The conventional wisdom is Nancy Pelosi has no leverage in her bid to force Mitch McConnell to hold a fair impeachment trial in the Senate. The thinking is the House speaker can delay sending articles of impeachment, but the Republicans there aren’t in any hurry. She can waste more time. The Senate majority leader is still going to “win.”

I’ve always thought the conventional wisdom is myopic. Pelosi does not have to bear the weight of a lying, thieving, philandering sadist making a fetish of exoneration. McConnell, however, does. When they impeached him, the Democrats cut Trump in ways he’s never been cut. He’s bleeding. The only way to stop it, from Trump’s point of view, is for the Senate to clear him, and maybe not even then. Trump is, has been and always will be weak. Impeachment made it apparent to all. His ego won’t let it go. The only thing he wants to know from McConnell is when they’re going to acquit him.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom does not account for ongoing reporting about the president’s extortion of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. The Center for Public Integrity and Just Security sued for access to administration emails showing the Pentagon was fully aware that blocking millions in aid money was illegal.

The US Constitution and federal statutes gives the Congress, and only the Congress, authority over how money is spent and why. Trump can’t legally withhold money allocated by the Congress for Ukraine even if he does so to encourage anti-corruption efforts. It’s not his call. The Pentagon made its objections clear, but Trump ordered the money withheld anyway. In other words, the president knew he was breaking the law even as he was breaking it.

Though the articles of impeachment are about abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress, not about this particular crime, news of Trump’s lawbreaking affirms them in effect. It may also bring more pressure to Republican senators facing reelection this year. Protecting his majority is the only political factor McConnell truly cares about.

The conventional wisdom does not account for recent events either. It’s becoming clearer each day the president didn’t have a good reason two weeks ago for bringing the United States to the brink of war with Iran. The administration said Trump was justified in ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. It said Iran’s top general in charge of its proxy wars in the Middle East was planning an “imminent attack.” Well, it turns out the administration was — how do I say this? — covering Trump’s ass.

On Sunday morning, Mark Esper was explicit in saying he saw “no hard evidence that four American embassies had been under possible threat when President Donald Trump authorized the targeting of Iran’s top commander,” according to the AP.

Compare that to this morning’s reporting from NBC News’ Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube. They said the president authorized Soleimani’s assassination seven months ago. They wrote: “The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final sign-off on any specific operation to kill Soleimani” (my italics).

That leaves us to infer a reason based on the known context of the president’s choice. That known context was captured by the Wall Street Journal. Deep inside a story about Trump’s national security team, seven reporters said: “Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate” (my italics).

The president authorized the killing in June but waited to sign off on it until right before his impeachment trial was set to begin in the Senate. It is reasonable, therefore, to suggest Trump ordered a man’s death for political reasons, not for national-security reasons (there aren’t any). I suggest he tried creating an image of himself as a war president too important to remove from office. I suggest Soleimani’s assassination is just one more way Trump has abused his power, and hence affirmed his indictment.

Does this mean Pelosi will “win”? I don’t make such claim. But the politics of this intra-branch stand-off is more complex than many in the Washington press corps believe. Pelosi has more leverage than she appears to. McConnell has less. She doesn’t stand with a president continuing to commit impeachable acts. He does.

Even if the Senate clears him, McConnell’s conference must explain acquittal to voters in the face of inevitable reporting showing even more wrongdoing by the president. Trump has always tread impotently. Are the Senate Republicans going to follow his path?

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: 13 January 2020
Word Count: 764
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The plain truth can often be so obvious as to be invisible. That’s my more charitable interpretation of the press corps’ coverage of Qassem Soleimani’s assassination. My less charitable interpretation? Reporters and editors in Washington, D.C., will find a way to avoid seeing the plain truth because the plain truth is too unbearable to see.

It would be unbearable to think the president ordered a man dead in order to give Republican Senators a means of defending him against an indictment for abuse of power and obstruction. It would be unthinkable for him to bring America to the brink of war in order to create an image of a “war president” too indispensable to remove.

As a result, the press corps has been busy this week reporting in granular detail virtually every aspect of Donald Trump’s decision last week to target and kill Iran’s top general in Baghdad. Everything, that is, short of reporting the plain, obvious and unbearable truth: the president ordered a man’s death because he was impeached.

That reporters and editors in Washington, D.C, find ways to avoid seeing the plain truth was brought to mind by this morning’s Wall Street Journal. In a piece about the president’s new national security team — how its “cohesion” resulted in Soleimani’s assassination — seven esteemed reporters committed one of journalism’s professional sins. They buried the lede. Nearly 30 paragraphs into a 2,200-word story, they said:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said (my italics).

Now, these are unnamed sources. They were speaking on background. In isolation, I wouldn’t make much of this. But in context, it matters — so much so, it warrants its own reporting, which we have not yet seen. That context would be the absence of legitimate non-political reasons for ordering Soleimani’s death. In all the reporting I’ve read, administration officials can’t keep their stories straight. On the one hand, that suggests no good reason. On the other, that suggests the most obvious one.

The buried lede suggests something else worth exploring. The president may not have been alone in seeking to please Republican senators who will sit in judgement of him during the impeachment trial. It may be that a Republican senator — Lindsey Graham comes to mind — encouraged the president to act on Soleimani. In that case, we would have to face yet another unbearable truth: some Republicans in the United States Senate are conspiring with the president in defrauding the people to maintain power.

Though unbearable, it’s plain and it’s obvious. The Republicans really are dumping constitutional principles once dearly and closely held for the sake of power. Graham and other Republicans declared their intent to violate preemptively the oath all impeachment jurors take to “do impartial justice, according to the Constitution and law.” Graham and Mitch McConnell, the current Senate majority leader, were highly principled during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Now that the defendant is a Republican, however, those principles are rather beside the point.

What’s good for Clinton is not good for Trump — that’s not a matter of hypocrisy. I can’t stress that enough, because that’s another unbearable truth. There are two value systems, according to the Republican theory and practice. There is one set of laws, rules and norms for Republicans. There’s another set for Democrats. One protects. One punishes. The GOP benefits enormously when the press corps sees just one.

It seemed hypocritical when Rand Paul, a Republican senator, said yesterday he was ready to debate separations of powers after administration officials told him and GOP Senator Mike Lee not to talk about military intervention in Iran. Lee said “it was un-American. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s wrong.” Their Democratic colleagues might have thought they prepared to support the conviction of Trump for the same offense. Lee made it clear he wasn’t. He told Fox News Thursday the president is the best.

Again, this isn’t hypocrisy. According to Republican theory and practice, Republicans get to be principled. Democrats do not. Republicans get to have the right to respect and deference. Democrats do not. When the Republicans impeached a Democrat, they stood on high moral ground. When the Democrats impeached a Republican, according to Republicans, the Democrats did no such thing. The Republican got to call witnesses. Democrats do not. There are two value systems — separate and unequal.

