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Ivanka Trump Backed Flynn and Manafort. She Discussed Firing Comey. How Has She Evaded Mueller's Investigation? |
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Saturday, 10 March 2018 14:54 |
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Seligson writes: "Ivanka Trump is the ghost of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation: She is connected, either directly or tangentially, to events at the heart of the probe, yet all but invisible to the public."
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the Diplomatic Room, June 14, 2017. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Ivanka Trump Backed Flynn and Manafort. She Discussed Firing Comey. How Has She Evaded Mueller's Investigation?
By Hannah Seligson, The Intercept
10 March 18
 vanka Trump is the ghost of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation: She is connected, either directly or tangentially, to events at the heart of the probe, yet all but invisible to the public.
But as Mueller’s investigation broadens, the so-called first daughter is becoming a long overdue part of the bigger story of alleged corruption at the Trump Organization. Last week, we learned that the FBI is looking into the financing and negotiations surrounding her involvement with Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver, which is home to an Ivanka Trump-branded spa. That inquiry may be unrelated to the Russia probe, but it should draw scrutiny to Ivanka’s business dealings and how they relate to her father’s political rise.
The mainstream press frequently describes Ivanka — who recently denied any collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians — as the head of a fashion company. Yet she was also a top executive at the Trump Organization and a hard-charging, and often quite effective, dealmaker for the real estate development company. Despite her entrenched role in the West Wing and status as one of her father’s most trusted advisers and emissaries on matters as wide-ranging as G-20 and the Winter Olympics, her identity — carefully curated on social media and through her press operation — hinges on issues such as female entrepreneurship, maternal leave, and being a mother to highly Instagrammable kids. It’s a persona that renders the media establishment and broader public largely incapable of considering that she might be a key player in the Trump-Russia narrative.
The first daughter has not merely developed some of her father’s Teflon quality; sexism and gender stereotypes have also worked in her favor. After all, who would suspect an ex-model, mother of three, and public champion of working women to be pulling the levers of power, calling the shots, and working alongside people like Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman with reputed mob ties who served jail time for stabbing a man in a bar fight?
Mueller’s probe is scrutinizing Trump’s business transactions. Although we don’t know the full scope of the investigation, Ivanka was reportedly among just a handful of people with a role in foreign projects at the Trump Organization.
She also appears to have been present, albeit briefly, at a controversial meeting aboard Air Force One on the way back from the G-20 summit in July, when Trump administration staffers and the president himself drafted a response to reporters’ questions about a meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. The statement, now exposed as a cover-up, said the meeting was focused on Russian adoption when it was really to discuss potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Ivanka, according to “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff, attended the Air Force One gathering, which is now reportedly of interest to Mueller. The first daughter’s team told Wolff that she quickly left the meeting to “take a pill, and go to sleep” — a timeline that works in Ivanka’s favor, giving her what Wolff describes as a “get out of jail free card.”
At other times, however, Ivanka has indisputably been more present. She was one of three people – along with her husband, Jared Kushner, and Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller – whom the president consulted before deciding to fire then-FBI director James Comey. Their motive for encouraging Comey’s ouster, Wolff claims, was fear for their own fortunes: Ivanka and Kushner were influenced by Jared’s father Charlie Kushner’s “panic” that the “Kushner family’s dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of Trump.” The couple, whom Wolff dubs “Jarvanka,” became, in his words, “co-conspirators” in the Comey firing, which is being investigated as a possible obstruction of justice, an impeachable offense.
And it was Ivanka who went to bat for Paul Manafort, the former lobbyist indicted by Mueller on 12 counts of tax evasion, foreign lobbying, and laundering $75 million in payments as part of a pro-Russian initiative in Ukraine, as well as new charges filed last month. Ivanka reportedly printed out Manafort’s pitch letter and gave it to her father because she and Kushner thought Manafort would “bring professionalism” to the campaign.
Ivanka was also a champion of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. In a 2016 meeting of the Trump transition team’s executive committee, Ivanka asked Flynn: “General, what job do you want?” “It was like Princess Ivanka had laid the sword on Flynn’s shoulders and said, ‘Rise and go forth,’” the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported. (Flynn pleaded guilty in December to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian officials and is now cooperating with Mueller.)
Then there are Ivanka’s ties to Felix Sater, who has loudly and plausibly boasted of connections with senior Russian officials. Sater is now being called one of the Trump Organization’s “biggest headaches in the Russia probe” because of a letter he wrote to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in 2015, saying: “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” Sater claimed that he had arranged financing for Trump Tower Moscow, a never-built project that was supposed to be the linchpin of the support from “Putin’s team.” The skyscraper included plans for an Ivanka-branded spa.
Ivanka was close enough with Sater that she traveled to Moscow with him in 2006. Sater claims he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s office chair at the Kremlin. (Ivanka told the New York Times that she may have sat in Putin’s chair, but “she did not recall it.”) And Bayrock, the company where Sater was managing director, helped finance Trump SoHo, a lower Manhattan condo and hotel project that Ivanka oversaw. (She was close to being charged with felony fraud for inflating the building’s sales figures.)
This series of events and decisions might help explain why former Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon labeled Ivanka and Kushner “Russia Toxic,” according to Wolff. The author says this was Bannon’s way of warning his White House colleagues not to speak to the couple lest they jeopardize their careers by getting entangled in Mueller’s investigation.
“Why is he [Mueller] not interviewing Ivanka?” asked CNN legal analyst Michael Zeldin, a former prosecutor who worked for Mueller at the Justice Department. “The answer is, beats me. Either he’s just biding his time or he has obtained this evidence elsewhere and he doesn’t need her, or he appreciates the possibility of a major eruption were he to do that.”
