Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

‘If anyone likes to play rough, we can play rough too.”

W.S. Churchill, Speech to Canada’s Parliament, 31 December 1941

Six months after Mr. Trump’s election, the Republican and Democratic establishments, most of the media, the academy, the bipartisan elite, the climate charlatans, the Neocons, the Israel-Firsters, and the near-zombies all of them have produced in the country’s student bodies and minority groups continue to think, behave (at times violently), and “resist” as if the election was illegitimate and President Trump will be removed from office.

Until the inauguration, this phenomenon seemed simply a combination of absurd whining about the defeat of the left’s favorite criminal, Hillary Clinton, and a chance for students to miss classes and the minorities and women to skip work. Since 20 January 2017, and Trump’s magnificent speech on that overcast day, however, the child-like behavior of the pre-inauguration weeks has turned into more or less criminality, and a pervasive belief in the anti-Trump ranks that holds neither Trump nor his supporters — and the ideas and aspirations of each — can possibly be held by genuine human beings and respectable U.S. citizens, and that only the anti-Trumpers are human beings and respectable citizens. There is, moreover, no sign, or even a hint, that this literally murderous attitude among that anti-American multitude is going to do anything but harden.

Now, as readers of this space will suspect, I have a strong case of heart-burn over Trump’s military intervention in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The result of these delusional exercises in reinforcing defeat will be the well-established norm: dead, maimed, and PTSD-ed Marines and soldiers; billions of wasted dollars; and more defeats. Honestly, the worth of U.S. military academies seems non-existent in terms of teaching their students how to fight wars and secure victory. How could General McMaster and his fellow generals, for example, believe that the retaking of cities in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan is a game that is worth the candle? Those knuckleheads seem not to realize that cities are an enormous burden to Islamist insurgent forces, and while the Islamists wanted to hold them, they will be a far more effective and deadly force when they return to their forte, guerrilla warfare. I know it is a lot to ask, but do you not think that these generals would recall that we held all the major cities in South Viet Nam and still lost that war, or that we won all the major Afghan cities in 2001-2002 and still have lost Bush’s war there, the renewal and loss of Obama’s war there, and — soon — the renewal and loss of Trump’s war there. The actor John Wayne is reputed to have said that “Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you are stupid.” U.S. generals have thoroughly validated Mr. Wayne’s words, and their pensions and post-military, corporate-director salaries ought to be confiscated to help pay for the enormous costs U.S. taxpayers are going to pay for having their military mired in demolished cities and responsible for administering, feeding, and rebuilding them as the trophy for the feckless campaign that captures them, but leaves an unbeaten, stronger, and more elusive Islamist insurgent enemy in the field.

Back to the so-called anti-Trump “resistance,” which, of course, will soon field the wholly-owned, Democratic Party-subsidiary known as the “American Peace Movement,” which I noticed was utterly silent during gangster-Obama’s rule, though that cold-blooded thug murdered far more civilians than all of the covert operations undertaken in the decade prior to his election, probably by a factor of 50-to-1 or more. This group, in addition, to those mentioned earlier, want nothing except to remove Trump; silence his supporters, by bloody coercion if necessary; and to then undo the exceptional number of positive achievements Trump has already scored for the rehabilitation of the republic’s economy. Those who have flocked to the many insane banners that fly over this cesspool of “resistance” are not going to give up. They have not only completely divorced themselves from America, they have made themselves utterly and literally expendable.

What to do? Two courses of action are in order.

A.) The first is for President Trump and his team to accelerate their campaign to make good on the goals set and promises made by Trump during the election, to ensure his base expands and remains enthusiastic so his party can retain control of both houses of congress in 2018 and win the 2020 election. There are several tasks remaining to be completed — some difficult, some easy — if this trick is to be turned, and they must be accomplished.

1. Restore Americans’ faith in the rule of law; the equality of all before the law; and the republic’s constitutional viability by indicting and trying — under the espionage laws — Hillary Clinton and all those in Obama’s administration who knowingly conspired to use her deliberately hidden, unclassified, non-government server to conduct the republic’s national security affairs. Ditto, under the appropriate laws, for those who knowingly participated in the Clinton Foundation’s patently illegal activities — including selling foreigners the power of the Secretary of State’s office — and those who used the U.S. intelligence community and the Internal Revenue Service to persecute, surveil/expose, and defeat Obama’s political opponents. Also, indict George Soros for funding violence by the brain-dead students and minorities the Democrats use as cannon fodder.
2. Complete the annihilation of Obama care, and replace it with health plans and premiums that are set by corporate competition, and allow the citizenry to purchase what they want and can afford.
3. Reduce tax rates to the lowest possible point in all categories, eliminate the death tax, and allocate a large part of the resulting increase in government revenue to reducing Obama’s debt.
4. Build the southern border wall as quickly as possible, no more dithering.
5. Remove all illegal aliens — they are all criminals — from the United States, forcibly if necessary.
6. Forget trying to withhold funds from sanctuary cities, towns, states, and campuses, and begin arresting any elected politician, “resistance” activist, judge, priest, mayor, journalist, professor, or celebrity who refuses to obey the law or seeks to obstruct it. Elected officials who defy the law are in a state of rebellion against the law, the Constitution, and the continued existence of the Union. These illegal and obstructive actions would justify the use of the U.S. military if local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies prove unable to compel the lawless to act legally.
7. Permanently stop all taxpayer-funding for Planned Parenthood, and, when the time comes, appoint nothing but pro-life justices to the Supreme Court.
8. Make NAFTA, and other trade agreements, America friendly or abandon or abrogate them.
9. Make all policy decisions, personnel appointments, and spending plans on education into crystal-clear and effective preliminaries to terminating the existence of the U.S. Department of Education.
10. Fix the Veterans’ Administration with rapid and ruthless efficiency.
11. End more than a century of republic-killing overseas interventionism, all foreign aid, and all immigration for three-years.

B.) With what Trump already has accomplished, moderate, visible, and tangible advances on the issues above ought to be enough to enlarge his majorities in Congress, and to reelect him in 2020. But, given the mindset of the “resistance,” this kind of success for Trump and the republic is likely to breed ever more violent and lethal demonstrations and attacks by the Soros-funded resistance. The loyal citizenry will then be faced with a decision as to whether they will tolerate the violence, economic destruction, and hatred being directed at them by the resistance. My answer would be to declare a “no-tolerance policy” for the expendables who fill the ranks of the resistance. Once Soros’s well-paid but addled boys and girls kill pro-republic citizens or nearby innocents a anvil should be dropped to obliterate them. For now,

1. The targets of the fascist “resistance” — that is, anyone who disagrees with them — ought to bide their time and support Trump. They also should continue to arm with the best weaponry they can afford. Pray God none of those willing to bide time are rewarded for their patience with death.
2. If Soros’s personal SS cross the line and kill those they hate, Trump supporters should hold tight, and see if the Trump administration will rid the republic of these wicked and expendable humans.
3. If Trump’s administration fails to act, or acts as if the expendables are misguided kids rather than vicious ideologues, there would be no more reason for those who are loyal to the American republic to hold back from defending their country, thereby making clear that they will never be servile enough to go back to the anti-republic, globalist, lawless, and anti-Constitution era of the Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas. But what to do? Well, on most issues I am not a great admirer of Winston Churchill, too much unnecessary war-making for me. But the American republic was formed to restore to Americans the English liberties that had been taken by the British Crown, and which are today again in dire need of restoration in the republic. And on the defense of these liberties, Churchill is without peer. If Soros’s fascist “resistance” kills those they hate, let the loyal citizenry’s response be the one called for by Churchill. “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries,” he declared in the early 1940s,

“across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy. The enemies ranged against us, coalesced and combined against us, have asked for total war. Let us make sure they get it. … Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat.”

