Can Trump Survive Ending Project Syria?

Tom LUONGO

From the moment that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Davos) announced reluctantly that impeachment proceedings would begin against President Trump I knew this was about his shift in Middle East policy.

It happened on Terrible Tuesday where both Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were handed smackdowns by their respective Deep States over their plans to unwind multiple decades of aggressive foreign policy on the one hand and subjugation to the growing European Union on the other.

Now that Trump has fully embraced ending some of the US’s involvement in Syria the knives have come out in full. There have been nothing but howls of pain from every corner of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism on both sides of the domestic political aisle, about how Trump is unfit for office because he abandoned the heroic Kurds to genocide by the Turks after fighting for freedom against the brutal Bashar al-Assad.

Even the impressive Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) promoted this narrative at the recent Democratic debate.

This narrative is so wrong on so many levels that it amazes me anyone still promulgating it can do so without their brain seizing up from the cognitive dissonance.

The Kurds were mercenaries in a cynical multi-country operation to atomize Syria into a failed state, a la the Libya model which John Bolton threatened North Korea with (and led to the public reason for his firing). This atomization would have seen Turkey take Idlib and the north eastern Arab lands its moving into now, the Kurds get a country comprised of Southeastern Syria and Northern Iraq with the eventual annexation of Kurdish territory in Iran.

This operation was paid for by the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK as well as sanctioned by EU leadership in Paris and Berlin. Russia’s intervention put the kibosh on all of it and the alliance formed in Syria’s defense between it, China, Hezbollah and Iran not only won back most of the country over the past four years but also defeated the Iraqi Kurds at Erbil after a failed rebellion by Mamoud Barzani and his Peshmerga forces.

Once Aleppo was retaken, Raqqa demolished, and the Peshmerga defeated the Kurds’ fate was sealed. The past two and a half years have been nothing more than delaying actions against the day that Trump finally gained control over the White House insurrections amongst his staff and ordered the operation ended.

Trump ordering US troops out of the region put the Kurds on notice that they either make a deal with Russia and the Syrian government or get slaughtered by the Turks. That took all of a day.

It also, as the great Pat Buchanan points out in his latest article, put the Saudis on notice that they no longer set US foreign policy objectives because they sell their oil in dollars and splash some money around D.C. and the media.

Their bloodthirst for war with Iran can be done on their dime or not at all.

The most shocking part in all of this is Trump just made the same statement to, of all people, Israel.

And that’s where the highest concentration of anguish is coming from in the media and elsewhere.

Finally, a Republican president had the stones to call AIPAC’s bluff and stop kowtowing to them over their highly sought-after election funds. Trump doesn’t need AIPAC’s money anymore. He raised $125 million in Q3 and with these moves will likely raise more in Q4.

His firing John Bolton was the clue you needed that AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson were no longer important voices in Trump’s White House. He doesn’t need favorable media coverage from a media dominated by Saudi and Israeli money.

It’s not like he’s gotten good press from them on any consistent basis since 2015. He only gets that when he’s willing to bomb people in the name of their agendas and call it ‘freedom.’

But at the same time, he made powerful enemies doing so.

This was finally the right move made by a US president standing firm in front of oppressive political and media opposition. Trump is showing a strength we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan pulled troops out of Beirut after the massacre of more than 200 marines in 1983.

That he didn’t immediately cave to the pressure like he did in December is noteworthy. I’ve given Trump no end of grief over his lack of moral courage on this very issue, but now that he’s been unleashed by the move to impeach him, he has little left to lose.

It proves that changing personnel can change policy. John Bolton is out and he’s running his mouth about how terrible Trump is trying to become the Hero of the Resistance in the process.

He and former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, dominated the news cycle in the wake of the Kurds making a deal with Syria and Russia, to paint Trump with the Nixon brush of spying on his political enemies.

Meanwhile, his replacement Robert O’Brien is gutting the National Security bureaucracy, reportedly cutting the staff in half. Good. That’s more than a hundred people no longer employed to feed the president false information to suit an agenda that contravenes US security.

These moves by Trump have upset the status quo in a fundamental way. It has blown up the narrative that we were in Syria to defeat ISIS. That was the cover story. And Trump has neatly called it out for exactly that.

The real story is that partitioning Syria has been the long-held goal of Israel, the neoconservatives, PNAC and so many others. And that goal is now looking to be out of reach lest they can convict Trump for doing his job for the first time since he became President.

With the rapid changes happening across the region and the collapse of so many narratives concurrently, Trump is in an excellent position to make good on many of his long-delayed promises.

What’s also clear is that Putin has played everyone in the region perfectly, balancing his relationships with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel so that once Trump made his move to pull back the curtain in Syria, they would all turn to him to broker their terms.

