President Trump: Making America Great Again...

[frank ryan]

Mattis is leaving. Kelly is leaving. It seems like everyone who was willing to try and prevent the White House from devolving into a complete and utter circus has been given their walking papers.

Everything is fine. No need to worry. Just ask falafel.

[Pelado]

It really isn't eating me up. Whatever might be at any time in life I wouldn't post here. But if it gives that impression I should probably work on expressing opinions a little more politically correct or however you want to describe it.

I would say I don't think everyone thinks Trump is awful. The way falafel tends to go into passive-aggressive mode around any criticism of Trump tells me he's one of those who doesn't.

Or maybe he just likes to be contrarian and/or play devil's advocate. Aren't most attorneys advocating for the devil, anyway?

[Flystripper]

Or maybe he just likes to be contrarian and/or play devil's advocate. Aren't most attorneys advocating for the devil, anyway?

fify

[Walter Sobchak]

Reading the resignation letter, it appears that perhaps Mattis was against leaving Syria. If so, then good riddance.

Our presence in Syria is illegal and was never authorized at any point since President Obama put troops on the ground there about 4 years ago. Removing our troops from a country where we have no business being and where we have no interests at stake is long overdue. Given the amount of heads exploding, I have my doubts that the withdrawal will actually happen... but if Mattis is/was in the way, then, well.... bye! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

[Bo Diddley]

Reading the resignation letter, it appears that perhaps Mattis was against leaving Syria. If so, then good riddance.

Our presence in Syria is illegal and was never authorized at any point since President Obama put troops on the ground there about 4 years ago. Removing our troops from a country where we have no business being and where we have no interests at stake is long overdue. Given the amount of heads exploding, I have my doubts that the withdrawal will actually happen... but if Mattis is/was in the way, then, well.... bye! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I agree that the deployment there was done all wrong from the beginning. But we certainly had an interest in defeating ISIS for multiple reasons.

Now half the troops from Afghanistan are going to be withdrawn.

[Commando]

Maybe he was also against deploying thousands of troops to the southern border for a bullshit, made-up political contrivance just before the mid-terms and this was the last straw.

[Uncle Ted]

Reading the resignation letter, it appears that perhaps Mattis was against leaving Syria. If so, then good riddance.

Our presence in Syria is illegal and was never authorized at any point since President Obama put troops on the ground there about 4 years ago. Removing our troops from a country where we have no business being and where we have no interests at stake is long overdue. Given the amount of heads exploding, I have my doubts that the withdrawal will actually happen... but if Mattis is/was in the way, then, well.... bye! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Yeah, Drumpf should have fired that warmonger's ass a long time ago... like Obama did!

I hope Drumpf now gets our 75,000+ troops out of Japan and Germany as well... before the last of our WWII vets die. We don't need troops over there any more. We let drones do our fighting for us these days anyway.

[PaloAltoCougar]

I'm thankful to Trump for being so committed to our entertainment that he's willing to make himself look like an idiot on Twitter pretty much everyday. Here's one that he launched, presumably from the crapper, early this morning:

The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone...

We're lucky to have as our leader a man who knows more about ISIS than the generals, and more about tech than anyone.

[Edit] Some of the responses to this tweet are great including, "The only thing older than a wall: ladders."

[Walter Sobchak]

Now half the troops from Afghanistan are going to be withdrawn.

Finally.

[Walter Sobchak]

MAGA.

< trigger warning ... alt-right opinions sourced from the fascist publication "The Rolling Stone" ahead >

We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends
Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war

So we’re withdrawing troops from the Middle East.

GOOD!

What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half?

For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention.

It will be difficult for each of us to even begin to part with our share of honor in those achievements. This must be why all those talking heads on TV are going crazy.

Unless Donald Trump decides to reverse his decision to begin withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads.

“Today’s decision would cheer Moscow, ISIS, and Iran!” yelped Nicole Wallace, former George W. Bush communications director.

“Maybe Trump will bring Republicans and Democrats together,” said Bill Kristol, on MSNBC, that “liberal” channel that somehow seems to be populated round the clock by ex-neocons and Pentagon dropouts.

