Recently, on a beautiful Kansas Saturday, I fell asleep early, exhausted by the excitement and ultimate disappointment of the Army football team’s double overtime loss to highly favored Michigan. Having turned against America’s forever wars and the U.S. military as an institution while I was still in it, West Point football, I’m almost ashamed to admit, is my last guilty martial pleasure. Still, having graduated from the Academy, taught history there, and spent 18 long years in the Army, I find something faintly hopeful about a team of undersized, overmatched, non-National Football League prospects facing off against one of the biggest schools in college football.

I awoke, though, early the next morning to the distressing — if hardly surprising — news that President Trump had spiked months of seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban, blocking any near-term hope for an end to America’s longest, most hopeless war of all. My by-now-uncomfortably-familiar response was to go even deeper into a funk, based on a vague, if overwhelming, sense that the world only manages to get worse on a near-daily basis. For this longtime skeptic of U.S. foreign policy, once also a secret dreamer and idealist, that reality drives me toward political nihilism, a feeling that nothing any of us can do will halt the spread of an increasingly self-destructive empire and the collapse of democracy at home.

Looking back, I can trace my long journey from burgeoning neoconservative believer to Iraq War opponent to war-on-terror dissenter to disenfranchised veteran nonbeliever. Thinking about this in the wake of Army’s loss and those cancelled Afghan peace talks, during a typically morose conversation with Tom, of TomDispatch, I realized that I could tell a story of escalating military heresy and disappointment simply from the three years of articles I’d written for his website. It mattered little that, at the time, I imagined them as anything but the stuff of autobiography.

If all this sounds gloomy, writing itself has been cathartic for me and may have saved me on this strange journey of mine. So, join me on a little autobiographical fast march through a world increasingly filled with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, as seen through the eyes of one apostate military veteran. Maybe some of you will even recognize aspects of your own life journeys in what follows.

“Hope and change” in Iraq In October 2006, when Second Lieutenant Sjursen arrived in Iraq, Baghdad was still, at least figuratively, aflame. It took only a few months of repetitious, useless “presence patrols,” a dozen IED strikes on my scout platoon, the deaths of three of my troopers and the maiming of others, as well as ubiquitous civilian deaths in marketplace bombings, to free me from a sense that the war in Iraq served any purpose whatsoever. Hearing again and again, even from long oppressed Shia Iraqis, that life under Sunni autocrat Saddam Hussein had been better, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S. invasion, launched by the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on thoroughly bogus grounds in the spring of 2003, had shattered their nation and perhaps destabilized a region as well.

Just 23 years old (and, by my own estimation, immature at that), I — and a surprising number of my junior officer peers — started cautiously acting out. I grew my hair longer than regulations allowed and posted World War I-era antiwar poems by British veterans like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen on my locker. I eventually even began “phoning in” my patrols, while attempting to avoid dicey, ambush-prone neighborhoods whenever possible.

And yet, despite a growing sense of darkness, I’d yet to lose all hope. At home, the Democrats (many of whom had once voted for the Iraq War) won back Congress in November 2006, largely thanks to a sudden burst of antiwar, anti-Bush rhetoric. In 2007, I began using my limited Internet time to ingest transcripts of every speech by or article about an upstart young African-American Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama. Unlike anointed frontrunner Hillary Clinton, he seemed inspirational, an outsider, and — as an Illinois state senator — an early opponent of the very invasion that had landed me in my macabre predicament. I quickly decided he was my man, buying into his “hope and change” rhetoric, while dreaming of the day he’d end my war, saving countless lives, including possibly my own.

Sadly, if predictably, despite the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and monthly U.S. military fatalities that regularly hit triple digits, nothing could stop the Bush administration from continuing to escalate the war. I remember the moment in April 2007 when I heard that, thanks to President Bush’s announced troop “surge” in Iraq, my squadron was designated to stay three months past our scheduled year-long deployment. It felt like a gut punch. Steve, my fellow lieutenant, and I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes in silence, while leaning against the brick wall of our Baghdad barracks. Then we faced the music and broke the news to our distraught soldiers.

In that bloodiest year of the war, my squadron would lose another half-dozen men in combat, while nearly 1,000 U.S. servicemen and women would die. Yet that famed, widely hailedsurge would, of course, ultimately fail. Not that most policymakers thought so at the time. The Bush-anointed, media-savvy new commander in Iraq, Army General David Petraeus, sold a temporary drop in violence to a fawning Congress, including most of those Democrats, as a profound success. It scarcely mattered that the announced purpose of the surge — to create space and time for a political reconciliation between Iraqi sects and ethnicities — failed from the start. My long-shot dream that an “antiwar” Congress would cut off funds for the conflict remained just that.

Still, landing at my home base in Colorado that New Year’s Eve, I remained almost unnaturally hopeful about Barack Obama as a potential savior. By April 2008, promoted to captain and sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for advanced schooling, I found myself secretly canvassing for him across the Ohio River in Indiana, which had just gained swing-state status. If only he could best Republican candidate John McCain, I thought, he might rapidly end what he had once called “the dumb war.” Given my single-minded focus on that possibility, I managed to ignore the way candidate Obama simultaneously called for an escalation of what he termed “the good war” in Afghanistan. Never mind, Obama won in November 2008. I spent Election Day drinking blue martinis and cheering him on with fellow dissenting officers. That night, holding my newly born infant son, I cried tears of joy as the election returns poured in.

Serving empire abroad, feeling empire close to home The next few years would be filled with disappointment, disenchantment, and disbelief as I followed America’s wars and the state of the world from a desktop computer in my new, highly immersive job with the 4th Cavalry on the squadron operations staff in Fort Riley, Kansas. I watched President Obama shed his dove credentials, unleash across the Greater Middle East exponentially more drone assassination attacks than the Bush administration, fail to close Guantanamo, and triple troop numbers — besting even Bush — in his own “surge” in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon would utilize a newly established U.S. military command, AFRICOM, to quietly expand deployments across another continent.

I was now in command of a company (we in the cavalry called it a “troop”) of some 100 scouts. In February 2011, Obama’s ongoing surge 2.0 diverted my unit from a potentially cushy “turn-out-the-lights” Iraq deployment to a fierce fight on the Taliban’s home turf in Kandahar, Afghanistan. That awful mission, as I told a Reuters reporter on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — to the frustration of my colonel — seemed to me futilely unrelated to the events of September 2001. (I was chosen for the interview as a New York native.)