That, to me, is not just a plain truth. It’s not just an unbearable truth. It’s a pernicious truth. The Republican Party can and will commit unthinkable acts to maintain power — like permitting foreign interference and encouraging acts of war, not to mention suppressing the vote and enshrining minority rule in constitutional and statutory law — even when those acts slowly eat away the foundations of our democratic covenant.

Now imagine a press corps reporting the plain and obvious truth.

I think things would be different.

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: 10 January 2020
Word Count: 828
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Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.

Oh, you’re going to bring that up immediately? Okay, you’re right. It’s true enough that the U.S. military can’t win a war anymore. In this century, it’s never come out on top anywhere, not once, not definitively. And yes, just to get a step ahead of you, everywhere it’s set foot across the Greater Middle East and Africa, it seems to have killed startling numbers of people and uprooted so many more, sending lots of them into exile and so unsettling other parts of the world as well. In the process, it’s also had remarkable success spreading failed states and terror groups far and wide.

Al-Qaeda, whose 19 suicidal hijackers so devastatingly struck this country on September 11, 2001, was just a modest outfit then (even if its leader dreamt of drawing the U.S. into conflicts across the Islamic world that would promote his group big time). Nineteen years later, its branches have spread from Yemen to West Africa, while the original al-Qaeda still exists. And don’t forget its horrific progeny, the Islamic State, or ISIS (originally al-Qaeda in Iraq). Though the U.S. military has declared it defeated in its “caliphate” (it isn’t, not truly), its branches have multiplied from the Philippines deep into Africa.

And the Afghan War, that original American invasion of this century, remains hell on Earth more than 18 years later. In December, the Washington Post broke a story about interviews on that conflict conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction with 400 key insiders, military and civilian, revealing that it was a war of (well-grasped) error. As that paper’s reporter, Craig Whitlock, put it: “Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Many of those generals and other officials who had claimed, year after year, that there was “progress” in Afghanistan, that the U.S. had turned yet another “corner,” admitted to the Inspector General’s interviewers that they had been lying to the rest of us. In truth, so long after the invasion of 2001, this wasn’t exactly news (not if you had been paying attention anyway). And it couldn’t have been more historically familiar. After all, U.S. military commanders and other key officials had, in a similar fashion, regularly hailed “progress” in the Vietnam War years, too. As U.S. war commander General William Westmoreland put it in an address to the National Press Club in 1967, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view,” a sentiment later boiled down by American officialdom to seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In fact, half a century later, these, too, have proved to be tunnel years for the U.S. military in its global war on terror, which might more accurately be called a global war of error. Take Iraq, the country that, in the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush and crew so triumphantly invaded, claiming a connection between its autocratic ruler, Saddam Hussein, and al-Qaeda, while citing the dangers of the weapons of mass destruction he supposedly possessed. Both claims were, of course, fantasies propagated by officials dreaming of using that invasion to establish a Pax Americana in the oil-rich Middle East forever and a day. (“Mission accomplished!”)

So many years later, Americans are still dying there; American air and drone strikes are still ongoing; and American troops are still being sent in, as Iraqis continue to die in significant numbers in a country turned into a stew of displacement, poverty, protest, and chaos. Meanwhile, ISIS (formed in an American prison camp in Iraq) threatens to resurge amid the never-ending mess that invasion created — and war with Iran seems to be the order of the day.

And just to continue down a list that’s little short of endless, don’t forget Somalia. The U.S. military has been fighting there, on and off, with strikingly negative consequences since the infamous Blackhawk Down disaster of 1993. Last year, American air strikes rose again to record levels there, while — no surprise — the terror outfit Washington has been fighting in that country since 2006, al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda offshoot, seems only to be gaining strength.

Hey, even the Russians got a (grim) win in Syria; the U.S., nowhere. Not in Libya, a failed state filled with warring militias and bad guys of every sort in the wake of a U.S.-led overthrow of the local autocrat. Not in Niger, where four American soldiers died at the hands of an ISIS terror group that still thrives; not in Yemen, yet another failed state where a Washington-backed Saudi war follows perfectly in the U.S. military’s footsteps in the region. So, yes, you’re right to challenge me with all of that.

How to run a war of error Nonetheless, I stand by my initial statement. In these years, the American war system has proven to be a remarkable institutional success story. Think of it this way: in the military of the twenty-first century, failure is the new success. In order to grasp this, you have to stop looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and the rest of those embattled lands and start looking instead at Washington, D.C. While you’re at it, you need to stop thinking that the gauge of success in war is victory. That’s so mid-twentieth century of you! In fact, almost the opposite may be true when it comes to the American way of war today.

After more than 18 years of what, once upon a time, would have been considered failure, tell me this: Is the Pentagon receiving more money or less? In fact, it’s now being fed record amounts of tax dollars (as is the whole national security state). Admittedly, Congress can’t find money for the building or rebuilding of American infrastructure — China now has up to 30,000 kilometers of high-speed rail and the U.S. not one — and is riven by party animosities on issue after issue, but funding the Pentagon? No problem. When it comes to that, there’s hardly a question, hardly a dispute at all. Agreement is nearly unanimous.

Failure, in other words, is the new success and that applies as well to the “industrial” part of the military-industrial complex. That reality was caught in a Washington Post headline the day after a CIA drone assassinated General Qassem Suleimani: “Defense stocks spike after airstrike against Iranian commander.” Indeed, the good times clearly lay ahead. In the age of Trump, when the last secretary of defense was a former Boeing executive and the present one a former lobbyist for arms-maker Raytheon, it’s been weapons galore all the way to the bank. Who cares if those weapons really work as advertised or if the wars in which they’re used are winnable, as long as they’re bought at staggering prices (and other countries buy them as well)? If you don’t believe me, just check out Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system ever (that doesn’t really work). Hey, in 2019, that company got a $2.43 billion contract just for spare parts for the plane!

And this version of a success story applies not just to funding and weaponry but to the military’s leadership as well. Keep in mind that, after almost two decades without a victory in sight, if you check any poll, you’ll find that the U.S. military remains the most admired institution around (or the one Americans have most “confidence” in). And under the circumstances, tell me that isn’t an accomplishment of the first order.

For just about every key figure in the U.S. military, you can now safely say that failure continues to be the order of the day. Consider it the twenty-first-century version of a military insurance policy: keep on keeping on without ever thinking outside the box and you’ll be pushed up the chain of command to ever more impressive positions (and, sooner or later, through Washington’s infamous “revolving door” onto the corporate boards of weapons makers and other defense firms). You’ll be hailed as a great and thoughtful commander, a genuine historian of war, and a strategist beyond compare.  You’ll be admired by one and all.