Kristol, who has rarely ever been in the ballpark of right about anything — he once told us Iraq was going to be a “two month war” — might actually be correct.

Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan will lay bare the real distinctions in American politics. Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor.

The real line is between a war party, and everyone else.

[...]

The departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — a standard-issue Pentagon toady who’s never met an unending failure of a military engagement he didn’t like and whose resignation letter is now being celebrated as inspirational literature on the order of the Gettysburg Address or a lost epic by Auden or Eliot — sounded an emergency bell for all these clowns.

[...]

You’ll hear all sorts of arguments today about why the withdrawals are bad. You’ll hear Trump has no plan, which is true. He never does, at least not on policy.

But we don’t exactly have a plan for staying in the Middle East, either, beyond installing a permanent garrison in a dozen countries, spending assloads of money and making ourselves permanently despised in the region as civilian deaths pile up through drone-bombings and other “surgical” actions.

[...]

Trump is a madman, a far-right extremist and an embarrassment, but that’s not why most people in Washington hate him. It’s his foreign-policy attitudes, particularly toward NATO, that have always most offended DC burghers.

You could see the Beltway beginning to lose its mind back in the Republican primary race, when then-candidate Trump belittled America’s commitment to Middle Eastern oil states.

“Every time there’s a little ruckus, we send those ships and those planes,” he said, early in his campaign. “We get nothing. Why? They’re making a billion a day. We get nothing.”

As he got closer to the nomination, he went after neoconservative theology more explicitly.

“I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” he said, in March of 2016. He went on: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up.”

Trump was wrong about a thousand other things, but this was true. I had done a story about how military contractors spent $72 million on what was supposed to be an Iraqi police academy and delivered a pile of rubble so unusable, pedestrians made it into a toilet.

The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction noted, “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate.”

SIGIR found we spent over $60 billion on Iraqi reconstruction and did not significantly improve life for Iraqis. The parallel body covering Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, concluded last year that at least $15.5 billion had been wasted in that country between 2008 and 2017, and this was likely only a “fraction” of financial leakage.

Trump, after sealing the nomination, upped the ante. In the summer of 2016 he said he wasn’t sure he’d send troops to defend NATO members that didn’t pay their bills. NATO members are supposed to kick in 2 percent of GDP for their own defense. At the time, only four NATO members (Estonia, Poland, the U.K. and the U.S.) were in compliance.

Politicians went insane. How dare he ask countries to pay for their own defense! Republican House member Adam Kinzinger, a popular guest in the last 24 hours, said in July 2016 that Trump’s comments were “utterly disastrous.”

“There’s no precedent,” said Thomas Wright, a “Europe scholar” from the Brookings Institute.

When the news came after Trump’s election that he’d only read his intelligence briefings once a week instead of every day as previous presidents had dutifully done, that was it. The gloves were off at that point.

“The open disdain Trump has shown for the agencies is unprecedented,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official for both George W. Bush and Obama.

All that followed, through today, has to be understood through this prism.

Trump dumped on basically every segment of the political establishment en route to Washington, running on a classic authoritarian strategy — bash the elites, pose as a populist.

However fake he was, there were portions of the political establishment that deserved abuse, the Pentagon most of all.

The Department of Defense has been a money pit for decades. It has trillions in expenditures it can’t account for, refused an audit for nearly 30 years and then failed this year (as in failed completely, zero-point-zero, not producing any coherent numbers) when one was finally funded.

[...]

We’ll see a lot of hand-wringing today from people who called themselves anti-war in 2002 and 2003, but now pray that the “adults in the room” keep “boots on the ground” to preserve “credibility.”

Part of this is because it’s Trump, but a bigger part is that we’ve successfully brainwashed big chunks of the population into thinking it’s normal for a country to exist in a state of permanent war, fighting in seven countries at once, spending half of all discretionary funding on defense.

It’s not. It’s insane. And we’ll never be a healthy society, or truly respected abroad, until we stop accepting it as normal.

Incidentally, I doubt Trump really follows through on this withdrawal plan. But until he changes (what passes for) his mind, watch what happens in Washington.