Ivanka may have plausible deniability when it comes to events like the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer, and Akhmetshin, the lobbyist. The first daughter did not attend the meeting, though she may have run into the Russians near the elevators afterwards and exchanged what have been described as “pleasantries.” But a brief conversation with shady Russian nationals hardly proves that she colluded with the Kremlin.
On the personnel matters, it’s a different story. Even a cursory Google search would have turned up Paul Manafort’s connections to some of the world’s foremost kleptocrats and his links to Russia, particularly a business relationship with and large alleged debt to aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who was named in a U.S. diplomatic cable as “among the two to three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”
As for Flynn, who would serve as Trump’s national security adviser for only 24 days, he told the transition team before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign.
Championing Manafort and Flynn does not amount to a crime, but it remains an open question why Ivanka ignored red flags about these two men. The infantilizing answer is that she simply doesn’t know enough about the inner workings of government and criminal liability to understand that Flynn and Manafort posed imminent threats to her father’s campaign, his administration, and national security. Or it could be that her judgment was disastrously poor.
In his post-mortem of the Comey firing and attempt aboard Air Force One to craft a false account of the Trump Tower meeting, Wolff concludes that “everyone on the Jarvanka side were now directly connected to actions involved in the Russia investigation or efforts to spin it, deflect, or, indeed, cover it up.” Yet reporters of all stripes have largely given Ivanka a free pass on matters Russia-related. Wolff is in a minority for zeroing in on Ivanka’s role in the Comey firing, which triggered Mueller’s appointment in the first place.
Ivanka’s absence from the nonstop coverage of the Russia investigation may be linked to her longstanding special relationship with the mainstream press, not to mention surrogates who spend hours on the phone with reporters buffering her image. Wolff claims that Josh Raffel, Jared and Ivanka’s spokesperson, “coordinated all of Kushner’s substantial leaking” and that the leaking culture at the White House is so “open and overt” that “everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks.” It stands to reason that reporters, all competing for the next scoop, would be loath to jeopardize their access to the palace intrigue that makes the Trump White House such juicy copy. That’s why, even though journalists whisper about it among themselves, no one will go on the record to say that Ivanka and her PR machine are key sources for White House gossip and more. As one senior White House staffer told Wolff, Jared and Ivanka “are so careful about their image and have crafted this whole persona — it’s like anyone who tries to pierce it or say something against it is like a big problem. They get very upset and will come after you.”
The result is that the press often spins events in Ivanka’s favor. After the white supremacist rally and subsequent violence in Charlottesville, the New York Times reported that Jared and Ivanka were urging Donald Trump to “take a more moderate stance.” After Trump announced the transgender military ban, Ivanka got the word out that she had only learned about it on Twitter, distancing herself from the discriminatory policy proposal.
As Drew Magary put it in a piece for GQ called “Michael Wolff Did What Every Other White House Reporter Is Too Cowardly To Do,” Wolff burned many of his sources, while the rest of the media, Magary writes, “are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.” While Magary notes that Wolff “represents the absolute worst of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding,” mainstream reporters are equally guilty for their kid-glove treatment of Ivanka.
That gives a whole new meaning to “collusion” — one that benefits the first daughter.
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The Lessons of the West Virginia Teachers' Strike |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47735"><span class="small">Eric Blanc, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 10 March 2018 14:45 |
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Blanc writes: "The Great West Virginia Wildcat is the single most important labor victory in the US since at least the early 1970s."
Jennyerin Steele Staats, a special education teacher from Jackson County, holds her sign aloft outside of the capitol building. (photo: Craig Hudson/AP)
The Lessons of the West Virginia Teachers' Strike
By Eric Blanc, Jacobin
10 March 18
West Virginia’s historic wildcat strike has the potential to change everything.
 he Great West Virginia Wildcat is the single most important labor victory in the US since at least the early 1970s. Though the 1997 UPS strike and the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike also captured the country’s attention, there’s something different about West Virginia. This strike was statewide, it was illegal, it went wildcat, and it seems to be spreading.
West Virginia’s upsurge shares many similarities with the rank-and-file militancy of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But there are some critical differences. Whereas labor struggles four decades ago came in the wake of a postwar economic boom and the inspiring successes of the Civil Rights Movement, this labor upheaval erupted in a period of virtually uninterrupted working-class defeats and economic austerity. The Supreme Court’s impending decision to throw the whole public sector back into the open-shop era gives West Virginia’s strike an added degree of momentousness.
It’s too early to tell whether West Virginia will spark the revival of a fighting labor movement nationwide. Much depends on whether workers here can keep winning over the coming months — and whether a looming public education strike wave materializes in Oklahoma, New Jersey, Arizona, Kentucky, and beyond.
Understanding the reasons workers won this strike will be crucial for activists engaged in these upcoming battles — and for all those interested in reviving the US labor movement. At the same time, it’s important to identify the challenges that lie ahead for the struggle in West Virginia.
Class Power
When it comes to a successful strategy for labor, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. West Virginia has once again clarified the continued relevance of simple political insights that were long ago abandoned by most union leaders, as well as much of the Left.
Class struggle gets the goods.
Labor-management “cooperation” has led to concession after concession over the past decades. Nor has the prevailing form of what passes for “social justice unionism” been able to reverse organized labor’s decline. Instead of building workplace power and strikes, many progressive unions have focused on public relations campaigns, moral appeals to consumers, and lobbying Democratic politicians.
In contrast, the bottom-up militancy and strike action of West Virginia’s teachers and school employees has reinvigorated working-class organization and won a whole series of important concessions, not the least of which was a 5 percent raise for all public employees.
