Woodward’s ''Fear'' Exposes Trump’s Ineptitude

Kevin Barrett

When I was in high school (1972–1976) my political heroes included JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane, antiwar provocateur Abbie Hoffman, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — the Washington Post journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon. Today, I still admire three of the four. But I’m not so sure about Woodward.

Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, a shocking and well-documented exposé of the Bush crime family, presents strong evidence that the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency was a coup d’état by deep-state actors — including a certain Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. Today, when I read Woodward’s work, I no longer embrace the illusions that led me to choose journalism as my undergraduate major. The USA does not have a free and independent press. What we have is “American Pravda,” as Ron Unz puts it in his masterful series of articles collected here.

Since Woodward is an intelligence officer whose cover job is “journalist,” should we believe anything he tells us about Trump’s White House? His new book Fear: Trump in the White House is almost entirely based on “Deep Throats” — that is, people who supposedly participated in and witnessed the events described, but whose names are withheld. So we are basically being asked to take the anonymous sources’ accounts on faith.

That said, I suspect that like most good disinformation, Woodward’s book is 95% true, at least to the extent of representing a reasonably accurate presentation of what the author heard from people who worked in and around the Oval Office. But the way the material has been selected and arranged betrays an agenda. Just as Woodward’s Watergate-era journalism was not disinterested truth-seeking, but part of an intelligence operation by oligarchs and their military intelligence friends aimed at ending Nixon’s presidency, Fear is part of a similar operation today whose purpose is to hobble and/or terminate the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

Like Nixon (and before him JFK), Trump poses a threat to the permanent national security state.* Each of these three presidential “threats” to the deep state was quite different: JFK had become a pacifist and an enemy of Israel’s nuclear program; Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger were freelancers who transformed America’s China policy without deep-state permission (and of course Nixon was an “anti-Semite” who dreamed of ending Jewish-Zionist control over American media); while Trump is dangerous due to his “isolationism” and ineptitude.

If we remove the punctuation Woodward’s title becomes “Fear Trump in the White House” — which is of course its barely-subliminal message. So why should we fear Trump’s presidency? Woodward’s series of artfully-arranged vignettes shows us a White House in complete chaos. Trump seemingly has no idea what he is doing from one moment to the next. He watches six to eight hours of television a day, gobbling junk food, raging against CNN and MSNBC commentators, and nodding sagely at the wisdom of Fox News talking heads. His agenda is neither written down nor remembered, so aides can derail his projects by stealing presidential edicts from his desk before he signs them, confident that Trump will forget them: out of sight, out of mind.

Like the Watergate tapes, Woodward’s quotes reveal a White House in which practically every other sentence is laced with profanity. In 1974 America, this posed a political problem with a public not yet inured to foul-mouthed leadership. Today, the USA’s manners and morals have sunk so low that even Trump’s evangelical base is happy to support their p-ssy-grabber-in-chief, even if he and his whole entourage cuss like sailors.

If profanity was once considered sinful, so was lying. Today’s Washington, DC is a swamp of prevarication, but recognizes a distinction between good and bad liars: good liars skillfully recite officially-sanctioned bromides and stick to their stories with confidence and consistency; whereas bad liars blurt out whatever comes into their heads, rattle easily, and get caught contradicting themselves. Trump, Woodward informs us, is the quintessential bad liar. This comes on the authority of Trump’s ex-lawyer, John Dowd, who explained to Robert Mueller that when Trump was put through a mock interview “he just made something up. That’s his nature.” Dowd told Mueller that if Trump ever testified the President of the United States would be exposed not only as a pathological liar but as “an idiot… a goddamn dumbbell,” which would pose a threat to the national security of the United States.

Woodward’s book confirms Michael Wolff’s earlier claim in Fire and Fury that practically everyone who has worked with Trump considers the President a mental midget. Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis is quoted as saying Trump acts like, and has the understanding of, “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward confirms earlier accounts that ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.” Many other Trump advisors express similar sentiments. There is only one denizen of the White House who thinks Trump is a “very stable genius,” and we all know who that is.

