TomDispatch
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Trump the Flamethrower
By Rebecca Gordon
Posted on December 17, 2017, Printed on December 19, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176365/ ;
In June, an American Green Beret was reportedly strangled to death in Mali
by U.S. Navy SEALs, allegedly in connection with a shadowy money-skimming
scheme. (The military is currently investigating.) In July, The Intercept,
the London-based research firm Forensic Architecture, and Amnesty
International revealed that a drone base used by U.S. forces in Cameroon was
also a site for illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings on
the part of local forces. (The military is investigating.) In August,
according to a blockbuster investigation by the Daily Beast, U.S. Special
Operations forces took part in a massacre in which 10 Somali civilians were
killed. (The military is investigating.) In October, four Special
Operations soldiers were killed in murky circumstances during an ambush by
militants in Niger. (The military is investigating.)
This spate of questionable, scandalous, or even criminal activity involving
U.S. forces in Africa should come as little surprise. Over the last decade
and a half, operations on that continent have been expanding and evolving at
an exponential rate. A token number of U.S. troops has grown into a cast of
thousands now carrying out about 10 separate missions per day, ranging from
training to combat operations, which are up 1,900% since last year alone.
U.S. commandos sent to that continent have jumped from 1% of special ops
forces deployed overseas in 2006 to nearly 17% today, the highest total
outside the Middle East. There have also been numerous indications of U.S.
forces behaving badly from one side of the continent to the other. Few in
the mainstream media or among those tasked with oversight of such operations
have, however, taken any significant notice of this.
We dont know exactly where were at in the world, militarily, and what
were doing, said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, in the wake of the ambush in Niger. More recently,
Congressman Ted Lieu of the House Foreign Affairs Committee added, From
combating al-Shabaab in Somalia to Boko Haram in Nigeria, U.S. military
personnel are deployed across the African continent with little public
scrutiny or awareness. This attention deficit helped set the stage for the
recent scandals that have forced lawmakers and the public to take some
notice.
The situation of the U.S. military in Africa is, in some respects, not
unlike that in California, where TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon begins
her latest article. There, climate-change-charged dry weather and
unseasonably warm temperatures made the state a tinderbox that recently
burst into a series of devastating wildfires. The U.S. military has created
its own tinderbox in Africa, where longtime expansion without oversight has
led to a series of blazing scandals. And all of this is just a small part
of the larger story told by Gordon -- of a world filled with the dry
underbrush of decades of failed U.S. policies and of a president with a
penchant for setting fires. Once, ignoble political calculations, futile
strategies, ideological idiocy, and intellectual ineptitude provided
flashpoints capable of sparking foreign policy failures, conflicts, or
ruinous domestic policies. Today, writes Gordon, the commander-in-chief
functions as a one-man flamethrower, setting blazes the world over as a
matter of whim and embracing the inferno as an end in itself. Nick Turse
The President Plays with Matches
And the Whole World Burns
By Rebecca Gordon
Ive just heard that my family home near Carpenteria is literally in flames
at this moment, a friend told me recently. She was particularly worried,
she said, because my mom has MS. She and my dad got the call to evacuate
after midnight last night. They were able to grab a few photos, my sisters
childhood teddy bear, and the dog. Thats it. Thats all thats left.
My friends parents are among the thousands of victims of the 240,000-acre
Thomas fire, one of Californias spate of late-season wildfires. Stoked by
80-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds, plenty of dry fuel, and 8% humidity, such
fires are devouring huge swaths of southern California from Los Angeles to
Santa Barbara. Months of dry weather and unseasonably warm temperatures have
turned the southern part of the state into a tinderbox.
Once again the country watches in horror as firefighters struggle to contain
blazes of historic voracity -- as we watched only a couple of months ago
when at least 250 wildfires spread across the counties north of San
Francisco. Even after long-awaited rains brought by an El Niño winter
earlier in 2017, years of drought have left my state ready to explode in
flames on an increasingly warming planet. All it takes is a spark.
Sort of like the whole world in the age of Donald Trump.
