The first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019 was no tragedy. It was always a farce. The second impeachment, in which Trump was acquitted on the night of Saturday, February 13 did not even rise to that. It was a hiccup, a non-event. The most solemn procedure in the sacred constitutional process of the United States did not even rise to the entertainment value of a bout of naked mud wrestling.

Washington during the week of the Second Great Impeachment Trial was a fascinating non-place to be. The skies were grey. It was quite cold: About minus Five Degrees Celsius most days.  There was a thin sprinkling of tired, dirty snow on the ground. The city was deserted. More virulent mutations of the COVID-19 virus from the United Kingdom and South Africa were said to be on the loose.

The streets were empty. There were no protests, wall graffiti, slogans or demonstrations either for or against Trump. Nobody cared. It echoed the empty deserted ghostly state of the city during Joe Biden’s non-existent presidential inaugural on January 20. Once again, all that happened was that someone taped a badly handwritten note on the Capitol saying “impeachment” and everything that followed was just a badly acted chaotic play performed by autistic children.

No real human being gave a second’s care for either convicting Trump or acquitting him. Not a single firework was fired off in celebrate his acquittal. Not a single liberal committed ritual suicide, tried to burn themselves to death in front of the Senate or even bothered to throw a rotten tomato or an egg at a single Republican Senator who voted for acquittal. It was never real. It didn’t matter. Nobody cared.

Yet impeachment is supposed to Mean Something. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than melt into blubber beneath its merciless glare. Bill Clinton, who was widely suspected of being guilty of so much, beat an impeachment rap only for lying in public that he had slept with a naive young girl intern.

George W. Bush surely rated impeachment for his unprecedented incompetence in so many areas: He bankrupted the country: He destroyed civil liberties. He failed to prevent the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. He ignored Mississippi flood defenses thereby drowning of the city of New Orleans, killing thousands more. He unleashed unnecessary, endless wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He got thosuands of youn g American soldeirs killed and ten thousands more hideously maimed for life – for nothing.

Yet the Democratic majorities that ran both chambers of Congress during the last two years of Bush’s presidency never had the guts or decency to dare to impeach him for any of these terrible, shameful things.

Bush’s successor Barack Obama blithely presided over the destruction of democracy in Ukraine, risking nuclear war with Russia. He locked the United States into a $1.5 trillion 30-years-long new nuclear arms race. He unleashed war, rebellion, anarchy and chaos in Yemen, Syria and Libya, killing untold millions more. The Republicans who controlled Congress never dared – or bothered – to impeach him either.

This non-existent second failed impeachment of Trump confirms what the world already learned in his farcical first impeachment in 2019. Impeachment as a solemn tool to preserve democracy, depose an unworthy national leader or mean anything at all is stone cold dead in the United States of America.

Like the rest of the Beloved, still so widely revered, more than 230-years-old US Constitution, impeachment has become a meaningless exercise in exhausted, archaic cliches. No one would ever dare to use it for anything that really mattered at all. Both Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly shown over the past 30 years that they are all too scared to.

The aging, absurd, senile and drooling old Democratic political elite in Washington were led over the edge of a political cliff yet again by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and House congressional “expert” Congressman Adam Schiff.  They will still revere and mindlessly follow them. Gadarene Swine are incapable of doing anything else.

The Democrats failed to discredit or even politically damage Trump. They revealed themselves as stupid, malignant fools, trying to impeach a powerless president who had already been cast out of office. They failed to plausibly document any of their charges against him. They made a mockery of President Biden’s half-hearted, dazedly delivered pledge of bipartisanship and burying of political enmities in his already forgotten Inaugural Address.

They also handed to the Republicans a perfect precedent for impeaching Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris if they regain control of Congress in 2022, assuming the ramshackle US political system can even survive until then.

The outcome of Trump’s second impeachment was therefore a catastrophe for the Democrats. It repeated Obama and Biden’s disastrous bungled start to their 2009 administration and it already heralds the rapid isolation and collapse of the Biden regime

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the mad Roman boy-emperor Caligula declared war on the God Neptune by collecting sea shells on the beaches of France and Belgium. Caligula had more credibility and success than Pelosi, Schumer and Schiff: At least he got the sea shells.

What we have just seen is another example of the compulsion of America’s liberal ruling elite to make a sick, discredited joke of what is left of their own collapsing and totally bankrupt political system.

What was the Second Impeachment of Donald Trump? Shakespeare gave us the answer in his Scottish Play more than 400 years ago.

It was a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Last week’s second impeachment trial of former President Trump should serve as a warning that something is very wrong in US politics. Far from a measured, well-investigated, rock-solid case against the former president, America was again abused with day after day of character assassination, innuendo, false claims, and even falsified “evidence.”

The trial wasn’t intended to win a conviction of Trump for “incitement” because the Democrats already knew that the votes were not there. So, just as with the last impeachment trial, the goal was to fling as much dirt at Donald Trump as they could while the cameras were rolling. Their hatred of Donald Trump is so deep and visceral that probably a psychologist would have been more beneficial to them than yet another impeachment trial.

It would be incorrect to say that the House managers’ case fell apart, because they had no case to begin with. They never had a case because they made no effort to develop a case. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court saw from the beginning that this was no legitimate impeachment trial and informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would not preside. Without the Chief Justice, there was no Constitutional impeachment trial. So they put on a show trial instead.

As Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley kept asking, why didn’t the House schedule a single hearing to investigate what really happened up to and on the day of the Capitol melee on January 6th? They had weeks to do so. Professor Turley believes they might even have been able to make a decent case if they had tried.

Why did they not call witnesses? Were there no rioters who could be called to explain under oath how Trump’s speech had inspired them to enter the Capitol building to overturn the election?

Were they afraid that under cross-examination we might have found out more about Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ claim that Trump offered to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops in Washington before January 6th but that his offer was rebuked? What about reports that Capitol Hill Police were left without back-up and unprepared for what happened? House and Senate leadership is responsible for security at the Capitol and they obviously failed. Why?

The House and Senate Democrats (and a few Republicans) did not succeed in their ultimate goal: preventing Trump from ever running again for political office. But that doesn’t mean they are giving up. They are not about to give citizen Trump a moment of peace. They are intent on continuing their witch hunt but it looks less and less like any desire for justice. It looks like fear. They are afraid if he is allowed to run again he may be elected. So they cannot allow that vote to happen.

And they accuse Trump of undermining democracy.