From day one, the active participation of rank-and-filers — and their remarkable ability at critical junctures to overcome the inertia or compromises of the top union leadership — has been the central motor driving West Virginia’s strike forward. Through the empowering dynamics of mass struggle, many individuals who only two weeks ago were politically inexperienced and unorganized have become respected leaders among their coworkers.
Winning labor battles often requires breaking the law.
Though it is illegal for public employees in West Virginia to strike, they struck anyway. Highlighting the long tradition of taking illegal action to win a righteous cause, many strikers here made homemade signs saying, “Rosa Parks was not wrong.” The state initially threatened to file injunctions to end the strike, but it was forced to back down. At moments of mass struggle, in other words, legality becomes a question of a relationship of forces. If a strike has the strength, the momentum, and the support of the public at large, it is hard for the ruling elite to crack down.
A willingness to flout the law will be particularly crucial over the coming period. The constraints of the legal and institutional structure of US labor relations have already set up the union movement to fail. This will become even more the case if, as expected, the Supreme Court eliminates crucial labor rights in the public sector. But as the experience of West Virginia shows, it is possible to fight and win even in the face of the most draconian legal obstacles.
Workplaces remain our most powerful site of resistance against the ruling elite.
The fact that the system depends on our labor gives us immense structural leverage. As the events of the past week and a half have demonstrated, this holds true for public employees — including categories of workers that are predominantly female, like teachers — no less than it does for the private sector. Fittingly, one of the most popular chants at the capitol over the past week and half was: “If they don’t fix it, shut it down!”
Unleashing and sustaining this potential power depends in large part on the independent initiatives of a “militant minority” of rank-and-file worker leaders.
It’s unlikely the West Virginia strike would have happened — or succeeded — without the tireless efforts of a small group of deeply rooted, radical teachers. Many of these rank-and-file leaders first coalesced during the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. Others, particularly in the southern part of the state, like Mingo County, had already been politicized into a multigenerational tradition of militancy going back to the Mine Wars of the early twentieth century.
Rebuilding an analogous layer across the country is essential. Ever since the McCarthy-era expulsion of radicals from the unions in the 1950s, the labor and the socialist movements have both been fatally weakened by this imposed divorce. And leftists in the past few decades have been surprisingly uninterested in trying to root themselves in workplaces and working-class organizations. Hopefully, the inspiring example of West Virginia will encourage a new strategic emphasis on class struggle at the point of production.
Promoting the merger of socialism with the labor movement will necessarily require abandoning the ideological baggage and bad political habits accumulated over decades of marginalization.
The ethos of the West Virginian strikers was the polar opposite of the sterile sectarianism, political insularity, and callout culture that prevails on so much of the Left. Radicals have much to learn from West Virginia’s model of unity in action. As Charleston high school teacher and union activist Emily Comer summed it up: “For a successful mass movement, people don’t have to agree on partisan politics, on religion, or anything else for that matter. But they do have come together and fight in solidarity around a shared issue.”
Focus on the big, burning demands that face working people.
The struggle here revolved around material questions — pay and health insurance — that directly impacted the livelihoods of thousands of West Virginians. The growing momentum towards strike action across the country shows that the urgency of these issues isn’t confined to Appalachia.
Challenges Ahead
Tuesday was a euphoric day for strikers across West Virginia. The celebration was well deserved. It was also well timed — many teachers were already teetering on the edge of physical exhaustion.
Unfortunately, there won’t be much time to rest. West Virginia’s governing elite suffered a major blow, but they’re far from defeated. Over the coming days and weeks, they will ramp up their efforts to undermine the important gains won on Tuesday. This will above all take the form of a concerted offensive to pit public employees against other layers of the working class by attempting to pay for the deal by cutting essential services, including Medicaid.
Whether the funding for the raise will come from the rich — as the strikers have demanded — or from the poor will largely depend on the ability of West Virginian educators and staff to continue mobilizing in the days to come, and whether or not other groups of workers, in both the public and private sectors, take to the streets.
Strikers deserve to celebrate their victory and get some rest. But there’s a real danger that Republican leaders will attempt to ram through a regressive bill while people are still recuperating. Funding the pay raise through cuts would be a major political setback. Not only would this would inflict serious harm on those who depend on these services, but it would set the stage for a successful right-wing campaign of divide and conquer. The struggle, in short, is far from over.
A similar dynamic will shape the fight to fix PEIA, the state public employee health insurance agency. This is a central demand, which played a pivotal role in uniting public sector employees with the rest of working class over the past months. On this front, the movement has a little more time since the current insurance rates are frozen up through 2019.
Yet the task force set up by the governor to find a solution is set to begin meeting on March 13. There is no reason to believe that the state government — which remains beholden to corporate interests — will voluntarily cede to the strikers’ widespread demand to fully fund PEIA by raising the severance tax on natural gas. Without a new upsurge in protest to make out-of-state corporations pay, a serious long-term fix for PEIA will likely remain a mirage.
While working-class West Virginians have gotten used to confronting and exposing the trickery of the Republicans, they will now face novel political challenges. In particular, though the forces of liberalism and official reformism are currently weak in West Virginia, this state of affairs will not last long.
Due to the institutional debility of organized labor, the union officialdom was neither able to prevent or control this strike. But we should expect national teachers’ union leaders to seek to re-cohere a solid apparatus as they try to seize the huge organizing opportunity opened up by the West Virginia victory. Much of this support should be welcomed. Financial and human resources are needed to rebuild a strong militant union movement. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. With this support will come increased pressure toward returning West Virginia’s educators and staff to more traditional, less disruptive, forms of organization and action.