In that ultimately futile deployment, my troop of scouts lost three more lives and several more limbs. That May, Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan and my mother promptly asked if I’d now get to come home early. No such luck.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration further shattered the Greater Middle East and beyond through a string of military interventions. During my year-long deployment in Afghanistan, Washington helped turn Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya into a failed state of battling warlords and Islamists through an ill-fated regime-change operation; inched its way toward an intervention in the Syrian civil war that would, in the end, counterproductively back jihadis; and stood aside as the Saudis invaded Bahrain to crush Arab Spring protests in a little country that just happened to be home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

I’d entered Afghanistan already opposed to that war and with few illusions that my own unit — or the U.S. military more generally — could alter the outcome there, let alone “win.” As that tour of duty wound down, I considered leaving the military once and for all. Still, I hedged. From remote southern Afghanistan, I had just enough fax-machine access to apply for a position teaching history at West Point, an assignment that could first get me two blissful years earning a master’s degree at a civilian university free of charge with full military pay and benefits. Surprisingly, I was accepted into that selective program and decided to stay in the Army indefinitely.

Grad school in the hippie enclave and university town of Lawrence, Kansas, in 2012 was all I’d hoped for, and more. Shedding my uniform, I felt strangely at home and thrived. I might have remained a student forever. Still, as I studied, I watched my former world continue to worsen.

During my two years at the University of Kansas, the Obama administration changed course, backing an Egyptian military coup against that country’s first democratically elected president; National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a massive illegal domestic surveillance program that was monitoring nearly all Americans; Army leaker Chelsea Manning, brought to trial by Obama’s Justice Department, was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison under the archaic World War I Espionage Act; and the newly branded Islamic State (formed in U.S. prisons in Iraq) exploded across Iraq and Syria. Soon, the president, having pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, found himself launching a new air war in Syria as well as relaunching an old one in Iraq, and then sending troops into both countries.

All the while, the war in Afghanistan raged on without end or a hint of progress. Not yet emotionally prepared to speak, I suddenly wrote a short, angry, letter to hawkish Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, which would, over the next two years, turn into an anti-Iraq war memoir focused on the myth of the success of the surge. Predictably, hardly anyone noticed. Rather than feeling elated over having my book published, I only became more cynical about our ability — any of us — to alter the hapless path on which imperial America seemed so fully embarked.

Life goes on, however, and from 2014 to 2016, I had, I thought, the best job in the Army: teaching U.S. history to “plebes” (freshmen cadets) at West Point. Despite my own heartache, my by-then crippling PTSD, and the barely suppressed mental-health crisis that went with it, I held onto one hope: that, if I could enthusiastically impart a more accurate and critical history of the nation to my students, I just might influence a new generation of more independent-thinking officers. My former cadets are now all lieutenants and though some do attest to the influence of my class, most are serving the empire as middle managers across a vast global chain of American bases.

The news only grew more distressing during my brief foray at West Point. By then, the Pentagon was supporting an ongoing Saudi war in Yemen that included regular terror bombing and a starvation blockade of the country. It would kill tens of thousands of civilians, starve perhaps 100,000 children to death, and unleash a cholera epidemic of epic proportions. Meanwhile, the president reversed a promise to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by December 31, 2014, and that war went right on. In those same years, the U.S. military “footprint” across Africa expanded exponentially, as (in a pattern already seen in the Greater Middle East) did a proliferation of Islamist militias on that continent.

Then, empire — as it always does — came home, this time in the form of increasingly militarized and Pentagon-equipped policing in neighborhoods of color across the nation. Thanks to YouTube and social media, pervasive instances of police brutality and the killing of unarmed, mostly young black men streamed into public consciousness. It was all brought home to me when a black man, Eric Garner, was choked to death by a white New York City police officer on a troubled street corner in my home borough of Staten Island, for the alleged crime of selling loose cigarettes. As a student of civil rights history, an aspirant activist, and the lead instructor (oddly enough) in African-American History at West Point, I felt galvanized into action.

The result: I found myself teaching cadets by day, then changing into jeans and a hoodie and driving 90 minutes to Staten Island, protest sign in tow. There, I would attend Eric Garner rallies and shout at the police. Hours later, I would trek back to the military academy, rinse and repeat. It felt good to be out on the streets, but, of course, it changed nothing. America’s warrior cops still operate with near impunity, using U.S. military counterinsurgency tactics (sometimes with Israeli Defense Force training) in communities of color as if they were occupied enemy territory.

Off the rails, once and for all Leaving West Point’s (relatively) progressive and intellectual history department in June 2016 for Fort Leavenworth’s stiflingly conventional Command and General Staff College in Kansas would prove deeply unsettling. Little did I know, though, that, as I began protesting America’s forever wars (my wars, so to speak) ever more volubly, my once-promising military career would soon be over. Army doctors determined that my emotional wounds qualified me for an early medical retirement. By February 2019, I found myself writing up a little antiwar storm and experiencing in-patient PTSD treatment in Arizona. I was, in other words, on my way out the door, an ignominious — if fitting — end to a career only months longer than America’s second Afghan War.

In those years, U.S. foreign policy should have gone into in-patient treatment, too. It had, in fact, spun out of control. In a through-the-looking-glass series of moves, our military continued to bomb seven countries, deployed troops to Syria, reentered Iraq, began expanding and modernizing its already vast nuclear arsenal, launched a new Cold War with Russia and China, and moved into the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan.

And did I mention that Donald Trump, corrupt real estate magnate, playboy, and reality TV star turned “populist” xenophobic hero, was elected president of the United States? He then ditched a promising Obama-era deal to deter Iran’s nuclear program, eschewed any American contribution to the global campaign against the existential threat of climate change (which he had previously called a “Chinese hoax”), and spiked the Cold War Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty, leading atomic scientists to tick the “doomsday” clock a stroke closer to midnight.

He or his top officials also militarized the southern border, separated children from immigrant parents, and stuck kids in cages. He cheered on white supremacist rallies; encouraged those militarized cops to “not be too nice” to suspects and perhaps even to slam their heads into patrol car doors on their way to the station; threatened a “fire and fury” nuclear war against North Korea before falling “in love” with that country’s ruler; indicted, for the first time in American history, a publisher, Julian Assange, for posting leaked files; officially recognized the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, while expressing approval for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to annex portions of the Palestinian West Bank outright; and… and… but I lack the energy to go on.

Which brings me back to Army’s heartbreaking (if inconsequential) loss in that football game and Trump’s recent decision to cancel ongoing peace talks with the Taliban (maybe the only hope left of getting our troops out of Afghanistan). That, of course, was the one constant of this tale of mine: that never-ending American war in Afghanistan. By September 2019, matters had so deteriorated that I was left with but one pathetic hope: that Donald Trump might, somehow, some way, sometime, be the one to end that absurd, Orwellian forever war.

And then, of course, he called off those peace talks and — a last gut punch — justified his decision by citing a Taliban attack that killed yet another American soldier. In the process, he ensured that yet more troopers like me (some of them undoubtedly born after the 9/11 attacks took place) will needlessly die in a war without end. Now, an alleged Iranian-sponsored attack on the Saudi oil industry may well scuttle any hopes for a long-shot peace deal with Tehran. War there, of course, could kill many more U.S. troops.