But is Trump really that stupid? The harshest attacks on Trump’s IQ are all coming from true believers in American imperial ideology. These people are frustrated that Trump doesn’t “get it” when they try to explain to him how self-evident it is that the USA must continue to serve as global policeman. Woodward notes that both Tillerson’s “moron” remark, and Mattis’s “sixth-grader” assessment, were responses to Trump’s rejection of American imperialist exceptionalism at a January 19, 2008 National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room. That meeting had been arranged by deep-state denizens John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Tillerson, and Mattis for the specific purpose of brainwashing Trump into accepting their “we must police the world” outlook. Trump belligerently refused. His final remark was, “We [have] spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.” Over and over, throughout Woodward’s book, we see Trump trying to pull US forces out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea… and his deep state aides panicking and sabotaging his efforts.

Is the “sixth grader” who notices that the emperor has no clothes a “moron”? If the self-styled smart guys and adults in the room all think the US should bankrupt itself destroying the Middle East for Israel, and needs a globe-straddling empire with more than 1,000 military bases in more than 60 countries, maybe we need to find an as-yet-unindoctrinated sixth grader to apply some common sense. Trump is right in asserting that the US could be far more prosperous, at least for its ordinary honest citizens, if it became, once again, a normal nation: a republic, not an empire.

So if Trump wants to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea, why hasn’t he? Isn’t the president supposed to be the commander-in-chief? Woodward explains that Trump’s aides have pulled off “nothing less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority.” In other words, they have committed treason. But that shouldn’t surprise us, since they are all complicit, actively or passively, in the greatest act of treason in American and perhaps world history: the September 11th, 2001 Zionist coup d’état.

Unfortunately, despite his isolationist instincts, Trump has fallen for neocon-Zionist brainwashing with respect to Iran policy. Though Iran hawk James Mattis, cited by Woodward as hating “the idiot raghead mullahs” of the Islamic Republic, may be on his way out, the even more obsessive Iran-haters Mike Pompeo and John Bolton are now firmly in charge. The good news is that Trump doesn’t want war, he wants leverage. The bad news is that he won’t get any leverage, or any deal, by waving Pompeo, Bolton, and their MEK terrorist friends at Iran’s principled and disciplined leadership. The resulting standoff could encourage Israel to gin up another 9/11-style false flag, or perhaps a Gulf of Tonkin style attack on a US ship in the Persian Gulf, to try to draw the US into attacking Tehran. Such a plot wouldn’t have succeeded against the Netanyahu-loathing Obama Administration. But it might work on Trump, who fell for the April 4, 2017 Syrian sarin gas false flag, screaming “kill them all” and firing a volley of missiles, to the delight of his deep-state advisors and the cheers of the mainstream media.

So what are we to make of this chaotic administration? It seems that America’s top leadership, according to Woodward and other semi-reliable sources, consists of an idiot (some would say idiot-savant) commander-in-chief surrounded by traitors bent on endless mass murder in service to a dying empire.

* On the permanent national security state or “deep state” see Michael J. Glennon, National Security and the Double Government; Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State; Eric Wilson (editor), The Dual State; Kouzmin, Witt and Kakabadse, State Crimes Against Democracy; and Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America. On Zionist influence on the American deep state see Laurent Guyénot, JFK-9/11 and From Yahweh to Zion.

 

Kevin Barrett

Will Next Steps on Iran Point towards a New ‘Big Three’ or World War III?

JAMES GEORGE JATRAS

On July 22 US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a bizarre speech on Iran. Delivered from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and ostensibly addressed to the Iranian-American community, the speech’s staging clearly sought to evoke the fall of communism, casting the Ayatollahs in the role of Leonid Brezhnev and company.

Iranian “regime change” is not the publicly stated goal of the Trump Administration’s policy. But it is hard to see how US demands on Tehran don’t amount to exactly that, with Pompeo comparing the Iranian “regime” (a term used dozens of times to imply illegitimacy) to a “mafia.” He asserted that Iran’s behavior is “at root in the revolutionary nature of the regime itself.” What can change its “root” or “nature” without ceasing to be itself?

Pompeo demanded not just a total change in policy from Tehran but a different mode of governance amounting to Iran’s ceasing to be an independent regional power. The Reagan venue’s analogy to the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe echoed in the Secretary’s heavy emphasis on “a new 24/7 Farsi-language TV channel” spanning “not only television, but radio, digital, and social media format, so that the ordinary Iranians inside of Iran and around the globe can know that America stands with them.”

The US position on Iran is that it is solely a question of removing a layer of malign governance, after which democracy, tolerance, peace, and general niceness will spontaneously break forth, and justice will roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Just like happened in Iraq after 2003. Just like in Libya.