Americans of another age would have found this strange indeed, but not today. Take, for instance, former Secretary of Defense and Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis who led troops into Afghanistan in 2001 and again in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2004, as commander of the 1st Marine Division, he was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”

And then, of course, he only rose further, ending up as the head of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (and you know how that went), until he retired in 2013 and joined the corporate board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Then, in 2016, a certain Donald J. Trump took a liking to the very idea of a general nicknamed “mad dog” and appointed him to run the Department of Defense (which should probably be renamed the Department of Offense). There, with full honors, the former four-star general oversaw the very same wars until, in December 2018, deeply admired by Washington journalists among others, he resigned in protest over a presidential decision to withdraw American troops from Syria (and rejoined the board of General Dynamics).

In terms of the system he was in, that may have been his only genuine “error,” his only true “defeat.” Fortunately for the Pentagon, another commander who had risen through the same dead-end wars, four-star Army General Mark Milley, having been appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew just what to whisper in the president’s ear — the magic word “oil,” or rather some version of protect (i.e. take) Syrian oil fields — to get him to send American troops back into that country to continue the local version of our never-ending wars.

By now, Milley’s rise to glory will seem familiar to you. In announcing his appointment as Army chief of staff in 2015, for instance, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called him “a warrior and a statesman.” He added, “He not only has plenty of operational and joint experience in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on the Joint Staff, but he also has the intellect and vision to lead change throughout the Army.” Exactly!

Milley had, in fact, fought in both the Afghan and Iraq wars, serving three tours of duty in Afghanistan alone. In other words, the more you don’t win — the more you are, in a sense, in error — the more likely you are to advance. Or as retired General Gordon Sullivan, president of the Association of the United States Army and a former chief of staff himself, put it then, Milley’s command experience in war and peace gave him “firsthand knowledge of what the Army can do and of the impact of resource constraints on its capabilities.”

In other words, he was a man ready to command who knew just how to handle this country’s losing wars and keep them (so to speak) on track. Once upon a time, such a crew of commanders would have been considered a military of losers, but no longer. They are now the eternal winners in America’s war of error.

In September 2013, Milley, then an Army three-star general, typically offered this ludicrously rosy assessment of Afghanistan’s American-trained and American-supplied security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.”

As Tony Karon wrote recently, “Either Milley was dissembling or he was deluded and therefore grotesquely incompetent.” One thing we know, though: when it comes to public military assessments of the Afghan War (and the global war on terror more generally), he was typical. For such commanders, it was invariably “progress” all the way.

Just in case you don’t quite see the pattern yet, after the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers came out last December, offering clear evidence that, whatever they said in public, America’s commanders saw little in the way of “progress” in the Afghan War, Milley promptly stepped up to the plate. He labeled that report’s conclusions “mischaracterizations.” He insisted instead that the endlessly optimistic public comments of generals like him had been “honest assessments… never intended to deceive either the Congress or the American people.”

Oh, and here’s a final footnote (as reported in the New York Times last year) on how Milley (and top commanders like him) operated — and not just in Afghanistan either:

As Army chief of staff, General Milley has come under criticism from some in the Special Operations community for his involvement in the investigation into the 2017 ambush in Niger that left four American soldiers dead. He persuaded Patrick M. Shanahan, who was acting defense secretary, to curtail a broader review, and also protected the career of an officer who some blamed for the ambush. General Milley’s backers said he prevented the officer from leading another combat unit.

Whatever you do, in other words, don’t give up the ghost (of error). Think of this as the formula for “success” in that most admired of institutions, the U.S. military. After all, Milley and Mattis are just typical of the commanders who rose (and are still rising) to ever more prestigious positions on the basis of losing (or at least not winning) an endless series of conflicts. Those failed wars were their tickets to success. Go figure.

Where Defeat Culture Leads In other words, the men who fought the twenty-first-century equivalents of Vietnam — though against right-wing Islamists, not left-wing nationalists and communists — the men who never for a second figured out how to win “hearts and minds” any better than General William Westmorland had half a century earlier, are now triumphantly running the show in Washington. Add in the corporate types who endlessly arm them for battle and lobby for more of the same while raking in the dough and you have a system that no one involved would want to change. It’s a formula for success that works like a dream (even if someday that dream is sure to end up looking like a nightmare).

Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture. In it, I traced how a deeply embedded American culture of triumph evaporated in the Vietnam War years, “its graveyard for all to see,” as “the answers of 1945 dissolved so quickly into the questions of 1965.” Speaking of the impact of that war on American culture, I added: “There was no narrative form that could long have contained the story of a slow-motion defeat inflicted by a nonwhite people in a frontier war in which the statistics of American victory seemed everywhere evident.”

Little did I know then how deeply a version of what might be called “defeat culture” would embed itself in American life. After all, Donald Trump couldn’t have been elected to “make America great again” without it. From the evidence of these years, nowhere was that culture more deeply absorbed (however unconsciously) than in the military itself, which has, in our time, managed to turn it into a version of the ultimate success story.

Afghanistan has, of course, long been known as “the graveyard of empires.” The Soviet Union fought Islamic militants (backed by the Saudis and the United States) for nine years there before, in 1989, the Red Army limped home in defeat to watch a drained empire implode two years later.  That left the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth and its military as the uncontested greatest one of all.

And it took that military just a decade to head for that same graveyard. In this century, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in the never-ending wars Washington has conducted across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, wars that represent an eternal reign (rain?) of error. I’ve long suspected that the Soviet Union wasn’t the only superpower with problems in 1991. Though it was anything but obvious at the time, I’ve since written: “It will undoubtedly be clear enough… that the U.S., seemingly at the height of any power’s power in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared, began heading for the exits soon thereafter, still enwreathed in self-congratulation and triumphalism.”

The question is: When will the far more powerful of the two superpowers of the Cold War era finally leave that graveyard of empires (now spread across a significant swath of the planet)? Still commanded by the losers of those very wars, will it, like the Red Army, limp home one day to watch its country implode? Will it leave a world of war, of the dead, of countless refugees and rubblized cities, and finally return to see its own society disintegrate in some fashion?

Who knows? But keep your eyes peeled in 2020 and beyond. Someday, the U.S. military’s war of error will come to an end and one thing seems certain: it won’t be pretty.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 January 2020
Word Count: 2,946
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The Iranians fired a dozen rockets last night into American compounds in Iraq. The strikes were retaliation for the president’s decision to assassinate that country’s top general. As the bombs fell, George Conway, a fierce conservative critic of Donald Trump, said something we should all bear in mind. It rings with a crystalline truth.

“It’s extremely difficult now to escape the conclusion that [Trump] started a war because he was impeached,” Conway wrote on Twitter. “I’d be perfectly happy to be wrong about this, but the evidence is hard to ignore. He let all sorts of transgressions by the Iranians go previously, and is perfectly happy to kowtow to evil foreign leaders … but suddenly, he chooses the option that the military thought too extreme to actually select, and then threatens to commit war crimes. What’s different now?” (my italics.)

Impeachment, he said.