Torching Jerusalem
The crazy comes so fast and furious these days, its easy to forget some of
the smaller brushfires -- like the one President Trump lit at the end of
November when he retweeted three false and inflammatory videos about
Muslims that he found on the Twitter feed of the leader of a British
ultra-nationalist group.
The presidents next move in the international arena -- his recognition of
Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel -- hasnt yet slipped from
memory, in part because of the outrage it evoked around the world. As
Moustafa Bayoumi, acclaimed author of How Does It Feel to be a Problem?
Being Young and Arab in America, wrote in the Guardian, The entire Middle
East, from Palestine to Yemen, appears set to burst into flames after this
week. Not surprisingly, his prediction has already begun to come true with
demonstrations in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, where U.S. flags and
posters of President Trump were set alight. Weve also seen the first
rockets fired from Gaza into Israel and the predictable reprisal Israeli air
attacks.
Trumps Jerusalem announcement comes as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner,
pursues his so-called Middle East peace initiative. Kushner's new BFF is
Mohammed bin Salman, the heir apparent to the Saudi throne. We dont know
just what the two of them talked about during a late night tête-à-tête as
October ended, but it probably involved Salmans plans to jail hundreds of
prominent Saudis, including 11 fellow princes. They undoubtedly also
discussed a new, incendiary Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that the U.S.
and Saudi Arabia are reportedly quietly circulating.
Under this proposal, according to the New York Times,
The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous
parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own
territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which
most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would
not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of
return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
If this is the deal of the century that President Trump plans to roll out,
then it's no surprise that hed prepare the way by announcing his plans to
move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
That move reveals a lot about Trumps much vaunted deal-making skills when
it comes to the international arena. Here he has made a major concession to
Israel without receiving a thing in return, except words of praise from
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and from evangelicals in this country).
Given that Israel came into possession of the eastern half of Jerusalem
through military conquest in 1967, a method of acquiring territory that
international law views as illegal, it was quite a concession. The ultimate
status of Jersalem is supposed to be a subject for the final stage of
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, not a gift to one side before the talks
even begin.
Behind this concession, as far as can be seen, lies no strategic intent of
any sort, not in the Middle East at least. In fact, President Trump was
perfectly clear about just why he was making the announcement: to
distinguish himself from his predecessors. (That is, to make himself feel
good.) While previous presidents have made [moving the U.S. embassy to
Jerusalem] a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am
delivering.
Some say, he added, that his predecessors failed because they lacked
courage. In point of fact, Trump did not exactly deliver either. Just
like his predecessors, he promptly signed a semi-annual waiver that once
again delayed the actual embassy move for six months.
Pyromania?
Rather than serving a larger Middle East strategy, Trumps Jerusalem
announcement served mainly his own ego. It gave him the usual warm bath of
adulation from his base and another burst of the pleasure he derives from
seeing his name in the headlines.
In his daily behavior, in fact, Trump acts less like a shrewd dealmaker than
a child with pyromania, one who relieves anxiety and draws attention by
starting fires. How else to explain his tendency every time theres a lull
in the coverage of him, to post something incendiary on Twitter? Each time,
just imagine him striking another match, lighting another fuse, and then
sitting back to watch the pyrotechnics.
Here is the grim reality of this American moment: whoever has access to the
president also has a good shot at pointing this human flamethrower wherever
he or she chooses, whether at Little Rocket Man in North Korea or Doug
Jones in Alabama (although that flame turned out to be, as the British say,
a damp squib).
The Middle East has hardly been the only part of the world our president has
taken visible pleasure in threatening to send up in flames. Consider the
situation on the Korean peninsula, which remains the greatest danger the
world faces today. Who could forget the way he stoked the already glowing
embers of the Korean crisis in August by threatening to rain fire and fury
like the world has never seen -- an obvious nuclear reference -- on North
Korea? And ever since its only gotten worse. In recent weeks, for
instance, not only Trump but his coterie have continued to ramp up the
rhetoric against that country. Earlier this month, for instance, National
Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster renewed the threat of military
action, saying ominously, There are ways to address this problem short of
armed conflict, but it is a race because [North Korean leader Kim Jong-un]s
getting closer and closer [to having a nuclear capacity to hit the United
States], and theres not much time left.