In addition, the militant minority will feel a strong pull to take union office. In many instances, this will likely make political sense. But without the democratic participation and organization of the rank and file at the school, county, and statewide levels — and without overcoming the debilitating divisions between the three statewide K-12 unions — electing even the best militants will be insufficient to revitalize West Virginia’s trade unions.
Relations with the Democratic Party will be even more difficult political terrain to navigate. Eighty years of rule by a corrupt West Virginia Democratic Party beholden to corporations has culminated in the implosion of the party’s political and institutional influence. West Virginia is now a so-called “Red State.” So while past labor battles in the state were typically directed against Democratic politicians, the political villains today are Republicans.
Whether out of conviction or electoral opportunism, the Democratic minority in the legislature consistently supported the strikers’ pay demands. Firebrand state senator Richard Ojeda in particular is widely regarded as a hero by West Virginia workers. One of the most common chants throughout the strike was, “We’ll remember in November.”
On the one hand, the strikers’ basic political intuition is correct. Protests aren’t enough. To systematically transform West Virginia’s priorities — and the country’s as a whole — requires political power. Given this fact, and the role played by local Democrats during the strike, it’s understandable that most teachers and staff will enthusiastically vote for Democrats in November.
The problem, however, is that neither the statewide nor national Democratic Party is a party of, or for, the working class. Democratic politicians have a long tradition of pro-business policies and broken promises. Today’s allies can quickly become tomorrow’s political turncoats. And not only have past attempts to “take back” the Democratic Party failed, but such efforts often played a critical role in demobilizing and defanging unions and social movements in the 1930s and 1960s. More recently, the powerful 2011 Wisconsin Uprising went down to defeat after protesters folded up shop in a misguided campaign to recall Republican governor Scott Walker.
Maintaining the political independence of the unions and the broader movement remains a burning question. West Virginia just demonstrated that mass struggle can win major gains no matter who is in power. Even if most workers vote for Democrats in November, the labor movement will be in a better position to defend the interests of working people if it mobilizes independently and resists absorption into the Democratic Party.
A New Labor Movement
No matter what happens over the coming period, this strike has etched its imprint onto the course of history. West Virginians have shown workers across the country that when you fight back, you can win.
We live in a particularly volatile historical juncture. After decades of neoliberalism, the liberal center is no longer holding. Conditions are more than ripe for socialists to begin fighting for the hearts and minds of the working-class majority. To quote Emily Comer:
If you have enough working people who are pushed to the breaking point, and who are angry about a specific grievance, then it’s the duty of activists to let them know that they deserve better — and that their lives can get better if they take action on that issue. If you lead the way, people will respond.
No one has any illusions that it will be easy to rebuild an influential left rooted in a fighting working-class movement. It will require patient organizing over many years. Our enemies are powerful — and we will certainly experience many defeats along the way. But after West Virginia, it’s clear that a new labor movement is not only necessary, but possible.
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FOCUS: God Wills It! The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade |
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Saturday, 10 March 2018 12:19 |
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Carroll writes: "America may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited the vast public disorder that is now our all-American world, has been almost completely forgotten here."
U.S. special operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a mission in Afghanistan. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
God Wills It! The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade
By James Carroll, TomDispatch
10 March 18
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: When my kids were little and had trepidations about doing something I knew they would end up liking, I would offer them what I called “the Engelhardt Guarantee.” It always worked. Now, let me offer that same guarantee on a book that had me raptly reading beginning to end: James Carroll’s new novel, The Cloister. It’s the story of a priest and a Jewish Holocaust survivor in modern New York City, woven together gracefully with a vivid retelling of the medieval love story of Abelard and Héloïse, itself set against the grim backdrop of the Crusades. (Read Carroll’s post below on that subject!) Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston called his novel “an enlightening, vitally important book, a necessity for our time” and Publisher’s Weekly, “a sweeping, heartbreaking blend of history and fiction... a very magnetic, satisfying novel.” Consider it a tale of paths not taken into the modern world. Carroll has agreed to send personalized, signed copies of The Cloister to any TomDispatch reader who donates $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.) to this website. In this case, your generosity, which makes all the difference to us, comes with the Engelhardt Guarantee. Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]
Here’s a thoroughly humdrum figure from the post-9/11 world: this February an estimated 1,294 people were killed in Iraq and another 266 wounded, including ISIS militants, numerous civilians, Iraqi security forces, Kurds, and Turks. Few of them died in major combat, just low-level incidents, suicide bombings, and bodies found in mass graves. And keep in mind that that’s what passes for a peaceful month in the country George W. Bush invaded and occupied in March 2003. Since then, the violence there has never ceased, amid insurgencies, religious strife, the rise and fall (and rise) of terror groups, acts of ethnic cleansing, and other horrors without end. A number of Iraq’s major cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, and its second largest urban area, Mosul, are little more than rubble today. Hundreds of thousands of its people, many of them civilians, have been killed and more wounded. In the last few years, an estimated 1.3 million Iraqi children have been displaced in the war against ISIS, even as the country remains deeply riven and without access to the funds necessary to truly rebuild.
And that, of course, is just one ruined land in the Greater Middle East, a region from Afghanistan to Libya increasingly filled with failed states, terror groups, and ruins as, almost 17 years after the attacks of 9/11, the Trump administration once again ramps up the war on terror (which should long ago have been renamed the war for terror). Today, TomDispatch regular James Carroll, a former columnist for the Boston Globe, leaves Donald J. Trump in the dust and returns to the fateful moments when all of this first began, when President George W. Bush launched what would be, to choose a word that has long been on Carroll’s mind, a “crusade” not just against terrorism but, as it turned out, against much of the Islamic world. Carroll, whose new novel The Cloister, is set against the age of the original crusades, takes in its enormity so many years later.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
God Wills It!