As for me, I have a feeling that I’ll wake up tomorrow to some new bit of bad news and begin repeating my now-endless refrain: Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse…

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

Copyright ©2019 Danny Sjursen — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2019
Word Count: 2,898
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I think we need to prepare ourselves for the unthinkable: that this president is above the law. Indeed, that any Republican president is above the law. We need to prepare ourselves to cast doubt on any public official who idolizes the rule of law but who can’t or won’t hold a historically weak president accountable for his many high crimes.

I think we need to prepare ourselves to accept as fact that there are two kinds of justice in this country. This isn’t a belief. This isn’t a hunch. This isn’t a feeling. The evidence is overwhelming if you’re paying attention. There’s one kind of justice for you and for me and for everyone we know. And then there’s one kind of justice for the very rich and the very powerful. I know what I’m suggesting. And yes, it’s hard to accept. I’m suggesting that equality isn’t just fictional. I’m suggesting that equality is a con. (I don’t think I really believe that, but the evidence is so overwhelming that continuing to believe in equality before the law is starting to feel like unhealthy self-delusion.)

Our system not only fails to protect the public from billionaire pedophiles, amoral business leaders, predatory bankers, and malicious pharmaceutical firms. It fails to protect democracy itself from a nihilist executive ready to burn everything down, including his own house, if that’s what it takes to “win.” Indeed, our system not only fails to protect the innocent; it congratulates the guilty! It’s no wonder we are losing faith in ourselves. What’s an American creed when the heretics are giving the homily?

The House Democrats are trying to focus the public’s attention on the president’s crimes — at least 10 instances of obstruction of justice are outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the Congress — but they are flailing. I’m not sure why.

The Republican Party remains united behind Donald Trump. It also had a gigantic right-wing media apparatus that keeps Trump voters in line, and that bends the press corps toward its preferred topics and perspectives. And then there’s the president himself. His vision of his office is boundaryless. So much so that he grants privilege to underlings when there’s no legal basis for granting it. But any executive’s power is limited only to the extent that other constitutional powers are willing to limit it.

Which brings me back to the Democrats. I see their struggle to hold a criminal president accountable as part of the larger struggles of liberalism. By that, I don’t mean to invoke a leftist complaint of “neoliberalism.” I don’t mean to invoke a conservative complaint of “cultural Marxism.” (Pish.) I do mean, however, to invoke a moral complaint.

The Democrats face creeping totalitarian, but are behaving as if the last thing they should do is act like it’s wrong much less offer a remedy steeped in civic virtue. Either Trump is above the law or he’s not. If not, they must act with the courage of their professed convictions or reveal themselves for the charlatans they are.

Allow me to rephrase. Half of the Democrats are behaving amorally.

The other half, including House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, does appear to understand the imperative of moving forward with the committee’s impeachment inquiry even if it does not result in Trump’s removal from office. The other half does seem to understand the political risks of doing so, even accepting Democratic House loses to do the right thing. I think that trade-off, to the degree that it’s real, is a pivot point between the liberalism of the last century and the liberalism of this one.

Trump’s former spokesman, Corey Lewandowski, testified Wednesday with contempt not just for members of the Congress but for popular sovereignty, for equality before the law and for the common good. Lewandowski is a thug’s thug. Yet the Democrats are ready to turn the other cheek instead of kicking over the moneychangers’ tables with the fury of the righteous.

Lewandowski is a flyspeck of insignificance, but the Democrats won’t act. How can they possibly impeach this president? I don’t know. But I do know more than politics is on the line.

Our democratic faith is, too.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 September 2019
Word Count: 697
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I’m ambivalent about what the Democrats should do about the US Supreme Court for two reasons. One, I’m not a legal scholar. Two, I’m not a legal scholar. I repeat myself to emphasize the dearth of my authority on the matter. But honestly, I doubt anyone truly knows what to do about a high court with two illegitimate justices on it.

What I can say with confidence is that it’s good that we’re having such a debate. That we’re having such a debate indicates our national discourse has shifted from the unthinkable — for instance, “packing the court” — to the OK-let’s-think-about-it. A liberal democracy like ours must evolve with the times. But institutions can’t evolve, indeed won’t, if the public is unwilling to re-imagine what they should be and why.

The debate comes and goes, and for now, that’s all right. As we get closer to November 2020, I’d expect arguments to intensify. (At least I hope they do!) The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie and the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent kicked off another round of debate recently, both of them reminding us that even if the Democrats win the White House and the Congress, they face a Supreme Court prepared to strike down any and all progressive legislation.

What to do? Pack the courts, Bouie said. All of them:

Bouie isn’t alone in rethinking the court. In 2014, Norm Ornstein, a conservative congressional scholar, argued that justices should have term limits. The best remedy for a polarized court, he said, is ending lifetime appointments and establishing 18-year terms. My friend Noah Berlatsky argued last year that presidents should appoint one justice per term so that nominations are tied to elections and the political will.

Samuel Moyn says term limits don’t fix the court’s anti-majoritarian nature. He suggests limiting the kinds of cases the court can decide. He told my friend Josh Holland that if a party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, “you can basically say, under Article Three of the Constitution, what the judiciary is allowed to do.” (Doing so would entail fighting with, you guessed it, the court.)

Then there’s the most radical option — Congress stripping the court of its ability to overturn laws. “Judicial review,” as it’s called, is not in the US Constitution. The power to strike down enactments is the result of an 1803 ruling. The poli-sci textbook I have at my side says, where is it, oh yes, here it is, that judicial review is “something of a usurpation.” The court said it has that power because the court said it did. (Again, Congress would have to fight with the court over any law limiting its power.)

All of these have major up- and downsides, and like I said, I’m pretty sure no one really knows if any of these would produce desired outcomes. What we can say for sure is that something that started out as “something of a usurpation” has become over the years a timeless and indisputable principle of democracy in which the highest court in the land has the final say. And what we can also say for sure is that it’s not how it should work.

“Judicial review” was not handed down by God. The founders didn’t enshrine it. It was the product of men making decisions they believed were right and proper at the time in which they made them. These choices, in a liberal democracy, are and should be up for debate, especially when two of the Supreme Court’s nine members are illegitimate.

All of the above solutions are rooted in the presumption that the court is the ultimate constitutional authority when it’s not, according to Louis Fisher. In a new book called Reconsidering Judicial Finality, the constitutional scholar argues that the court’s power is proportional to how much power the three branches of the federal government, the states, civil society and the public are willing to give it. In his conclusion, he wrote:

I don’t know if we should pack the courts. I don’t know if any solution would work. But I do know that we must debate the question, and more importantly, that we must move the debate from the unthinkable to the OK-let’s-think-about-it. Judicial finality has become sacred, immune or untouchable. It is no such thing. We must move our national discourse so the people understand the Supreme Court isn’t the final say.