What’s also clear is that any move he makes now will be interpreted through the impeachment lens as proof he’s trying to save himself or that he really is a Putin puppet or whatever random anti-Trump thought flits through the tiny openings in the minds of his opponents.

Trump has stepped on sacred ground here, US interventionist foreign policy. And, right now, only he has the platform and the ability to separate fact from fiction about its efficacy and who it really serves.

Because it doesn’t serve the American people, nor does it serve the people our continued presence is supposed to protect. Trump won’t come out and say that he’s turned his back on Israel’s goals in the Middle East. But with his Deal of the Century dead, its proponents on their last legs politically (Netanyahu and Kushner) it seems likely that he’s cutting bait and changing course.

And even if he doesn’t survive this politically, the vacuum he’s creating right now is big enough that it won’t matter. With Putin signing major deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, China welcoming Iraq into the Belt and Road family and Turkey all but leaving NATO, what are a bunch of feckless and politically spent neocons going to do?

Not much from where I’m sitting.

Tom LUONGO

Tom Luongo is an independent political and economic analyst based in North Florida, USA

Will Trump Take Neocon Bait and Attack Iran Over Saudi Strike?

written by ron paul

The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in blowback. In 2015 Saudi Arabia attacked its neighbor, Yemen, because a coup in that country ousted the Saudi-backed dictator. Four years later Yemen is in ruins, with nearly 100,000 Yemenis killed and millions more facing death by starvation. It has been rightly called the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.

But rich and powerful Saudi Arabia did not defeat Yemen. In fact, the Saudis last month asked the Trump Administration to help facilitate talks with the Houthis in hopes that the war, which has cost Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars, could finally end without Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman losing too much face. Washington admitted earlier this month that those talks had begun.

The surprise Houthi attack on Saturday disrupted half of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas production and shocked Washington. Predictably, however, the neocons are using the attack to call for war with Iran!

Sen. Lindsay Graham, one of the few people in Washington who makes John Bolton look like a dove, Tweeted yesterday that, “It is now time for the US to put on the table an attack on Iranian oil refineries…” Graham is the perfect embodiment of the saying, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” No matter what the problem, for Graham the solution is war.

Likewise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who is supposed to represent US diplomacy – jumped to blame Iran for the attack on Saudi Arabia, Tweeting that, “Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.” Of course, he provided no evidence even as the Houthis themselves took responsibility for the bombing.

What is remarkable is that all of Washington’s warmongers are ready for war over what is actually a retaliatory strike by a country that is the victim of Saudi aggression, not the aggressor itself. Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia in 2015. It was the other way around. If you start a war and the other country fights back, you should not be entitled to complain about how unfair the whole thing is.

The establishment reaction to the Yemeni oilfield strike reminds me of a hearing in the House Foreign Affairs Committee just before the US launched the 2003 Iraq war. As I was arguing against the authorization for that war, I pointed out that Iraq had never attacked the United States. One of my colleagues stopped me in mid-sentence, saying, “let me remind the gentleman that the Iraqis have been shooting at our planes for years.” True, but those planes were bombing Iraq!

The neocons want a US war on Iran at any cost. They may feel temporarily at a disadvantage with the departure of their ally in the Trump Administration, John Bolton. However, the sad truth is that there are plenty more John Boltons in the Administration. And they have allies in the Lindsay Grahams in Congress.

Yemen has demonstrated that it can fight back against Saudi aggression. The only sensible way forward is for a rapid end to this four-year travesty, and the Saudis would be wise to wake up to the mess they’ve created for themselves. Whatever the case, US participation in Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen must end immediately and neocon lies about Iran’s role in the war must be refuted and resisted.

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Bolton and Neocons responsible for billions in opportunity costs – does Trump realize it?

By Martin Love

NORTH CAROLINA - It’s obvious Donald Trump, who touts himself as a superb “dealmaker”, has not made any important deals yet as President. In fact, he’s done little but tear up extant deals, and the most notable one he destroyed was the JCPOA. But at the same time, Trump literally likes talking to other leaders, and some other leaders have responded to him saying they actually thought he was almost charming and reasonably well spoken. One would like to imagine this is the case, because Trump made a lot more sense when he was on the campaign trail back in 2016 than he has in the past two years. Why the change, because now, very few people like Trump, and his reelection is in doubt?