There were a number of reasons to impeach and convict President Trump while he was in office. Bombing Syria on bogus grounds without authorization was one of them. But Democrats love war as much as Republicans so they weren’t about to uphold their Constitutional obligations.

Impeachment 2.0 may be over, but those blinded by hatred for Trump are not about to give up. They are irrational and obsessed. They are also dangerous.

ronpaulinstitute.org

The Doom of the Biden Administration and within the next eight years of the entire supposedly great and mighty Democratic Party has been written in deeds on the very first full day of Joe Biden’s presidency.

There were absolutely no surprises whatsoever in it. Biden did what he said he was going to do. He nominated exactly the people he said he was going to nominate. The US Liberal Mainstream Media with their usual Courage and Character slavishly applauded with unanimous mindless reverence.

We are back in 2016. Donald Trump Never Happened. The populist national awakening across the American Heartland never happened. All the material gains that the white, black and Hispanic long-suffering working classes genuinely made in the first three years of Trump’s presidency are going to be erased. They Never Happened Either. Just Shut Your Eyes and It Will All Go Away.

Thousands of violent, illegal organized criminals from MS-13 and other cartels are going be allowed to demonize the land. Russia and China as usual will be scapegoated for catastrophic, bungled policies that the American Liberal Elite continues to destroy its own people with. Nothing will have changed.

Or so they think.

The two key themes of Biden’s first full day in office on Thursday, January 21 made a mockery of the new president’s soft words of apparent reconciliation in his Inauguration Address to the 74 million Americans (at least) who voted against him and to the long-suffering, despised and crushed Heartland populations of small towns and agricultural America alike.

The real lesson of Biden’s determination to rejoin the empty and – for other more sensible nations, purely ceremonial – Paris Climate Accords is clear. The real purpose of the Paris Peace Accords is to destroy the jobs of working-class Americans – Black and Hispanic too but especially white families – in the name of “saving the environment.” But this is a romantic nonsense that all the protected middle classes with their non-productive, government-secured, free market-proof parasite clerks’ jobs can embrace. It makes them imagine they are brave, heroic and noble when every evidence of life cries out the contrary reality in derision.

The mad, obsessive war on the production and use of all fossil fuels will continue. At the same time, the most reckless and environmentally dangerous (for millions of years) policies of upgrading and expanding nuclear complexes to continue Barack Obama’s $1.5 trillion atomic weapons modernization program will continue. So will the ludicrous claims that nuclear power is somehow environmentally “green,” “safe” and “good for the environment” in ways that the use of natural gas, oil and carbon-capture clean coal is not.

The cheap energy and industrial renewal policies including tariff protections that were the key to the jobs creation miracle across old Heartland Industrial America from 2017 through 2019 will be scrapped. West Virginia and the Pennsylvania industrial areas will be fed to the dogs.

Biden also made clear he was removing Trump’s consistent strong support to the agencies of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Both agencies will be gutted.

Trump’s highly successful border wall – a testament to simple good common sense with minimal effect on the revered arid desert environment – has already been frozen in place. Without question, much of it will be quietly demolished an or left to crumble. The enormous drugs, human trafficking and sex slave trades will once again be allowed to flourish untroubled.

Billions of dollars worth of worthless “high tech” and supposedly “humane” detection devices made by the big Silicon Valley companies that bankroll the Democrats will be poured into the land security gap and they will all prove as worthless as usual as soon as any low level cartel goon bothers to piss urine on them. Border security will once again become a sick joke to the people of Arizona and Texas.

The second, even more farcical and insane Impeachment of Donald Trump is an essential part of this process. Its ostensible purpose is of course to crush, humiliate and intimidate the 74 million people who voted for him. It will be a classic Show Trial. Kim Jong-un could not come up with a better one.

But this will backfire. The Impeachment trial is certain to backfire catastrophically in its intended function. It will make an explicit and ongoing mockery of Biden’s instantly-discredited “Words of healing and reconciliation” that Liberal Media Hypocrites sighed so sweetly over. The man who genuinely fought for jobs, law and order and border protections for the forgotten and despised Americans of all colors will be assailed with arguments that only liberal lawyer hairsplitting morons like Congressman Adam Schiff can swoon over.

But the real, unconscious, repressed and unacknowledged purpose of the Trump Crucifixion demands that it proceed and restore the burning rage and hatreds that still sweep America. It is vital for the Liberal Elite and their Bovine Herd of Protected Government Bureaucrats to imagine that that the upheavals of the and expressed rage of the past four years were generated “only”‘ by Trump.

It is essential for them to deny that their own beloved policies and ideologies have driven at least 100 million people to absolute despair and breaking point across the United States. It is vital for them to deny to themselves that Trump was only the voice and expression for a mighty, very real upsurge of social and economic forces.

Yet reperession and denial as Sigmund Freud warned us are impossible to sustain in the long run: They only guarantee that the long-repressed forces eventually break through in far more destructive and terrifying ways.

The Triumph of Biden and his Mainstream Liberals and their immediate, instinctive, purely reflexive and unthinking efforts to abolish the past four years and restore Obama’s complacent, discredited, totally failed rule guarantees instead their inevitable destruction. The Liberal Sleepwalkers are not dealing with the passive, stupid thuggish, unthinking herd that they geniunely believe half the American people to be.

They are in a for a very rude and unpleasant awakening.

The only interesting thing about either of the conventions held by America’s two mainstream political parties this month was not anything that was said by the interminable parade of vapid speakers, but rather what those speakers did not say.

Despite their dominating mainstream news cycles for years on end, at no time during the four-day Democratic National Convention was the word “impeachment” ever uttered, nor was any mention made of the Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and the Russian government.

Politico reports:

Eight months after Democrats mounted a historic effort to remove Donald Trump from office, not a single speaker uttered the word “impeachment” during their four-day convention.

…

For Democrats to completely omit impeachment from their convention was once unthinkable. Democrats had mounted a case that Trump had abused his power to blackmail Ukraine into investigating his political adversaries, including Biden. And they made an existential argument that without removing him from office, Trump’s behavior would get worse and democracy itself would be at risk.

…

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — which Democrats once thought could topple Trump for obstruction of justice — also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office.