In September, Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley,
reinforced this message in an interview with CNN. If North Korea keeps on
with this reckless behavior, if the United States has to defend itself or
defend its allies in any way, North Korea will be destroyed.
Indeed, Vipin Narang, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at MIT, thinks
the Trump administration may already have accepted the inevitability of such
a war and the near-guarantee that South Korea and Japan will be devastated
as well -- as long as it comes before North Korea can effectively launch a
nuclear strike on the U.S. mainland. There are a lot of people who argue
that theres still a window to stop North Korea from getting an ICBM with a
nuclear warhead to use against the United States, he commented to the
Washington Post. Theyre telling themselves that if they strike now,
worst-case scenario: only Japan and South Korea will eat a nuclear weapon.
You dont exactly have to be an admirer of Kim Jong-un and his sad outcast
regime to imagine why he might be reluctant to relinquish his nuclear
arsenal. North Korea remains the designated U.S. enemy in a war that, almost
seven decades later, has never officially ended. Its situated on a
peninsula where the most powerful nation in the world holds military
exercises twice a year. And Kim has had ample opportunity to observe how
Washington has treated other leaders (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi)
who gave up their nuclear programs. Certainly, threats of fire and fury are
not going to make him surrender his arsenal, but they may still make Donald
Trump feel like a real commander-in-chief.
Home Fires Burning
Its not only in the international arena that Trumps been burning things
up. Hes failed -- for now -- to destroy the Affordable Care Act (though not
for lack of striking matches), but the GOP has successfully aimed the Trump
flamethrower at any vestiges of progressive taxation at the federal level.
And now that the House and Senate are close to reconciling their versions of
tax legislation, the Republicans have made it clear just why theyre so
delighted to pass a bill that will increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion. It
gives them a reason to put to flames what still remains of President
Franklin Roosevelts New Deal of the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnsons
Great Society of the 1960s.
House Speaker Paul Ryan gave a vivid sense of where that presidential
flamethrower could be aimed soon when he told radio host Ross Kaminsky,
We're going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is
how you tackle the debt and the deficit. The goal? Cutting appropriations
for Medicare and Medicaid, programs shepherded through Congress in the
mid-1960s by Lyndon Johnson. These achievements helped realize his vision of
the United States as a Great Society, one that provides for the basic needs
of all its citizens.
Meanwhile, when it comes to setting the American social environment on fire,
President Trump has already announced his post-tax-bill target du jour:
welfare "reform."
Welfare reform? Not a subject he even mentioned on the campaign trail in
2016, but different people are aiming that flamethrower now. The Hill
reports the scene as Trump talked to a group of lawmakers in the Capitol
basement:
Ticking through a number of upcoming legislative priorities, Trump briefly
mentioned welfare reform, sources in the room said.
We need to do that. I want to do that, Trump told rank-and-file lawmakers
in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol. The welfare line got a
big applause, with one lawmaker describing it as an off-the-charts
reception.
We know that getting big applause guarantees that a Trump line will also
get repeated.
At a time when entitlement has become a dirty word, wed do well to
remember that not so long ago it wasnt crazy to think that the government
existed to help people do collectively what they couldnt do as individuals.
As a friend said to me recently, taxes are a more organized way of
crowd-funding human needs.
Who even remembers that ancient time when candidate Trump, not yet an
arsonist on the home front, promised to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security? President Trump is a different matter.
It seems likely, however, that at least for now the Republicans wont push
him on Social Security because, as Paul Ryan told the Washington Posts
"Wonkblog," the Republicans dont have enough votes to overcome a Senate
filibuster and the program is too popular back home for a super-majority of
Republicans to go after it.
Why can they pass a tax reform bill with only a simple majority, but not
Social Security cuts? The tax bill is being rushed through Congress using
the reconciliation process by which differences in the Senate and House
versions are smoothed over to produce a single bill. This only requires a
simple majority to pass in each house. The Senate's Byrd Rule, adopted in
1974, prohibits the use of the reconciliation process to make changes to
Social Security. Thank you, former West Virginia senator Robert Byrd!