We’re about to have a very graphic demonstration of the near-total uniformity of the political class when it comes to the military and its role. The war party is ready for a coming-out party.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I hate to do Walter's heavy lifting, but here goes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ent=edit-promo

How the Press Sustains the Forever War
Too much media coverage of Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria treats indefinite deployments as the only legitimate option.

...

But one false note is being struck again and again in coverage of Mattis’s departure: the treatment of U.S. withdrawal from Syria as though it is a self-evidently reckless, borderline-illegitimate course.

...

It is proper to note the risks of U.S. departure. But most coverage of Trump’s move adopts only those frames that cast keeping Americans in Syria in a good light and withdrawing them in a bad light. Readers are told that Vladimir Putin hailed the decision, but no mention is made of the American spouses and children thrilling at the prospect of a loved one leaving harm’s way and coming home sooner.

Now let's get out of Afghanistan.

[frank ryan]

I hate to do Walter's heavy lifting, but here goes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ent=edit-promo




Now let's get out of Afghanistan.

It is reckless. There are reasons the military brass, including people like Mattis were strongly against it, and it's not because they dance on the graves of slaughtered babies as Walter would suggest.

Trump’s Abrupt Syria Withdrawal Thwarted ‘Major’ Operation Targeting ISIS, Sen. Bob Corker Says
The Foreign Relations chairman said the U.S. was weeks away from launching a ‘major clearing operation’ in the Euphrates River Valley when Trump decided to withdraw from Syria.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee revealed on Friday that the U.S. military was planning a “major clearing operation” targeting ISIS before President Donald Trump decided abruptly this week to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.

“One thing that hasn’t been reported is, we were six weeks away from a major clearing operation that has been planned for a long time. I got briefed on this a year ago—with ISIS in the Euphrates River Valley,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said Friday on Capitol Hill, referring to the area where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is believed to be hiding.

Trump’s decision, which at least partly led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, has rattled congressional Republicans, who have questioned the wisdom of withdrawing from Syria before ISIS is fully eradicated. In defending his decision, Trump claimed that the extremist caliphate has been defeated, but Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a top Trump ally, called that claim “fake news,” and said America’s adversaries will benefit from Trump’s order.

Aaron Stein, director of the Middle East program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said he was unfamiliar with any specific U.S. operation planned in the area but that further cleanup efforts against the extremist group seemed logical.

“I’d assume this was a final push in the Middle Euphrates River Valley to clear the small ISIS-held villages out near the Iraqi border,” Stein told The Daily Beast.

Corker said “at least 20,000” ISIS fighters are still in the region. The “major clearing operation” Corker referred to “would have changed the dynamic tremendously” in Iraq and Syria, where ISIS has lost significant territory in recent years. He later clarified that the operation was intended to take place in “six to eight” weeks.

“So to pull the plug—it’s just hard to understand,” Corker said of Trump’s decision to pull U.S. forces from Syria. “If you want to move away from Syria, why wouldn’t you do it after you’ve done the work that you’ve been planning for so long? Why would you pull the plug in advance of that? That’s the part that I think is heartbreaking to those in the military that are aware of what we were getting ready to do, to those of us who supported the clearing of ISIS and the things that have happened on the ground in Syria.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps...a=twitter_page

[Walter Sobchak]

It is reckless. There are reasons the military brass, including people like Mattis were strongly against it, and it's not because they dance on the graves of slaughtered babies as Walter would suggest.

We definitely need to listen to the military brass...



these are the same folks that have been telling us just one more surge in Afghanistan (or Iraq) will finally be what it takes to "win" there.

But civilian leaders - not generals - are ultimately in charge of the military. Thank god.

[Bo Diddley]

We definitely need to listen to the military brass...



these are the same folks that have been telling us just one more surge in Afghanistan (or Iraq) will finally be what it takes to "win" there.

But civilian leaders - not generals - are ultimately in charge of the military. Thank god.

History seems to show that civilian leaders are too quick to send the military in, and then too quick to pull them back out. But you're absolutely right. The civilian leaders are ultimately in charge. By the way, you civilians have failed us in the foreign policy department for years.

[Walter Sobchak]

By the way, you civilians have failed us in the foreign policy department for years.

Agree. Americans (by and large) love dropping bombs on brown people.