The president hasn’t quite started a war. The news this morning is the Iranians sent warning they were going to strike. The result was no American or Iraqi casualties. Iran is likely to move on to more covert actions, as it has for decades in the Middle East. The goal appears to be pushing US forces out of Iraq entirely. Barring retaliation from the US, tensions may have peaked for now. Trump is making a statement later today.

That we’re not quite at war yet doesn’t diminish Conway’s point. There’s a reason Trump ordered Qassem Soleimani’s death. It wasn’t keeping Americans safer. It wasn’t killing him because he deserved it. The reason, once you think about it, is rather plain to see: Trump is trying to make himself out to be a war president. A war president, to his way of thinking, can’t be removed from office. A war president, he thinks, always gets reelected (false). The New York Times reported Tuesday the Trump campaign promoted Soleimani’s death days after his assassination. He’s telling us. Are we listening?

Well, some are.

According to a new Morning Consult survey (Jan. 4-5), majorities favor Trump’s impeachment as well as his removal. This pattern is growing or holding steady. (His job rating has been underwater since forever.) Fifty-two percent approve of impeachment while 42 percent disapprove (50 percent approve and 39 percent disapprove among independents). Fifty-one percent approve and 43 percent disapprove of removal after a Senate trial (independents were 47 percent approve to 40 percent disapprove).

I have no idea whether public opinion will change Republican Senators’ minds. My immediate point is the public is listening when Trump says killing Soleimani is good for him politically. (Well, he thought it was; as I argued Tuesday, it’s backfiring.) That he is saying this at all is more evidence the House Democrats were right to indict him and the Senate Republicans are wrong to sweep his serial crimes under the rug.

The Morning Consult survey raises another point. The Washington press corps tends to be myopic. It pays attention to one thing at a time, creating the impression that news events are unrelated. This is why Politico can run a piece Tuesday evening asserting Mitch McConnell “won” and Nancy Pelosi “lost” after McConnell said he had enough votes for trial rules excluding witness testimony. (That Pelosi “lost” is strange given McConnell can’t move until she sends articles of impeachment.) But if the new poll numbers are any indication, normal people are connecting the dots.

Soleimani’s death is just one more way Donald Trump has abused the powers of his office. He did it when he involved a foreign government in a conspiracy to defraud the American people. (That is, extorting Ukraine to “investigate” a chief rival.) He did it again when he ordered the assassination of a leader of a sovereign nation, which gives Senate Republicans reason to acquit him in order to protect a “war president.” (For that matter, he did it when he fired FBI Director James Comey for greenlighting a special counsel investigation showing decisively he’s an illegitimate president.)

Put another way, normal people are not waiting for the Washington press corps to catch up to them. They aren’t waiting for White House reporters to figure out the precise reason Trump did what he did — whether firing Comey, extorting Ukraine or killing Soleimani. They know the truth despite the absence of all the facts. They made up their minds. Every time Trump violates his oath of office — whether to defend the US Constitution or the United States itself — he deepens feelings already acutely felt.

George Conway is right. It is indeed difficult to escape the conclusion Trump escalated an international conflict because he was impeached. Unfortunately, the press corps will likely continue trying to escape it. Fortunately, normal people won’t.

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: 08 January 2020
Word Count: 782
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It’s becoming clearer by the hour. There was no legitimate reason for Donald Trump to order the military assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.

The allegation that Soleimani was planning an offensive against Americans is turning out to be malarkey. That he deserved death isn’t reason enough. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama chose not to target him. They feared what might happen.

With Soleimani dead, ISIS is set for a comeback. Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad will regain lost strength. Iran says it will restart nuclear weapons development. Iraqi politicians are pushing for US troops to exit, leaving Kurdish allies to face threats of genocide.

Was one man worth all this? No.

It’s becoming clearer by the hour. Trump had his own reasons for assassinating Iran’s second most important political figure. Those reasons had little if anything to do with satisfying his oath to defend and protect the US against all enemies. Those reasons appear to be similar to the reasons he involved Ukraine’s president in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people. He stood to gain from both personally.

To be sure, Mike Pompeo may have rolled him. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the secretary of state had long advocated for targeting the Iranian general. But an impeached president is a desperate president. Headlines are dominated by Trump’s disgrace and what comes next for him in a Senate trial. It figures Pompeo’s interests may have aligned perfectly with the president’s interest in changing the subject.

But like all things Trump, it’s backfiring.

He forgot, or didn’t bother trying to remember, that a president can’t start a war on his own. He has to ask the Congress for permission, or at least inform members what’s going to happen, and why. The closest Trump came to doing that was telling US Senator Lindsey Graham as they were golfing at Mar-A-Lago. Assassinating a top-ranking figure of a sovereign country is a BFD. Not telling the US Congress about it is an even bigger BFD. It’s the kind of BFD that might get a president impeached.

Remember: there was more to the Ukraine conspiracy than getting a foreign government to interfere with the people’s right to fully consent to Trump’s governance. He held up military aid to Ukraine under the false pretense of seeing corruption eradicated. But it doesn’t matter what his reasons were. The Congress has the power of the purse. The Congress decides what money is spent, and why. That he held up the money at all violates the Constitution as well as federal statutory law.

We know this is true thanks to the Center for Public Integrity and Just Security. Both outlets sued to gain access to administration emails showing without a doubt the president knew withholding military aid to Ukraine was illegal but ordered it withheld anyway. Importantly, this truth came to light after the House impeached him. In other words, the US Senate has, or should have, more than articles of impeachment to consider.

There is clear evidence of the president knowingly breaking federal law.

It remains to be seen if the Senate moves ahead with a fair impeachment trial. But whether it does is unlikely to stop the House from returning to its interrogative posture. Trump just gave the House Democrats, especially Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, another reason to hold public hearings. He gave them a reason to tell another story before the 2020 election — about a president so desperate to distract us from his impeachment trial he ordered a man killed, possibly starting a war.

Even if the Senate trial was a charade, it could take place as the House subpoenas testimony explaining why the president choose to assassinate Qassem Soleimani. Such a context would almost certainly ramp up pressure on Senate Republicans up for reelection this year. Side-by-side televised proceedings might undermine the Republican defense and underscore the rationale for removing Trump from office.

But even if the Senate acquits, the president faces another peril of his own making. As I said, evidence of lawbreaking with respect to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act came to the light after the House impeached him. Moreover, Schiff said today he would not rule out subpoenaing John Bolton, the former head of the White House Security Counsel. Schiff also told my friend Greg Sargent his panel will be fully engaged in uncovering the facts behind Qassem Soleimani’s death. Put all these together and you have the making of — yes, it’s hard to believe — yet another impeachment inquiry.

Is that likely? I wouldn’t say that. But this president and these Republicans depend for their success on the Democrats “playing by the rules.” That rule in this case is you never impeach a president twice. Well, Trump is no ordinary president, and there is no double jeopardy when it comes to impeachment. Anyway, it seems a round two would merely be an extension of round one. Trump abused his power for political gain once. He’s abusing it a second time. And he’ll keep abusing it until his last day in office.