The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade
 merica may be sinking ever deeper into the moral morass of the Trump era, but if you think the malevolence of this period began with him, think again. The moment I still dwell on, the moment I believe ignited the vast public disorder that is now our all-American world, has been almost completely forgotten here. And little wonder. It was no more than a casually tossed-off cliché, a passing historical reference whose implications and consequences meant nothing to the speaker. “This crusade,” said President George W. Bush just days after the 9/11 attacks, “this war on terrorism…”
That, however, proved to be an invocation from hell, one that set the stage for so much of the horror to follow. The Crusades were, of course, a centuries-long medieval catastrophe. Bush’s Global War on Terror, in contrast, has already wreaked comparable havoc in a paltry 17 years, leading to almost unimaginable mayhem abroad and a moral collapse at home personified by President Donald J. Trump.
Despite the threads of causality woven together as if on some malignant loom that brought about his election -- the cult of reality-show celebrity, the FBI director's last-minute campaign intervention, Russian mischief, Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability to self-defeat and misogyny, electoral college anomalies, Republican party nihilism, and a wickedly disenchanted public -- the ease with which such a figure took control of the levers of power in this country should still stun us. Some deep sickness of the soul had already played havoc with our democracy’s immune system or he wouldn’t have been imaginable. Think of him as a symptom, not the disease. After Trump finally leaves the Oval Office, we’ll still be a stricken people and the world will still be groaning under the weight of the wreckage this country has brought about. How, then, did we actually get here? It might be worth a momentary glance back.
A Fever Dream of a War
“This is a new kind of evil.” So said the president that September 16th, standing on the South Lawn of the White House. “And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” In that way, only five days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush elevated a band of petty nihilists to the status of world-historic warriors. “And the American people must be patient,” he continued. “I’m going to be patient.”
He, of course, is long gone, but what he initiated that day is still unspooling. It could have been so different. September 11th was a tragic moment, but the initial reactions of most Americans to those collapsed towers and a damaged Pentagon were ones of empathy and patriotism. The selflessness of first responders that day had its echo in a broad and surprising manifestation of national altruism. The usual left-right divides of politics disappeared and the flag, for once, became a true symbol of national unity. The global reaction was similar. From across the world, including from erstwhile adversaries like Russia and China, came authentic expressions of support and sympathy, of grief-struck affection.
But in every phrase the president would speak in those weeks -- “this is war… with us or against us… dead or alive” -- he chose to take this country on quite a different path into the future.
Two days before invoking the Crusades, for instance, he presided over a religious service, which, though officially defined as “ecumenical,” took place in the neo-Gothic National Cathedral. “Just three days removed from these events,” he said from that church’s pulpit, “Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil… This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”
In a specifically Christian setting, that is, George W. Bush answered the criminal attacks of 9/11 not by calling on international law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice, but by a declaration of cosmic war aimed at nothing less than the elimination of Islamist evil. Labeling it a “crusade” only underscored the subliminal but potent message conveyed by television cameras that lingered on the cathedral’s multiple crucifixes and the bloodied figure of Jesus Christ. Held up for all to see, that sacred icon sent a signal that could not be missed. A self-avowed secular nation was now to be a crusader, ready to display the profoundly Christian character of a culture erected on triumphalist pieties from its Pilgrim roots to the nuclear apocalypticism of the Cold War.
Bush’s message was received in the Arab world just as you might expect. There, his reference to “this crusade” was rendered as “this War of the Cross.” Even then, many Muslims knew better than to regard the president’s characterization of the conflict to come as purely accidental and of no import, just as they would later disregard the insistence of America’s leaders that their country’s violent intrusions across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa were not “religiously” inspired in any way. Today, of course, Donald Trump’s brazen denigrations of Muslims have made clear just how on target observers in the Islamic world were about what lay behind Washington’s new “global war.”
At the time of Bush’s cavalier use of crusade, I was one of the few here to take offense and say so. I feared even then that stumbling into sectarian strife, into -- in the argot of the day -- a “clash of civilizations,” could set in motion, as the original Crusades had, a dynamic that would far outrun anyone’s intentions, loosing forces that could destroy the very principles in whose name that “war of choice” was declared. Little did I know how far short of an accurate damage assessment my thoughts would fall.
In fact, Bush’s use of that term wasn’t a stumble, however inadvertent, but a crystal-clear declaration of purpose that would soon be aided and abetted by a fervent evangelical cohort within the U.S. military, already primed for holy war. With what Bush himself called “the distance of history,” it’s now possible to see the havoc his “crusade” is still wreaking across much of the globe: Iraq and Afghanistan are in ruins; Syria destroyed (with Russian, American, Israeli, Turkish, and Iranian warplanes testing one another in its airspace); Yemen gripped by a war-induced famine; the Turks at the throat of the Kurds; the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dead; Libya a failed state; U.S. Special Ops garrisons in Somalia, Niger, and across Africa; and Europe increasingly politically destabilized by refugee flows from these conflicts. Meanwhile, Bush’s crusade became the American disease now peaking in the fever dream of President Donald Trump.
Exercises in Apocalyptic Millennialism, Then and Now
The actual Crusades were a multi-phased series of wars waged in the name of God. They began in 1096 and continued intermittently for almost two centuries until 1291. By the time the Crusading era drew to a close, moral values had been trashed; a nascent structure of capitalism had infused the new economy of Europe with greed; a dark inclination toward mass violence was seething in European consciousness; and the militarization of religion was taken for granted. The mayhem of modernity followed.
