juncture, not the edge.”

But an edge is exactly what President Trump’s wall would make it. Wall construction was and remains his foremost campaign pledge: 500 miles of wall by November of 2020, or 450 miles, or whatever the number du jourhappens to be. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post, and others have tried to deflate the president’s boasts by asserting that he’s actually built no new wall and his promises are empty.

In their calculations, substituting a 30-foot-tall wall for vehicle barriers is only “replacement” and therefore doesn’t constitute “new” construction. That’s like arguing that mooring an aircraft carrier where a rowboat used to be changes nothing because there’s still just one vessel in the harbor. Such semantic jousting only camouflages the pervasive damage already being done both to people and to the land on the border — and there’s no end in sight. The congressional budget agreement hammered out in December 2019 appropriates another $1.375 billion for wall construction for fiscal year 2020, while removing obstacles to yet more transfers of Pentagon funds. And Trump is not being shy about those transfers.  He evidently plans to divert $7.2 billion more from legitimate Pentagon projects to wall building this year.

The international drug cartels should be thanking us. The wall will not curb their principal business of smuggling and the Trump administration’s new immigration policies have turned what was formerly a minor sideline — kidnapping people for ransom — into a growth industry. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers to whom the U.S. has refused entry are now huddled in cardboard slums in Mexico’s border towns, vulnerable to human predators. Their relatives in the United States — the people they were trying to reach — will beg, borrow, or steal to pay the ransoms that the increasingly busy (and brutal) kidnappers in Mexico demand.

That, however, is just collateral damage in the land of the free. Of course, we treat asylum seekers as though they were an inferior variety of human being. They talk funny. They aren’t like us. And we treat the borderlands and its creatures with the same loyalty we showed the Kurds. After all, we are America. Behind our wall, we are great again.

William deBuys writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is the author of nine books, including The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures and A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.

Copyright ©2020 William deBuys — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 January 2020
Word Count: 3,581
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Last night saw the final debate between candidates running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Naturally, this morning’s papers are full of claims about winners and losers. As I have said often here at the Editorial Board, “winners and losers” with respect to debates is a political fiction. What’s real is the human desire for a victor rising to the top. We need one so much our press corps invents one for us.

My argument isn’t empirical. History may offer numerous examples of clear outcomes. But if there’s any clear outcome we can draw from this cycle’s Democratic debates it’s the Democratic debates made hardly any difference at all. Ever since the former vice president announced his candidacy, he has been in the lead, according to the aggregate of public opinion surveys. Even when Joe Biden was pronounced a “loser,” as when Kamala Harris challenged his mixed Senate record, he came out stronger than ever.

Something is happening. I don’t think it’s because everyone and his mother chose to run. I don’t think it’s because the Democratic National Committee decided against using its own polling as criteria for who gets to participate in the debates. The top three or four candidates have been the top three or four candidates for months. Polling has been so consistent as to be remarkably predictable. There’s a reason why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens stuck knives into each other over the weekend. They need to do something to break the deadlock. But there may be nothing they can do.

Last night’s debate was the first to feature an all-white panel. Cory Booker dropped out this week. So did Julian Castro at the turn of 2020. Kamala Harris left the trail last year. The conventional wisdom is the Democratic Party isn’t as woke as it seems to be. The conventional conclusion is Democratic voters want a “moderate” like Joe Biden.

This interpretation is understandable yet simplistic. It’s also color-blind. It does not take into account who is standing behind Biden. The majority of his supporters are not white working-class voters who went for Donald Trump last time. His base is black. Biden isn’t leading despite saying some kinda sorta racist things offending the wokest Democrat. He’s leading because of them. Many black voters believe if he can win over some racist white voters, he can defeat the most racist president of our lifetimes.

Some pundits argue that liberals are out of touch with the Democratic base. That may be true but it’s not because the base is more conservative than liberals would prefer. The base is just more risk-averse. That’s my understanding of writers like Theodore Johnson, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He says we’re undervaluing the role of black pragmatism. It may be true black voters want candidates like Harris and Booker, but what they want even more, Johnson argued, is “voting out the president.”

“A viable Biden campaign is likely to remain the practical choice for most black voters,” Professor Johnson wrote for the Washington Post in June. “Pragmatism may not inspire, excite or check all the boxes on voters’ wish lists, but it may be what transforms Obama’s second-in-command into the country’s commander in chief.”

Black pragmatism may be misguided, but it’s shrewd. Bill Clinton did his share of race-baiting during the 1992 presidential election. He went out of his way to demonstrate to white working-class voters Democrats were not a black party. He signed into law punitive sentencing measures. He pushed cuts to welfare. He did things harmful to African Americans. Yet he did enough to protect hard-won gains in civil rights for Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison defended him against Republican attempts to remove him, calling Clinton “the first black president.”

