For Trump, Regime Change Begins At Home

Donald Trump

by John Feffer

A month after he won the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump gave a speech in North Carolina where he declared that “we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”

It’s still commonplace for foreign policy analysts of the left, right, and center to distinguish Trump from his predecessors by pointing out that he hasn’t pursued the regime-policies of either neoconservatives or liberal internationalists. After all, there’s been no Iraq or Libya on Trump’s watch.

It’s a pretty myth.

True, Trump has no beef against dictators who write him “beautiful” letters, so regime change is off the table for the time being with North Korea. But Trump developed a specific animus against Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and did what he could to push him out of office. First, Trump talked about the military option. Then he ratcheted up sanctions against the country. Finally, he supported what might have been a coup if the plotters hadn’t made such a mess of it.

With Iran, the regime-change policy has been both subtler and more aggressive. Rather than encourage a coup within the country, Trump has developed a variety of different strategies to squeeze the regime.

First, he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal (over the objections of a number of his key advisors). Then he imposed ever-more punitive sanctions on the country and pressed hard against nations that continued to import energy from Tehran. Finally, he has continued to stand by Saudi Arabia as it seeks to destabilize Iran.

So far, Trump hasn’t sent in the soldiers. But the goal of the administration remains the same.

Of course, Trump denies that regime change is his objective. But it doesn’t really matter what Trump says. His rhetoric floats above reality like smog over a city.

Rather than debate the finer points of Trump’s objectives — which change from day to day, perhaps minute to minute — let’s reverse the lens. If it’s difficult to determine precisely what Trump’s intentions are toward countries he knows nothing about, it’s much easier to figure out what Trump wants to do in the one country he does know something about.

Trump wants regime change in the United States. He’s not interested in changing the leadership in the White House, as long as he’s occupying the Oval Office. But he does want to change the very nature of the government.

Fox News and others love to talk about a “coup” by a “deep state” desperate to remove Trump from power. It’s but one more example of the radical right projecting its covert hopes and fears onto its adversaries.

The coup is real. But it’s all about Trump transforming American governance from within and expanding executive power to the max. It’s not Trump vs. the “deep state.” It’s Trump vs. the state, full stop.

Incredibly, Trump has been busy enlisting the services of foreign leaders who can help make that happen. And it’s this malfeasance — on top of his other crimes — that has now driven Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to attempt a regime change of their own.

From Norway to Ukraine

Trump has flouted U.S. rules and regulations, relying on the incorrigible American love of outlaws to maintain his political base. The publication of the Mueller report, which detailed the wrongdoing of the Trump campaign and its connections to Russia, should have made the president think twice about once again enlisting the services of a foreign government to improve his own electoral chances.

But when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on June 13, Trump responded, “If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it…It’s not an interference, they have information — I think I’d take it.” Federal law, of course, prohibits the solicitation of anything of value from a foreign government in connection with an election.

The next month, Trump flipped the script. Instead of a foreign leader phoning in with a juicy morsel of information, Trump himself was trying to extract the intel from an unwilling or at least uncomfortable interlocutor. In a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump reportedly pressured the Ukrainian president to initiate a corruption investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.

Someone in the intelligence community who listened in on the phone call — and possibly Trump’s other communications with foreign leaders — decided that the president crossed a line. This person blew the whistle, which is how the phone call came to public notice.

Trump admits that he talked about Biden with the Ukrainian leader. He even admits that he put a hold on U.S. military aid to Ukraine prior to the phone call. But Trump denies any wrongdoing, including any hint that U.S. aid would stop flowing if Zelensky didn’t comply with the request.

Trump, as usual, has tried to turn the tables by accusing both Joe Biden and his son of impropriety. Hunter Biden had served on the board of a large Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma, while his father was vice president.

Although there is no evidence that Hunter Biden’s position affected Obama administration policy toward Ukraine, that hasn’t prevented Trump’s attack dog, Rudy Giuliani, from trying to manufacture such a connection. In 2018, Giuliani started building a case that Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin because he was investigating Hunter Biden and Burisma’s co-founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

As Adam Entous explains in The New Yorker:

There is no credible evidence that Biden sought Shokin’s removal in order to protect Hunter. According to Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, Shokin was removed because of concerns by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the U.S. government that he wasn’t pursuing corruption investigations. Contrary to the assertions that Shokin was fired because he was investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky, Hochstein said, “many of us in the U.S. government believed that Shokin was the one protecting Zlochevsky.”

Facts be damned, Republican supporters of Trump are scrambling to get ahead of the scandal. The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes (R-CA), reading the old cue cards from Russiagate, immediately blamed everything on Hillary Clinton and the opposition research she’d dug up on Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian connections to counter his father’s possible presidential candidacy in 2016. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) urged Trump to release a transcript of the phone conversation because he’s convinced that it will exonerate Trump.

It’s not the scandal itself that reveals Trump’s executive overreach. It’s his blithe disregard of all rules in his quest for absolute power. He simply refuses to be handcuffed (literally and figuratively).

In a democracy, the state — its checks-and-balances, its bureaucracy — is the box that contains any potential autocrats. The Republican Party adopted its anti-statist philosophy largely to benefit businesses and the wealthy. Trump has a different agenda. He’s against the American state largely to benefit himself.

The Siren Call of Impeachment

The Democrats have been in a quandary since practically day one of the Trump administration.

Here was a president whose crimes and misdemeanors preceded his assumption of office. But for the first two years of Trump’s term, the Democrats were a minority in both houses of Congress. After 2018, they controlled the House, which meant that they could launch a series of investigations that the president and his team have stonewalled. Because the Senate remains in Republican hands, impeachment continues to be a long shot.

And yet, Trump continues to act with impunity. So, the Ukraine call has emerged as the proverbial line in the sand. A number of prominent Democrats threatened to proceed with impeachment if Trump didn’t disclose the full contents of his call with Zelensky. Some otherwise centrist Democrats, like Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, joined the bandwagon.

Trump backed down by promising to release both a transcript of his phone call with Zelensky and the whistleblower’s complaint. But Pelosi decided on Tuesday to press forward with an impeachment inquiry nonetheless. Right now, it looks as though the impeachment inquiry will focus only on the Ukraine matter rather than the other obstruction and financial issues that congressional committees are investigating.

Impeachment of Trump, at this point, is both a legal and moral necessity. It’s also very likely a political trap.

Trump relishes the role of an underdog, persecuted by the powerful. It’s what enables him to connect to a political base that, aside from his deep-pocket funders, feels disempowered by a rigged economy and a sclerotic political system. Impeachment, for this constituency, vindicates the narrative of the “deep state.”

Indeed, it suggests that the entire state is out to get Trump – which it is and should. But impeachment is the only thing that can turn the most powerful man in the world into a cornered victim and thus, for a significant number of American voters, a sympathetic character.

Even better for Trump if impeachment hinges on this particular scandal. The rough transcript of the phone call, released on Wednesday, does not exonerate the president. It demonstrates that he brought up the Bidens as part of an implied offer of greater assistance to Ukraine. But it’s not a slam-dunk either, since there was no specific quid pro quo. A more comprehensive transcript as well as the whistleblower’s full complaint might provide more details. But inevitably there will be room for interpretation, and Trump will drive the bulldozer of his reelection campaign right through that gap.

Public opinion, at this early juncture, is against impeachment. According to a Quinnipiac poll released on Wednesday morning, which doesn’t reflect the events of the last few days, shows that 37 percent of Americans favor impeachment and 57 percent are opposed. Virtually no Republicans support impeachment.

Yet, if the Dems had continued to equivocate, they would have appeared weak and lacking the leadership necessary to govern the country. Appeasing Trump is not a good election strategy.

There’s no easy way out of this impossible situation. But let’s think inside the box. Or, rather, inside the boxing ring.

At a rally last year, Biden said of Trump, “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Trump responded by tweet: “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”

So, let Trump and Biden fight a battle royal, just the two of them out back of the White House. If the country gets lucky, they’ll knock each other out — and out of the running for 2020. It would be a gift of regime change for both political parties. And maybe someone who’s not so punchdrunk will occupy the Oval Office in 2021.

AMERICA’S MILITARY ADVENTURISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . .

. . . and the Scapegoating of Iran!

by Selvam Canagaratna

"The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power on unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling."

– François Mauriac, Second Thoughts, 1961.

Seventeen years of war in the Middle East, noted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, before posing the inevitable question: "and what does the United States have to show for it?"

Someone has to be blamed for debacles that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, including at least 200,000 civilians, and millions driven from their homes, he wrote. ‟Someone has also to be blamed for the proliferation of radical jihadist groups throughout the Middle East, the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, the wholesale destruction of cities and towns under relentless airstrikes and the abject failure of US and US-backed forces to stanch the insurgencies."

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘scapegoat’ as ‟a person bearing the blame for the sins, shortcomings, etc. of others, esp. as an expedient."

But you can be sure it won’t be the generals, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the rabid neocons such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton who sold us the wars, the Central Intelligence Agency, the arms contractors who profit from perpetual war or the celebrity pundits on the airwaves and in newspapers who serve as cheerleaders for the mayhem.

Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, although Iran was in compliance with the agreement, was the first salvo in this effort to divert attention from these failures to Iran. Bolton, the new National Security Adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advocate the overthrow of the Iranian government, with Giuliani saying last month that Trump is "as committed to regime change as we [an inner circle of presidential advisers] are."

"The Iran nuclear deal was possible following several letters by President Barack Obama assuring the Iranian leadership that America had no intention of violating Iranian sovereignty," the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, Gholamali Khoshroo, told me. "America said it wanted to engage in a serious dialogue on equal footing and mutual interests and concerns. These assurances led to the negotiations that concluded with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."

Donald Trump, however, even as a candidate, called the agreement with Iran ‘the worst deal America ever made’, Ambassador Khoshroo reminded the world. "He called this deal a source of embarrassment for America. Indeed, it was not the deal but America’s unilateral decision to walk away from an agreement that was supported by the United Nations Security Council, and in fact co-sponsored and drafted by the United States that is the source of embarrassment for America. To walk away from an international agreement and then threaten a sovereign country is the real source of embarrassment since Iran was in full compliance while the US never was."

Iran announced recently that it has tentative plans to produce the feedstock for centrifuges – the machines that enrich uranium – if the nuclear deal is not salvaged by European members of the JCPOA. European countries, dismayed by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, are attempting to renegotiate the deal, which imposes restrictions on Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

"Why go to war with a country that abides by an agreement it has signed with the United States?" asked Chris Hedges. "Why attack a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State, that now threaten us after we created and armed them? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?"

The architects of these wars are in trouble, explained Hedges. "They have watched helplessly as the instability and political vacuum they caused, especially in Iraq, left Iran as the dominant power in the region. Washington, in essence, elevated its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake, beyond attacking Iran. Those both in the US and abroad who began or promoted these wars see a conflict with Iran as a solution to their foreign and increasingly domestic dilemmas."

Hedges noted that it was Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, facing internal unrest, who launched the war in Yemen as a vanity project to bolster his credentials as a military leader. Now he desperately needs to deflect attention from the quagmire and humanitarian disaster he has created.

And then there is President Trump, desperate for a global crusade he can use to mask his ineptitude, the rampant corruption of his administration and his status as an international pariah when he runs for re-election in 2020.

"Of course, blaming and threatening Iran is not new," Ambassador Khoshroo said. "This has been going on for 40 years. The Iranian people and the Iranian government are accustomed to this nonsense. United States intervention in the internal affairs of Iran goes back a long time, including the [Iranian] war with Iraq, when the United States supported Saddam Hussein. Then America invaded Iraq in 2003 in their so-called ‘intervention for democracy and elimination of WMDs.’ Iran has always resisted and will always resist US threats."

"America was in Iran 40 years ago," the Ambassador recalled. "About 100,000 US advisers were in Iran during the rule of the Shah, who was among the closest allies of America. America was unable to keep this regime in power because the Iranian people revolted against such dependency and suppression. Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, for 40 years, America continued to violate international law, especially the Algeria agreements it signed with Iran in 1981."

The Algeria Declaration was a set of agreements between the United States and Iran that resolved the Iranian hostage crisis. It was brokered by the Algerian government.

The warmongers have no more of a plan for "regime change" in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the idea – pushed by lunatic-fringe figures like Bolton and Giuliani – that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

In all these equations the 80 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. Perhaps, they would not welcome a war with the United States. Perhaps if attacked they would resist. Perhaps, they don’t want to be occupied. Perhaps a war with Iran would be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, are unable to fathom.

The issue of Palestine is at the heart of turmoil in the Middle East for Muslims. Americans say they want the Middle East to be free from violent extremism, but this will only happen when the Middle East is free from occupation and foreign intervention.

The Americans are selling their weapons throughout the Middle East. They calculate how much money they can earn from destruction. They don’t care about human beings. They don’t care about security or democratic process or political process. This is worrisome."

"What are the results of American policies in the Middle East?" asked Hedges. "All of the American allies in the region are in turmoil. Only Iran is secure and stable. Why is this so?"

Courtesy- The Sunday Island

5 Reasons Why Washington Was the Main Culprit in Ahvaz Terror Attack

TEHRAN (FNA)- On Sunday, September 23, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani couldn’t be more accurate when he said the United States is a "bully" that wants to create insecurity in the Islamic Republic, following an attack on a military parade that killed 26 people, including members of the country's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps.

Rouhani further accused the US-backed Persian Gulf Arab states of providing financial and military support for anti-government terrorist groups inside Iran.

This is not out of the ordinary. President Trump’s last year visit to Saudi Arabia, during which he loudly pushed for general hostility toward Iran, can’t help but also be noted for being followed so quickly by virtually unheard of terror attacks and unrest in Iran. On balance, the Trump administration isn't eyeing America's safety as much as a regime change:

1) Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, while addressing a recent rally staged by the anti-Iran terrorist group of Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (MKO) in Paris, called for regime change in Tehran. MKO or MEK was once listed as a terrorist organization in the US and Europe and is still widely viewed as a death cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi. During the gathering, Giuliani said, “We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran… which must be replaced by a democratic government which Rajavi represents. Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran”!

2) In May, Trump abrogated the 2015 international nuclear deal and ordered a campaign of intense economic pressure, threatening sanctions against any foreign company doing business with Iran and calling for an end to trade in Iranian oil by November. In the Paris convention, Giuliani said the recent wave of protests in Iran was being orchestrated from outside. “Those protests are not happening spontaneously,” Giuliani said. “They are happening because of many of our people in Albania [which hosts an MKO compound] and many of our people here and throughout the world.” “Our people” means the US and the MKO and other terrorist groups, which have no support in Iran and are widely hated for their use of violence and close links to Saudi-Israeli intelligence services.

3) The policy of the Trump administration is not officially to call for regime change, but top officials have often made that clear in public. Outlining his approach in May, Pompeo said it was up to the Iranian people to relieve the pressure on the country by changing their government. However, regime change is on the agenda, as it involves waging economic war against Iran and backing terror attacks within the country, like the one that was carried out in Ahvaz, for which the terrorist groups of ISIL and Al-Ahvazieh with links to the US and Saudi Arabia claimed responsibility.

4) The Trump camp itself is open to the dark arts. Trump has selected John Bolton as his national security adviser. Bolton’s appointment, along with the nomination of Iran deal critic Pompeo as secretary of state, helped to kill and bury the nuclear agreement and pave the way for confrontation with Iran. Bolton has spent the better part of a decade calling for the US to help overthrow the government in Tehran and hand power to the terrorist group of MKO. Also speaking at the Paris convention, Bolton said the Trump administration should embrace the MKO’s goal of immediate regime change in Iran and recognize the group as a “viable” alternative. “The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday,” Bolton said. The 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution will be on February 11, 2019.

5) The Trump administration views terror attacks and protests as the best avenue for regime change in Tehran without a US military intervention. To that end, Pompeo says the US is stepping up its propaganda broadcasts to Iran with help from Persian-language TV channels based in Europe and the US, and portrays the sanctions as targeting the government, even though the unjustified economic pressure ultimately touches Iranians of all walks of life.

Overall, the notion that Iranians are clamoring for the fall of the Islamic Republic and welcome American assistance in precipitating that fall is the same kind of “we will be greeted as liberators” nonsense the Bush administration believed in the lead-up to the illegal Iraq War in 2003. Iranians want a better life, but the Syria-style collapse of their economy, society, and state is surely not the kind of change they have in mind. After all, we now know that their guild-related protests discouraged the US since their numbers never went beyond a few thousand, which never lasted more than a week, despite what had been promised by the US and its puppets. Picking up the MKO and the son of the deposed Shah has been the best service the US could render to the government in Iran as it encouraged even those few thousands to go back home after they came to see the truth.

In addition, the fact that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and of course Israel are influencing the Trump administration’s anti-Iran strategy is further evidence that Washington didn’t act alone in supporting the terrorists that carried out the September 22 attack in Ahvaz. The aim of their plan is not for Iran to pursue internal reform and external dialogue as Trump would like to claim, but for the Islamic Republic government to collapse entirely so that it can no longer stop their regime-change fantasies and undermine their illicit interests and designs in the region. Little wonder they hardly cared when the Southwestern city of Ahvaz was violently attacked.