To believe that killing could be holy, Christians first had to accept that God willed such violence. So they constructed a theology in which He would ordain the bloody death not just of evil-doers (a favorite word of George W. Bush), but of His only begotten Son, whose suffering alone could “atone” for human sin. The instrument of Christ’s saving death, the cross, soon became sacred and an emblem of war against Muslims. The Crusaders would wear it proudly on their tunics and shields. This violent theology of “atonement” would sear the religious imagination of Christians forever after, making them all too ready to kill in the name of God. Long before the war on terror, whether explicitly or implicitly, such a theology had come to justify and often motivate similar American campaigns of killing, starting with King Phillip’s War, launched by Puritan colonists against the native peoples who had welcomed them to Plymouth. (God wills it!)
The Crusades themselves began with an urge to take back the holy city of Jerusalem from the Saracen infidel. As Western civilization jelled in the crusading centuries, Europe became fixed on Islam as its existential negative-other. This fixation -- what scholar Edward Said called “Orientalism” -- still undergirds the identity of the West, which is why an anti-Muslim war, fueled by anti-Muslim prejudice, turns out to fit the American Century like a mailed fist in a velvet glove.
As Said suggested, European Christian contempt for the “Orientals” of the Levant soon leached into other God-sanctioned projects, especially once the age of the Crusades had given way to the age of exploration. Recall Christopher Columbus’s three crossed-marked caravels, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, as they set out from Spain for the New World, soon enough to be followed by the wooden vessels of other European powers. It didn’t take long before native peoples globally began to fall victim, often genocidally so, to gun-toting European adventurers and slave traders who had learned to think of themselves as “white.” Though Donald Trump has no more idea of such roots of contempt for the Muslim world than George Bush did, he has successfully lifted the relit torch of race hatred yet higher.
The Crusades were an exercise in apocalyptic millennialism, a hot current that also runs just below the surface of twenty-first-century American martial ardor. Is it only an accident that the first Crusade and Bush’s were both keyed to the turning of a millennium? After the year 1000, a Biblical mythology attached to Jerusalem fueled frenzied End Time expectations that culminated in the never-ending war for that city and a European obsession with it ever since. The first purpose of the primordial Holy War of that era was Jerusalem’s rescue from the Muslim infidel; no one should be surprised that, 11 centuries later, the establishment of an American embassy there remains a flashpoint for the anti-Muslim crusade of the present moment.
More generally, the excesses of the American reaction to 9/11 had an edge of millennial dread from the beginning. The endlessly replayed footage of the collapsing World Trade Center towers had the look and feel of an atomic attack on America (hence the almost instant labeling of the site as “Ground Zero,” a term previously reserved for nuclear explosions). Those scenes plucked unconscious chords strung deep in the American psyche, ones the president promptly played on. A few days after 9/11, he went before Congress to declare that “God is not neutral” and so claimed for his administration the mantle of being God’s purifying agent.
Almost a year later, before a throng of West Point cadets, he was still at it, insisting that “we are in a conflict between good and evil and America will call evil by its name.” In such a conflict, of course, outcomes are no longer to be measured by real consequences in the lives of actual human beings, but by the transcendent will of God (or, in his stead, the “sole superpower” of planet Earth) to whom actual human beings can naturally be sacrificed.
“For much of the last century,” Bush declared in his Crusader-style West Point address, “America’s defense relied on Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment… But new threats also require new thinking.” A hard-won twentieth-century assumption that Washington must, in the end, take the path of the lesser evil had, by then, already been summarily replaced by a determination to simply obliterate evil altogether. Deterrence and containment had saved the human species from nuclear apocalypse, but for the country’s new apocalyptic encounter with “terrorism” such modes were obviously insufficiently absolute.
And when a nation’s purpose becomes the cosmic destruction of evil, anything goes -- as it has in the American Crusade. Hence the jettisoning of the Geneva Accords, the embrace of torture, the obliteration of prisoners' rights, the abuses that live on in the unchecked intrusions of government surveillance, or in what Americans are too polite to call the concentration camp at Guantánamo that Donald Trump so devoutly desires to keep open and running.
The Crusading appetite for enemies is insatiable, which is why, in the Middle Ages, the war against Islam morphed so seamlessly into wars against, first, the Rhineland Jews in Europe’s early pogroms; then, Eastern Orthodox believers whose cities, including Constantinople, were besieged and sacked; and finally, Catholic dissenters (think “heretics”) like the Albigensians and Cathars who were brutally eliminated.
In America’s version of such enemy-creep, the war against the al-Qaeda network quickly morphed into a “war” against terror groups in more than 60 nations, starting with Afghanistan and the Taliban, and within a year and a half Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country and regime utterly unrelated to al-Qaeda. From there, it was on to Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Niger, the Philippines, and parts as yet unknown.
When George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address four months after 9/11, he redefined America’s main enemies as -- again that word -- an “axis of evil,” consisting of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. By then, it already mattered not at all that Shiite Iran had nothing to do with the Sunni sect led by Osama bin Laden; that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11; and that North Korea had not the remotest connection to the September crisis that so traumatized the United States. Once named in this way, the leaders of Iran and North Korea, now knowing that, in American eyes, they were the fonts of (almost) all evil, could, of course, be expected to take immediate measures to brace themselves against future American aggression -- and so they did with nuclear programs that still are at the heart of the aggressively militarized policies being pushed by Donald Trump and his generals today (and with a future war in either of those countries a distinct possibility).
However, the most salient echo of the medieval Crusades in contemporary U.S. military campaigns comes under the heading of failure. For all the romance associated with the knights-in-shining-armor of that era, their God-willed liberation of the Holy City in 1099 did not survive the Muslim reconquest of 1187, a Christian defeat that would make the English king, Richard the Lionheart, a mythic figure, and guarantee Jerusalem’s place in the lost-cause fantasies of Europe forever after. (It was a defeat that would not be avenged until 1917, when Field Marshal Edmund Allenby finally reclaimed Jerusalem for Christians, with catastrophic consequences for Jews and Muslims alike.) America’s failures in the Middle East, despite Pentagon rhetoric about the U.S. military’s “full spectrum dominance,” have been no less obvious and no less total on a planet that can no longer tolerate decades, no less centuries, of war.