The Democratic Party is a black party, of course, in that winning the nomination is impossible without the support of a majority of black Democrats. That leaves Bernie Sanders in a pickle. He does not have the penumbra of Barack Obama. He’s certainly a risky choice. Put these together to see why he’s trailing Biden, and why his long-shot strategy is cobbling together a base of power inside and outside the Democratic Party.

That he has no chance of taking Biden’s voters means he has to take Warren’s, and that means hyping the differences between them when there is, in terms of substance, not much difference between them. Contrary to popular belief, and to the branding of his campaign, Sanders is not a socialist. He’s not a democratic socialist. He’s not a social democrat. He’s a very liberal liberal in FDR’s mold. Though FDR rejected right-wing accusations of being a socialist, Sanders has succeeded in reclaiming the epithet. But success has limits. Black voters might support him if not for calling himself a socialist.

Well, probably not. Part of Sanders’ appeal is hostility toward the Democratic Party. Part of his problem is by attacking the Democratic Party, he’s attacking the base necessary for winning the Democratic Party’s nomination — that is, black Democrats. This factor combined with the literal, physical threat of a fascist president to Americans of color leads to a rather predictable conclusion. What we learned during this year’s Democratic debates is that the Democratic debates hardly mattered at all.

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: 15 January 2020
Word Count: 875
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As if the swirling pace of events lately were not enough to expose the rudderless nature of Turkey’s regional foreign policy, the killing of al-Quds Force Major-General Qassem Soleimani along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, leader of the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia and deputy commander of Al-Hashed al-Shaabi, added to the confusion in Ankara.

Turkish media were once again mired in their blurred optics, with Islamist and leftist media joining ranks to condemn US imperialism while ignoring the divisive, violent and subversive activities of Soleimani in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in the furtherance of Iranian expansionism.

Turkish opposition media tried to determine what to make of the killings and their aftermath while Islamist pro-government outlets speculated about whether Soleimani’s death could benefit Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This explains the remarkable delay in Ankara’s reaction to the eruption of tension between Iran and the United States. In a routine statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry employed cautious language, saying: “Turkey has always been against foreign interventions, assassinations and sectarian clashes in the region. We call upon all parties to show restraint and act responsibly, avoiding moves that can threaten the peace and stability in the region.”

From the various statements in Ankara, it was obvious that official sources had their eyes and ears locked on what Erdogan would say. Eventually, many of them focused on his hints that Turkey was involved in reducing tensions between Iran and the United States. This seemed to be an “aha moment” to suggest that Erdogan had realised that returning Turkey to a soft power role and adopting an intermediary mission would take him out of the dark hole into which he had squeezed himself.

While it was true that, in the killing of Soleimani, Erdogan might have seen windows of opportunity but it didn’t include a genuine recalibration of his pursuits in the region.

On the face of it, the death of Soleimani and Muhandis might have come as a relief for Erdogan’s government. They represented Shia expansionism in the region but, more important, a steady stumbling block for Turkey’s pursuit of regime change to the benefit of Sunni jihadists in Syria. Good riddance of anything supportive of Damascus, as long as it doesn’t rock the vulnerable boat Turkey and Russia are rowing.

Erdogan likely saw a tactical opportunity for a go-between role between US President Donald Trump and Tehran. Despite the historical rivalry between Turkey and Iran and despite the Sunni-Shia divide, Turkey under Erdogan’s predominantly Islamist rule since 2012 has deepened trade with Iran, often challenging the US embargo — on several occasions crossing the line. Two massive graft investigations in Turkey in 2013 brought about serious charges involving a US federal court specialising in organised crime.

At the centre of the cases stood top figures of the Erdogan administration and Halkbank. Experts said the findings constituted the tip of the iceberg, extending far beyond the $30 billion in an oil-for-gold scheme involving Turkish and Iranian governments.

The trial in New York continues to be the main parameter through which Erdogan shapes his policies with Washington. His once ceaseless obsession with having the cases in the US courts dismissed has evaporated. This is one of the major reasons he has Trump as the sole American figure who supports him in Washington.

If any of the suggestions that Erdogan may adopt an intermediary role in helping de-escalate Iran-US tensions are true, it is through calculations by the Turkish president. It may be true that Trump will need damage-control efforts and dialogue-by-proxy with Tehran. If he reaches out to his friend in Ankara, Trump is highly likely to have a familiar condition thrown at him: Help me so we all forget the breach of Iranian embargo that my folks have been involved in, free Halkbank of charges so we can all proceed to better times.