At DNC, “the word ‘impeachment’ [was] entirely left out over the course of the 4-night event. Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia… also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly 4 years in office.” https://t.co/Dgt9WQ3LeA pic.twitter.com/q8EvEthwZq

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) August 28, 2020

“The fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to even mention Russiagate or Ukrainegate (the first-ever sequel to a flop?) at their convention should maybe hasten some reflection for those who made these issues the ‘defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office,’” quipped incisive Russiagate skeptic Aaron Maté of the omission on Twitter.

“Next on Unsolved Mysteries: Democrats and media allies accused Donald Trump of being a Russian agent for four years,” Maté added. “They chanted ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ and ‘The Walls Are Closing In.’ But at their political convention, they forgot all about it. Did Russia give them amnesia?”

“I personally feel like if the President of the US seeking re-election is beholden to and controlled by an adversarial foreign power, the opposition party should find a few seconds to squeeze in a mention of it if, you know, it wasn’t utter bullshit,” tweeted The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.

And, of course, it was utter bullshit. And that is indeed why the Democrats saw no need to mention it at their own four-day convention despite dominating news cycles with it for years. Russiagate and Ukrainegate were never the cataclysmic scandals that the Democrats and their allied media factions portrayed them as. They weren’t even actually about getting rid of Trump.

In an extremely strange and confounding development, the Democrats *never once* mentioned what this NYT columnist calls “the biggest lie in American politics” at their Convention.

In fairness, they only had 4 full nights so maybe they couldn’t squeeze in any mention of it. https://t.co/TMJkoiX199 pic.twitter.com/BvYjH4VZTc

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 28, 2020

Anyone with an ear to the ground knew that Russiagate would fizzle, and anyone capable of counting Senate seats knew impeachment would fail to remove Trump. The drivers of these attention-monopolizing narratives knew this also.

If there’d been any solid evidence to find that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump, or that his campaign had conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, the US intelligence community would have found some of it and leaked it to The Washington Post long before Trump took office. The Russiagate narrative has been completely dismantled from the very beginning by journalists like the late Robert Parry, and then Maté after Parry’s death. There was never any real evidence for it, and the people pushing Russiagate from the beginning knew there was never any real evidence for it.

All you really need to know about Russiagate was that it was started by unsubstantiated claims by the US intelligence community, and in the end it facilitated pre-existing plans by the US intelligence community. Everything else in between those two points is just empty narrative fluff.

In 2017 Parry documented how the original assessment that Russia meddled in the US election in the first place was put forward without proof by just a couple dozen officers from three intelligence agencies hand-picked by the notoriously Russophobic then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Maté has documented that this allegation remains just as suspicious and porous as the day it was first made. Despite having sweeping investigative powers Mueller indicted not one single American for conspiracy with the Russian government. The recent evidence-free Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report did nothing to change the flimsy nature of the entire Russiagate narrative.

So the whole thing has been plainly bogus from the beginning, with the foundation laid by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies who have an extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing. And it just so happens to have paved the way for operations against a longtime geostrategic foe that were being unfolded well before Trump’s arrival in the White House.

This is an excerpt from an article by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger from March 2016:

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

This was all happening during the Obama administration. But he was still more doveish than the spooks and cold warriors who drive US foreign policy would prefer, resisting for example loud calls from the warmongers to arm Ukraine against Moscow and forcibly install a no-fly zone in Russia’s ally Syria.

The heir apparent to Obama’s throne, Hillary Clinton, did not suffer from such peacenik scruples. She’d already been making people on both sides of the aisle nervous with her anti-Russia hawkishness, and supported both arming Ukraine and installing a no-fly zone in Syria.

So these escalations were already underway, and more were being prepared for.

Then what happened? Somehow a political neophyte who’d been talking about making nice with Russia got in instead.

We suddenly found ourselves bombarded with narratives from the US intelligence community and its mass media stenographers about Russian election meddling and Trump playing some mysterious role in it. These narratives were pushed with steadily increasing frequency and shrillness, with the help of a humiliated Democratic Party that stood everything to gain by participating, until those of us who expressed any skepticism of them at all were being accused on a daily basis by MSM-brainwashed dupes of running psyops for the Russian government.

We were never at any time presented with any proof of these claims which rose anywhere near the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but we were hammered with them anyway, day in and day out, year after year.

This ended up putting a lot of political pressure on Trump to keep existing sanctions and military tensions with Russia, and he ended up adding dozens more new cold war escalations including further sanctions, shredded nuclear treaties, NATO expansionism and more. He even armed Ukraine due to these pressures, just like the anointed queen was scheduled to do.

For years, neocons and arms industry darlings like @RepAdamSchiff have sought to re-arm Ukraine and escalate the conflict in Donbas. By stirring up Russiagate, they finally got their deadly deal. My latest: https://t.co/pyJB4btOSk

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 8, 2018

The cold warriors wanted their escalations, and they got them. From beginning to the end, that’s all this was ever about. They pushed the narratives, the media joined in because it was great for ratings, and the Democrats joined in because it took the focus off their 2016 scandals and gave them a kayfabe phantom to punch instead of pushing for actual progressive changes.

And now the slow motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and the loose collective of unabsorbed governments is right on schedule, with Biden all set and ready to carry the omnicidal torch forward. The 2016 scandals are well enough forgotten, no progressive changes have been made, and there is no need to talk about Russiagate or impeachment at the Democratic National Convention.

Because everyone already got what they wanted. Everyone except ordinary people, of course.

medium.com

Why Mitt Romney ended up all alone.

James ANTLE III

Impeachment has ended in the acquittal of President Donald Trump and all we have to show for it is a legion of op-eds praising Mitt Romney, the only Republican senator to vote to convict on one of the two articles. (You can read my more skeptical take on Romney here.) The whole affair ultimately fizzled out, even though John Bolton threatened to inject some excitement into the proceedings as recently as last week. Why in the end did this end up being a party-line affair, sans Romney?

1. The public hearings made the impeachment inquiry look partisan. Republicans were outraged by the House Democrats’ process, which included a lot of closed door hearings and leaking to the press. But that was the only time period where there was an undeniable uptick in popular support for impeachment. Adam Schiff and company learned from the Robert Mueller report that you needed a clear narrative of wrongdoing, not a nuanced document about which competing arguments could be made. The House’s initial approach allowed Democrats to get their side of the Trump-Ukraine story out without the American people seeing any Democrats. Eventually, however, some kind of transparency was going to be needed (notwithstanding calls for the Senate to remove Trump by secret ballot) and once impeachment became a television show in which Democrats and Republicans did battle, momentum in the polls stalled.