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: 07 January 2020
Word Count: 846
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Thirty years ago this month, President George H.W. Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver his first State of the Union Address, the first post-Cold War observance of this annual ritual. Just weeks before, the Berlin Wall had fallen. That event, the president declared, “marks the beginning of a new era in the world’s affairs.” The Cold War, that “long twilight struggle” (as President John F. Kennedy so famously described it), had just come to an abrupt end. A new day was dawning. President Bush seized the opportunity to explain just what that dawning signified.

“There are singular moments in history, dates that divide all that goes before from all that comes after,” the president said. The end of World War II had been just such a moment. In the decades that followed, 1945 provided “the common frame of reference, the compass points of the postwar era we’ve relied upon to understand ourselves.” Yet the hopeful developments of the year just concluded — Bush referred to them collectively as “the Revolution of ’89” — had initiated “a new era in the world’s affairs.”

While many things were certain to change, the president felt sure that one element of continuity would persist: the United States would determine history’s onward course. “America, not just the nation but an idea,” he emphasized, is and was sure to remain “alive in the minds of people everywhere.”

“As this new world takes shape, America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom — today, tomorrow, and into the next century. Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores and the millions still struggling to be free. This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world — our new world.”

Bush had never shown himself to be a particularly original or imaginative thinker. Even so, during a long career in public service, he had at least mastered the art of packaging sentiments deemed appropriate for just about any occasion. The imagery he employed in this instance — America occupying the center of freedom’s widening circle — did not stake out a new claim devised for fresh circumstances. That history centered on what Americans professed or did expressed a hallowed proposition, one with which his listeners were both familiar and comfortable. Indeed, Bush’s description of America as a perpetually self-renewing enterprise engaged in perfecting freedom summarized the essence of the nation’s self-assigned purpose.

In his remarks to Congress, the president was asserting a prerogative that his predecessors had long ago appropriated: interpreting the zeitgeist in such a way as to merge past, present, and future into a seamless, self-congratulatory, and reassuring narrative of American power. He was describing history precisely as Americans — or at least privileged Americans — wished to see it. He was, in other words, speaking a language in which he was fluent: the idiom of the ruling class.

As the year 1990 began, duty — destiny, even — was summoning members of that ruling class to lead not just this country, but the planet itself and not just for a decade or two, or even for an “era,” but forever and a day. In January 1990, the way ahead for the last superpower on planet Earth — the Soviet Union would officially implode in 1991 but its fate already seemed obvious enough — was clear indeed.

So, how’d we do? Thirty years later, perhaps it’s time to assess just how well the United States has fulfilled the expectations President Bush articulated in 1990. Personally, I would rate the results somewhere between deeply disappointing and flat-out abysmal.

Bush’s “circle of freedom” invoked a planet divided between the free and the unfree. During the Cold War, this distinction had proven useful even if it was never particularly accurate. Today, it retains no value whatsoever as a description of the actually existing world, even though in Washington it persists, as does the conviction that the U.S. has a unique responsibility to expand that circle.

Encouraged by ambitious politicians and ideologically driven commentators, many (though not all) Americans bought into a militarized, Manichean, vastly oversimplified conception of the Cold War. Having misconstrued its meaning, they misconstrued the implications of its passing, leaving them ill-prepared to see through the claptrap in President Bush’s 1990 State of the Union Address.

Bush depicted the “Revolution of ‘89” as a transformative moment in world history. In fact, the legacy of that moment has proven far more modest than he imagined. As a turning point in the history of the modern world, the end of the Cold War ranks slightly above the invention of the machine gun (1884), but well below the fall of Russia’s Romanov dynasty (1917) or the discovery of penicillin (1928). Among the factors shaping the world in which we now live, the outcome of the Cold War barely registers.

Fairness obliges me to acknowledge two exceptions to that broad claim, one pertaining to Europe and the other to the United States.

First, the end of the Cold War led almost immediately to a Europe made “whole and free” thanks to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet while Poles, Lithuanians, the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic, and other Eastern Europeans are certainly better off today than they were under the Kremlin’s boot, Europe itself plays a significantly diminished role in world affairs. In healing its divisions, it shrank, losing political clout. Meanwhile, in very short order, new cleavages erupted in the Balkans, Spain, and even the United Kingdom, with the emergence of a populist right calling into question Europe’s assumed commitment to multicultural liberalism.

In many respects, the Cold War began as an argument over who would determine Europe’s destiny. In 1989, our side won that argument. Yet, by then, the payoff to which the United States laid claim had largely been depleted. Europe’s traditional great powers were no longer especially great. After several centuries in which global politics had centered on that continent, Europe had suddenly slipped to the periphery. In practice, “whole and free” turned out to mean “preoccupied and anemic,” with Europeans now engaging in their own acts of folly. Three decades after the “Revolution of ’89,” Europe remains an attractive tourist destination. Yet, from a geopolitical perspective, the action has long since moved elsewhere.

The second exception to the Cold War’s less than momentous results relates to U.S. attitudes toward military power. For the first time in its history, the onset of the Cold War had prompted the United States to create and maintain a powerful peacetime military establishment. The principal mission of that military was to defend, deter, and contain. While it would fight bitter wars in Korea and Vietnam, its advertised aim was to avert armed conflicts or, at least, keep them from getting out of hand. In that spirit, the billboard at the entrance to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, the Pentagon’s principal Cold War nuclear strike force (which possessed the means to extinguish humankind), reassuringly announced that “peace is our profession.”

When the Cold War ended, however, despite the absence of any real threats to U.S. security, Washington policymakers decided to maintain the mightiest armed forces on the planet in perpetuity. Negligible debate preceded this decision, which even today remains minimally controversial. That the United States should retain military capabilities far greater than those of any other nation or even combination of numerous other nations seemed eminently sensible.

In appearance or configuration, the post-Cold War military differed little from what it had looked like between the 1950s and 1989. Yet the armed forces of the United States now took on a radically different, far more ambitious mission: to impose order and spread American values globally, while eliminating obstacles deemed to impede those efforts. During the Cold War, policymakers had placed a premium on holding U.S. forces in readiness. Now, the idea was to put “the troops” to work. Power projection became the name of the game.

Just a month prior to his State of the Union Address, President Bush himself had given this approach a test run, ordering U.S. forces to intervene in Panama, overthrow the existing government there, and install in its place one expected to be more compliant. The president now neatly summarized the outcome of that action in three crisp sentences. “One year ago,” he announced, “the people of Panama lived in fear, under the thumb of a dictator. Today democracy is restored; Panama is free. Operation Just Cause has achieved its objective.”

Mission accomplished: end of story. Here, it seemed, was a template for further application globally.