As the US 2020 election season begins, Trump and Erdogan know they need each other — badly. For the former, any regional victory he can sell to his public would secure a second term. For the latter, helping his sole friend win the election would grant Erdogan carte blanche for further consolidation of absolutist power at home.

It may be far-fetched but Soleimani’s death may provide such a breakthrough moment to serve the two men’s personal interests.

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: 15 January 2020
Word Count: 713
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This seems like a strange moment to be writing about “the deep state” with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment, just as we had settled into a more or less stable stalemate over when (and if) the Senate will hold an impeachment trial, the president shook the snow globe again, by ordering the assassination of foreign military officials and threatening the destruction of Iran’s cultural sites. Nothing better than the promise of new war crimes to take the world’s attention away from a little thing like extorting a U.S. ally to help oneself get reelected.

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly the moment to think about the so-called deep state, if by that we mean the little-noticed machinery of governance that keeps dependably churning on in that same snow globe’s pedestal, whatever mayhem may be swirling around above it. Maybe this is even the moment to be grateful for those parts of the government whose inertia keeps the ship of state moving in the same general direction, regardless of who’s on the bridge at any given time.

However, that sometimes benign inertia is not what the people who coined that term meant by deep state.

What is a “deep state”? The expression is actually a translation of the Turkish phrase derin devlet. As historian Ryan Gingeras has explained, it arose as a way of describing “a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” In the Turkish case, those “unacknowledged persons” were, in fact, agents of organized criminal enterprises working within the government.

Gingeras, an expert on organized crime in Turkey, has described how alliances between generals, government officials, and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” allowed the creation and execution of “policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” In the Turkish case, the history of such alliances can be traced to struggles for power in the first decades of the previous century, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The interpenetration of the drug cartels and government in Mexico is another example of a deep state at work. The presence of cartel collaborators in official positions and in the police hierarchy at all levels makes it almost impossible for any president, even the upright Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to defeat them.

The term “deep state” has also been used to characterize the role of the military in Egypt. As Sarah Chayes has written in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, Egypt’s military has long been a state-within-a-state with its own banking and business operations that constitute 25%-40% of the Egyptian economy. It’s the country’s largest landowner and the ultimate maker and breaker of Egyptian presidents. In 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak, who had run the country for 30 years, to resign. The military certainly had something to do with that resignation, since he handed over power to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

When, however, a nascent democracy brought their longtime opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood, to power with the election of Mohamed Morsi, that was too much for the generals. It helped that Morsi made his own missteps, including the repression of peaceful protesters. So there wasn’t much objection when, in 2012, his own minister of defense, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, led a military coup against Morsi. Sisi and the Egyptian military have run the country directly ever since, making the state and the deep state one and the same.

Donald Trump and the “deep state” From his earliest days in the White House, Donald Trump and his officials have inveighed against what the president has regularly labeled the “deep state.” What he’s meant by the term, though, is something different from its more traditional use. Rather than referring to a “shadow or parallel system of government” operating outside official channels, for Trump the deep state is the government — or at least those parts of it that frustrate him in any way.

When, for example, the judicial system throws up barriers to government by fiat, that’s the deep state at work as far as he’s concerned. Want to proclaim “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” but the courts put a hold on your executive order? Blame the deep state.

Did anonymous government officials tell the press that your National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, lied about his contacts with Russian officials? Blame the deep state for the leaks.

As early as March 2017, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged that the administration did indeed believe in the existence of a deep state, a shadow operation that had infiltrated many of the offices and activities of the federal government. A reporter asked him, “Does the government believe that there is such a thing as a ‘deep state’ that is actively working to undermine the president?”

Spicer replied:

“I think that there’s no question when you have eight years of one party in office that there are people who stay in government — affiliated with, joined — and continue to espouse the agenda of the previous administration, so I don’t think it should come to any surprise that there are people that burrowed into government during the eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it.”

In other words, for the Trump administration and its supporters, the deep state is any part of the apparatus of government itself that doesn’t do their absolute bidding.

The Huffington Post has assembled a convenient list of some of Trump’s tweets invoking the “deep state.” Here’s a summary:

•  In November 2017, he blamed unnamed “deep state authorities” for a failure to continue investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling those authorities “Rigged and corrupt.”

•  That same month, he tweeted that the FBI and the Justice Department were withholding information about “surveillance of associates of Donald Trump.” This was, he said, “Big stuff. Deep State,” and he demanded that someone “Give this information NOW!”