Licensing a War Against Evil
George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq remains a marker of virtue (and vice) in contemporary American politics. Those few legislators who were against the invasion still wear their votes of opposition as badges of honor, while those in favor were permanently shamed. (And think of how that played out in the 2016 presidential campaign.) But that’s far too convenient a way to replay our recent history. In fact, the die had already been cast long before that vote, which meant that the invasion of Iraq followed the invasion of Afghanistan as inevitably as wakes follow warships. After all, Operation Enduring Freedom, supposedly meant to target Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network of a few hundred fighters, began with a massive bombing campaign across large parts of Afghanistan. The blind faith of the U.S. Air Force in the long-discredited tactic of “strategic” bombing would be touching if it didn’t involve such a blindness to its effects on human bodies -- and almost 17 years later, American bombers, including the latest drones and Vietnam-era B-52s, are still dropping fire on Afghani flesh as that war goes from bad to worse.
The Afghan campaign, which quite literally ignited the war on terror, was officially launched on October 7, 2001. But who remembers that everything to come -- from that Afghan invasion to the deaths late last year of four U.S. Green Berets in Niger -- had already been enthusiastically licensed three weeks earlier when George W. Bush stepped to that cross-shadowed pulpit of the National Cathedral to berate evil. Only hours before, the Joint Congressional Resolution on the Use of Force (“The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons...”) passed the Senate 98 to 0 and the House of Representatives 420 to 1. Those are the numbers that should live on in history, if not infamy.
The lone dissenter that day was Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat. In warning against the coming American crusade, she denounced the Joint Congressional Resolution as “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events -- anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.” She added all too prophetically, “A rush to launch precipitous military counterattacks runs too great a risk that more innocent men, women, children will be killed.”
As they were, as they still are. Lest one assume that responsibility for the catastrophe that followed rests solely upon Bush and his hawkish circle, remember that the administration’s responses were approved by 90% of the American public, the highest presidential approval rating ever achieved, while a full 80% of them expressly favored Bush’s open-ended war against Afghanistan. That war would eventually let loose mayhem across a dozen other nations (and it’s still spreading), leaving millions of dead, disfigured, displaced human beings in its wake. Most Americans and nearly all of their congressional representatives were complicit in what remains an unfinished global moral, economic, and political calamity that far exceeds anything the grotesque Donald Trump has so far brought about. He may yet start a nuclear war and has already undoubtedly sparked what could become a cascade of nuclear proliferation, yet for now the malign legacy of the 43rd President -- that American crusade -- exceeds anything the 45th one has yet imagined. And no, God does not will it.
James Carroll, TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist, is the author of 20 books, including the new novel The Cloister (Doubleday). His history of the Pentagon, House of War, won the PEN-Galbraith Award. His memoir, An American Requiem, won the National Book Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Boston with his wife, the writer Alexandra Marshall.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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FOCUS: Trump Is a Dangerous Idiot. So Why Is the Media Pushing Him Toward War? |
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Saturday, 10 March 2018 11:43 |
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Taibbi writes: "There's a big conference going on at the moment in Brussels, where the bipartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy - a group of journos, pols, and intelligence vets from around the West - is holding a conference to discuss how to rebuild the world order in a 'time of distrust.'"
Donald Trump. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Trump Is a Dangerous Idiot. So Why Is the Media Pushing Him Toward War?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
10 March 18
In North Korea and in Syria, we should be encouraging Trump to mellow out – not the opposite
here's a big conference going on at the moment in Brussels, where the bipartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy – a group of journos, pols, and intelligence vets from around the West – is holding a conference to discuss how to rebuild the world order in a "time of distrust."
Speakers like Madeline Albright, Senator Chris Murphy, New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger, U.S. NATO Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and a host of other CNN panelist types are getting together to discuss how to solve that whole "The people are revolting!" problem Beltway pols have been stumbling over for years now.
The Alliance is part of the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is the group that built Hamilton 68, whose "digital dashboard" blacklist site exists to remind us daily that Russians are lurking behind basically all unorthodox opinions here in the U.S. Such opinions apparently include any desire to not get into a nuclear war.
For instance, according to Hamilton 68, five of the Russian bots' current six "top trending topics" are "South Korea," "Kim Jong Un," "Kim," "Jong" and "Un."
This comes in the wake of Thursday evening's news that Trump met in the White House with South Korean envoys, who in turn announced that Trump would be meeting with Kim Jong Un "by May, to achieve permanent de-nuclearization."
I stupidly thought it was good news that Trump had been convinced to sit down with Kim Jong Un to negotiate an end to the nuclear standoff, as opposed to letting him continue to egg Kim on to launch via Freudian name-calling sessions and late-night tweets.
Obviously, whenever Donald Trump is involved in any meeting of import, and particularly a peace negotiation, it would be preferable to have him gagged, perhaps with the straitjacket-and-mask setup they used to allow Hannibal Lecter to speak with Senator Ruth Martin in Silence of the Lambs. Certainly you don't want him making any sudden movements toward the nuclear football in a meeting with Kim. But talking is for sure better than trading warheads. Right?
Nope. According to David Ignatius, the well-known Washington Post reporter who apparently is also on the board of this Alliance For Securing Democracy, Trump's negotiation plan is a sign of weakness.