As it happened, however, Operation Just Cause proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Intervention in Panama did inaugurate a period of unprecedented American military activism. In the years that followed, U.S. forces invaded, occupied, bombed, or raided an astonishing array of countries. Rarely, however, was the outcome as tidy as it had been in Panama, where the fighting lasted a mere five days. Untidy and protracted conflicts proved more typical of the post-Cold War U.S. experience, with the Afghanistan War, a futile undertaking now in its 19th year, a notable example. The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places.

Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. From a military perspective — except perhaps in the eyes of the military-industrial complex — the legacy of the “Revolution of ‘89” turned out to be almost entirely negative.

A broken compass So, contrary to President Bush’s prediction, the fall of the Berlin Wall did not inaugurate a “new era in world affairs” governed by “this idea called America.” It did, however, accelerate Europe’s drift toward geopolitical insignificance and induced in Washington a sharp turn toward reckless militarism — neither of which qualifies as cause for celebration.

Yet today, 30 years after Bush’s 1990 State of the Union, a “new era of world affairs” is indeed upon us, even if it bears scant resemblance to the order Bush expected to emerge. If his “idea called America” did not shape the contours of this new age, then what has?

Answer: all the things post-Cold War Washington policy elites misunderstood or relegated to the status of afterthought. Here are three examples of key factors that actually shaped the present era. Notably, each had its point of origin prior to the end of the Cold War. Each came to maturity while U.S. policymakers, hypnotized by the “Revolution of ’89,” were busily trying to reap the benefits they fancied to be this country’s for the taking. Each far surpasses in significance the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The “Rise” of China: The China that we know today emerged from reforms instituted by Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, which transformed the People’s Republic into an economic powerhouse. No nation in history, including the United States, has ever come close to matching China’s spectacular ascent. In just three decades, its per capita gross domestic product skyrocketed from $156 in 1978 to $9,771 in 2017.

The post-Cold War assumption common among American elites that economic development would necessarily prompt political liberalization turned out to be wishful thinking. In Beijing today, the Communist Party remains firmly in control. Meanwhile, as illustrated by its “Belt and Road” initiative, China has begun to assert itself globally, while simultaneously enhancing the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army. In all of this, the United States — apart from borrowing from China to pay for an abundance of its imported products (now well over a half-trillion dollars of them annually) — has figured as little more than a bystander. As China radically alters the balance of power in twenty-first-century East Asia, the outcome of the Cold War has no more relevance than does Napoleon’s late-eighteenth-century expedition to Egypt.

A Resurgence of Religious Extremism: Like the poor, religious fanatics will always be with us. They come in all stripes: Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims. Yet implicit in the American idea that lay at the heart of Bush’s State of the Union Address was an expectation of modernity removing religion from politics. That the global advance of secularization would lead to the privatization of faith was accepted as a given in elite circles. After all, the end of the Cold War ostensibly left little to fight about. With the collapse of communism and the triumph of democratic capitalism, all the really big questions had been settled. That religiously inspired political violence would become a crucial factor in global politics therefore seemed inconceivable.

Yet a full decade before the “Revolution of ’89,” events were already shredding that expectation. In November 1979, radical Islamists shocked the House of Saud by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Although local security forces regained control after a bloody gun battle, the Saudi royal family resolved to prevent any recurrence of such a disaster by demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt its own fealty to the teachings of Allah. It did so by expending staggering sums throughout the Ummah to promote a puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism.

In effect, Saudi Arabia became the principal underwriter of what would morph into Islamist terror. For Osama bin Laden and his militant followers, the American idea to which President Bush paid tribute that January in 1990 was blasphemous, intolerable, and a justification for war. Lulled by a belief that the end of the Cold War had yielded a definitive victory, the entire U.S. national security apparatus would be caught unawares in September 2001 when religious warriors assaulted New York and Washington. Nor was the political establishment prepared for the appearance of violence perpetrated by domestic religious extremists. During the Cold War, it had become fashionable to declare God dead. That verdict turned out to be premature.

The Assault on Nature: From its inception, the American idea so lavishly praised by President Bush in 1990 had allowed, even fostered, the exploitation of the natural world based on a belief in Planet Earth’s infinite capacity to absorb punishment. During the Cold War, critics like Rachel Carson, author of the pioneering environmental book Silent Spring, had warned against just such an assumption. While their warnings received respectful hearings, they elicited only modest corrective action.

Then, in 1988, a year prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in testimony before Congress, NASA scientist James Hansen issued a far more alarming warning: human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, was inducing profound changes in the global climate with potentially catastrophic consequences. (Of course, a prestigious scientific advisory committee had offered just such a warning to President Lyndon Johnson more than two decades earlier, predicting the early twenty-first-century effects of climate change, to no effect whatsoever.)

To put it mildly, President Bush and other members of the political establishment did not welcome Hansen’s analysis. After all, to take him seriously meant admitting to the necessity of modifying a way of life centered on self-indulgence, rather than self-restraint. At some level, perpetuating the American penchant for material consumption and personal mobility had described the ultimate purpose of the Cold War. Bush could no more tell Americans to settle for less than he could imagine a world order in which the United States no longer occupied “the center of a widening circle of freedom.”

Some things were sacrosanct. As he put it on another occasion, “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”

So while President Bush was not an outright climate-change denier, he temporized. Talk took precedence over action. He thereby set a pattern to which his successors would adhere, at least until the Trump years. To thwart communism during the Cold War, Americans might have been willing to “pay any price, bear any burden.” Not so when it came to climate change. The Cold War itself had seemingly exhausted the nation’s capacity for collective sacrifice. So, on several fronts, the assault on nature continues and is even gaining greater momentum.

In sum, from our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Restoring the American compass to working order won’t occur until we recognize those illusions for what they are. Step one might be to revise what “this idea called America” truly signifies.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft. His new book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory has just been published.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bracevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 January 2020
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Political scientists are weighing in after the president ordered last week a missile strike that killed Iran’s second most influential political figure, Qassem Soleimani. The presumption is Donald Trump believes escalating conflict abroad will lift pressure at home or aid reelection. Michael Tesler said Saturday in the Washington Post this is called the “rally effect.” The UC Irvine professor also said the president is getting everything wrong.

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein concurred this morning. “If Trump is seeking a confrontation to help him win reelection, he’s almost certainly making a big mistake,” he said. “[That’s] more or less the consensus among political scientists—contrary … to the Wag the Dog assumptions in the popular culture about the popularity of war.”

Others presume Trump is escalating conflict abroad to boost support at home. Elizabeth Warren spent a good deal of time Sunday on Meet the Press asking why the president decided now was the time to strike. “We are not safer because Donald Trump had Soleimani killed. We are much closer to the edge of war. The question is: Why now? Why not a month ago? Why not a month from now?” She answered her own question: “Trump faces the start potentially of an impeachment trial. … Why now?”