•  In January 2018, he accused Hillary Clinton’s former aide Huma Abedin of putting “Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents.” Did this mean, he asked, that the “Deep State Justice Dept must finally act”? If it were to “finally act,” he added, it should be “Also on Comey & others.”

•  In May 2018, he accused the “Criminal Deep State” of going after “Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam” and “getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” Apparently the president was referring to a conspiracy theory of his that the Obama administration had embedded a spy in his campaign operation in order to ensure a Hillary Clinton victory.

•  In July 2018, he was ruminating about a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server that the FBI, he believed, had failed to impound. Was this failure, he wondered, an action of the “Deep State”? (Yes, this is the same nonexistent server he later asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for in his country as a precondition for releasing U.S. military aid.)

•  In September 2018, he inveighed against the deep state in general, suggesting that it and its allies were upset at his policy achievements. This time he suggested that the deep state does have its extra-governmental allies, “the Left” and “the Fake News Media”: “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy — & they don’t know what to do. The Economy is booming like never before, Jobs are at Historic Highs, soon TWO Supreme Court Justices…”

Trump, in other words, sees the U.S. government as infected by “Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters, to push their own secret agendas.” Those “operatives,” he told a rally in 2018, are “truly a threat to democracy itself.”

Does the United States have a deep state? The November House impeachment hearings brought us the testimony of a number of career diplomats and civil servants like Marie Yovanovich, the former ambassador to Ukraine, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine specialist on the National Security Council. Their appearance led John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA, to exclaim in a speech at George Mason University, “Thank God for the deep state.”

He meant it as a joke, but he was also pointing out that their dignified testimony might serve as a reminder of the value of government service. “Everyone here has seen this progression of diplomats, and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now,” he explained. Those who watched that progression, he said, certainly recognized that “these are people who are doing their duty.” McLaughlin told National Public Radio’s Greg Myre and Rachel Treisman that he had received some “blowback” from his joke, and added:

“I think it’s a silly idea. There is no ‘deep state.’ What people think of as the ‘deep state’ is just the American civil service, social security, the people who fix the roads, health and human services, Medicare.”

I’ll give one cheer for that kind of deep state: not a secret, extra-official shadow government, but the actual workings of government itself for the benefit of the people it’s meant to serve. Personally, I’m all for people who devote their lives to making sure our food is as safe as possible, the cars we drive won’t kill us, our planes stay up in the air, and roads and railways are built and maintained to connect us, not to speak of having clean air and water, public schools and universities to educate our young people, and a social security system to provide a safety net for people of my age — all of which, by the way, is in danger from this president, his administration, and the Republican party.

But there’s another way of thinking about the deep state, one that suggests an ongoing threat not to Donald Trump and his pals but to this democracy and the world. I’m thinking, of course, of that vast — if informal, complex, and sometimes internally competitive — consortium composed of the industries and government branches that make up what President Dwight Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex.” This was exactly the “state” that I think President Obama encountered when he decided to shut down the George W. Bush-era CIA torture program and found that the price for compliance was a promise not to prosecute anyone for crimes committed in the so-called war on terror. January 2009 was, as he famously said, a time to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Here is Mike Lofgren, a long-time civil servant and aide to many congressional Republicans, writing in 2014 about that national security machine for BillMoyers.com. In “Anatomy of the Deep State,” he described the power and reach of this apparatus in chilling terms:

“There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol…

“Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

Lofgren was not describing “a secret, conspiratorial cabal.” Rather, he was arguing that “the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.” This has certainly been the experience of those who have, in particular, opposed U.S. military adventures abroad. They discover that many of the lies, deceptions, and crimes of that “state within a state” are openly there for all to see and are being committed in the equivalent of broad daylight with utter impunity.

This, by the way, creates certain obvious problems for those of us who oppose the presidency and the striking new militarism of Donald Trump — if, at least, it means embracing such representatives of Lofgren’s deep state as that old war criminal, John Bolton. He has not become a progressive hero just because he’s suddenly proclaimed himself ready, if subpoenaed, to testify in the Senate impeachment trial of his former boss. If Bolton chooses to do so, you can be sure that he will not be motivated by a devotion to democratic government or the rule of law.

Trump’s own relationship to the national security deep state has been ambivalent at best. It’s clear that many of those officials initially thought he might be a weapon they could aim and shoot at will, but he’s turned out to be far more bizarre and unpredictable than any of them expected. There’s evidence, for example, that the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani was presented to Trump as the most extreme option possible — in a bid to convince him to act against Iran, but in a less drastic way. As the New York Times reported recently, “Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable,” but they don’t expect presidents to choose the decoy. Donald Trump is clearly not one of those presidents.