Once that occurred, there was little incentive to cross party lines. Impeachment was popular enough, especially with the progressive base, that Democrats couldn’t abandon it. It was too unpopular, especially among grassroots conservatives, to compel many Republicans to break ranks. Trump isn’t as popular with Mormons as he is evangelicals, so Utah’s Romney could afford to vote for one of the articles of impeachments. Even Justin Amash, who represents Gerald Ford’s old congressional district in Michigan, had to leave the party once he decided he was pro-impeachment based on the Mueller report before Trump-Ukraine. (I defended Amash’s integrity and conservatism.) Zero Republicans ended up voting for impeachment in the House. Trump’s removal was always going to require 20 Republican senators to break ranks and that was an extremely tall order under these political conditions.

2. Democrats didn’t really expect to convict Trump. Once it was clear that this was going to be a partisan impeachment, of the kind Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had previously wanted to avoid, it could serve only two purposes: damage Trump in the 2020 election and fire up progressives who wanted congressional Democrats to go through with this. Jim Geraghty outlined a serious case that could have pried loose some Republican this side of Amash and Romney (or at least made acquittal votes tougher to justify).

But Democrats never thought enough Republican votes were in play to matter nor did they think their activists would be satiated by an impeachment over the Impoundment Control Act. Instead they stirred together a strange cocktail of maximalist liberal Trump-Russia conspiracy claims and neoconservative talking points about the need to fight Russians over there rather than over here. The whole thing relied on hyperbole and self-serving narratives that the the White House was an Aaron Sorkin program before Trump got there.

3. The break between Trump and Senate Republicans never came. Bolton aside, the big risk for Trump—who does not boast relationships with the senators in his own party as strong as Bill Clinton’s—was that he would become enraged when GOP lawmakers did not go as far in defending him as he preferred. Trump said the Ukraine phone call was “perfect,” many Republican senators believed it was inappropriate but not worth removing a president in an election year. In the end, Trump’s lawyers and House Republicans offered the defense the president wanted. Senators like Lamar Alexander explained the rationale for his votes the way he wanted. No split came, which left Romney by himself.

4. It’s an election year. At the end of the day, “Let the people vote” triumphed over Democratic arguments that asking for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma (and still releasing the aid when nothing of consequence happened) constituted election interference that needed to be dealt with immediately. The voters are going to get to decide what they want to do with Trump.

5. It’s the Trump era. The news cycle has moved quickly ever since Trump’s famous escalator ride. On the day of his acquittal by the Senate, impeachment was perhaps the third biggest story. Even world historical events don’t feel like an especially big deal for longer than 72 hours or so. Trump powers through them and the public tunes into something else. Some other pols, like Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, have learned from his example.

theamericanconservative.com

The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay, also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like “Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow” will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump’s decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won’t be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His “closing arguments” speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as “magisterial,” “powerful,” and “impressive.” The Washington Post’s resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it “a grand slam” while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it “dazzling.” Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it “a great job” and added that Schiff is now “a rock star.” Daily Beast enthused that the remarks “will go down in history” and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it “a closing statement for the ages.” Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”

Actually, a better adjective would have been “scary” and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow’s “interference” in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet. Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to “assure the integrity” of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said “As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that “Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power.” Aaron Mate at The Nation added that “For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let’s assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke.”

Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was “a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.”

The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded “poor innocent Ukraine” in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden’s son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that “Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.” Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the “United States” for “Russia” and “Kremlin” and changes “Ukraine” to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today’s Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don’t you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it’s first major step, per Schiff, will be to “remake the map of Europe by dint of military force.”

Donald Trump’s erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Immediately after the Iranian counter-attacks occurred on Wednesday morning at the same hour of Soleimani’s assassination, Iran’s Foreign Minister stated: “Iran took & concluded proportionate measures in self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens & senior officials were launched. We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.” Iran’s retribution was more moderate than many analysts imagined as fore notice was delivered to the Iraqi government 30 minutes before rockets were launched giving American military personnel in the bases ample time to seek shelter.

In Trump’s remarks the following day, the President stated: “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world… ISIS is a natural enemy of Iran. The destruction of ISIS is good for Iran, and we should work together on this and other shared priorities.”

Although Trump’s speech characterized Iran as a “major supporter of terrorism” and Gen. Soleimani as a “top terrorist”, his assertion that a common interest exists between the USA and Iran in the combat of ISIS is a spectacular break from the neocon agenda. This break is also one of many in a long line of internal struggles emanating from the corridors of American power in the days since Soleimani’s murder. This includes the memo written to the Iraq government by William Seely, commanding general of the Iraq Task Force saying: “We respect your sovereign decision to order our departure.” Seely’s memo created a major crisis amongst the radical war hawks like Mark Esper and Mark Milley who raced to deny the memo’s validity.

Recent revelations published in the Wall Street Journal demonstrating the incredible back channel discussion set up by Trump through the Swiss embassy in Tehran in the hours after Solemenei’s murder also play into this “movement of sanity” within the USA.

The Paradox of America Resolved

This contradictory behaviour is undoubtedly not so confusing for leading figures among Eurasia’s intelligentsia who are not ignorant to the battle occurring within America between nationalists who genuinely wish to end “the forever wars” in the Middle East vs those Pax Americanists embedded throughout the neoconservative and neo-liberal establishments who would rather burn the earth than abandon their dark age ideology. Trump’s many calls for positive relations with Russia and China over the past 3 years terrify these groups, and this potential US-Russia-China alliance has represented a real threat which today’s London-steered impeachment debacle, and years of Russia-gating has always aimed to derail.

With the impeachment bill now sitting in the republican-dominated Senate, the neocons loyal to the Military Industrial Complex which Trump has so loudly criticized have major leverage on the President and are using it. If you are thinking “why would any republican ruin their careers by supporting a democrat-driven impeachment bill against a republican leader?” then you haven’t realized that the drive for war with Iran (as well as Russia and China) is not a matter of “practical politics” for our later day fanatics of the evangelical pre-millennial garb like John Hagee or Benny Hinn who sincerely believe it is man’s duty to usher in Armageddon and fulfill their twisted view of prophecy. Nor is it an issue for their Israeli counterparts who believe essentially in the same prophecy with the small exception that the Savior’s arrival amidst the fires of war will be occurring for the first time rather than the 2^nd. If you are reading this thinking “certainly no one could be so nuts”, then let this televised prayer led by Rev. John Hagee and Benny Hinn cause you to think twice:

Bill Kristol, a leading figure behind the neocon cult and co-author of the dystopian Project for a New American Century Manifesto has already poured tens of millions of dollars into billboards, commercials and lobbying teams gunning for Trump’s impeachment. Kristol tweeted on October 17, 2019 that “If Trump is not impeached and removed, the corruption will get even worse, the White House even more lawless, the violations of norms even more routine. The case for impeachment isn’t merely retrospective; it’s prophylactic. And it isn’t merely just; it’s urgent.”