Rukmini Callimachi, who covers Al Qaeda and ISIS for the New York Times, wondered the same. Soleimani was well known for mass murder by proxy. The US government knew where he was. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama decided against targeting Soleimani. His death would have been too inflammatory. In this context, Callimachi tweeted Saturday, “it’s hard to decouple his killing from the impeachment saga.”

The most prominent neutral skeptic was Jake Tapper. The host of CNN’s State of the Union cast doubt on Mike Pompeo’s claim killing Soleimani prevented an imminent attack on Americans. (Callimachi said she was told the intelligence behind that claim was “razor thin.”) This government has said so many things “that were not true,” Tapper said. “Do you understand that there might be a special responsibility to provide proof and evidence to the American people of the imminence of this attack?”

Perhaps the president’s greatest critic is Donald Trump. In the fall of 2011, Trump said the following of Barack Obama: “Our president will start a war with Iran, because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. We have a real problem in the White House. So I believe that he will attack Iran sometime prior to the election, because he thinks that’s the only way he can get elected. Isn’t it pathetic?”

Yes, it is.

Let’s take a step back to note a few points. First, when Trump accuses people of wrongdoing, that’s the most reliable indicator of what he is doing or planning to do. The only time we know this president is telling the truth is when he’s projecting.

Second, the president is no longer getting the immediate benefit of the doubt even from a Washington press corps habituated to giving all presidents an endless supply of benefit-of-the-doubt. Telling more than 13,000 lies or falsehoods since taking office (according to the Post) will do that. As CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote, telling gigantic whoppers — “deliberate, significant attempts to deceive and manipulate” — will do that.

But more than lies are at work. We are seeing, I think, a material consequence of impeachment. Being indicted by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction, and thus violating the public trust, has resulted in a depth of distrust. The Washington press corps might have been more credulous back in May when Trump first considered targeting Soleimani. That, however, was before we knew he involved Ukraine’s president in an international conspiracy to defraud the American people. That was before the impeachment inquiry made a majority of Americans more aware of the fact that the Ukraine conspiracy was not the first time Donald Trump cheated.

When Dick Cheney said Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators, that seemed plausible to many people at the time. Nearly everyone in the run-up to the 2003 invasion was willing to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt. (That changed later on, of course, when the occupation soured and it was known the Bush administration lied to the American people to justify invasion.) When Mike Pompeo said the same thing last week about Iranians, his statement was met with howls of laughter. After three years of lies and a perennial fog of illegitimacy, there’s little chance of Trump being taken seriously about something as significant as war.

Which leads me to my final point.

The president is proving the Democrats were 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: 06 January 2020
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The new year began with a bang. The drone attack that killed Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of al-Quds Force, the external wing of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, will have far-reaching consequences in the Middle East and beyond, adding to the battle for influence in the region between Russia and the United States.

However, the strike does not change the situation created by Turkey’s convulsive moves in the Eastern Mediterranean and Libya.

Initially underestimated and watched with measured anxiety by the European Union, the escalation reached a new level January 2 after the vote by Turkish parliament to allow Turkish troops to be dispatched to Libya, as Greece, Israel and Cyprus signed an accord for a 1,900km undersea pipeline deal in Athens.

Russia and Turkey are to sign the Turk Stream agreement, which would set up an accelerated power struggle as the countries in the region display axes being formed against each other, a dangerous development that is reminiscent of the times preceding two world wars in the 20th century.

Turkey’s policy choices have placed it in a massive vortex. In the Eastern Mediterranean and Libya, it stands far closer to serving Russia’s long-term interests, while challenging the European Union and, to a great deal, the United States. As a consequence, the policies pursued by Ankara, contrary to what major European capitals seem to think, will have a determining effect on developments. The resolve of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his team in the pursuit of a high-stakes game should be better understood.

“The one who considers his own end can never become a hero,” Turkish Vice-President Fuat Oktay said before the vote in Turkish parliament.

What should be understood is that Ankara’s policies are designed by a solid group of adventurists circling around Erdogan, who, instead of standing up to his delusions of grandeur, seem to encourage him to pursue more daredevil gambling.

This is not without a rationale: the rudderless drift in Europe and the disarray in Washington provide a perfect setting for raising the stakes. Erdogan has long realised that, to have a say in a world in disorder, his government can and should cross the lines and do its best to benefit from fait accompli situations.

Syria was a fine example and now Ankara has its eyes set on Libya — no diplomatic bluffing there. A foothold in North Africa’s shoreline has less to do with neo-Ottoman dreams than with spreading Ikhwanism — Muslim Brotherhood ideology — having access to energy and politically winning over Africa.

“I don’t think there’s any thought of a re-establishing the Ottoman Empire with control over territory but there is a desire to establish Turkish influence throughout the former Ottoman area, which covers, of course, all of North Africa and extends into parts of sub-Saharan Africa,” said David Shinn, a former US ambassador now teaching international relations at George Washington University in an interview with Public Radio International.

“As a result, you’ve seen a major effort by Erdogan to re-establish Turkey’s interests throughout all of Africa, including those parts that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Ottoman Empire.

“A good indication of this is simply the fact that Turkey now has embassies in 42 of 54 of Africa’s countries. That’s an astounding number for an economy the size of Turkey. I think it’s an effort to establish not only a political presence but also political influence in as many countries as possible to ensure these countries’ support in forums such as the United Nations over issues like Cyprus, for example.”

Those observations are only part of a broader reality. What has united Turkey’s staunch nationalist, anti-Western circles with Erdogan was the will to recalibrate Turkish foreign policy as autonomous from American-European frameworks.

In Syria and in Libya, Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) still see an opportunity to help the Muslim Brotherhood regain the sphere of influence it lost there. The resolve with which Erdogan raises his stakes in tying his links is, in a way, an attempt to keep the AKP rule intact at home. Erdogan knows that Turkey, which he rules with the help of his Islamist circle of advisers, and his party are the last bastions of Ikhwanism — a fact often ignored by analysts.

Throughout 2020 we will watch Erdogan’s Turkey pushing the boundaries for irredentist adventures, backed by the notion that Erdogan will do his best to endorse US President Donald Trump, his only base of support in the West.

All this is fine with Russia, which sees this as its best chance for revenge after the fait accompli toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya, after the adventurist move by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The stage is set for huge complications for Europe and its fragile democratic orders.

Erdogan is launching a game-changing offensive in the entire Eastern Mediterranean and he may succeed unless the European Union’s major actors master their courage and pre-empt his move. The odds of that happening are quite remote. Expect a storm ahead.

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: 06 January 2020
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Donald Trump ordered a missile strike that killed one of Iran’s top generals in Baghdad. Qassem Soleimani was no ordinary commander. He was the most elite of Tehran’s military elite. He was said to be Iran’s second most powerful leader to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His death sent oil markets reeling. It opened the door to open war with Iran.