Historically, U.S. political and military interventionism reliably produces three negative results: (a) motion without movement that fools Americans into thinking they are more secure; (b) dead and maimed Americans; and (c) a larger national debt. Let us, for a moment, look at the immediate results of the U.S. military interventionism that has occurred during the past two week:

• We bombed the Syrian military airfield from which a poison gas attack may have been launched against Asaad’s enemies. We destroyed none of Asaad’s gas arsenal, and did not destroy the base’s runways. This is a zero achievement for U.S. national interests, but a reason to celebrate for all of America’s most lethal enemies: Israel, the Neocons, Saudi Arabia, the media, the Republican and Democratic establishments, and the disloyal Israeli-First Americans, all of whom share the priority goal of keeping the republic perpetually involved in unnecessary wars with those they deem their enemies.
• We praised and pledged eternal fealty to NATO, as we have to even such less relevant entities as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. In essence we have signed blank checks for NATO’s spendthrift leaders, men and women who will never defend themselves as long they can extort our financial help by stroking the enormous egos of official Washington and its self-serving general-officer corps with meaningless words like “America’s world leadership is back.”
• We dropped what we called “Mother of all Bombs” in Afghanistan and managed to killed less than 100 IS fighters. Probably not a cost effective use of the bomb; a good lesson to IS to stay out of easily identifiable cave systems; and a really craven replacement for the personal courage and massive killing that even now may be too late to defeat the Islamists.
• We and the Chinese have claimed a victory over North Korea because The Dear Leader backed down, except he did not back down, fired a missile that failed, and and earned no Chinese or U.S. military response for doing exactly what he was warned not to do. (NB: If the Dear One’s missile failed because it was hacked by U.S. war-makers, why has that method not been used previously to ensure no progress was made on North Korea’s nuclear program? And, if dearie’s missile was killed by a U.S. hack, do we not have yet another reason to thank Ronald Reagan — peace be upon him — for funding SDI?)

These four items all fall under the category of: “Using Military Power to Send a Message.” In none of the forgoing cases did the message sent mean any substantive improvement in the situation in so far as genuine U.S. national interests are concerned. Things may be quiet for a week or two, but the messages sent merely popped loudly, killed few, changed little, and will send the targets of the messages scurrying to find work-arounds that will allow them to proceed and then confront us with our failure.

There are two bottom lines here. The first is that the only clear and effective message that can ever be sent with military power is the utter destruction of all the facilities that allow the enemy to wage war, and the production of extraordinary numbers of dead enemies, their civilian supporters, and those who need to learn they cannot live happily and safely among the enemy.

If we do not have the moxie to wage war in the only way it has ever delivered definitive success, we are merely sending loud but strategically meaningless messages via military force. Those messages may convince the delusional and multi-starred braggarts who do the shooting, and then falsely trumpet the attacks as world-changing successes on Sunday news shows. Those who received the messages, however, will simply get on with their wars, having again been reminded that the U.S. and Western militaries and their political masters have no contact points with the nature of the religious war they are fighting, and remain steadily, and very effeminately striding along the path that leads to calamity. The Islamists will exclaim, “Allahu Akhbar!” and thank the Almighty for sending Islam enemies who send messages but have no clue about how men fight if they mean to win and are willing to die in the effort.

The second bottom line is that the President Trump and his foreign-policy and defense advisers ought to call a timeout for a week or ten days and read about the conflicts in which they recently reintervened and so get a grasp on genuine U.S. national interests. (NB: They could do no better than to start their reading with Walter A. McDougall’s The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy. How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, (Yale, 2016)). With a bit of knowledge under their belts, they can then reflect on the clear fact that all of the conflicts of the past fortnight are the result of past U.S. national governments unconstitutionally intervening in other peoples’ wars, and, in doing so, jettisoning genuine U.S. national interests — keeping the republic at peace, its military kids alive, and not expanding the debt, for example — for the irrelevant interests of greedy and/or effete foreigners.

Syria: The Syrian missile raid was only necessary because George W. Bush started an unnecessary war he did not intend to win in Iraq — removing Saddam, the West’s best ally against the Islamists — and because the thug-racist Obama intervened to an extent sufficient to get what he wanted; namely a war that would produce an unmanageable mass migrant problem for the United States and the West that would, over time, end the role of white people, republicanism, nationalism, and Christianity in the governance of Europe and North America. Lesson: When the unnecessary, not-intended-to-be-won wars caused by unconstitutional U.S. military and political interventions go wrong, they can never be turned around and won by more unconstitutional, unnecessary, and not-intended-to-win U.S. military and political interventionism.

NATO: Question: Why does NATO need defending? Answer: Because (a) it will not pay to defend itself but can extort protection from U.S. leaders who are always eager to intervene and pay the bill for foreigners, especially if, when doing so, the irrelevant, weakling foreign nations praise the president of the day and “America’s world leadership”; (b) because George H.W. Bush intervened in post-Cold War European affairs to expand NATO up to the border of Russia, a potentially war-causing interventionism now being carried forth by Senators McCain and Graham; and (c) because the Obama administration, the EU, the UN, and the Western media politically, financially, and media-wise intervened in Ukraine and led and funded the overthrow of a pro-Russia regime and replaced it with a pro-EU regime on territory that historically has been Russia’s, and which is a strategic threat thereto if held by Russia’s enemies, or those friendly to Russia’s enemies. Lesson: When the unnecessary, not-intended-to-be-won wars caused by unconstitutional U.S. military and political interventions go wrong, they can never be turned around and won by more unconstitutional, unnecessary, not-intended-to-win U.S. military and political interventionism.

Afghanistan: The thinking behind the decision to drop a huge bomb in Afghanistan could only have been hatched in an asylum for either the mentally deranged or haters of America. In a country where there is never any national unity unless their is a common, non-Muslim foe to fight, the dropping of the bomb can only be understood as a means by which the asylum’s denizens sought to further unite Afghans and their Arab allies against the United States and NATO, and to get the former to kill its soldier-children and deepen its debt by deepening its intervention there and, thus, reenforce its earlier and irreversible Afghan defeat. Lesson: When the unnecessary, not-intended-to-be-won wars caused by unconstitutional U.S. military and political interventions go wrong, they can never be turned around and won by more unconstitutional, unnecessary, not-intended-to-win U.S. military and political interventionism.

Korea: The seemingly endless U.S. war in Korea began when President Truman behaved as a dictator and unconstitutionally invaded Korea without the approval of Congress, but — like Obama in Libya — claimed to be armed with the irrelevant authority of the UN. Nearly seventy years later, the republic’s unconstitutional and unnecessary intervention in Korea — combined with several nations speeding the Dear Leader’s nuclear development — leaves the United States with a problem that has progressed from cavity, to root-canal, to a mouth full of gums. This week’s naval interventionism and hollow threats have done nothing to remedy the problem, but probably have made the Dear Leader’s trigger finger more itchy. Lesson: When the unnecessary, not-intended-to-be-won wars caused by unconstitutional U.S. military and political interventions go wrong, they can never be turned around and won by more unconstitutional, unnecessary, not-intended- to-win U.S. military and political interventionism.