Never mind that Iran isn’t North America or Europe. Never mind that American and European ideas of social and personal liberty would be anathema to an unknown but significant percentage of Iran’s population. Never mind that the replacement for the Ayatollahs envisioned by many Administration big shots, the cultish People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Mojahedin-e Khalq, MEK), may not be particularly democratic or popular with Iranians. Don’t bother us with details – the neo-Bolshevik myth of a spontaneous uprising by the oppressed masses (with a little help from outside, like the Kaiser’s generals were kind enough to provide Lenin) is alive and well in Washington.

One is reminded of “true believer” Condoleezza Rice in 2006 denouncing as – you guessed it! – racist any objections to militant democracy promotion in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq:

‘“Well, growing up in the South and having people underestimate you because one of the reasons for segregation, one of the reasons for the separation of the races was supposedly, the inferiority of one race to the other,” she explains. “And so when I look around the world and I hear people say, ‘Well, you know, they're just not ready for democracy,’ it really does resonate. I hear echoes of, well, you know, blacks are kind of childlike. They really can't handle the vote. Or they really can't take care of themselves. It really does roil me. It makes me so angry because I think there are those echoes of what people once thought about black Americans.”’

Pompeo heavily emphasized Iran’s internal problems, such as political repression, corruption, economic distress, many of which are no doubt are quite real. Still, it was hard to listen to the Secretary without mentally comparing how the identical litany of abuses would apply to Washington’s perennial darling of the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, which in every particular is far, far worse than Iran. But nobody is talking about what amounts to regime change in Riyadh or even any sanctions against them. Accusations of Iranian state support for terrorism would be risible if arming myriad Sunni jihadist groups by the US and our various partners, the Saudis chief among them, were a laughing matter.

Pompeo’s speech triggered a rebuke by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that “peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars” – an unfortunate choice of words given how Saddam Hussein’s “mother of all battles” turned out. Trump immediately shot back with a tweet threatening that Iran could “SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Predictably, Trump’s ubiquitous critics focused as much on the all capital letters as on the substance of the exchange.

No one knows where any of this is leading. The memory immediately triggered was that of harsh verbal exchanges between North Korea’s “Little Rocket man” Kim Jong-un and the “mentally deranged US dotard” Trump prior to their love fest in Singapore. Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com was succinct in his optimism: “This means he’ll be scheduling a Rouhani summit in a few months.”

On the other hand, instead of Singapore 2018 we could be seeing a repeat of the lead-up to Iraq 2003. So many of the same people who were beating the drums for the war with Iraq under President George W. Bush are playing the same tune now with respect to Iran. It is significant that whereas with respect to North Korea our foremost regional partner, South Korea, is pushing hardest for a peaceful outcome, Israel and Saudi Arabia, the two foreign states that exercise almost total control over the political class in Washington, are itching for the US to take care of their Iran problem for them. The hare-brained “Arab NATO” idea has been revived.

Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has denied a report that the US was identifying targets in Iran to be struck as early as next month and disowned regime change. For what it is worth (probably not much) a recent poll shows that Americans are against war with Iran by a better than two-to-one margin. But, as Raimondo observes, “there are plenty of warmongers in Washington who just can’t wait for the shooting to start in the Middle East again, and they have targeted Iran as their next victim. … [S]uch a war would destroy Trump’s presidency precisely because his base would oppose it. And yet, … despite the fact that the President’s advisors are pushing war with Iran, Trump routinely ignores them and does exactly as he pleases: that’s why we had the Singapore summit and the Helsinki meeting with Putin.”

We can hope that Trump will decide on his next steps with regard to Iran based on much broader international considerations that impact his domestic goals. Taken most optimistically, that could mean a concept that some of us have been suggesting for almost two years: a new “Big Three” understanding among Trump, Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Indeed, Professor Michael T. Klare, writing in TomDispatch.com, claims this is Trump’s conscious intention:

‘An examination of his campaign speeches and his actions since entering the Oval Office -- including his appearance with Putin -- reflect his adherence to a core strategic concept: the urge to establish a tripolar world order, one that was, curiously enough, first envisioned by Russian and Chinese leaders in 1997 and one that they have relentlessly pursued ever since.

