THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE HAS SCREWED US OVER TWICE IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS AND THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH, THANK YOU. IT NEEDS TO BE ABOLISHED.
By Robert Parry, the investigative reporter who many of the
Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Originally published at Parry’s Consortium News (republished with permission).
Donald Trump must decide –
and decide quickly – whether he wants to be a great U.S. President or a
robo-signature machine affixing his name to whatever legislation comes from
congressional Republicans and a nodding figurehead acquiescing to more neoconservative
foreign policy adventures.
Or, to put it in a
vernacular that Trump might use, does he want to be “Paul Ryan’s bitch” on
domestic policies? And does he want to surrender his foreign policy to the
“wise guys” of Washington’s neocon establishment.
Donald Trump speaking with
supporters in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Trump’s
problem is that he has few fully developed ideas about how to proceed in a
presidency that even many of his close followers did not expect would happen.
Plus, over the past few decades, the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks have marginalized almost every
dissenting expert, including old-line “realists” who once were important
figures.
So,
the bench of “confirmable” experts who have dissented on neocon/liberal-hawk
policies is very thin. To find national security leaders who would break with
the prevailing “group thinks,” Trump would have go outside normal channels and
take a risk on some fresh thinkers.
But most mainstream media
accounts doubt that he will. That is why speculation has centered on Trump
settling on several neocon retreads for Secretary of State and National
Security Advisor, such as former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton,
former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former CIA Director James Woolsey and
ex-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, all staunch supporters of George
W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War which Trump has denounced.
‘Team of Rivals’
If
Trump is guided in that direction, he will make the same mistake that President
Barack Obama made during the 2008 transition when Obama was seduced by the idea
of a Lincoln-esque “Team of Rivals” and staffed key top national security jobs
with hawks — keeping Bush’s Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, hiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and leaving in place top generals,
such as David Petraeus.
That decision trapped the
inexperienced Obama into a policy of continuity with Bush’s wars and related
policies, such as domestic spying, rather than enabling Obama to achieve his
promised “change.”
Faced with powerful
“rivals” within his own administration, Obama was maneuvered into an
ill-considered “counterinsurgency” escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 that did
little more than get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed along with many more
Afghans.
Secretary
Clinton also sold out the
elected progressive president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, when he was ousted in
a coup in 2009, signaling to Latin America that “El Norte” hadn’t changed much.
Then,
Clinton sabotaged Obama’s first attempt in 2010 to enlist the help of
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan to work out a deal with Iran on constraining its nuclear
program. Clinton favored an escalating confrontation with Iran along the lines
dictated by Israeli hardliners.
Clinton
and the other hawks succeeded in thwarting Obama’s will because, as Gates wrote
in his memoirDuty, Gates and
Clinton were “un-fireable” in that they could challenge Obama whenever they
wished while realizing that Obama would have to pay an unacceptably high price
to remove them.
As clever “inside players,”
Gates, Clinton and Petraeus also understood that if Obama balked at their
policy prescriptions, they could undercut him by going to friends in the
mainstream news media and leaking information about how Obama was “weak” in not
supporting a more warlike approach to problems.
Obama’s Real Weakness
Yet, by failing to stand up to this neocon/liberal-hawk pressure,
Obama did make himself weak. Essentially, he never got control of his foreign
policy and even after the Gates-Clinton-Petraeus trio was gone by the start of
Obama’s second term, the President still feared angering Washington’s foreign
policy establishment which often followed the heed of Israel’s Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
President Barack Obama stands
with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
during the President’s official arrival ceremony in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2013.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Obama was so worried about
Israel that, at the apex of his power after winning reelection in 2012, Obama
went on a several-day trip to visit Netanyahu in a craven attempt to show his
love and obeisance to Israel. Obama took similar trips to Saudi Arabia.
Still,
that was not enough to spare him the wrath of Netanyahu and the Saudi royals
when Obama finally pushed successfully for an Iran nuclear deal in 2014. Netanyahu
humiliated Obama by
accepting a Republican invitation in 2015 to speak to a joint session of
Congress where he urged U.S. lawmakers to repudiate their own President.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia
demanded and got new concessions from Obama on arms sales and his grudging
support for their proxy war in Syria as well as their direct aerial bombardment
of Yemen – both part of a Sunni Wahhabist sectarian strategy for destroying
Shiite-related regimes. (The Sunni/Shiite clash dates back to the Seventh
Century.)
Indeed,
the little-recognized Israeli-Saudi alliance targeting the so-called “Shiite crescent”
– Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran – is at the
heart of what has been driving U.S. policy in the Middle East since the 1990s.
And, if President-elect
Trump wants to truly reverse the downward spiral of the United States as it has
squandered trillions of dollars in futile Mideast wars, he will have to go up
against the Israeli-Saudi tandem and make it clear that he will not be manipulated
as Obama was.
Barack Obama at Erga Palace after a state
visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete
Souza)
Facing down such a powerful
coalition of Israel (with its extraordinary U.S. lobbying apparatus) and Saudi
Arabia (with its far-reaching financial clout) would require both imagination
and courage. It would not be possible if Trump surrounds himself with senior
advisers under the thumb of Prime Minister Netanyahu and King Salman.
So, we will learn a great
deal about whether Trump is a real player or just a pretender when he selects
his foreign policy team. Will he find imaginative new thinkers who can break
the disastrous cycles of Mideast wars and reduce tensions with Russia or will
he just tap into the usual suspects of Republican orthodoxy?
Testing- one two three
four. This is just before dinner. If you are looking for the place where two of
the Seven Cardinal Virtues are slightly modified- that is two words – Integrety
and Dilligence - - this is in “For the Record” on the August 8th 2014
blog about how Democracy can’t exist without responsibility. The question is whether Democracy can exist with the Electoral College. Places like California are by design under-counted in such a scheme. In a recent blog I quoted some official as bragging that they were going to disqualify as many blacks, old people and students as they can because they tend to vote Democratic. They have openly BRAGGED about the fact that THIS is the REASON they are seeking to prune the voter registration rolls. But we won't be able to get rid of the electoral college because I don't foresee a time when the Republicans, (by their own scheming) will NOT be in control, short of some unforeseen REVOLUTION of the PEOPLE. "Tis a consumation most devoutly to be desired". My lament about the latest election is that there was not enough Sol Allinsky "outside the box" manovers by the progressives. If you want to read more moral precepts some of which relies on excessive inside humor, go to August 8th 2014 in "For the Record". I’m puzzled why I refer to John Mc Cain as “Low
hanging fruit” when it comes to ISIS.
Maybe I wanted to remind my readers how much John Mc Cain has suffered
for his country but I honestly don’t know what I was referring to. Jeff asked for coffee from Glenda at two
thirty and then she mentioned coming over here again and at the same time gave
me her key to get coffee from her room. Glenda
was over here at twenty to three trying to get her phone to work and for a
while she had me talking to the phone lady.
I even gave her my number so she could call me back for some reason. Finally Glenda got fed up herself and I
resumed my word search of the word “Integrety”. The seven cardinal virtues once again are
FAITHFULNESS, COMPASSION, PURSUIT OF JUSTICE, BRAVERY, INTEGRETY, PRUDENCE AND DILLIGENCE.
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