The answer to this set of self-made problems for the republic is to retreat to the safety of the Constitution (as it was written), American nationalism, a clear and commonsense definition of genuine U.S. national interests, and a recognition that an always strong U.S. military is the indispensable tool needed to ensure that America’s only survival-ensuring foreign policy — neutrality and non-intervention — is resolutely maintained unless the nation is attacked by foreign miscreants. Spreading democracy, women’s rights, and human rights; protecting favored nations from the consequences of their own actions; and the governing elite’s passion to be praised by foreigners, even at the cost of America’s demise, are all sure-fire war starters. The term America First means exactly that. It does not mean NATO, Israel, and Egypt first, and then, if any money left, Americans. And it certainly does not mean that the national government should be moved to military interventions because mounds of dead Syrians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Afghans, or most any other foreigners are piling up.

The only foreign-policy reason that the always evil presence of a central government is allowed in the United States is to defend Americans and the republic’s life-and-death national interests, even with the use war, as a last resort. The national government created by the Constitution has no plausible legal, moral, or ethical responsibility to ensure the survival of any foreign entity or population. In short, foreigners are always expendable.

The Trump administration is reaping the whirlwind created by U.S. foreign policies that — between 1945 and 2017 — have served the interests of foreigners far more than those of Americans, have bankrupted their republic in the process, and have given the president the powers of a tyrant. The people who elected President Trump thought that his words meant he understood this simple reality, and that he would reestablish the binding principle of putting America First. Perhaps he does, and he is off to a slow start.

But if Trump maintains or strengthens the interventionist status quo, there is no longer a reason to maintain what has become a national government that, in foreign policy, can only wage unnecessary, unconstitutional and always losing wars, at the cost of constricting liberty at home. With the national government also having proven long ago it is incapable of conducting a domestic policy that is not bankrupting, liberty-eroding, and society dividing, moreover, the citizenry would be left staring at the fact that there is no plausible reason why the national government — as currently configured, empowered, and staffed — should be permitted to continue to exist.

President Trump:

Last time we discussed your refusal to abide by the Constitution’s hard-and-fast war-making provision, a decision that merits — as it did for most of your post-1945 predecessors — impeachment proceedings. Waging war in the manner you did in Syria is the work of an absolute monarch or a dictator, not that of a popularly elected president of this republic.

Today, we must discuss a topic that has been covered in this space on multiple occasions; namely, the need for you to immediately purge — via forced retirement — scores of your general officers. The American fetish for treating these officers as god-like wonders is baseless, and must be curtailed to the greatest possible extent. Among the most obvious reasons they merit forced retirement are:

• They and their predecessors have not won a war since 1945. In truth, they have won nothing in the most war-filled 72 years in American history.
• They have regularly betrayed the military men and women entrusted to their care by American parents by taking those troops to fight in wars that neither they nor their political masters intended to win. I do not know of a single case, since 1945, when a general officer resigned and told the citizenry that he did so because he refused to lead their soldier-children into a war no one meant to win, and in which the rules-of-engagement made those soldier-children targets rather than killers.
• They hold their positions for venal self-interest. To understand why no general has resigned and told the foregoing truth to the public, just survey the membership of America’s corporate boards of directors. Those boards are loaded with former generals who are making more mounds of money to add to their already luxurious pensions. The formula-for-success for US general officers obviously is: keep silent, get use to losing, get your troops killed for nothing, and you will be generously rewarded when you retire.
• They are incompetent and, apparently, shoddily educated men and women. One example should suffice. They have been waging war, at various levels of intensity, against Islamists since Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war in 1996, and they have lost on every field of battle on which they have engaged the Islamists. Mr. President, did you know that our Islamist enemies are not professionally trained soldiers; that they are armed almost entirely with small arms, some of Korean War vintage; that they have no air cover or naval support; and that their funding, supply lines, and safe havens are always at risk? Did you know that this is the kind of paramilitary force that has consistently humiliated the United States and its military for two decades, one that has forced your canting generals to obliquely admit to being losers and fantasists with the words like “There is no military solution to this conflict” and “The Islamists have nothing to do with Islam.”
• They are thoroughgoing liars. Again, one example will suffice. Since at least 2003-2004, every Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every US general officer commanding in Afghanistan, has told the American people that: (1) the remnants of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist groups were being eliminated; (2) that our democracy- and nation-building efforts were bearing durable results; and (3) that the Afghan military was on the verge of being able to defend its country with minimal foreign assistance. Each statement was a transparent lie every time it was spoken, and the general officers who spoke them knew they were lies. Today, the truth is that al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Taliban are thriving in Afghanistan, while the Afghan government and its military are collapsing. No number of additional lies will save either. Are these dishonest men and women the ones you are going to trust to restore America’s greatness? They are much more likely to again cover the republic in infamy.

Now is the moment, Mr. President, to fall back on you instincts, commonsense, and, most important, the non-interventionist demands of the people who elected you. America has no life-and-death national interests in Syria or the rest of the Middle East. Very few citizens want to expend trillions of additional tax dollars and their kids’ lives on a war there that is not necessary; which would be fought for Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. corporate interests; and which your generals would surely lose. So, dump your in-house, Cheney-sounding, Neocon war-monger, General McMaster; immediately ban the self-admitted criminal General Petraeus– who lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deliberately compromised classified information — from the White House grounds; and then get on with a wide-ranging purge that can do nothing but improve the the quality, commonsense, and nationalism of the US general-officer corps.

With this done, Mr. President, recall how much essential work you have pledged to do at home, and how sick your supporters are of unnecessary, interventionist, and always lost wars. Then, Sir, look around the nation and understand two irrefutable facts: (a) that America is located in North America, 5,000 miles from the Middle East’s idiot wars, wars which cannot come here save through the continued lax enforcement of border and immigration laws, and (b) that the republic’s security, unity, and prosperity would not be damaged if those distant peoples killed one another for however long it takes for their wars to burn out, or until there is not a single living soul from Morocco eastward to India.

America First, Mr. President, always, America First.

It was almost as if a retired U.S. general wanted to sharpen and buttress the point made in this space on 11 April 2017, the one that argued that President Trump ought to purge scores of serving U.S. generals if he intends to put America First and thereby abandon endless, unnecessary war. Today, 12 April 2017, retired U.S. Army General Jack Keane appeared twice on FOX News and did exactly that.

Keane has been a staple interviewee on FOX for as long as I can remember. He has been treated as great military god by every FOX host, and he has advocated unnecessary U.S. military interventionism as the solution to nearly every foreign-policy problem the republic encounters. And when the military interventionism that he and his fellow generals — retired and serving — have advocated becomes an obvious and murderous quagmire that kills our Marines and soldiers, deepens the nation’s bankruptcy, and returns thousands of maimed, mentally troubled, and suicide-prone veterans to the United States, the loud demand from Keane and his far-from-the-front general buddies is always the same; namely, increase the size of the failed military intervention and reinforce defeat. Some military god, eh?

In two appearances on FOX today, General Keane was at his smug, arrogant, and relentlessly interventionist best. On Fox&Friends this morning, Keane crowed with smarmy self-satisfaction:

• He rejoiced that America was now a “player in the Syrian civil war”
• He advocated the creation of safe zones, which, he let on, the Trump administration has disguised from Americans with the blander term “zones of stabilization.”
• He drooled with a keen, near-orgasmic eagerness at the possibility of Asaad using gas-or-barrel bombs on civilians so that Trump could destroy the other five operational Syrian airfields.

Following this war-loving warm-up, General Keane swaggered over and parked his god-like butt on the set of Trish Regan’s Intelligence Report. There he said:

• He never really knew where the Trump administration “would move in terms of America’s global leadership” and the republic’s “historic traditional role to help stabilize the world.” He feared, explained this military deity, that Trump might “pull back and be more isolationist.”
• He then said “but that’s over” and during the last week the Trump administration showed that it is “reassuming the protection of U.S. interests and the interests of our allies.”
• He went on to express his regret over the time that had been wasted by “lot of debate” about that non-interventionism stuff. That debate, the almighty military god then declared, is ended, adding “that is a fact,” and that non-interventionism is “no longer a debatable subject.”