‘Such a tripolar order -- in which Russia, China, and the U.S. would each assume responsibility for maintaining stability within their own respective spheres of influence while cooperating to resolve disputes wherever those spheres overlap -- breaks radically with the end-of-the-Cold-War paradigm. During those heady years, the United States was the dominant world power and lorded it over most of the rest of the planet with the aid of its loyal NATO allies.

‘For Russian and Chinese leaders, such a “unipolar” system was considered anathema. After all, it granted the United States a hegemonic role in world affairs while denying them what they considered their rightful place as America’s equals. Not surprisingly, destroying such a system and replacing it with a tripolar one has been their strategic objective since the late 1990s -- and now an American president has zealously embraced that disruptive project as his own. [ . . . ]

‘The big question in all this, of course, is: Why? Why would an American president seek to demolish a global order in which the United States was the dominant player and enjoyed the support of so many loyal and wealthy allies? Why would he want to replace it with one in which it would be but one of three regional heavyweights? [ . . . ]

‘In the Trumpian mindset, this country had become weak and overextended because of its uncritical adherence to the governing precepts of the liberal international order, which called for the U.S. to assume the task of policing the world while granting its allies economic and trade advantages in return for their loyalty. Such an assessment, whether accurate or not, certainly jibes well with the narrative of victimization that so transfixed his core constituency in rustbelt areas of Middle America. It also suggests that an inherited burden could now be discarded, allowing for the emergence of a less-encumbered, stronger America -- much as a stronger Russia has emerged in this century from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and a stronger China from the wreckage of Maoism. This reinvigorated country would still, of course, have to compete with those other two powers, but from a far stronger position, being able to devote all its resources to economic growth and self-protection without the obligation of defending half of the rest of the world.

‘Listen to Trump’s speeches, read through his interviews, and you’ll find just this proposition lurking behind virtually everything he has to say on foreign policy and national security. “You know... there is going to be a point at which we just can’t do this anymore,” he told Haberman and Sanger in 2016, speaking of America’s commitments to allies. “You know, when we did those deals, we were a rich country... We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We’re not anymore.”

‘The only acceptable response, he made clear, was to jettison such overseas commitments and focus instead on “restoring” the country’s self-defense capabilities through a massive buildup of its combat forces. (The fact that the United States already possesses far more capable weaponry than any of its rivals and outspends them by a significant margin when it comes to the acquisition of additional munitions doesn’t seem to have any impact on Trump’s calculations.)’

If such is indeed Trump’s calculation, his likelihood of attacking Iran is very low.

Conversely, the forces benefitting from the status quo Trump would dismantle cannot be expected to accept such a future with equanimity: the Pentagon and NATO military establishments, the intelligence community, the hordes of contractors and think tank denizens, and others. Perhaps even worse, Trump’s domestic critics face the terrifying prospect that he could emerge as the greatest peacemaker in modern history, as well as restorer of America’s economic might.

We can thus expect an added zeal born of desperation from former “CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, Robert Mueller, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Democratic National Committee,” who, Paul Craig Roberts aptly says, are “engaged in high treason against the American people and the President of the United States and are actively engaged in a plot to overthrow the President of the United States.” Just in recent weeks the intensity of this campaign prevented Trump from agreeing to anything of substance with Putin in Helsinki, forced him to tap-dance around what he did or didn’t say at the post-summit press conference, and postpone according to Grand Inquisitor Mueller’s convenience a follow-up US-Russia summit (no doubt to the delight of his own appointees no less than to his enemies’).

We can expect that between now the November 2018 Congressional elections Mueller will come out with several indictments against Trump associates with the hope of tipping the House of Representatives to the Democrats. If that happens, despite an anticipated GOP retention of the Senate, Trump will be removed or forced to resign in 2019, with a substantial percentage of Republicans ready to jump at the prospect of putting Mike Pence into the Oval Office, with current UN Ambassador Nikki Haley a virtual shoo-in as Vice President.

Such a development would prompt an anguished but futile outburst from Trump’s base. But with l’ancien régime back in power, the guardians of the neoliberal, unipolar order the interloper had imperiled will move quickly to repudiate any understandings he might have had with Moscow and Beijing. The slide toward a catastrophe of literally unimaginable proportions, which Trump had sought to arrest, will become for all intents and purposes irreversible.

At that point Iran will be the least of our worries.

JAMES GEORGE JATRAS

Analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate