Just as the imperial state’s war-making ways weren’t overcome by the colossal debacle in Iraq or neutralized by its Libyan calamity, I am skeptical about reports that the covert arming of al Qaeda and its allied Sunni jihadists in Syria is being reined in, at least for the long term. For all the interventionist madness of US policies in Syria, genius policies which have seen your taxes used so that CIA-armed fundamentalists could battle Pentagon-backed jihadists – not to mention the endless carnage – it’s not likely that lasting lessons have been learned. But even if I am wrong for now, the unacknowledged, global objectives behind the US drive to oust Assad have not changed. When Mueller takes Trump’s rather unique scalp, we can expect Warrior Pence to let the CIA and its Saudi colleagues re-target Assad and justify it all as part of the intensifying showdown with Russia.
In fact, judging by what we’ve seen in 200 days of the Trump administration, we may not even have to wait for President Pence to see a full-tilt resumption of the “secret” arms flow to Assad opponents. We’ve had time enough to become thoroughly acquainted with the schizophrenic quality of Trump’s foreign policy, neatly summed up by William Summers in an American Conservative article this week: “We do not seek to overthrow Assad but we bomb him; we feel NATO is obsolete but we are ‘huge’ supporters of NATO; we want to get along with Russia but we are enemies of Russia. Finally, Trump cannot seem to decide upon a strategy in Afghanistan, where he is again torn between establishment proposals to send more troops and populist reticence about such proposals.”
It’s too bad that when war-weary Americans were finally ready to elect a non-interventionist president in 2016, it couldn’t have been a serious one from elections gone by, one like Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan.
5:50 pm on August 7, 2017