The most recent commercial promoting Trump’s impeachment which Kristol’s think tank Republicans for the Rule of Law released raised the argument that since republicans supported Nixon’s impeachment in 1973, republicans should impeach Trump today.

This argument obviously overlooks the problem that while Nixon actually appeared to have committed crimes, nothing even approximating illegal activity has occurred in Trump’s case.

Things are not as black and white as many believed until recently. Iran’s recent military exercises with Russia and China have demonstrated clearly in the minds of saner Americans that no war with Iran is possible without taking Russia and China on as well. Putin’s brilliant maneuvers in the Middle East have led to the destruction of the Anglo-American plot to grow radical Islam as a geopolitical tool first against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and then against nation states more generally since the Soviet Union’s collapse. For this reason, Putin’s enemies throughout the neocon world and British intelligence have never forgiven him. Although China has not brought much military might to bear in the Middle East, the Belt and Road Initiative has provided a gateway to a durable peace which cannot be overlooked, as BRI projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and beyond have given the Middle East a new chance for a future.

The question still remains whether or not Trump can continue to move away from the WWIII agenda and into this positive alliance.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

So a true-blue liberal website known as the Daily Kos declared in a bizarre headline last month. It’s as good an example as any of how completely Democrats have retreated into a fantasy world all their own.

Pelosi is not crushing anyone. Thanks to the ongoing impeachment fiasco, she’s caught in a trap of her own devising and is unable to take a single step without making matters worse. The more she balks at forwarding the articles of impeachment to the Senate, the more foolish she appears. But if she does forward them, she’ll end up looking worse since Mitch McConnell will use his power as leader of the Republican majority to put them to a quick up-or-down vote that will almost certainly result in Trump’s acquittal. All those fancy speeches on the House floor about upholding the Constitution, standing up to Russia, defending brave little Ukraine, blah blah blah – all that sturm-und-drang will go down in defeat in a strict party-line vote that the rankest political amateur could have predicted months ago.

If, on the other hand, Pelosi follows the urgings of the New York Times and maneuvers McConnell into holding a full-blown trial, the outcome will be even more devastating. The reason is that Pelosi and the Times are hoping against hope that a trial will allow Democrats to subpoena ex-national security adviser John Bolton, who will then regale the Senate with inside stories about Trump blackmailing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that are so shocking, so sensational, so redolent of corruption and bad faith, that even hardline Republicans will vote to convict.

If so, Trump will slink off stage, Mike Pence will impose a theocratic dictatorship, and presumably Pelosi will live happily ever after.

But it’s a pipedream. For one thing, it’s unlikely that Bolton has anything to say at this point beyond what his deputy, Fiona Hill, already told the House intelligence committee in November. Hill, a stern ramrod-straight neocon who would probably scare the pants off Vladimir Putin himself, testified that European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland declared last summer that Trump would grant Zelensky a much-desired White House meeting only “if specific investigations are put underway” concerning why Joe Biden had pushed for the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into a businessman who had hired his son.

This was the quid pro quo that Democrats had been looking for according to the corporate media. But it wasn’t for the simple reason that Hill was unable to shed light on why Trump was so keen for an investigation in the first place. Was it because he wanted to smear a political opponent he knew to be innocent? Or was he bursting with outrage over Biden’s obviously corrupt behavior and therefore determined that the Ukraine help bring the facts to light?

The difference is crucial. Yet Hill was in no position to say one way or another, and there’s no evidence that Bolton will be either. What Democrats can’t bring themselves to admit is that the second option – moral outrage – is by the far the likelier since Biden’s behavior was every bit as appalling as Trump says it was. “Biden’s family has been cashing in on his career for decades,” Ryan Grim pointed out in The Intercept a few months ago, and allowing his son to take a job with one of the Ukraine most notorious oligarchs after Barack Obama had put him in charge of rooting out corruption was so over the top that it was as if 1930s gangbuster Eliot Ness had looked the other way while one of his offspring went to work for Al Capone. Indeed, the facts are so damning that it’s all but impossible to prove that moral indignation was not a motive on Trump’s part, which undermines impeachment all the more.

But that not the only reason why the ultra-hawkish Bolton won’t deliver the goods. The other is that he’s so elated by Trump’s assassination of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani that the last thing he wants to do is loosen his grip on power. “Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran’s malign Quds Force activities worldwide,” he tweeted a few hours after the hit. “Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.”

Does that sound like a man looking to stab his ex-boss in the back? Hardly. Given Bolton’s famous infighting abilities, it sounds like someone trying to worm his way back into Trump’s good graces in case he wins re-election – and delivering damning testimony in the Senate is the worst way imaginable of accomplishing the goal.

So Pelosi will wind up humiliated all the more. And that assumes that Republicans don’t twist the knife by subpoenaing witnesses of their own – people like Joe and Hunter Biden, Adam Schiff, or CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella – a collection of frauds and phonies whom they’ll happily roast over burning coals. Their glee will br boundlesss. Yet the only person Pelosi has to blame is herself.

All of which is highly unfortunate since not only is Trump guilty of multiple high crimes and misdemeanors – locking up children in cages along the Mexican border, banning Muslims, waging an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, abrogating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and so on – but allowing him to waltz away untouched means that he’ll never have to worry about impeachment again. He’ll be free to behave as undemocratically as he pleases if he wins a second term, and after shooting its wad, there will be nothing that Congress will be able to do about it.

Dictatorship here we come, not despite the Democrats but because of them. Instead of zeroing in on the offenses that count, they opted to attack Trump from the right by accusing him of being soft on Moscow, withholding military aid from the Ukraine’s neo-Nazi defense forces, and pushing for an investigation into a corrupt Democrat who eminently deserves it. It’s a classic example of cowardly Dems trying to prove themselves more conservative than the GOP and, as a consequence, pushing the country ever more firmly to the right. It’s a despicable gambit that deserves to go down in defeat, and fortunately it is.