Well, guess again arrogant and aging god-boy. Your oracular arguments, divine assertions, and omnipotent declarations can be picked apart and killed just as Royal Marine Major John Pitcairn’s redcoats were by America’s citizen-soldiers — fortunately no West Pointers among them — as they retreated headlong from Lexington to Boston. But, for now, the important thing for you and your stinking band of general-officer brothers to know is that, unless you can use Obama’s law allowing national-government censorship of the internet, your non-interventionist enemies will make absolutely sure that the Founder’s argument against American interventionism is continued and continuously spread and strengthened.

And if — may the real God forbid — worse ever comes to worst, you will find that there are far more non-interventionists locked-and-loaded than you and your war-loving, but always losing band of brothers have ever imagined.

And, oh yes, did I mention that General Keane sits on the Board of Directors of a company called General Dynamics. Coincidentally, that company just happens to sell the technology needed to launch Tomahawks cruise missiles. (1)

Endnotes

1. http://www.mediaite.com/online/guy-whos-been-appearing-on-fox-to-praise-missile-launch-secretly-works-in-missile-tech-industry/

“While we all condemn the atrocities in Syria, the United States was not attacked. The President needs congressional authorization for military action as required by the Constitution, and I call on him to come to Congress for a proper debate. Our prior interventions in this region have done nothing to make us safer, and Syria will be no different.”

Senator Rand Paul, (R-Kentucky), 7 April 2017

A central concern of the Founding generation, when writing the Constitution, was to ensure that no one man, or one man and his clique, could take the Republic to war. To that end, the Constitution delegates the citizenry’s power to declare war solely to its servants in Congress, and, in doing so, uses language that makes it clear that the Congress cannot delegate this power to the executive branch of the government. The ability of a president to order military action was — and is — tightly limited to instances in which the United States is attacked or, perhaps, if a clear threat must be preempted.

Since 1955, however, every president and every Congress have acted in clear and deliberate violation of the Constitution’s allocation of war-making powers. In 1955, the Congress passed a resolution — called an “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” (AUMF) — that allowed President Eisenhower to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it, with U.S. military forces in the defense of Formosa (Taiwan) against Mao’s China. Later, the Vietnam war began with another AUMF, and every other U.S. war since Vietnam has started with one, save for those which the president started off his own hook — the Obama/Clinton Libyan war, for example, — without even bothering to seek an unconstitutional delegation of the war-making power from Congress.

Your 6 April 2017 attack on a Syrian military airfield/chemical-storage depot, Mr. President, is the latest example of this unconstitutional war-making. The barrage of 60 cruise missiles — worth about $5.5 billion — was, as usual for the U.S. military, a feckless exercise in concrete-smashing. As in Bill Clinton’s Serbia war, the national government attacked a state that had not harmed the United States, and in which the republic has no genuine national interests at stake. All of this was done via the decision and then orders of one man — advised by his unelected advisers — for the U.S. military to conduct an unconstitutional act of offensive war, as if the republic is an absolute and so lawless monarchy.

President Trump, was your pledge to install a commonsense, non-interventionist and America First foreign policy just lying words? I trusted that they were not, but now I wonder. You appear to have been genuinely shaken by the chemical attacks and the deaths that resulted therefrom. Yes, Mr. Trump, war is tough and bloody, and people of all ages get killed, just ask some Gold Star families. But if you truly launched 60 cruise missiles because you were overcome by your personal emotions after seeing the results of the chemical attack, your temperament is worrisome. Indeed, if you attacked because you felt bad about the deaths in Syria, you created a situation in which the Founders’ genius has never been on better display than in their creation of a document that tried to make sure that no single distraught individual could use the republic’s military power to seek revenge for his personal pain.

What have you and the pro-war Americans gained from the attacks, Mr. Trump? Are you and they enjoying soothed sensitivities and weeping less? Well, good on you and them. Other than some smashed-up military facilities, a handful of dead Syrians, and 20 or so destroyed Syrian aircraft, you, your generals, and advisers achieved only a disgrace.

• You ignored constitutional requirements and you attacked a state that did not threaten the republic. These are two distinct and self-inflicted defeats for the rule of law.
• You probably will see the Russians and the Iranians station additional aircraft squadrons of their own in Syria, and more sophisticated anti-aircraft systems, to replace Syrian losses and issue a silent challenge to you to come after them.
• You have certainly focused Syrian and Iranian irregular forces in the Syria and Iraq on the task of killing U.S. Marines and soldiers in response.
• You followed the attack by placing more sanctions on Syria, which appears to mean that, as in Iraq under Clinton and Bush, the killing of civilians — including kids like those you got all weepy over — by starvation and the lack of medical care is, as Albright said, “worth it.”

So as not to be entirely negative, Mr. Trump, there is some praise flowing in for your attack. The NATO leaders who refuse to defend themselves, and want America to do so and pay for the privilege, have given you a collective thumbs up. The Arab tyrants who oppress their peoples, and fund al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, think you are swell. And just look at the hurrahs coming from Israel’s leader, who graciously took time out from extorting U.S.taxpayer money from the congressmen and senators he has suborned to send his congratulations. Needless to say, the leaders of ISIS and al-Qaeda also have sent you their hearty thanks.

Finally, I hope you can revel in the widespread praise of those who are more loyal to Israel and endless war than they are to the United States, and who did all they could to elect Clinton, defame your family, and slander you. The praise of disloyal, Neocon, and interventionist U.S. citizens like John McCain, Bill Kristol and his Weekly Standard, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, whose speech on FOX this morning must have been written by AIPAC, emanate from men who hate your guts and will never stop seeking to destroy you. Their praise is not even worth what John Nance Garner once described as a “bucket of warm spit.”

You said, Mr. President, that you only wanted to be America’s president, and not the president of the world. Well the only way to be the former is to obey the constitution, and the only way to be the latter is evade it, so as to become the world’s self-funding policeman who gets the title of “Leader of the Free World,” which means you get to bleed the United States white by fighting other peoples’ wars. That title would be sought only by a Globalist, never by an American nationalist.

Your attack on Syria — like the attacks of all your post-1945 predecessors — evaded the constitution, and so damaged the republic by undermining the rule of law. The achievements that the attack achieved are, at best, paltry, Islamist-assisting, and unconscionably expensive. The applause you have won for attacking is both a plague sent by your and the republic’s enemies, and a nightmare for your supporters and advocates.

Surely you must remember the latter, Mr. Trump, they are the people who elected you because they believed you meant what you said about putting America First. Perhaps they were wrong.