In addition to the programs that made up Johnsons War on Poverty, he also
signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Trumps
Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is already hard at
work setting fire to the latter, as the president continues to demand
evidence for his absurd claim that he won the popular vote in the 2016
election. He must be having an effect. At least half of all Republicans now
seem to believe that he indeed did win that vote.
And before we leave the subject, just a couple of final notes on literal
fires in the Trump era. His Department of Transportation has been quietly at
work making those more likely, too. In a move supported by fans of train
fires everywhere, that department has quietly reversed an Obama-era rule
requiring that trains carrying crude oil deploy, as Reuters reports, an
advanced braking system designed to prevent fiery derailments... The
requirement to install so-called electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP)
brakes was included in a package of safety reforms unveiled by the Obama
administration in 2015 in response to a series of deadly derailments that
grew out of the U.S. shale boom.
Government data shows there have been 17 such derailments of trains carrying
crude oil or ethanol in the U.S. since 2006.
Then theres the fire that has probably destroyed my friends house in
southern California even as I wrote this. Donald Trump can hardly be blamed
for that one. The climate in this part of the world has already grown hotter
and drier. We can certainly blame him, however, for turning up the heat on
planet Earth by announcing plans to pull the United States out of the 2015
Paris agreement on climate change, overseeing the slashing of tax incentives
for alternative energy (amid a bonanza of favors for the fossil fuel
industry), and working to assert an oil, gas, and coal version of American
energy dominance globally. From the worlds leading economic power, there
may be no larger match on the planet.
A Flame of Hope
What hope is there of quenching the Trumpian fires?
There is the fact that much of the world is standing up to him. At this
months climate accord follow-up meeting in Paris, billionaires Bill Gates
and Richard Branson announced a dozen international projects emerging from
the summit that will inject money into efforts to curb climate change. The
head of the World Bank insisted that the institution would stop funding
fossil fuel programs within the next two years. Former American officials
spoke up, too, as U.S. News & World Report observed:
One by one, officials including former California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, billionaire [and former New York City mayor] Michael
Bloomberg, and former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted the world
will shift to cleaner fuels and reduce emissions regardless of whether the
Trump administration pitches in.
I take comfort, too, in the extraordinary achievements of international
civil society. Consider, for example, the work of the International Campaign
to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), this years recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize. This summer, as a result of a campaign it led, two-thirds of the
worlds nations -- 122 of them -- signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws the use, production, and possession of
nuclear arms. That treaty -- and the Nobel that rewarded its organizers --
didnt get a lot of coverage in the United States, perhaps because,
predictably, we didnt sign it.
In fact, none of the existing nuclear powers signed it, but the treaty
remains significant nonetheless. We should not underestimate the moral power
of international agreements like this one. Few of us remember the 1928
Kellogg-Briand pact, which outlawed recourse to war for the resolution of
international disputes. Nevertheless, that treaty formed the basis for the
conviction of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg for their crimes against
peace. By implication, the Kellogg-Briand treaty also legalized a whole set
of non-military actions nations can now take, including the use of economic
sanctions against countries that violate international norms or laws.
ICAN leaders Beatrice Fihn and Setsuko Thurlow (herself a Hiroshima
survivor) believe that, over time, the treaty will change how the world
thinks about nuclear weapons, transforming them from a necessary evil to an
unthinkable one, and so will ultimately lead to their elimination. As Fihn
told the BBCs Stephen Sackur, If youre uncomfortable with nuclear weapons
under Donald Trump, youre probably uncomfortable with nuclear weapons in
general. In other words, the idea of Trumps tiny fingers on the nuclear
trigger is enough to start a person wondering whether anybodys fingers
should be on that trigger.
The worlds reaction in Paris and ICANs passionate, rational belief in the
moral power of international law are like a cool drink of water on a very
hot day.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
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
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and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Rebecca Gordon
© 2017 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
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