Edward Luce, of The Financial Times, said: “Most urgent question is whether Trump understood massive implications of killing Soleimani. If not, and I suspect not, we’re faced with very real risk of self-escalating World War I-style blunders into war.”

Soleimani was evil, but his death by American hands is not necessarily a good thing. Israel has assassinated leaders of terrorist groups — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. It has killed Iranian officials in Syria. “But it never killed someone like Soleimani,” Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international affairs at the University of Illinois, told me. It doesn’t brag about it either, as the Trump administration is.

Fred Wellman is Iraq War veteran and CEO of ScoutComms, a marketing firm for military families. He told me last night Soleimani was “a titan of the Iranian military. One of their national heroes. He has been the puppet master in Iraq for years. But understand he is a high-ranking Iranian military official, not a non-government terrorist. If we executed him, that’s an act of war on Iran and a huge escalation.”

This morning, Wellman added that Soleimani “was in many ways the face of Iran. His death isn’t bad news for many of us who served. He was a murderous thug. The question remains what’s next. We really don’t have the military that invaded Iraq.”

Someone tell Mike Pompeo. The US secretary of state was on CNN this morning rationalizing the president’s decision. He said Soleimani was involved in a plot to kill more Americans, but didn’t provide details. He said, “I saw last night there was dancing in the streets in parts of Iraq. We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom.”

That should sound familiar. We had to invade Iraq in 2003 because it was involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We had to invade Iraq because it possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (nuclear bombs). We had to invade Iraq because doing so would, according to Vice President Dick Cheney, free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he said.

Every single word, including “a” and “the,” was a lie.

I don’t know what’s next any more than anyone else, but if Pompeo is any indication, we should be very concerned. Grossman said: “The main geopolitical affect of the Iraq War was empowering Iran, facilitating Iranian expansionism in the Middle East. There’s a decent chance the main geopolitical affect of killing Soleimani is finishing that job, getting Iraq to push the US out and fall further under Iranian influence.”

As David Frum, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter and a supporter of the Iraq invasion, wrote in May, war with Iran would “mean repeating a mistake, only on a much bigger scale: without allies, without justification, and without any plan at all.”

What I do know is that the president and his party have run out of ideas. Just as they peddle the lie that tax cuts bring prosperity, they peddle the lie that military power brings freedom. Yet the Republicans keep pushing the lies — and frankly why not?

Not one person was ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths since 2003. Not one person was ever held accountable for the trillions of dollars wasted. Not one person was ever held accountable for the countless American arms and legs blow off. “In a world where the pundits who advocated for war in Iraq lost their jobs and the politicians who voted for the war in Iraq lost their jobs and the people who carried out our war crimes were prosecuted, this would almost certainly not be happening,” wrote Jesse Brenneman, a former public-radio producer.

As long as the Republicans are never held accountable, they can continue perverting American patriotism. We’re already hearing the same propaganda we heard in 2003 — anyone opposing war with Iran opposes America. These are the same people by the way who turn a blind eye to Russia’s attack on our sovereignty in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Love of country is in fact love of party. It’s loyalty to lies.

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: 03 January 2020
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When I heard the news this morning, I was surprised by my sadness. I knew Julian Castro was a long shot for the presidency. He’s never won statewide office. He’s never polled more than 1 or 2 percent in early states. Yet Castro seems to me to represent America’s better angles — values and ideals currently under attack or in retreat. That he suspended his campaign feels like those values and ideals are suspended as well.

They aren’t, of course. They are always at work. That these values and ideals are not visible in the administration — that they are suppressed by Donald Trump’s policies of sadism — doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. Castro’s ideas especially with respect to immigrants, immigration law and the border are not going away. Whoever wins the nomination is going to capitalize on Castro’s spirit. The nominee is going to make room for Castro’s supporters in the national Democratic coalition. More importantly, Castro’s supporters are going to fight for a space in it. As Hall of Famer and former Sunday Night Baseball color commentator Joe Morgan used to say, that’s the way it is.

I suspect many Democrats forget this. I suspect many Democratic activists in particular believe if their candidate loses, their ideas lose, too. If their candidates lose, they themselveslose, as if their individual identities are balled up in the success or failure of individual candidates, as if Castro’s struggles are their struggles, as if when the press ignores Castro, the press ignores them, too. While there is utility in going all-in for candidates — this is a competition after all — let’s keep some perspective. Democratic Party politics isn’t static. It isn’t homogeneous. If it were, we’d be defending “three-strikes laws,” proposing more “welfare reform” and calling pot a “gateway drug.”

OK, yes, Joe Biden said marijuana is a gateway drug. His critics glommed on to that bumbling statement as evidence of the Democratic Party being hopelessly stuck in the past, and why candidates like Castro — and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — can’t gain traction. The party is still in thrall to Wall Street interests, critics say. The party is still too bigoted to recognize a generational, multi-racial and rising electorate.

But the same can be said of Biden’s critics. They too are stuck in the past. Economic arguments advanced in favor of Bernie Sanders are the same economic arguments that leftists lost in the 1990s. Critics who blamed Hillary Clinton for her husband’s record were too sexist to recognize her own record of liberal accomplishment. Critics who blame racism for dooming Castro’s and Harris’s campaigns are shockingly colorblind. Black voters are behind Joe Biden. As long as they are, he’ll likely be the nominee.

Put another way, the president is a domestic fascist. Trump is advancing white supremacy just by occupying the Oval Office. He literally puts Americans of color at risk with his demagoguery. The El Paso massacre happened after the president, for a week, attacked cities and all the diversity they imply. Biden would not be in the lead if not for Trump. Black voters wouldn’t support Biden if not for Trump. Yes, racism is preventing Castro and the others from gaining traction, but let’s not be colorblind. They are not gaining traction because many black voters don’t want them to.

It’s fair to say Joe Biden is in the lead because everyone learned the wrong lesson from 2016: that Trump won due to working-class “economic anxiety” and that only a working-class warrior like the former vice president can win them back. But it’s unfair to blame Biden or the Democratic National Committee for that mistake. It’s also unfair to say Biden’s nomination would be a step backward for the party. He said pot was a gateway drug. Then he walked it back after public outrage. That he walked it back suggests a capacity — and a desire — to represent the heart of the Democratic Party. That’s what you want to see in a nominee. That’s what matters most of all.

When it comes down to it, parties matter most, not candidates. Candidates are, or should be, vehicles for expressing and advancing policy preferences of the majority of the candidate’s party. Nominees should demonstrate a capacity — and a desire — to hear what the majority wants before doing his or her best to incorporate demands into a winning message. As president, they should do the same while bringing around as much of the rest of the electorate as they can. Biden comes with baggage. His views are not the wokest by any stretch. But neither his lead nor his nomination (if he gets is) is at the expense of Julian Castro and the others. Parties aren’t static. They’re dynamic.

As Joe Morgan said, that’s the way it is.

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: 02 January 2020
Word Count: 794
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