The president has squandered much of his promise with his hard line on Iran.

Scott MCCONNELL

Fifteen months ago I had a private conversation with President Trump about Iran.

It wasn’t long. It was, frankly, casual. It took place in the locker room of my golf club, which Trump had purchased during the Great Recession. (And improved considerably, without raising dues substantially, as he promised the members he would not.)  We had both played that morning, and at one of the points where the two courses adjoin,  I had watched his group hit tee shots. Trump had hit a solid drive. A few hours later, after wanding by Secret Service, I entered the locker room and was walking towards the urinal when I passed the president, by himself in front of the mirror, dabbling with his sunscreen. “How are you doing?” he called out as I walked by.

I had a ready conversation opener. “Very well thanks, sir. I saw you hit a great drive on 4.”

“Well pretty good,” he replied.

“220 or so, probably in the top one percent for our age group,” I added.

“One percent, can’t really do better than that,” Trump answered. 

“No, no war with Iran,” he replied. As I walked out, he called out behind me. “Wait a minute, you don’t want there to be a war with Iran, right? ”  I then realized the ambiguity in my words . “No,” I said. “Besides Israel, Iran is the most sane country in the Middle East.”

Trump didn’t respond directly. He paused. “No, there won’t be a war. It’s just talk,” he said. The president then made the classic childhood gesture for babble, flicking his lower lip several times with his forefinger.

Obviously war with Iran did seem a possibility then, in the fall of 2018—the president had recently scuttled the non-proliferation agreement that President Obama and six major powers had negotiated to constrain Iran’s nuclear activities, and had appointed longtime Iran hawk Mike Pompeo secretary of state. Yet there were rumors of possible diplomatic contacts—Rouhani was coming to the UN General Assembly. Like much about Trump’s Iran policy the situation seemed full of ambiguity, but I went away heartened by the conversation.

Like a certain percentage of his voters, I had supported Trump in great part because he challenged the Bush, Cheneyite Republican conventional foreign policy wisdom. Trump wasn’t an active Iraq war opponent, and his social milieu in New York was hawkish, but he was clearly lukewarm when prompted by Howard Stern in 2002 to tout the pending invasion of Iraq. In a 2008 interview with Wolf Blitzer, he wondered why Nancy Pelosi hadn’t sought to impeach George W. Bush for lying the country into war with Iraq. He began calling the Iraq war a big fat mistake, most notably in a debate before the  2016 South Carolina primary, perhaps the nation’s most hawkish state. He won that primary, and later the nomination, establishing that pro-war views were no longer necessarily majoritarian in the GOP. His messaging was mixed, ambiguous, perhaps intentionally, perhaps instinctively.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?” he said, a sentiment I shared. He seemed implicitly to acknowledge that the bipartisan policy of trying to expand NATO up to the Russia’s borders and fomenting  pro-Western coups in Russia’s neighbors was perilous and self-defeating. But he came across as tough and hawkish too. He praised tough generals and said he would “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” But since ISIS was a genuine enemy, then actively recruiting and training terrorists to kill civilians inside Western countries, hawkishness seemed altogether appropriate. A certain Jacksonian bluster about killing America’s enemies seemed an appropriate way to steer the Republican foreign policy away from neoconservatism and back towards realism.

In any case, I wrote several pro-Trump pieces, the first pushing back in early 2016 against National Review’s attempt to bury his campaign, a second touting the legitimacy of the nationalist and pro-border sentiments to which Trump was appealing. Of course I voted for him. And nothing, until now, has really made me question the correctness of that vote.

Naturally there were worries. Trump seemed never to have expected actually to win the presidency, and was oblivious to the exigencies of staffing. There were quite a few people with brains and administrative experience and Trumpian views willing to work for his administration, but if any of them got hired, it was largely an accident. So apart from one trade hawk and Jeff Sessions’ contribution of Stephen Miller, one sometimes had the impression that the only real Trumpian in the new administration was Trump himself. Of course the infusion of standard GOP types was not necessarily bad—they were political people and realized that an earthquake size rejection of the legacy of George W. Bush had taken place amongst their voters, and most were willing to make adjustment. But the personnel deficit meant that a lot of initial energy would be dissipated on standard GOP partisan initiatives, lowering taxes for the rich, abolishing Obamacare.

And then there were the neoconservatives. Many had signed petitions during the campaign denigrating Trump but many had not, and the Trump administration was open to hiring them. Neoconservatives had always played an inside game in Washington. The faction had survived the political collapse of its favored candidates (Marco Rubio, Joe Lieberman). One heard too many stories for comfort about the comings and goings of FDD types around the White House. (The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a major promoter of the Iraq war, was created to promote hawkish “pro-Israel” foreign policy positions in Washington.) It couldn’t be ignored that Sheldon Adelson, a passionate Israel supporter and advocate of nuking Iran, was Trump’s biggest donor. Equally important were the Saudis and other wealthy gulf states, who lavishly irrigated Washington foreign policy think tanks with oil money and were major customers of the defense industries. Their views, grounded in a fundamentalist Sunni Islam vigorously opposed to Shi’ite Iran, were always treated respectfully in Washington.

But countering this at least partially was Trump himself, who seemed to realize what a major Mideast War would do to his reelection chances, So he pushed back, sometimes mockingly, against warmongering advisers like John Bolton. (But why was Bolton hired in the first place?)  Six months ago Trump called off strikes against Iranian forces because he worried about civilian casualties. He fired Bolton. He seemed inclined to talk to adversaries and one hoped he would realize that Iran could be talked to as well. His seeming disregard for the beltway conventional wisdom might lead to new initiatives.

It’s a nearly ineffable mystery how it is decided that Saudi Arabia, womb of the 9/11 hijackers, a backwards and oppressive theocracy, which funds radical Islamist educational institutions the world over, gets to be designated as America’s great ally in the Muslim Middle East. And that Iran—with its prickly, hostile, but partially democratic regime, its large and at least latently pro-Western middle class, its cinema, literature, scientists, chess grandmasters, should be an implacable enemy. That power to decide who are friends and who are enemies is perhaps the most important one, but no one has ever satisfactorily explained who wields it and why. But Donald Trump, an unconventional and disrespectful Washington outsider, once seemed more likely than any other politician to at least ask fresh questions about it.

Of course one realized this way of thinking about Trump was based on hope and more than a dollop of wishful thinking. What brings this home,  and perhaps the main factor which distinguishes Trump of today from the Trump of six months ago, is the impeachment drive.