They are.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 September 2019
Word Count: 897
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Two days before Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, I wrote that the Republicans were poisoning its legitimacy and the Democrats must redeem it. I said doing so required questioning the high court’s integrity, foremost the integrity of the “due process” that was installing Brett Kavanaugh. On October 4, 2018, I wrote:

There is in fact a growing nonpartisan consensus that [Kavanaugh is] not only unfit. He’s a liability for a court whose legitimacy has been increasingly in doubt. … This means the Democrats are on solid ground for any attempt to reform the court to restore its credibility. The question isn’t whether they should. The question is how.

The question of how is still very much in play, but I was more right than I could have known back then about whether the Democrats should clean up the Republican Party’s corruption of our legal system. We are now seeing the beginning of a major scandal in which the crime, as it were, is less important politically than the cover up.

The New York Times and LA Times reported over the weekend a previously unknown allegation of sexual misconduct against the new associate justice. More significance, the reporting verified the degree to which Judiciary Republicans sandbagged the FBI’s inquiry into that and other allegations. Kavanaugh, for his part, may have lied under oath. Four Democratic candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are now calling not only for a new inquiry but potential impeachment hearings, too.

When I wrote that, “To save the village [SCOTUS], the Democrats have to burn it down,” I didn’t think they’d arrive with torches! But it appears at least some of the Democrats, even leading candidate Joe Biden, are ready to fight post-confirmation even if fighting leads to the undermining of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy. (Biden, to be clear, has not called for impeachment hearings. His campaign said revelations raise “profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process” and that “we must follow the evidence wherever it leads” to restore faith in government.)

OK, what happened?

You already knew about Christine Blasey Ford. She went to the Capitol to tell Senators in nationally televised testimony about Kavanaugh’s sexually assaulting her when they were in high school. You probably already knew about Deborah Ramirez. She and Kavanaugh were freshman at Yale together. During a night of heavy drinking, she said he shoved his penis in her face. Her account ran in the New York Times before Kavanaugh was confirmed on Oct. 6, 2018, by a vote of 50-48, the closest judicial vote in 130 years.

What no one knew, however, was that there was a second allegation from a second source who witnessed a second and separate incident that was similar to Ramirez’s. This account was revealed by two NYTimes reporters in an excerpt published Sunday of their forthcoming book about Kavanaugh. “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” (The victim was not identified. She said she doesn’t remember the incident. She and Stier credit her intoxication for her memory lapse.)

The LA Times’ Jackie Calmes reported that Stier told Democratic Senator Chris Coons about the second penis incident. Coons then told Chris Wray, the FBI Director. The FBI, however, never contacted Stier. Indeed, the FBI took less than a week to complete its background investigation of Kavanaugh. Senate Republicans had insisted on that time frame. Moreover, they permitted FBI agents to talk to no more than 10 people.

Lawyers for Ford and Ramirez “sent letters to Wray that, together, named more than 50 individuals that the bureau’s agents should interview,” Calmes reported. “Only nine were ever contacted — all of them from the list that Republicans had submitted (my italics).

We don’t know if any of these allegations can be proven. We don’t know, as a consequence, if Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. We do know, however, thanks to this new reporting that the Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee went to great lengths to prevent the truth from coming to light, whatever that truth was. We know furthermore that the Republicans lied to ram Brett Kavanaugh through.

Chuck Grassley said at the time: “There is no corroboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez.” Yes, because he and other Republicans made sure of that. Susan Collins, a pro-choice Republican who knew the FBI could not conduct a very thorough investigation, told reporters: “It appears to be a very thorough investigation.”

It was none of those things.

Will Kavanaugh be impeached? I have no idea. For now, what’s important is for the American people to understand what the GOP did to the rule of law, and for the Democrats to get the American people’s permission to clean up its corruption.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 September 2019
Word Count: 814
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Those who wonder whether Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will follow through on his audacious proposal to annex the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea, as well as parts of the West Bank, need only look east and then west.

East, to India, where Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the breathtakingly bold decision to unilaterally downgrade the constitutionally recognised special status of the disputed territory of Kashmir. As of August 5, Kashmir has become a federally administered region of India; its state flag consigned to the museum of lost objects and its people subject to a security lockdown as well as drastic restrictions on communicating with the wider world.

West, from where Netanyahu is campaigning for the September 17 Israeli election, are the United States and the Israeli prime minister’s unabashed supporter US President Donald Trump.

It is in the person of this US president that East and West gloriously meet, at least from Netanyahu’s perspective. After Modi’s decisive action on Kashmir, Trump responded: The Indian leader feels he has the situation “under control.” The hands-off US approach to unilateral action on a disputed territory must surely be reassuring for Netanyahu. It leaves open the possibility that any Israeli move to annex almost 30% of the West Bank will not be resisted by the Trump administration.

Even without Kashmir-grab as a template, it has become increasingly apparent that Trump is not minded to censor Israeli unilateralism towards disputed territories. In fact, he has pushed the process along. In December 2017, Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy there, taking the holy city off the table in final-status negotiations. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Trump also recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, breaking from the post-WWII international consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war. Israel captured the plateau from Syria during the 1967 war.

In March, when Trump made his gift of the Golan Heights to Netanyahu — as if it were his to give — the Israeli prime minister faced a tight election battle. Now, Netanyahu is back fighting for his political life in Israel’s second vote in six months.

The possibility of Trump’s backing on crude electoral stunts and bold measures afterward matters hugely. Annexation of West Bank territory increasingly enjoys popular support in Israel. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute in August indicated that 48% of Jewish Israelis asked said they were in favour if supported by the Trump administration. Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s rival and head of the main opposition Blue and White alliance, said it had been his grand idea all along.

Clearly, Trump’s somewhat casual attitude to agreed international principles — on conflict, disputed regions, unilateral action — are central to developments in disparate parts of the world. Add to that this US administration’s frivolous approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a whole. Can there be anything more derisory than Trump’s announcement that his new Middle East peace envoy will be 30-year-old Avi Berkowitz?

Berkowitz is a former aide to the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. His role was once described by former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks as “primarily administrative and involved assisting Kushner with daily logistics like getting coffee or coordinating meetings.”

Berkowitz has no experience of international problem-solving and no discernible expertise on the Middle East other than one that might be a liability. He is a Zionist Jew, who spent a couple of years studying at an Israeli secondary school where the focus was traditional religious texts.

Berkowitz aside, how committed is Trump to the mirage he advertised as the Deal of the Century? Jason Greenblatt, the man Berkowitz is replacing, was Trump’s real estate lawyer, a greenhorn diplomat who damningly announced his departure before the full Trump plan was rolled out. As US President Barack Obama’s Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations Martin Indyk has said, with Berkowitz, Trump is replacing the unqualified architect of a widely panned peace plan with someone even worse.

What’s clear is that Trump likes the theatrics of peace-making but not the logistics, the detail and the emotional subtext of the politics on all sides.