Ignatius wrote as much in a column this morning called "Trump is Wile E. Coyote," in which the Post writer relayed that his CIA buddies think Trump is getting pantsed by Little Rocket Man. Here's the lede:
"Beep beep" was the subject line of an email message I received a few weeks ago from former CIA analyst Robert Carlin, as Kim Jong Un was accelerating his diplomatic charm offensive. "So typical," wrote Carlin in his brief text. "The North Koreans as Road Runner, the U.S. as Wile E. Coyote."
So to recap: Russian bots are pushing Korean peninsula-related hashtags, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, whose board member David Ignatius is simultaneously telling America that negotiating an end to an unprecedented nuclear danger there makes us look like loser cartoon characters.
As Ignatius wrote: "We'll probably be chasing Kim around a negotiating table for a while, which is better than 'duck and cover.' But as Carlin says, 'Beep beep.'"
I wrote to Ignatius to ask him what would be good, if negotiating an end to a nuclear standoff is bad. He hasn't answered.
While the Trump White House has been fumbling to coordinate a response to the whole "The President of the United States apparently cheated on his wife with a porn star and then paid her off" problem, and fighting off the anaconda-like Mueller criminal probe, Trump's political opposition has been spending more and more time pushing our president into aggressive military stances.
Continuing a theme that really began last year with Trump's much-praised decision to lob missiles into Syria while eating cake with horrified Chinese leaders, Beltway voices continue to demand, for instance, that Trump escalate America's on-the-ground opposition to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Both Ignatius and Kenneth Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute are examples of think-tankers arguing the widespread D.C. consensus, that Syria is the perfect place for American forces to dig in and take on Iran, Assad, and by extension Russia as well.
Americans seem to be in denial about the tinderbox nature of this lunatic Syrian situation.
Things took a serious turn in early February, when a mysterious news story suggested Russian contract fighters were killed by American weapons in a town called Deir al-Zour. The incident reportedly happened on the night of February 7th, as part of a counterattacking raid conducted across the Euphrates River by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
News outlets in both the east and the west seriously buried the lede when this incident first took place. The BBC and the AP were classic examples. This was the second-to-last line in the BBC's February 8th article: The Russian defense ministry said the U.S. strike wounded 25 pro-government volunteers…
What? Were any of those "wounded" by our strike Russians? Were they planning to retaliate? What was going on?
The Russians similarly downplayed the incident at first. There were reports from the Russian government that first suggested "five Russian citizens" had died. That later became dozens "injured."
Then on February 14th, Novaya Gazeta, historically the most trustworthy and independent of Russian news outlets, ran a piece called "Mistake or Treason?" that asserted 13 Russians had died that night. The paper claimed Russian officials let private Russian "Wagner" contract fighters join pro-Assad forces in a troop advance Russian military leaders had assured their American counterparts would not take place.
Novaya Gazeta said the Russians died under fire from Apache helicopters, F-15s, drones, and ground batteries. There were later rumors that the casualties were in the hundreds, but subsequent investigations by outlets like Der Spiegel failed to bear that out.
Still, the mere fact that Russian citizens were killed by American forces in an ongoing proxy war that both sides seem determined to escalate should be absolutely terrifying to ordinary citizens here and there – especially given that aggressive rhetoric is at an all-time high, again on both sides.
Vladimir Putin recently gave a frightening speech in advance of the March 18 presidential "election" in which he spent most of his time boasting about the size, modernity, and potency of Russia's military.
Pooty-poot boasted of new "unlimited range" nuclear missiles. He paused mid-speech to show a pulled-straight-from-Dr.-Strangelove animated clip of a missile weaving through snow-covered mountains on its way to the American continent (the presentation ended up including simulated explosions over Florida).
"Nobody in the world has anything like this," Putin bragged.
Meanwhile here in the States we've had a constant drumbeat of "new Pearl Harbor" stories describing the troll farm indictment as an "act of war," with politicians and pundits alike calling for escalations of hostilities with Russia.
Putin's boasts are completely in line with what he's always been about, using nationalist rhetoric and military imagery to cover up his almost total incompetence as an economic leader. He's just the latest in a long line of Russian heads of state, dating back to the Soviet days, who reflexively try to cover up for empty shelves and crumbling infrastructure with marches and missile parades.
Meanwhile, in the States, the only thing about Donald Trump that any sane person ever had to be grateful for was that he entered the White House claiming to be isolationist and war-averse. That soon proved to be a lie like almost everything else about his campaign, but Jesus, do we have to help this clown down the road toward General Trump fantasies?
We have the dumbest, least competent White House in history. Whatever else anyone in America has as a goal for Trump's remaining time in office, the single most important priority must to be keeping this guy away from the nuclear button. Almost anything else would be survivable.
Which is why it makes no sense to be taunting Trump and basically calling him a wuss for negotiating with Kim Jong Un or being insufficiently aggressive in Syria. In the middle of a shooting conflict, our troops are currently stationed right across the river from large numbers of both private and official Russian forces. Who doesn't think this is crazy?
The rhetoric we're hearing now about Trump's weakness from the likes of Ignatius and Max Boot is essentially identical to the stuff we heard directed at Barack Obama when he had the temerity to express willingness to talk to leaders of nations like Iran.
There is a segment of D.C. thinkluencers who seem to think the U.S. is setting a bad precedent if it doesn't bomb and threaten its way through every foreign policy conundrum, from Libya to Yemen to Iran to Syria to, apparently, even Russia.
It seems like the smart thing to do would be to wait until we had someone with an IQ over 9 in office before we start demanding that the White House play war with nuclear opponents. Of course, I might be biased because I have kids and live in a major population center. Can we chill on the gunboat diplomacy for a couple of years at least? And if not, why not?
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ast week I 