There is a sense, however, in which the United States under Trump does resemble the original Turkish conception of a deep state, that “kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.” That’s a pretty apt description, for instance, of the actions of the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in relation to U.S. policy towards Ukraine, which he’s been coordinating and in some sense directing for some time.

The only difference in this case is that Trump has been fool enough to acknowledge his personal lawyer’s role. May that foolishness get him turned out of office, one way or another. In the meantime, I’ll keep giving my one cheer for the civil servants who keep the wheels turning. I suspect, however, that as the world awaits developments in the Middle East now that Trump has followed 18 years of U.S. state (and deep state) disaster there with his own impetuous intervention, few people will be offering many cheers for the United States of America.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article appeared) and teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 January 2020
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I argued yesterday Nancy Pelosi has more leverage over the form and integrity of the Senate impeachment trial than most people think. I argued Mitch McConnell has less. One of these people must bear the onerous weight of a lying, thieving, philandering sadist making a fetish of exoneration, and that person is not the speaker of the House.

More importantly, the drip-drip-drip of bad news for Donald Trump is affecting GOP senators facing reelection this year. There are more Senate Republicans running for reelection in this cycle than there were Senate Democrats in 2018. The difference is the Democrats aren’t yoked to the weakest, most unpopular president of our lifetimes. The weakest, most unpopular president of our lifetime has now been impeached.

It would seem I was wrong. Pelosi announced last week she intended to ask Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to draw up a resolution for sending articles of impeachment to the upper chamber. (The full House will vote on that resolution Wednesday.) That would seem to be capitulation, as if Pelosi were caving. But that was before CBS News reported, and others have since confirmed, Pelosi’s gambit worked out pretty much as intended, forcing the GOP’s hand.

Yamiche Alcindor, of PBS Newshour, wrote: “Confirmed: A source tells me White House officials increasingly believe that at least four Republicans, and likely more, will vote to call witnesses at the Senate impeachment trial including Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and possibly Cory Gardner” (my italics).

The veteran White House reporter added: “As first reported by CBS News, a source tells me the White House views Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as a “wild card” and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee as an ‘institutionalist’ who might vote to call witnesses. That shows Trump is increasingly aware that the trial could be damaging.”

If public opinion is pressuring vulnerable Republican Senators to call for witnesses, McConnell will allow it. There’s very little the Senate majority leader cares about more than keeping his Senate conference in the majority. To be sure, he cares about holding the White House. But Trump isn’t worth the cost of a complete wipe-out in November.

It remains to be seen whether Romney and others actually vote for witnesses, and even if they do, it remains to be seen which witnesses are called. Hugh Hewitt and Byron York, influential “conservative” pundits, are urging the Republicans to demand testimony from the anonymous whistle-blower. Others are demanding testimony from Hunter Biden and even his formerly vice presidential dad. Getting the Senate to call witnesses isn’t the same as fair. Even so, things seem to be going where they should.

Things are going where they should for another reason. The fight has been so far only between the chambers of the US Congress and between the political parties. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have called on the judicial branch to interfere. That’s as it should be. The Constitution gives the judiciary no meaningful role. It has a bit part. The US Supreme Court’s chief justice presides over a Senate trial as a judge would preside over a court of law. But even that role is perfunctory. John Roberts won’t even be calling balls and strikes. He won’t be making any meaningful judgments at all.

That the Constitution gives no role to the judiciary doesn’t prevent people from arguing in good faith it should have one. We have recently seen a spate of articles, in the run-up to the Senate trial, saying John Roberts could compel witnesses if he wished to or the Supreme Court could legally review Trump’s conviction if that were to happen. Like I said, all of these arguments seem in good faith. All of them are bad.

The last thing we should want is for the high court to settle a fight that can only be settled by partisan conflict in the US Congress. The last thing we should do is cede the sovereignty of the people to nine unelected jurists. The last thing we should do is repeat what we have been doing: turning the high court into a jurisprudential fetish.

It may seem politically neutral to call on the court to settle constitutional crises like the one we are now experiencing, but in effect, it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly political, and not the kind of “political” any democratic republic should want. To call on the court to settle a constitutional crisis is an exercise in authoritarianism. It’s empowering people whose small number — nine — should never command that kind of power.

Again, so far neither party has asked for the court’s interference, and hopefully they never will. Politics is about conflict. Politics in a republican democracy is about persuasion. Pelosi, by delaying articles of impeachment, appears to be persuading otherwise recalcitrant Republicans to reconsider the wisdom of a fair and impartial trial. That’s what we should want. Especially, that’s what liberals should want.

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: 14 January 2020
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