Well, Trump literally had no idea whom to appoint to help him once in office. He wound up appointing people (Bolton, Pompeo, even Pence) opposed to many aspects of his original, campaign agenda, and above all, he appointed some of the worst people imaginable to soothe U.S. relations and establish fundamentally peaceful relations with other countries like Russia, China, Iran and some others in the Middle East, except for Israel (which has been totally rewarded by the U.S. alone for nothing good). The Neocons have long been particularly aggressive. With Bolton fired this week, and some saner names being suggested as a replacement, one can only hope that Trump is beginning to realize that if he wants to MAGA, it will be impossible if he caters to Neocon madness. Under the spell of these American traitors, who are mostly Zionist in orientation, Trump hit Iran with the worst economic sanctions ever imposed on anyone short of outright military attack. And the thinking was that Iran would do the bidding of Pompeo and Bolton, which was way off the mark, and even farther off the mark succumb to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic in favor of the MEK, which is a whacko terrorist organization.

But more importantly, with the U.S. meddling in Hong Kong and with the tariff war underway between the U.S. and China, China’s President Xi no longer trusts Trump and seems to have concluded that trying to make a deal with the U.S. is a fruitless undertaking and that China might be better off just going its own way and doing deals itself with better partners. Such as Iran.

China has said it will invest $400 billion in Iran’s oil infrastructure and other industry. (Iran is, after all, the keystone country in China’s Belt and Road initiative given its size and location between East and West Asia. This scheme by China for Iran gives Iran the option of even continuing its current foreign policies in the Middle East.

Could it be that Trump realizes the opportunity costs the U.S. has borne with the Mideast policies it has maintained over the past three years? This may be too much to ask of Trump, such realization, but it’s not hard to imagine the benefits of a slowly warming relationship between the U.S. and Iran had the U.S. stuck to the JCPOA. (This writer argued with an editor at a major U.S. newspaper for the “normalization” of U.S. relations with BOTH Israel at one extreme and Iran at the other back in 2013, but the ideas were rejected and the editor refused to publish them. The editor had Neocon pals like Bill Kristol, a Zionist.) With normalization, the U.S. certainly would have gotten the lion’s share of scores of commercial deals with Iran, and China would not likely be preparing to make Iran a strategic partner.

Iran, for example, would likely have bought hundreds of Western-made aircraft from Boeing and Airbus, for one thing. The facts are that Natanyahu and the Jewish lobbies in the U.S., aiming to dominate naïve Trump as they did other Presidents, are ultimately to blame for what may be one of the biggest, commercial economic errors the U.S. has made since World War 2: pushing most of Asia and Russia together into a virtually united bloc that ultimately will declare a big “sayonara” to the unreliable, untrustworthy U.S.-led West.

Now, with Bolton out, it is possible that President Rouhani may have second thoughts about rejecting any talks with Trump at the UN General Assembly later this month. The question may be (in some jest) that if “Bibi” Natanyahu loses the election in Israel, whether Trump will do something even crazier than appointing Bolton in the first place in 2018 and appoint “Bibi” or someone like him to replace Bolton. 

‘Keep friends close, enemies closer’: Why Donald Trump works with bloodthirsty Neocons

Robert BRIDGE

[Note: This article was sent to press just prior to the news that Donald Trump had requested the resignation of his National Security Advisor, John Bolton. Since that decision does not alter the argument made in this article, it is being presented here in its original form].

Trump supporters suffered a collective convulsion when foreign policy hawks, like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams, were brought screeching into his administration. How could the US president be sincere about rolling back US military activities abroad, they asked, when the neocons had a hotline to his ear?

Yet here we are, almost three years later, and we’ve yet to witness Armageddon, although we do have a spectacular trade war raging with China. Mere mortals would view the cessation of US-driven hostilities as a positive development. For the US deep state, however, which depends upon military expansion and war for its very survival, it is an unspeakable disaster. In that sense, if Trump is really serious about draining the Swamp, abstaining from global aggression would be one of the most effective ways of achieving that goal.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · Sep 10, 2019

I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.

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Had Hillary Clinton squeaked out a victory in 2016, we’d all be handwringing once again, attempting to make sense of yet another killing field – this time in Syria – reminiscent of the former Secretary of State’s “We came, we saw, he died” psycho scenario that played out in both Iraq and Libya. The closest the Trump administration got to full-blown warfare came in April 2017 when it launched missiles at a Syrian air base purported to have been involved in a chemical attack on civilians. Since that moment, which made the carnivorous media cheerleaders giddy from the promise of bloodshed, it has been relatively quiet on the Western front. So quiet in fact that John Bolton is probably wondering why Trump chose him as his security advisor in the first place.

New Day

✔@NewDay

.@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: "I think Donald Trump became President of the United States" last night

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Indeed, not only has Washington not invaded a foreign country since Trump entered the Oval Office, it looks like Bolton may be remembered as the White House National Security Advisor who was sent home without a head of some foreign leader to place above the fireplace. And certainly not for lack of trying.