We’ve seen this time after time in the past three years. Trump’s love of grand personal gestures has fallen short with Afghanistan, North Korea and China. The pattern is clear: North Korea talks are stalled; the part-reveal of the Middle East peace plan was a non-event. Few are setting much store by the second installment, due right after the Israeli elections.

The art of the deal seems still to elude Trump. Thus far, the number of just and sustainable deals he’s done for the United States — or anyone else — can be reduced to a single number. Zero.

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

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 September 2019
Word Count: 796
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Donald Trump got the headlines as usual — but don’t be fooled. It wasn’t Trumpism in action this August, but what we should all now start referring to as the Pompeo Doctrine. Yes, I’m referring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and, when it comes to the Arctic region, he has a lot more than buying Greenland on his mind.

In mid-August, as no one is likely to forget, President Trump surprised international observers by expressing an interest in purchasing Greenland, a semi-autonomous region of Denmark. Most commentators viewed the move as just another example of the president’s increasingly erratic behavior. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen termed the very notion of such a deal “absurd,” leading Trump, in an outburst of pique, to call her comments “nasty” and cancel a long-scheduled state visit to Copenhagen.

A deeper look at that incident and related administration moves, however, suggests quite a different interpretation of what’s going on, with immense significance for the planet and even human civilization. Under the prodding of Mike Pompeo, the White House increasingly views the Arctic as a key arena for future great-power competition, with the ultimate prize being an extraordinary trove of valuable resources, including oil, natural gas, uranium, zinc, iron ore, gold, diamonds, and rare earth minerals. Add in one more factor: though no one in the administration is likely to mention the forbidden term “climate change” or “climate crisis,” they all understand perfectly well that global warming is what’s making such a resource scramble possible.

This isn’t the first time that great powers have paid attention to the Arctic. That region enjoyed some strategic significance during the Cold War period, when both the United States and the Soviet Union planned to use its skies as passageways for nuclear-armed missiles and bombers dispatched to hit targets on the other side of the globe. Since the end of that era, however, it has largely been neglected. Frigid temperatures, frequent storms, and waters packed with ice prevented most normal air and maritime travel, so — aside from the few Indigenous peoples who had long adapted to such conditions — who would want to venture there?

Climate change is, however, already altering the situation in drastic ways: temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet, melting parts of the polar ice cap and exposing once-inaccessible waters and islands to commercial development. Oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered in offshore areas previously (but no longer) covered by sea ice most of the year. Meanwhile, new mining opportunities are emerging in, yes, Greenland! Worried that other countries, including China and Russia, might reap the benefits of such a climate-altered landscape, the Trump administration has already launched an all-out drive to ensure American dominance there, even at the risk of future confrontation and conflict.

The scramble for the Arctic’s resources was launched early in this century when the world’s major energy firms, led by BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Russian gas giant Gazprom, began exploring for oil and gas reserves in areas only recently made accessible by retreating sea ice. Those efforts gained momentum in 2008, after the U.S. Geological Survey published a report, Circum-Arctic Resources Appraisal, indicating that as much as one-third of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas lay in areas north of the Arctic Circle. Much of this untapped fossil fuel largess was said to lie beneath the Arctic waters adjoining Alaska (that is, the United States), Canada, Greenland (controlled by Denmark), Norway, and Russia — the so-called “Arctic Five.”

Under existing international law, codified in the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal nations possess the right to exploit undersea resources up to 200 nautical miles from their shoreline (and beyond if their continental shelf extends farther than that). The Arctic Five have all laid claim to “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs) in those waters or, in the case of the United States (which has not ratified UNCLOS), announced its intention to do so. Most known oil and gas reserves are found within those EEZs, although some are thought to be in overlapping or even contested areas beyond that 200-mile limit, including the polar region itself. Whoever owns Greenland, of course, possesses the right to develop its EEZ.

For the most part, the Arctic Five have asserted their intent to settle any disputes arising from contested claims through peaceful means, the operating principle behind the formation in 1996 of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental organization for states with territory above the Arctic Circle (including the Arctic Five, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). Meeting every two years, it provides a forum in which, at least theoretically, leaders of those countries and the Indigenous peoples living there can address common concerns and work towards cooperative solutions — and it had indeed helped dampen tensions in the region. In recent years, however, isolating the Arctic from mounting U.S. (and NATO) hostilities toward Russia and China or from the global struggle over vital resources has proven increasingly difficult. By May 2019, when Pompeo led an American delegation to the council’s most recent meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, hostility and the urge to grab future resources had already spilled into the open.

Reaping the Arctic’s riches Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention than it got at the time. So let’s take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation (in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.

“In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research,” the secretary of state began mildly. These were, he said, “all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But no longer do we have that luxury. We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region.”

In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new era in the Arctic. Because climate change — a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered — is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region’s vast resource riches, a scramble to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and China, generating new risks of conflict.

On the matter of resource exploitation, Pompeo could hardly contain his enthusiasm. Referring to the derision that greeted William Seward’s purchase of Alaska in 1857, he declared:

“Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be in Seward’s time, the Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources.”

Of equal attraction, he noted, was the possibility of vastly increasing maritime commerce through newly de-iced trans-Arctic trade routes that will link the Euro-Atlantic region with Asia. “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade,” he enthused. “This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and the West by as much as 20 days… Arctic sea lanes could come [to be] the 21st century’s Suez and Panama Canals.” That such “steady reductions in sea ice” are the sole consequence of climate change went unmentioned, but so did another reality of our warming world. If the Arctic one day truly becomes the northern equivalent of a tropical passageway like the Suez or Panama canals, that will likely mean that parts of those southerly areas will have become the equivalents of uninhabitable deserts.

As such new trade and drilling opportunities arise, Pompeo affirmed, the United States intends to be out front in capitalizing on them. He then began bragging about what the Trump administration had already accomplished, including promoting expanded oil and gas drilling in offshore waters and also freeing up “energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” a pristine stretch of northern Alaska prized by environmentalists as a sanctuary for migrating caribou and other at-risk species. Additional efforts to exploit the region’s vital resources, he promised, are scheduled for the years ahead.

A new arena for competition (and worse) Ideally, Pompeo noted placidly, competition for the Arctic’s resources will be conducted in an orderly, peaceful manner. The United States, he assured his listeners, believes in “free and fair competition, open, by the rule of law.” But other countries, he added ominously, especially China and Russia, won’t play by that rulebook much of the time and so must be subject to careful oversight and, if need be, punitive action.

China, he pointed out, is already developing trade routes in the Arctic, and establishing economic ties with key nations there. Unlike the United States (which already has multiple military bases in the Arctic, including one at Thule in Greenland, and so has a well-established presence there), Pompeo claimed that Beijing is surreptitiously using such supposedly economic activities for military purposes, including, heinously enough, spying on U.S. ballistic missile submarines operating in the region, while intimidating its local partners into acquiescence.

He then cited events in the distant South China Sea, where the Chinese have indeed militarized a number of tiny uninhabited islands (outfitting them with airstrips, missile batteries, and the like) and the U.S. has responded by sending its warships into adjacent waters. He did so to warn of similar future military stand-offs and potential clashes in the Arctic. “Let’s just ask ourselves, do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?” The answer, he assured his listeners, is “pretty clear.” (And I’m sure you can guess what it is.)

The secretary of state then wielded even stronger language in describing “aggressive Russian behavior in the Arctic.” In recent years, he claimed, the Russians have built hundreds of new bases in the region, along with new ports and air-defense capabilities. “Russia is already leaving snow prints in the form of army boots” there, a threat that cannot be ignored. “Just because the Arctic is a place of wilderness does not mean it should become a place of lawlessness. It need not be the case. And we stand ready to ensure that it does not become so.”

And here we get to the heart of Pompeo’s message: the United States will, of course, “respond” by enhancing its own military presence in the Arctic to better protect U.S. interests, while countering Chinese and Russian inroads in the region:

“Under President Trump, we are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia’s destabilizing activities, we are hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet, expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs inside of our own military.”

To emphasize the administration’s sincerity, Pompeo touted the largest NATO and U.S. Arctic military maneuvers since the Cold War era, the recently completed “Trident Juncture” exercise (which he incorrectly referred to as “Trident Structure”), involving some 50,000 troops. Although the official scenario for Trident Juncture spoke of an unidentified “aggressor” force, few observers had any doubt that the allied team was assembled to repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Norway, where the simulated combat took place.

Implementing the Doctrine And so you have the broad outlines of the new Pompeo Doctrine, centered on the Trump administration’s truly forbidden topic: the climate crisis. In the most pugnacious manner imaginable, that doctrine posits a future of endless competition and conflict in the Arctic, growing ever more intense as the planet warms and the ice cap melts. The notion of the U.S. going nose-to-nose with the Russians and Chinese in the Far North, while exploiting the region’s natural resources, has clearly been circulating in Washington. By August, it had obviously already become enough of a commonplace in the White House (not to speak of the National Security Council and the Pentagon), for the president to offer to buy Greenland.

And when it comes to resources and future military conflicts, it wasn’t such a zany idea. After all, Greenland does have abundant natural resources and also houses that U.S. base in Thule. A relic of the Cold War, the Thule facility, mainly a radar base, is already being modernized, at a cost of some $300 million, to better track Russian missile launches. Clearly, key officials in Washington view Greenland as a valuable piece of real estate in the emerging geopolitical struggle Pompeo laid out, an assessment that clearly wormed its way into President Trump’s consciousness as well.

Iceland and Norway also play key roles in Pompeo’s and the Pentagon’s new strategic calculus. Another former Cold War facility, a base at Keflavik in Iceland has been reoccupied by the Navy and is now being used in antisubmarine warfare missions. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps has stationed several hundred combat troops at bases near Trondheim, Norway, the first permanent deployment of foreign soldiers on Norwegian soil since World War II. In 2018, the Pentagon even reactivated the Navy’s defunct Second Fleet, investing it with responsibility for protecting the North Atlantic as well as the Arctic’s maritime approaches, including those abutting Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Consider these signs of heating-up times.

And all of this is clearly just the beginning of a major buildup in and regular testing of the ability of the U.S. military to operate in the Far North. As part of Exercise Trident Juncture, for example, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and its flotilla of support ships were sent into the Norwegian Sea, the first time a U.S. carrier battle group had sailed above the Arctic Circle since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Similarly, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently announced plans to send surface warships on trans-Arctic missions, another new military move. (U.S. nuclear submarines make such journeys regularly, sailing beneath the sea ice.)

The irony of Arctic melting Although Secretary Pompeo and his underlings never mention the term climate change, every aspect of his new doctrine is a product of that phenomenon. As humanity puts more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and global temperatures continue to rise, the Arctic ice cap will continue to shrink. That, in turn, will make exploitation of the region’s abundant oil and natural gas reserves ever more possible, leading to yet more burning of fossil fuels, further warming, and ever faster melting. In other words, the Pompeo Doctrine is a formula for catastrophe.

Add to this obvious abuse of the planet the likelihood that rising temperatures and increasing storm activity will render oil and gas extraction in parts of the world ever less viable. Many scientists now believe that daytime summer temperatures in oil-producing areas of the Middle East, for instance, are likely to average 120 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, making outdoor human labor of most sorts deadly. At the same time, more violent hurricanes and other tropical storms passing over the ever-warming waters of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico could imperil the continuing operation of offshore rigs there (and in other similarly storm-prone drilling areas). Unless humanity has converted to alternative fuels by then, the Arctic may be viewed as the world’s primary source of fossil fuels, only intensifying the struggle to control its vital resources.

Perhaps no aspect of humanity’s response to the climate crisis is more diabolical than this. The greater the number of fossil fuels we consume, the more rapidly we alter the Arctic, inviting the further extraction of just such fuels and their contribution to global warming. With other regions increasingly less able to sustain a fossil-fuel extraction economy, a continued addiction to oil will ensure the desolation of the once-pristine Far North as it is transformed into a Pompeo-style arena for burning conflict and civilizational disaster.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books), will be published in November.

Copyright ©2019 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 September 2019
Word Count: 2,699
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You have read plenty here and elsewhere about an international trend in which democracy is in retreat. I’m going to suggest that this international trend isn’t being fueled by fascist politics so much as by elites around the world, but especially elites in the United States, who betrayed the egalitarian tenets of liberal democracy.

I’m going to suggest that this betrayal began on September 11, 2001.

As you probably know, there were about a dozen democratic governments on the planet in the aftermath of the Second World War. By the end of that bloody century, there were 87. Now, in light of the UK’s Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election, we’re more aware that democracy is more fragile than many of us ever thought.

Fascist politics, which always comes from democratic politics in crisis, has reemerged and is flourishing in countries as diverse as Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines. In the 2010s, the growth of democracy stopped for the first time in decades and receded, raising fears of democracy’s survival. Many argue this trend is a consequence of a backlash against globalization. I think there’s a better argument.

Democracy’s retreat is a consequence of two things: when conservative elites in America perversely and successfully married ordinary patriotism with militarism; and when liberal elites began thinking and acting more as morally relative citizens of the world than as morally grounded citizens of the United States. To the extent that there has been a “crisis of confidence” in the West — and to the extent that America is no longer the leader of a postwar international economic order — that current is deeply sourced in a volatile mixture of fascist emergency and cosmopolitan aloofness.

Over the weekend, Anne Applebaum wrote about this “crisis of confidence.” For the Washington Post, she wrote: “There is a decline in faith in liberal democracy, a loss of confidence in universal human rights, a collapse in support for all kinds of transnational projects. There is a constitutional crisis brewing in London. There is a president who defies democratic norms in Washington. There are challenges to the free press and independent judges in democracies everywhere, from Budapest to Manila.”