Mr. President:

With respect, Sir, you are letting the pro-status-quo swampers overtake you and position themselves to paralyze your plan to make the concept of America First the operative guideline for the national government. Except on the vital job-creation and morale-building fronts — on which you have done splendidly — the goal of America First seems to be fading from your administration in favor of business as usual both at home and abroad. Please consider the following:

• Criticism of the Freedom Caucus: Your abrasive and unnecessary comments about these representatives may have been a function of your innate — and much needed in these times — propensity for combativeness. But now that you have had your say, just accept the fact that the Caucus saved your administration’s ass from a terrible bill put forward by the bulk of Republicans who want almost nothing that America needs. More fundamentally, if your advisers suggested that you attack the Caucus, it is time for new advisers. The members of the Caucus long ago demonstrated that they will only back-off when America is going to be assisted by the legislation upon which they are asked to concur. Criticism from you, denigration from other Republicans, or threats to work against their reelection in 2018 are not going to move them an inch. In a line of thought that flows directly from that of the republic’s Founders, the Freedom Caucus sees their task as legislating not only for the improvement of life and security for Americans today, but to ensure that all of our posterity inherits both a chance to prosper and a constitutionally viable republic. They will go down fighting for this goal not matter what pressures are brought to bear against them, and for that reason their worth to your and their effort to make America First a durable reality is inestimable. Wise up, Mr. President, as it is much more likely that the small Freedom Caucus will be re-elected in its entirety, than that you will be reelected in 2020 if you abandon their republican principles and concern for posterity, and side with the establishment Republicans. This reality, of course, assumes that there will be an election in 2020 and that the republic will not then be consumed in a civil war fought over the national government’s failure to prosecute the dozens of people who acted criminally under Bush and Obama, and whom the American people know could return to power and further restrict liberty, launch more interventionist wars, create minority rule, and impoverish them with new taxes. One way or another, Mr. President, those people must — and will — be neutralized, either by trial, conviction, and incarceration, or by rope and a very well-armed citizenry.
• Montenegro: What can possibly be found in this irrelevant-to-America, Balkan country, Mr. President, that would ever be worth a single U.S. dollar or the life of a single Marine or soldier? What is it that makes this country worth negating the Congress’s and, thereby, the citizenry’s sole constitutional prerogative to declare war? What is it that benefits the United States from an automatic war if a non-NATO country attacks Montenegro? Mr. President, this is the fine madness of Senators McCain and Graham, both of whom are reprehensible political ghouls who love any war they can find so long as their children or loved ones are not at risk. Only the quickly growing-in-stature Senator Rand Paul had the courage to stand for America First when he blocked McCain’s late-night attempt to sneak Montenegro into NATO. Senator Paul needed and merited the support of you and your administration, as did the parents, wives, and children of our Marines and soldiers who would be killed or maimed in some half-assed, McCain-wanted war to defend Montenegro. Damn both you and your lieutenants for not joining Senator Paul to defend America First.
• Idiot Generals and Iran: Mr. President, with respect, you need to begin to think for yourself and go with your commonsense, and not with the advice of U.S. generals, a species that has proven itself unable to win a war since 1945, and who seem to live mostly to retire and become wealthy in the employ of arms makers, other industrialists, and foreign governments. This week we heard the Commander of the U.S. Central Command, Army General Joseph Votel, tell a congressional committee that Iran is “the greatest long-term threat to stability” in the Middle East, and that, “We need to look at opportunities where we can disrupt through military means or other means their activities.” (1) Later in the week, FOX’s top-and-always-wrong retired general, Jack Keane, backed-up General Votel and said that, under the Trump administration, “We are finally going to hold Iran accountable.” (2) Mr. President, have you ever asked your genius generals — serving or retired — why, if Iran is such a terrible threat to the United States, they support the growing presence of U.S. military forces in Syria and Iraq that are nothing more than facilitators for the Iranian leaders’ campaign to establish Iran’s control from the Iran-Afghanistan border westward to the Mediterranean? Or, why they believe that the only entities capable of destroying the Iranian regime — the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, their allies, and the Gulf Arabs who fund them — should be defeated using the blood and limbs of U.S. soldiers and Marines in a campaign that will do nothing but ensure Iran’s hegemony? Get with the program, Mr. President, your generals are anything but America First; note their universal support for committing America to automatic war via NATO. You need to educate them to the fact that America First means as little war as possible, and no war ever to serve the interests of so-called friends —Saudi Arabia, other Arab Tyrants, NATO, and Israel — and known enemies, like Iran, Iraq, and Syria. There is, of course, no reason not to shoot to hell any Iranian naval ship or aircraft that is harassing or even nearing a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. Otherwise, the course of wisdom is to just sit back and leave the slitting of Iran’s throat — and those of Syria and Hizballah — to those who are most eager and capable of doing so, the fiercely anti-Shia, Sunni mujahideen and their Arab-tyrant supporters.
• Israel First: It is beyond me, Mr. President, to know whether you understand that there is a direct correlation between the manner in which you manage the U.S.-Israel relationship and the number of U.S. Marines, soldiers, and civilians killed and maimed by the mujahideen. The more you side with, arm, and fund Israel, the more Americans you will get killed. This was true when bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and it is true today. It also is true that you, as president, are the only U.S. official who can limit the damage done to the republic and its people by this relationship. Save for Senator Paul, it would not be surprising to find that the other 534 members of the U.S. Congress are in the pay of one or another of the major Jewish-American political organizations, all of which you should immediately force to register as agents of a foreign power. (NB: Russia’s purported tampering in the 2016 election is nothing compared to the decades of manipulation of U.S. presidential and congressional elections by disloyal, Israel-First, Jewish-American citizens.) You will know, of course, that both Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi raced to the recent AIPAC conference to pledge their eternal allegiance to Israel’s interests, and this after they and their caucuses gave $38 billion of the money taken from U.S. taxpayers’ incomes to Israel. One might have thought, Mr. Trump, that that $38 billion would have helped pay for some of the infrastructure building, veterans’ care, and border-wall projects you promised. Would this amount not be helpful if spent in the interests of America First? So far, however, you have been nearly bellicose in your support for Israel, and you have sent there an ambassador whose loyalties lie entirely on the side of Israeli expansionism — and so war-causing — and therefore is a foe of U.S. interests and security. Whether or not Israel survives is of no relevance to the United States. It, like all other nations, has no right to exist and will continue to do so only on the basis of its own decisions and actions. The U.S. national government ought never to speak or act in a way that damages Israel’s absolute right to defend itself, but, more important, the national government ought to seek nothing but the kind of standard commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel that it seeks with all the other nation-states that are irrelevant to the republic’s survival, prosperity, and social cohesion.

The bottom line, Mr. President, is that there are no compromises possible with either the Republican or Democratic establishments because most of both are your enemies. Bipartisanship has long been dead because that process requires the existence of two distinct political parties, and today, on most issues, there is only one.

Your staggeringly difficult job, Sir, is to form and lead a strong and clear-sighted political entity that can be successful only if it neuters the Democrat-Republican monster, and then imposes upon its defeated, stinking carcass the will of the citizens who delivered the White House and their republic’s future into your hands. Time is short, Mr. President. While you dally with America’s enemies — most domestic, and mentioned above — and so strengthen the status quo, the party establishments, the mainstream media, and their super-rich allies are seeking to choke off your supporters’ access to the internet and social media, as well as their fair share of advertising revenue, both of which are nearly the only means that allow your message to reach your supporters. If they succeed in this effort, your own and the republic’s goose will be cooked. Time to get on the stick, Mr. Trump.

Endnotes

1. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/29/general-calls-iran-destabilizing-force-suggests-us-disrupt-regime-by-military-means.html
2. http://video.foxnews.com/v/5307261368001/?#sp=show-clips

It seems that Speaker Ryan and most of his fellow Republicans in the House have yet to understand what happened in the 2016 presidential election.

They seem not to have understood that Americans do not want to be told by the national government that they must buy government-approved insurance; that they must buy coverage for care that they do not need or want; that they are not stupid enough to believe that any policy with a $5,000-to-$8,000 deductible can possibly be regraded as insurance; that their premiums will only go up because insurance cannot be bought in states where it is cheapest (surely a violation of the interstate commerce clause); or that their national government has the right to confiscate their earnings and use the money to assure that illegal immigrants, unvetted refugees, and slackers receive healthcare better than their own and that provided for veterans.

They also seem to forget that, once again, the American people know that they are shackled to this whole socialist and meant-to-be bankrupting plan of nationalized healthcare only because of one unaccountable Supreme Court Chief Justice. (NB: This was not a banner week for Court. A 14-year-old girl in Maryland was raped in school lavatory by an illegal alien who was on the scene only because of a diktat by the Court’s unaccountable autocrats that said all of us must pay for non-citizen criminals to attend school so they can endanger young U.S. citizens.)