The belligerent Bush-era hawk who once spoke out in favor of preemptive strikes against both Iran and North Korea, Bolton also failed, thus far, to drive Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro out of Caracas. In fact, Maduro has claimed, without providing any evidence, that Bolton was personally responsible for organizing an attempt on his life.

The setbacks for the hawks continues in Afghanistan, where Trump has expressed a willingness to cut a deal with the Taliban that will allow him to draw down US troops and declare a foreign policy victory ahead of 2020 elections. Yet conspicuously missing from those peace talks is John Bolton, who reportedly has been blacklisted for peace talks later this month.

According to a report in the Washington Post, quoting an anonymous source, “Bolton asked for a copy of the draft agreement the United States is trying to strike with the Taliban. But the U.S. envoy leading the negotiations, Zalmay Khalilzad, denied the request, saying Bolton could read the agreement in the presence of a senior official but not leave with it in hand…”

Most shocking of all, however, as far as the deep state is concerned, is Trump’s recent suggestion that he would be willing to sit down with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at UN headquarters later this month.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

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Trump made the comments after he was essentially ambushed during the G7summit in Biarritz, France last month. At the secret invitation of French President Immanuel Macron, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise visit to the meeting, to discuss possible ways of ending the standoff with Washington after the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal last year.

According to US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, US sanctions are an effort to reduce Tehran’s oil exports—which provide some 40 percent of its revenue—to “zero.” Washington’s allies, however, fear that crushing the Iranian economy will eventually force Tehran into some sort of response, potentially a violent one, thereby giving the US a possible pretext for war.

“Iran’s strategy at this time is reducing its commitments under the nuclear deal,” Mehdi Mahmoudi, an Iranian journalist based in Tehran, told The Media Line. “Indeed, this tactic is successful because the European Union is now trying to do more and more work to appease Iran.”

ايران وطن من . IRAN My Homeland@IranHomeland

Iran Gives Ultimatum, Threatens to Abandon Nuclear Deal (with AUDIO INTERVIEW) https://themedialine.org/top-stories/iran-gives-ultimatum-threatens-to-abandon-nuclear-deal/ … via @TheMediaLine

Iran Gives Ultimatum, Threatens to Abandon Nuclear Deal (with AUDIO INTERVIEW) - The Media Line

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has issued a stern warning to European powers, saying that Tehran would “in the coming days” further scale back its commitments to the 2015 nuclear agreement.

themedialine.org

4:39 PM - Sep 5, 2019

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Trump’s great gambit

In an effort to understand Trump and his balancing act between a government loaded with hawks, and a geopolitical chess game rigged to dynamite, there are at least three dynamics at play – ‘3D chess’ if you like.

First, Trump the relentless businessman, whose talents are to be found in the boardroom as opposed to the battlefield, understands the need for strong-arm tactics in order to get the best possible deal. This he hopes to accomplish by putting notorious Neocons like Bolton, Pompeo and Abrams on the government payroll. Their mere presence sends an unmistakable message to Trump’s opponents: Cut a deal with me or I will remove the leash from these warmongers, who will be only too happy to do the bidding of the deep state. Thus far the nerve-rattling strategy, despite the unfathomable risks involved, has worked like magic against North Korea.

Next, by keeping snarling Neocons on the payroll, Trump gives the deep state the ‘false security,’ as it were, that another regime change operation is just one false flag attack away. Despite the string of chemical attacks in Syria, and the attack on foreign vessels blamed on Tehran, thus far Trump has managed to avoid a full-blown military scenario in places like Syria and Iran. Of course all that could change in a millisecond, but for now a very tense ‘peace regime’ is in place.

Finally, by keeping some of the most prominent members of the deep state under his wing, Trump not only works towards his own self-preservation, but facilitates his campaign pledge to drain the swamp. The importance of a ruler keeping his enemies close was laid out millennia ago by Sun Tsu, the Chinese military strategist. The question at this time is whether Trump is sincere, or still up to the task, of carrying out his incredibly ambitious plan.

Considering the untold humiliations he has suffered since entering the White House, at the hands of a media that has been completely co-opted by the deep state, it seems doubtful Trump will forego his house-cleaning campaign. In that event, the likes of Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams and other Neocon officials will be less useful against foreign adversaries than they will be against battling the D.C. swamp creatures, even if they, the neocons – Trump’s eternal enemies that he has deemed to keep close as the sage Chinese strategist advised – are wholly unaware of the contributions they will make to the main event.

Robert BRIDGE

American writer and journalist.