Case in point is “the slow, grinding, murderous endgame of the war in Syria. Right now, the Syrian government army, aided by its Russian allies, is fighting the last pockets of resistance in Idlib, the only remaining rebel province in northwest Syria. As these forces advance, they shred what remains of humanitarianism and the law of war.”

I have no doubt Applebaum is right, but I also have no doubt that America’s behavior in the wake of September 11, 2001, forever bankrupted our authority as moral leaders. Not only did the Bush administration lie about who our real enemies were; not only did it break international law to invade a country that did us no harm; not only did it torture innocents; not only did it imprison people without due process; not only did it fail to bring to justice the terrorists who murdered more than 3,000 Americans — it did all this and yet even liberal elites, which is say authoritative public figures who are supposed to help actualize self-rule, encouraged the American people to forget it.

We can’t, of course.

Americans are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan. The Iraq invasion created a massive power vacuum eventually filled by the Islamic State (ISIS), which turned to be even more murderous than Al Qaeda. ISIS vowed to create a new nation, or “Islamic caliphate,” by cutting out chunks of Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Such outside threats provided cover for Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan to roll back liberal reforms. They gave Syria’s Bashar al-Assad rationale to gas his own people to death with Russian gas. That years-long civil war has forced more than three and a half million Syrians to seek safe haven in Europe, where local racists panicked at the sight of “the invaders,” thus sparking a right-wing backlash that global elites now attribute to globalization.

Globalization did play a role but of greater significance, I think, was the class-based effort to persuade the citizenry that the disastrous outcome of a globalized economy did not require criminal accountability on the part of the elites who destroyed it. To be sure, the too-big-to-fail banks got bigger after the American people bailed them out. To be sure, the status quo still gives Wall Street incentive to do it all over again. But there was no need for justice, liberal elites told us. That would be something like mob rule, we were told. And lo, not one person was ever prosecuted. Instead, as we learned later, patriotic Americans who publicly protested Wall Street’s capture of their lives and liberty were investigated by American elites, in this case the FBI, as domestic terrorists, itself a consequence of America’s behavior after September 11, 2001.

The west’s “crisis of confidence” is real. But it’s not because of globalization.

It’s because elites here and elsewhere betrayed liberal democracy.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 September 2019
Word Count: 823
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A narrative is taking shape in Washington in which it’s clear to those telling the story that Donald Trump is mentally unwell. As evidence, they point to “Sharpie-gate.” There’s no reason, the storytellers allege, why the president would lie so obviously about something so trivial if he were not experiencing rapid cognitive decline.

Business Insider magnified that view Friday. One source said: “His mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window because he’s losing his s—.”

A Republican strategist went further: “He’s deteriorating in plain sight.”

Another source once close to the president’s legal team said: “There’s just no getting through to him, and you can kiss your plans for the day goodbye because you’re basically stuck looking after a 4-year-old now.”

That’s the story. I’m skeptical. For one thing, this is pretty much what we’ve all come to expect from Trump. He is, after all, the first president in our lifetimes to have told more than 12,000 documented lies and falsehoods since taking office. The Trump who ran for president and the Trump who is the president now are the same Trump.

For another, such stories pathologize Donald Trump’s sadism. They in effect prevent citizens from facing fully the ugly reality of our political moment. Moreover — and I can’t stress this enough — stories that pathologize the president’s sadism in effect prevent the rest of us from fully facing the masochism that’s animating his base. It’s not that they don’t care that he lies. It’s that they derive pleasure from being lied to.

Here’s the backstory: For days on end last week the president insisted that Alabama was among southern states likely to be affected by Hurricane Dorian. Alabama was never in its direct path, but Trump said again and again that it was, even though government scientists publicly contradicted him. The president produced a weather map Wednesday in the Oval Office on which someone, probably Trump, used a black Sharpie marker to include Alabama in the hurricane’s trajectory. He wouldn’t admit his error. He denied that he erred. And he denied it over and over … and over.

Some, like FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver said the “map controversy” was too tiresome to heed. Others, like The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner, said that “Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?”

Neither is quite right. On the one hand, Sharpie-gate (if you’ll excuse the suffix) explains everything about Trumpism and our moment. It cannot and must not be dismissed. On the other, he doesn’t have psychological impairments he didn’t already have. (He’s not getting worse. It’s more of the same. We’re just seeing it better, I hope.) Indeed, citing mental illness gives this authoritarian far too much credit. He’s not lying because he’s unhinged. Trump is lying because to him, it feels good to lie.

What began, I suspect, as mere error (misreading a map) turned into an opportunity for an authoritarian president to impose his will. He might have known he was wrong, but being wrong, or being right for that matter, is immaterial when the authoritarian’s objective is getting you to accept what he says as the only truth. Moreover, the more ridiculous his statements — like using a Sharpie on a weather map to “prove” he was right — the more pleasure he’ll derive from its ultimate acceptance. To the extent that he’s “not well,” it’s to the extent that your humiliation is to him a source of pleasure. (Later on, NOAA issued an official statement declaring that Trump was correct!)

As to masochism, I speak as someone who once inhabited an authoritarian religious environment in which the leader is the one and only source of truth. In such a climate, facts don’t matter because no truth exists outside the authority of “the father.” If he says the sky is green, it’s green. Over time, followers start feeling good being told what to think. They start feeling good believing lies, not in spite of knowing the truth, but often because they know—and yet surrender anyway. The psychic surrender of the will is, I think, an underappreciated aspect of Trumpism. For those inhabiting an authoritarian climate, which is to say for the president’s most loyal supporters, the absence of punishment for independent thinking is the presence of great pleasure.

Is sadism a mental illness? I don’t know. What I do know is if we’re talking about mental wellness that causes ridiculous, voluminous and vicious lying, we’re talking about the wrong thing. Trump isn’t imposing his will on us because he’s sick.

He’s imposing his will on us because that’s what sadists do.

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2019
Word Count: 805
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ISTANBUL — New rules for internet media and streaming services in Turkey are stoking fears of increased government pressure on dissent.

Turkey granted its radio and television watchdog, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK), sweeping oversight over all online content, including streaming platforms and news outlets. The move to strengthen the RTUK, an institution dominated by the government and its nationalist ally, raised concerns that the state was tightening control over the media.

More than 600 institutions, including Netflix and local streaming platforms Puhu TV and BluTV have applied for licences under the new rules, RTUK said.

Free speech advocates said RTUK’s new powers could be used to smother media outlets that refuse to toe the government line. The regulations extend RTUK rules to online broadcasters such as Medyascope, an internet television station critical of the government.

“Of course this is censorship,” Veysel Ok, a Turkish lawyer who specialises in free speech cases, said about the new rules.

Turkish-language services of international outlets such as the Britain’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) or the United States’ Voice of America (VoA) might be affected, Ok said by telephone. He said he had initiated a complaint before Turkey’s highest administrative court in Ankara to stop the new RTUK rules.

Medyascope and foreign content providers the BBC, DW and VoA have become popular with Turks seeking news coverage not under Ankara’s control. Most of Turkey’s large media organisations are owned by companies close to the government.

Critics said pressure on independent outlets has increased since a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. More than 100 journalists are in prison, journalist associations said. Turkey ranked 157th out of 180 countries on a press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group.

The government denies it is cracking down on free speech, arguing that some media in Turkey were instruments of the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Islamic cleric accused by Erdogan of masterminding the 2016 coup attempt.

RTUK said the new requirements had nothing to do with censorship. “Our aim is not to limit individual freedom but to regulate a field that has been off the books,” the organisation said on Twitter. “There is no cause for concern.”

However, critics do not trust RTUK. Six of the nine council members represent Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party and its right-wing partner, the Nationalist Movement Party.

The new RTUK regulations stipulate that content providers must have a fresh licence and comply with RTUK guidelines to operate in Turkey. If they do not respect the guidelines, they will be given 30 days to change their content or face having their licences suspended for three months and later cancelled. It is unclear what standards RTUK expects.

One result of the new requirements could be that images of cigarettes and alcoholic drinks will have to be blurred in programmes on Netflix and other broadcasters, in line with RTUK rules that the organisation said have been introduced to protect young people and family values.

Consequences could be much more serious than blurred whisky glasses, said Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University and a cyber-rights activist.

Akdeniz said Turkey already restricted the free flow of information on the internet by blocking access to more than 245,000 websites, including the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. By the end of the year, that figure was likely to be around 300,000, Akdeniz said by e-mail.

“Based on this censorship climate, things will only get worse,” Akdeniz said. “The new system is advertised as a ‘licensing regime’ but, in reality, this is yet another censorship mechanism and tool that will target independent media outlets.”

Akdeniz agreed with Ok in saying that international providers such as BBC, DW and VoA could face problems in Turkey.

“If they choose not to apply for a licence or if their applications are rejected, [RTUK] will ask a criminal judgeship of peace to block access to such media outlets’ websites from Turkey. This is now a strong possibility.”

Kerem Altiparmak, a human rights lawyer, said the move was the “biggest step in Turkish censorship history” and said all outlets producing opposition news would be affected.

“Everyone who produces alternative news and broadcasts will be affected by this regulation,” Altiparmak wrote on Twitter. “Every news report that can be against the government will be taken under control.”

International streaming services such as Netflix must find a way to comply with RTUK’s new rules or risk being barred from Turkey.

Netflix serves 1.5 million subscribers in Turkey and reaches about 10% of the country’s broadband households, the company said. That makes the Turkish market a potentially important and lucrative source of new subscribers as competition mounts.

The company operates one of the world’s largest streaming services and has sustained its position at the top by courting new subscribers outside the United States as its US home market matures. In the quarter ended June 30, Netflix lost subscribers in the United States for the first time in eight years and fell short of targets for new subscriber growth overseas.

As part of obtaining the Turkish licence, Netflix said it would set up a local entity and pay 0.5% of revenue generated in Turkey to the government. The company said it is in discussions to pay similar levies in Spain and Italy.

Turkey has not attempted to censor Netflix content, a source told Reuters.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2019
Word Count: 898
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A reliable feature of American fascism is taking something that’s completely normal and making it look completely abnormal or worse: immoral, alien, deviant, corrupt, criminal or even treasonous. Take for instance free speech on college campuses.

There you will find young people disagreeing passionately about X, Y and Z. In disagreeing passionately, they are using free speech against free speech, which is what anyone would expect in a liberal democracy and its independent institutions in which freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are of paramount importance.

Fascists don’t like free speech, but they can’t attack it openly for fear of giving the game away. So they attack it indirectly by alleging that young people disagreeing passionately about X, Y and Z are actually suppressing free speech. Or they take a position that’s beyond the pale — like, say, the earth being center of the solar system — and accuse dissenters of using “dehumanizing and totally unacceptable” rhetoric.

Their goals are various and sundry, but in the end, fascist political figures seek to dismantle the good-faith communal bonds on which an open democratic society must depend, and replace them with power and bad faith, but most of all loyalty to the leader. As long as communal bonds endure, free individuals can govern themselves. As long as free individuals can govern themselves, fascist politics can’t take hold. So fascists make normal things seem abnormal and normalize what’s beyond the pale.

Fascism doesn’t work the way we tend to think it does. As novelist Umberto Eco, who had been an unwilling member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, wrote: “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises.”

By Ur-Fascism, Eco meant Eternal Fascism. It’s never going to go away completely, and it promises to come back. I think that’s a constructive concept and history with which to understand recent developments coming out of president’s reelection campaign.

Axios reported Tuesday that Donald Trump’s allies are seeking to raise a couple of million dollars to undermine the legitimacy of the press. The plan is targeting “people producing the news” by slipping “damaging information about reporters and editors to ‘friendly media outlets,’ such as Breitbart, and traditional media.”

This isn’t new.

The Washington press corps has been a frequent target of the Republican Party since forever, but especially since the early 1990s when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who was taking a page from Spiro Agnew’s playbook) advised colleagues to doubt publicly the legitimacy of the press. Remember: bias isn’t the point of the Republican complaint. The point is suppression of a free press and free speech. That Trump’s allies plan to spread disinformation about members of the Washington press corps is the logical next step in the evolution from implicit to explicit fascist politics.

Citizenship hasn’t been the party’s focus for as long, but it’s now of superlative importance. We can see this in the administration’s approach to a time-honored tradition in the armed forced: immigrants can become members of the political community if they sacrifice for it. Last summer, the Pentagon began discharging immigrant recruits who had been promised a pathway to citizenship.

It gets worse.

In July, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said it was considering a rule change so that immigrant spouses and children of military personnel would not be shielded from deportation during overseas service. (Imagine coming back to find your family missing.) The USCIS also said last week that children born overseas to “active service members” — everyone from grunts to spies to foreign diplomats — would not be automatically eligible for citizenship. That rule change would affect about 25 people a year, according to the New York Times, leading critics to ask: Why change it? Good question.

Why erode, undermine, and compromise the meaning, value and ideal of citizenship when it’s only going to affect a few? For that matter, why attack other normal things, like free speech and a free press? My suggestion is that we try to understand what the Republican Party has become. Normal politics no longer works for it. It must do something else if it wants to prevail in the 21st century. It’s no longer committed to liberal democracy and individual liberty. Instead, it has become a collectivist ethno-nationalist enterprise, which is to say Republican politics is now fascist politics.

Free speech, a free press and citizenship serve individuals seeking the actualize the ideal of self-government. What’s that to a fascist prizing loyalty above all? What’s that to a fascist whose demands are so totalizing nothing can exist outside the party.

Ur-Fascism doesn’t rule. And it won’t ever. Not as long as we take Eco’s advice: “Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day.”

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 ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 September 2019
Word Count: 828
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