Enter the Freedom Caucus, God bless ’em. Implicitly asking Mr. Ryan and their colleagues why they are so damn dumb, most of the Caucus stood their ground and forced Ryan to withdraw his bill before it could be voted down. The Freedom Caucus has never demonstrated to greater effect that it truly knows what freedom, liberty, and the Constitution mean, and that the people who elected President Trump want him and his party to reclaim and then defend those things on their behalf. The simpering Mr. Ryan and his supporters, on the other hand, continue to regard the citizenry as dupes who will not recognize another bag of Obama-Care lawlessness simply because it is wrapped with a Republican ribbon.

Perhaps the most detestable words voiced by Mr. Ryan and his supporters were their references to “polls” that showed Americans really just wanted the “improvement” of Obama Care. These polls, of course, were taken by the same scoundrel organizations that constructed polls before the election based on over-sampling Democrats, and whose results showed that another criminal named Clinton would win in a walk. But again, Mr. Ryan and the so-called “moderate Republicans” — that is, those who want to enslave Americans and rob their wallets only “moderately” — demonstrated their deep faith in, and contempt for the stupidity of Americans by referring to the corrupt polls and the need they showed to create a healthcare system that can be approved by “all Americans.” Which is another way of saying that the national government knows what is best for all of us, and so the people will get what government wants to give them and not what they demanded — the root-and-branch repeal of Obama Care.

As for you, President Trump, you better be schooled by the old Irish-American proverb of my youth, “Ya gotta dance wit da guy dat brung ya.” And you were “brung” to the presidency by Americans who believe what the Freedom Caucus demanded, the utter annihilation of Obama Care, and its replacement by a non-socialist, non-bankrupting, non-enslaving, and minimalist healthcare system that lets Americans decide how, where, and if their money for healthcare should be spent.

Ryan and most of his Caucus, Mr. President, are no different than the Democrats. They talk smaller-government but never deliver; they talk lower taxes but — you watch and see — will not deliver; they talk less war but will always expand NATO and agitate for more military interventionism; they oppose abortion — another one-vote, Supreme Court sanction for murder — but do next to nothing to end it; and they champion the Bill of Rights but support unconstitutional “hate speech” laws, allowed Obama to trash the Constitution for eight years, and probably will vote to censor the internet. In short, Mr. President, you have fallen in with scum that is — with the exception of the Freedom Caucus — only slightly less malodorous and pestilential for liberty than the Democrats.

You certainly must know, Mr. President, that it is the ideas, values, and plans for domestic policy proclaimed by yourself and the Freedom Caucus that won you and the Republican Party the election. The success of Mr. Ryan’s bill would have told your supporters that Trump and his party are just more of the same charlatans, and that voters were wrong to believe that Trump meant to do what he said he would so. It is Ryan and the main Republican caucus that must begin to think, and then vote, on domestic issues, as the Freedom Caucus does, and not vice versa. All Republicans, after all, were elected because you advocated the domestic policies that have been consistently advanced by the Freedom Caucus and everyday Americans, both of which are blessed — unlike the Congress — with God’s greatest gifts, commonsense and a fierce love for liberty, family, and the republic.

“But while there are so many laws of our ancestors’ devising, and many that the deified [Emperor] Augustus enacted, the former have become ineffectual because they are forgotten, the latter (which is worse) because they have been flouted. This has only bolstered confidence in the life of luxury. For if you hanker after what is not yet forbidden, you may fear its being forbidden in the future. But if you have transgressed in a prohibited area and not been punished, there is no fear or shame after that.” — Tacitus, The Annals (1)

One of the themes that has been consistently focused on in this space has been the lawlessness of all parts of the national government. Now it seems that this rank lawlessness is accompanied by ignorance and/or contempt for the law and the Constitution. It is an amazing fact that this lawlessness, ignorance, and contempt are entrenched not only in elected politicians and senior Federal civil servants, but also in those who are entrusted with enforcing the law, the FBI, the Supreme Court, and Federal Judges.

Take the FBI. Under Director Comey — Tacitus might call him the “flouter-in-chief “— the FBI has proven itself to be the protective police for the American political elite. Now, each time he speaks, Comey’s words conjure those directed at a political opponent by perhaps the greatest non-interventionist of the early republic, Virginia’s John Randolph. “He is a man of splendid abilities,” Randolph said of his foe, “but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.” (2)

It is, of course, old news, but Director Comey has established his legacy as the man who told all non-elite Americans that he will enforce the law against them, but not against their betters. A first-year prosecutor could have gotten an arrest warrant for Hillary Clinton with nothing more than three facts: (a) she set up an unclassified e-mail system to avoid the law requiring the retention of federal records; (b) she deliberately trafficked in classified information on that unclassified system and sent classified information to people who had no clearances; and (c) she lied to the Congress under oath on multiple occasions. Director Comey, however, must be too long out of law school to recall the fundamentals of his profession. Our, perhaps, he is happy to enforce the law against non-elite citizens, but is either fearful for his life if he takes on the elite, or he is being paid off by that entity. There does not seem to be a third possibility.

The Supreme Court has written its own well-deserved death warrant. During the ratification debate in 1787-1788, Hamilton, Jay, Madison, and other Federalists assured the citizenry that the anti-Federalists’ warnings that the Court would become a judicial tyranny, beyond the control of the people, were unfounded and indefensible. They even ridiculed their foes for fear-mongering.

But Hamilton and his centralizing colleagues were dead wrong, and the anti-Federalists were prescient republicans. The Federalists and especially the Anti-Federalists probably never imagined a citizenry so supine that it would allow — without undertaking armed rebellion — the republic to be ruled by nine unaccountable judges, many of whom, in the contemporary era, are often no more than berobed legal charlatans who twist the Constitution and the laws into shapes and meanings that are absurd and unsupportable by commonsense and human experience, let alone credible legal scholarship.

But that scenario is at hand. Witness Chief Justice Roberts’ argument and vote in support of Obama Care. Both would have earned him a failing grade in law school because Roberts’ seemed to know neither the law nor the Constitution. The first-year prosecutor mentioned above would have rendered a much more legally substantive and defensible decision. In a very real sense, all of the monetary costs, social divisiveness, wasted time, and political animosities in which the republic is now ensnared on the issue of healthcare are the direct responsibility of Chief Justice Roberts’ lawlessness and, apparently, his utter lack of commonsense and moral courage. Roberts’ is a most worthy successor to the civil war-fueling chief justice, Roger B. Taney.

Most recently, the national judiciary’s rife lawlessness has been seen in Federal judges blocking the implementation of President Trump’s attempt to protect Americans from at least a portion of the ongoing flow of violent Islamists — many under the guise of immigrants and refugees — into the United States. The clarity and constitutionality of the law under which Trump acted is irrefutable; indeed, his predecessors as president chose not to use the law fully and so knowingly exposed Americans to domestic attack. The judges who blocked this national-defense action knew that there is no valid legal basis for their actions, and so they have fled the legal arena for the more highly publicized field of self-made celebrity-hood and amateur mind-reading.

To please the bipartisan political elite they serve and protect, the judges found the non-existent in the Constitution. There is, for example, not a word in that document that provides a basis for believing that the 1st Amendment’s religion clause can be applied in any way to non-U.S. citizens residing in foreign countries. The Constitution was written by Americans for Americans, and any attempt to apply it as protection for overseas foreigners is either a form of madness, or a chauvinistic imperialism of a kind that could only be held by those who believe themselves superior beings fit to rule all of mankind. There was not a bit of this kind of totalitarian thinking in those who wrote the Constitution, but, sadly, it is today an all too common and debilitating mental malady among those power-hungry individuals who believe the synonym for judge is deity.