Based on essentially trivial and inconsequential charges, it is the Democratic Party’s and deep state’s attempted revenge on a man who unexpectedly defeated them and then refused them the deference to which they feel entitled. But however unjustified, the impeachment effort clearly threatens Trump’s presidency, and perhaps has him feeling cornered. It may be that Trump now realizes that war with Iran might be popular with the electorate, at least in the short run—in 2011 he accused Obama of preparing to ignite a war with Iran for domestic political reasons. And to the extent that the impeachment drive overshadows all else, at least for the president, war becomes a much more attractive option.

Whatever threatening or waging war might do for Trump politically, the reality of it would be a disaster. No one knows where we are precisely on the escalation escalator. Perhaps Iran will not respond with more than Tuesday’s errant rockets to the assassination of one of its leaders. But one already sees flourishing on the Right all the chest-beating rhetoric which one hoped a Trump presidency dampen; with the critical and important exception of Tucker Carlson, Fox News, the important conservative mass media platform, is in its 2002 mode all over again, as if nothing has been learned from the Iraq war. Once again patriotic Americans are rallying to the absurd notion that the turmoils of the Mideast can be traced to one evil man or evil regime, that a regime change war will solve the problem.   

Vaporized from public memory is the fact that Iran, including the leaders now most robustly demonized, played a critical role in organizing the paramilitary militias who defeated ISIS. And if Trump somehow remains aware that occupying Iran with troops—overwhelmingly the sons and daughters of his red state voters—wouldn’t go well, his proposed alternative to occupation of Iran is apparently to commit war crimes against the archaeological legacy of ancient Persia, smashing with drones cultural treasures which are less the property of the Iranian regime than they are of all humanity. Some of his cheerleaders advocate turning Tehran into 1945 Dresden. It is simply obscene.

There was an argument during the last campaign, expressed most notably by Michael Brendan Dougherty, that the worst possible  thing for those who wanted a different kind of American conservatism—an end to stupid wars in the Mideast, a more controlled immigration flow, an industrial policy that valued something other than cheap goods and “free trade”—might be a victory for Donald Trump, who campaigned for all of these things. Whether he believed in them or not, Trump recognized that this is what many voters wanted, that this was an open political lane to run in, an untapped yearning. I think, to an extent, he did believe in them, but had no idea, no real plan how to bring them about.

Faced with unrelenting hostility from the Democrats, the media and the permanent class of  Beltway bureaucrats which began before he took office, and no real base in the organized Republican Party, he floundered. No wall was built. No immigration legislation was passed. No grand and necessary Rockefellian infrastructure initiatives were initiated. He has hired to key positions Beltway types who had nothing but contempt for him, and they have led him down well worn paths. One of those paths leads to a major war with Iran, an obsessively pursued project of the neoconservatives since long before 9/11.

Impeachment makes taking that path more plausible. Indeed, Trump could reasonably see it as the best possible way out. It’s now hard to see how a Hillary Clinton presidency could have turned out worse.

theamericanconservative.com

The immediate termination of Chewning and Sweeney, at the same time as the assassination of Soleimani and Iran’s response raises some big questions. In the near future it will be of critical importance to get to the bottom of any possible relationship that Esper and his subordinates Chewning and Sweeney – who both served as Defense Secretary Esper’s Chiefs of Staff – had to the assassination of Soleimani. The assassination and any number of possible Iranian responses, can push the U.S into a broad and open military conflict with Iran. Such a war would also be Trump’s undoing.

We might otherwise be led to believe that Chewning and Sweeney’s sudden departure has something to do with Ukraine and the recent release of unredacted emails relating to L3Harris Technologies and funding in Ukraine. These of course also relate to the case against Trump and any possible impeachment. But the timing and symbolism of these as concurrent with the provocation against Iran and the blowback, as well as Esper’s backing of the ‘Kerfuffle theory’, lends strong credence to an Iran connection.

The connection to impeachment cannot be denied, but the necessity of uncovering its potential relation to Iran is tremendously important because it directly relates to larger constitutional and practical questions of the president’s ability to have a Department of Defense that works either for or against U.S strategy as formulated and executed by its democratically elected leadership, as opposed to its permanent bureaucratic administration. This is what Trump and his supporters quite rightfully refer to as the ‘Deep State’.

Were elements in the defense department working towards a heightened brinksmanship that the president did not really want? It would be far from the first time in history that such was the case.

Because the proverbial excrement rolls down-hill, was Esper involved in ordering Soleimani’s assassination which Trump was not informed of until it was too late, or until after? Chewning and Sweeney’s fate may be understood here. The ‘kerfuffle’ which was the withdrawal statement would then be a simple ruse to distract from the actual reasons that Chewning and Sweeney were terminated – acting without orders, insubordination, and even treason.

Trump’s Balancing Policy on Iran and America’s leadership crisis

One undeniable point is that a war with Iran works entirely against Trump’s middle-east policy and his prospects for re-election.

What the Trump administration seeks most now is a de-escalation with Iran. Given that Trump has fueled a rumor mill including the possible ending of sanctions if Iran doesn’t respond, or that there will be no further attacks if Iran’s response is ‘reasonable’, all exists in the unspoken framework that Trump inherently recognizes the ‘guilt’ of the U.S in its irrational act, while it is nevertheless politically impossible to frame it overtly as such.

Impeachment against Trump has now been used several times to push him to act aggressively in the middle-east, contrary to his policy and self-interest. On all the ‘impeachment threat – then strike’ occasions, Trump ordered strikes on predictable targets – targets so predictable and oddly executed, that Syrian and Iranian forces barely felt them. There appears to be at the very least an ‘unspoken communication’ at play, where strikes are made to assuage political needs but not to inflict serious damage. If Trump really wanted an excuse to strike Iran, he’s had it before.

There was precisely such an opportunity when subversives in government hatched a plan to push Trump into a war with Iran, when two planes were sent to violate Iranian airspace – one manned, the other unmanned – flying in close proximity. This created the chance that Iran’s downing of either plane could be used as a pretext for a major war-creating strike on Iran.

Despite Trump’s acting reasonably, government actors and media attempted to create a sensation where Trump was ridiculed for ‘calling off’ a planned retaliation in the aftermath of the downed drone. The same liberal media and Democratic Party establishment that attacked Trump’s de-escalation then from a hawkish perspective, today manifest as doves who suddenly oppose Trump’s reckless hawkishness.