Not satisfied with finding something in the 1st Amendment that does not exist, and, with it, willingly endangering Americans, the two Federal judges also violated the legitimate and obvious protections for free speech contained in the 1st Amendment by basing their decision on what then-candidate Trump said during the presidential campaign. They, in essence, defend their unconstitutional action by (a) deciding that Mr. Trump is the only American who has no free-speech rights under the 1st Amendment and that he, and the republic, can be punished by the courts for his words; (b) believing that they can publicly abuse him for something he said, even though it has no legal bearing on what he does to legally execute constitutional immigration laws; and (c) claiming that they can read his mind — sort of law by tarot cards — and know without doubt that his supposed anti-Muslim beliefs, and not the obvious requirements of national defense, motivated his actions.

This is a judicial performance Mr. Orwell could have used in his book: judges using an unconstitutional attack on Trump’s free-speech rights to prevent the protection of Americans and their families. It would have been applauded by Stalin and Mao, and is being applauded by their ideological successors, Obama, Clinton, Soros, Sanders, Warren, and most of the media. That performance, however, cannot find legitimate justification anywhere in either the Constitution or the legal system founded thereon. It is simply another egregious example of the Federal judiciary’s lunacy-tinged and self-aggrandizing lawlessness.

Thomas Jefferson, as was his habit, swayed back and forth between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. But on the reality of the Federal judiciary’s potential for tyranny, he was more often on side of the latter; that is, on the side whose dire warnings have proven accurate. “The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary,” Jefferson wrote in 1821. “That body, like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains….” (3) Two years later, Jefferson laid out more fully his belief that the judiciary posed a clear threat of tyranny to the republic and so the end of republicanism. “At the establishment of our constitution,” Jefferson said,

“the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a free hold and irresponsibility in office, that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.” (4)

Having decided to side always with the bipartisan political elite, and immunize it from criminal charges, it is increasingly apparent that the FBI, the Supreme Court, and the Federal judiciary are the enemies of the citizenry, and of the republicanism on which America was founded, and without which it cannot survive. Also clear is that they are eager to keep pressing attacks on each, blatantly, repeatedly, and with an air of smug, god-like superiority. They seem to be absolutely confident that they are bulletproof and noose-proof, and so are free to continue their deepening lawlessness and deliberate destruction of the Constitution without fear of reprisal. They are in for a brutal surprise.

Endnotes

1. Tacitus, The Annals. Oxford World Classics, (2008), p. 123
2. John Randolph, “Congressional Speech,” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/who-was-john-randolph/
3. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammon, 18 August 1821
4. Thomas Jefferson to Monsieur A. Corray, 31 October 1823

Mr. President:

I was driving home Friday afternoon (10 March 2017) and listening to Oliver North doing an interview on FOX. North was delighted that we now had 5,000 troops in Iraq and 1,000 in Syria and — he said — more would be going to each. North also gleefully praised you for “listening to your generals.”

Colonel North, Mr. President, is — like John McCain — a brave man but a war-loving ninny. He sees America’s glory only in military activity abroad, not, as the Founders did, in protecting liberty, prosperity, and social cohesion at home, and in maintaining the affection of the citizenry for the republic and its limited government.

During the campaign you once said something like “I know more about the war against the Islamic State (IS) then the generals.” You were right then because you have two qualities they utterly lack: (a) substantial commonsense and (b) a sure knowledge, deep in your bones, that to put things right at home, the non-interventionist facet of America First is of supreme importance. You should put a minimum of confidence in your general officers, as they, and all of their predecessors back to 1945, have not won a war, and now, because of Obama, are fully engaged in turning the U.S. military into an LGBT resort.

Additionally, you should put zero confidence in all of TV’s retired generals — now in their well-paid dotage — who have been right about absolutely nothing since 9/11. They have pontificated about the “cowardly enemy” and “the surge” and about the coming victory over the Islamists, while the lives and limbs of U.S. Marines and soldiers were shamefully wasted in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that no general or president intended to win.

For God sake, Mr. President, get a map of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, look at it carefully, and then realize that:

• 6,000, 60,000, or 600,000 Marines and soldiers — the latter two probably not possible without renewed conscription in America — would not be sufficient to win the war, because the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are wars of all against all. Our so-called allies in each are united in only one thing: they hate the United States, but will take its weapons, blood, and money until each faction of this motley bunch believes it is ready to make a grab for complete power. When that time comes, they will turn on any residual U.S. forces we are foolish enough to leave behind.
• Captured cities are great irrelevancies in this war. Your generals took all the major cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they still definitively lost both wars. If you held Mosul, Aleppo, and ar Raqqa tomorrow morning, Mr. President, what would you have? The answer is simple, Sir, three completely wrecked cities, peopled by the sick, hungry, unemployed, and orphaned, and IS forces fading into the wilderness from where they will do what they do best, fight as guerrillas. In this situation, U.S. forces would be responsible not only for feeding, clothing, healing, defending, and rebuilding the cities and their people — which amounts to a sharply deeper U.S. debt — but also for keeping Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Russians, Kurds, Sunnis, Alawites, and Shias from turning on each other and starting an even more bloody than that fought against IS. Mr. President, you would have a festering, prolonged, unending, manpower-intensive, and utterly bankrupting disaster on your hands.
• There are no democrats on in all the players in Syria and Iraq, even if your intelligence services and generals tell you there are such supposedly noble creatures present. If IS is driven into the wilderness and Asaad’s government falls — and it will, because its military has been bled white — only Islamists will form the next government. The Islamists are the best fighters in the war and they will never, ever, permit any part of Syria to ruled by Kurds, Alawites, or Shia. Indeed, in a battle against this combined apostate-atheist enemy, the Islamists will find a reliable glue for rough unity, and they will draw support from Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. The bottom line is that U.S.military intervention in Syria — and in Iraq and Afghanistan — will yield, at best, either a Sunni or Shia theocratic tyranny, almost certainly the former.
• There are no genuine, life-and-death U.S. interests at risk in Syria and Iraq. Whichever sect forms a government in Damascus and Baghdad — and in Kabul, for that matter — will become enslaved to the needs of governing, while still fighting an Islamist insurgency. Road construction, re-electrification, restoring irrigation systems, oil production, providing potable water and medical care, rebuilding war damage, and a hundred other tasks will — with the IS insurgency — consume both its attention and meager resources. And if the Islamists succeed in rebuilding anything, they also acquire (a) something they do not want to lose, and (b) items that give even your generals a target they can understand: easily visible, immobile, and susceptible to air power. If a future Islamist government in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan becomes a threat to any genuine U.S. interest, an intense U.S. aerial campaign can demolish any reconstruction the Islamists have done in a matter of weeks, and thereby return them to trying to fight the IS insurgency and apostate-atheist forces, as well as to govern an again destitute population.
• There are no reasons why the U.S. government should take any actions to get the Russians and Iranians to withdraw from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Rather, it should be making every effort to ensure that Russia and Iran remain players in all three. Russia’s President Putin leads a country that is an economic shambles, a demographic nightmare, and, increasingly, a top priority target for the Islamists. Putin, instead of waging a short, decisive campaign in Syria, has pulled Russia’s military punch and is now stuck. Our withdrawal from Syria would leave him stuck fast, and he still has a mandatory and surely fiscally disastrous military intervention to conduct in Afghanistan. Mr. Putin, in reality, is containing himself and Russia without any assistance from the West. Regarding Iran, the mullahs will ensure their own demise if they try to create the Iran-to-the Mediterranean Shia imperium that your generals, the Necons, and Israel-First and their mainstream media shills are always howling warnings about. Any effort by Iran to acquire and maintain this kind of empire will pit 200 million Shia against 1.58 billion Sunnis in a sectarian war which would seem to favor the Sunnis.