Here, in the aftermath of the drone incident, a Trump policy was formulated – and it’s a policy that figures prominently in de-escalation in the aftermath of the assassination of Soleimani and Iran’s measured response.

The policy is this – if Iran kills Americans, then the U.S escalates. If the U.S does something provocative, then Iran is actually allowed to respond militarily, so long as American personnel are not killed.

Iran’s striking of the al-Asad airbase was predictable. That Trump has decided to officially declare that there were no U.S casualties has indicated his real stance. In all reality, the predictability of the target was such that American soldiers would have been repositioned out of that base, so that Iran could assuage its own popular-democratic needs in terms of legitimacy, without forcing the U.S. to respond again further.

Between an AIPAC rock and an Anti-War Hard-spot

A war with Iran would push the anti-war sentiments of independent voters away from Trump, and towards a more revitalized and mobilized Democrat Party anti-war base. Trump needs an anti-war base to be re-elected, and war with Iran pushes that base towards nearly any Democrat candidate.

At the same time, Trump also needs the continued support from America’s Christian Zionist evangelical ‘Israel Firsters’, as well as the infamous AIPAC, not only to be re-elected, but to maintain the support in the senate against impeachment.

That conflict between Trump’s two greatest populist strengths – between Trump’s anti-war base and his Christian Zionist base – largely defines his weakest political spot. That’s why it’s the best place to attack him.

Trump for his part, has a frenemy relationship with AIPAC, and has worked hard to build his profile with Christian Zionist voters even to the extent that this might limit AIPAC’s influence on them. He has purchased a lot of AIPAC support along the way by tearing up the JCPOA and recognizing the Golan Heights and Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This is capital he will have to spend to maintain support in the Senate.

All together this means that while Trump may or may not have personally sought the assassination of Soleimani, he must take credit for it for any number of reasons. In brief, these relate again to the Zionist base and AIPAC, as well as needing to appear in control of the very country that he is nominally the president of. When Trump refused to go to war over the downing of the un-manned drone, the liberal media monopoly accused him of being soft on Iran and indecisive.

Israel for its part is not tremendously happy with either of the two competing U.S policies. They have been pushing a ‘bomb Iran’ line for years, so that Israel’s conquest of Iraq may come to be. They are also not happy that the U.S presence in the region will come to an end. Trump may or may not have green-lit Soleimani’s assassination, but in either even its result will be the purchase of political capital that he can use towards ending the anti-ISIS campaign in Iraq. The reality is that the U.S is being pushed out either way. Soleimani’s assassination has only strengthened that resolve.

Simultaneously, the anti-war sentiment in the U.S. is one that both led to Trump’s election and can lead to Trump’s undoing. Americans love sabre rattling and posturing. They also hate war.

To wit, in the immediate aftermath of the Soleimani assassination, the well-known American communist group – the PSL – and its anti-war front organization ‘ANSWER’ have already received incredible donations from deep-pocketed Democrat Party sponsors at the local party level, to stage the first significant anti-war demonstration since the Bush presidency. While PSL/ANSWER members and activists have been laudable in their consistent opposition to all American wars for capital and empire, they only seem to magically receive the funds for permits, advertising, organizing, and staging anti-war marches when a Republican is president. The secondary slogan of these mobilizations was ‘Dump Trump’. ‘Dump Obama’ was never a slogan seen at the non-existent mass mobilizations against the Libyan, Ukrainian, and Syrian wars.  Trump’s refusal to take the Democrat-laid war bait, means he can pull off an end-run around the Democrat and deep-state plot.

Democrats also don’t want war with Iran, they only want that Trump loses the anti-war vote. They can force him into these compromised positions by coordinating with the ‘permanent administrative military-intelligence bureaucracy’, by coordinating with AIPAC. The Democrat’s plan is therefore pretty simple: use impeachment to force him to strike at Iran (or get Trump to take credit for a strike that the deep-state pulled off), and then use that entanglement to tank his re-election prospects. Then Democrats ride in on an anti-war ticket, restart JCPOA, and move towards integrating Iranian elites into the EU economy. Israel could ultimately guarantee its piece of Iraq and its Greek pipeline deal in due course, with a reformed and EU friendly Iran, ready to make major compromises with Israel. Maybe this is what Biden means by ‘restorationist’ – restoring the traditional left/right political divide which has empowered the Atlanticist status quo.

A Backroom deal? Iran’s Measured Response and Trump’s face-saving

The successful attack on the US’s al-Asad airbase in Iraq was characterized by Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei has characterized as a ‘slap’.

Interestingly, Khamenei’s language used is strategic, and uses a sleight of hand to take the steam from possible opponents. It is clear that Khamenei has said today that while the attack on the airbase is just a slap, and that Iran’s full response will come in the future, he has in fact set up that the solution will be political and diplomatic. He did so in a creative way which appeals to hardliners, saying that any solution could not simply be political and diplomatic, but rather more than this. This sort of double-speak does not reflect any moral lapsus, but is necessary for Iran’s greater geopolitical aims and serves the greater good.

De-escalation requires that both parties save face, and can come away with tangible minor victories and agree that the real underlying dispute is resolved in the future.

This reluctance to engage militarily is beyond the mere politics of justifying American casualties, but points to broader considerations of U.S power projection in the region in the aftermath of the failure of the Obama administration policy of overthrowing the government of Syria.

To understand the events at play requires a multi-dimensional and realist understanding of motivations and relationships, and how relationships work at the level of statecraft. And so in a way that would be popularly understood – as in Game of Thrones – just because you’re invited to the banquet or receive a high-honored appointment, doesn’t mean that are you indispensable or even a friend. Trump’s ‘GoT’ relationship with Israel and even his own cabinet, needless to say any number of Pentagon bosses, is precisely this. Bolton and Pompeo are such frenemies, as have been any number of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ members of the Trump administration, more or less foisted and forced upon the chief executive by Trump’s opponents in the permanent administration and his partisan opposition, and within the Republican Party itself.

Did Trump make a backroom deal with Iran? Probably not – there was a high public dimension to Trump’s offers, and a recent history where an unspoken language was developed. Iran has demonstrated a high level of intelligence, restraint, intuition, and strategic thinking in its several thousand year-old civilization. There is no reason to think that they wouldn’t have understood and inferred everything explained in this article, and much more, without needing a direct conversation with Trump which no doubt would have led to yet another impeachment fandango.