Mr. President, you were right during the campaign, your instincts about America’s Islam war are far better than those of your generals. Indeed, you would be better off speaking — with no generals present — to some serving and recently retired or separated field officers and gunnery sergeants. These men and women have actually risked their lives in combat against the Islamists, and they would give you the true skinny about what the republic is facing and why it is in danger of getting stuck like Putin. This is a benefit you will never derive from listening to your generals.

There is, Mr. President, no upside in continuing and expanding U.S. military intervention in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. The only things to be gained for the republic in such a continuation are more dead and maimed military personnel, more debt, more Islamist hatred and domestic attacks, and — if you are, as North said, listening to your generals — more humiliating military defeats. Perhaps the last chance for America to again become, as you say, “great,” will be lost if you discard America First’s non-interventionism, which you know is the key to the republic’s survival, and thereby ensnare U.S. forces in the murderous and none-of-our-business Syria-Iraq-Afghanistan morass.

“And thus the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of anybody, even of their legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish, or so wicked, as to lay and carry on designs against the liberties and properties of the subject.” — John Locke, Second Treatise, Chapter 13 (1)

“General revolts and rebellions of a whole people never were encouraged now or at any time. They were always provoked.” — Edmund Burke, 1777 (2)

Sentiment is human weakness that always is an obstacle to clear thinking, or at least it always is in my case. I have always given George H.W. Bush and and George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt because I thought both were patriots and decent men. The former flew more than 50 combat missions during World War II, and the latter seemed sadly trapped in, and manipulated by, a nest of Neoconservative and Israel-First cretins. Since early in 2016, however, I have come to see how stupid and blinding it is to let sentiment hide the clearly visible truth that the Bushes are not America’s friends.

The elder Bush was a disaster for America, his only accomplishment being that he kept the White House from the Democrats for a 4-year term. He is the author and first implementer of the totalitarian idea of a “New World Order,” which began what is now nearly 30 years of constant war for the United States. He laid the ground work for the current confrontation with Russia by greatly expanding NATO and unleashing Western greed to suck anything economically worth having out of the former USSR; he added countries to NATO that are irrelevant to U.S. security but sit right on Russia’s border; he squandered most of what President Reagan had accomplished; he fought an unnecessary, half-fought, unwon, and Islamist-benefiting war against Iraq; and he ran a reelection campaign against the whore-loving buffoon Bill Clinton that looked like it should have been in one of the lesser Marx Brothers movies. Finally, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Bush refused to endorse Trump, and his closest confidants suggested he preferred Hillary Clinton. Revalidating the McCain Rule that great physical courage does not connote even moderate brainpower or commonsense, it was all downhill for George H.W. Bush after the second Great War ended. Sadly, that decline ended up by delivering the United States to the malevolent hands and minds of Clinton and Obama, as well as to those of his son.

George W. Bush outdid his Dad in terms of negative accomplishments, his only accomplishment being that he kept the White House from the Democrats for eight years, and even that success was minimal as his performance allowed the presidency of the execrable Obama. The younger Bush picked up his father’s interventionist mantle and waged a effeminate war against al-Qaeda, a genuine enemy of the United States, and a half-witted, small-footprint, losing, and utterly unnecessary war in Iraq, a war whose negative impact on U.S. interests has yet to be fully seen. Then, after his silence during Obama’s eight years of military and cultural interventionism, pathological lying and racism, and Constitution-shredding, he joins his Dad, and his clueless yet extraordinarily arrogant bother Jeb, to publicly and clandestinely oppose Trump as Republican presidential contender, Republican candidate, president-elect, and president. Most recently, George W. Bush has been out hawking a book of his paintings and hobnobbing with Michelle Obama and other such mindless, virago-like Democratic women and celebrities, and mindlessly basking in the praise of these racist and authoritarian Amazons who would gladly spit on his grave.

As if this long record of Bush anti-Americanism was not enough, George W. Bush this week took the time to instruct President Trump to avoid adopting an “isolationist tendency” because it would be “dangerous to national security.” By avoiding unnecessary interventions and wars and minding its own business, Bush said, the United States creates a vacuum that “is generally filled with people who don’t share the ideology, the same sense of human rights and human dignity and freedom that we do.” (3)

Well, God bless George the Younger. In his reliably bumbling way, he has allowed Americans to see — in the 30 words quoted above — that the intent of post-1945 U.S. foreign policy has not been to defend them and their republic but to use the taxes and children of American workers to endlessly intervene abroad to rid the world of people and governments that “don’t share our ideology” and who do not have the same “sense … [of] freedom we do.” Bush is not referring here to the ideology and sense of freedom possessed by Americans, but rather to those that the internationalist/globalist/interventionist elites, like the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, most European leaders, Bill Gates, George Soros, and untold numbers of other rich and highly educated people, want to impose on all peoples — including Americans — so they can rule people as they see fit and without the possibility popular resistance.

Coincidentally, as this piece was being completed, the younger Bush’s war buddy, Tony Blair, published a piece in the New York Times which calls on “centrist progressives” to hold their ground and defeat the populists and nationalists. “Today,” the Globalist-shill Blair wrote,

a distinction that often matters more than traditional right and left is open vs. closed. The open-minded see globalization as an opportunity but one with challenges that should be mitigated; the closed-minded see the outside world as a threat. This distinction crosses traditional party lines and thus has no organizing base, no natural channel for representation in electoral politics …

So this leaves a big space in the center. For the progressive wing of politics, the correct strategy is to make the case for building a new coalition out from the center. To do so, progressives need to acknowledge the genuine cultural anxieties of those voters who have deserted the cause of social progress: on immigration, the threat of radical Islamism and the difference between being progressive and appearing obsessive on issues like gender identity.

The center needs to develop a new policy agenda that shows people they will get support to help them through the change that’s happening around them. At the heart of this has to be an alliance between those driving the technological revolution, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and those responsible for public policy in government. At present, there is a chasm of understanding between the two. There will inevitably continue to be a negative impact on jobs from artificial intelligence and big data, but the opportunities to change lives for the better through technology are enormous.

Any new agenda has to focus on these opportunities for radical change in the way that government and services like health care serve people. This must include how we educate, skill and equip our work forces for the future; how we reform tax and welfare systems to encourage more fair distribution of wealth; and how we replenish our nations’ infrastructures and invest in the communities most harmed by trade and technology. (4)

I added the emphasis to Blair’s words to make the point that the Western and global elites have not a clue about what is going on all around them, and what is increasingly likely to happen to them. For Blair, there is not a mortal divide between those who believe progressive government is the answer, and those who know that progressive government, if fully developed and entrenched, will be the greatest slave master in history. No, Blair sees the divide as being between the “open-minded” progressives and the “close-minded” hay seeds who “have deserted the cause of social progress” and cannot understand that progressives know what is best for them, a prescription that includes unlimited immigration; suppression of religion, nation-states, and nationalism; more intrusive government control of their lives through improved “government services”; and, naturally, larger taxes and welfare payments to ensure a “more fair distribution of wealth,” which, as always, means more money given to groups that are generally composed of the scum of the earth and will always vote for those that pledge to keep them forever on the dole.

Throughout history, watching the demise of those who speak about and treat the great mass of people as if they are inferior human beings, and who are then utterly shocked when they find the inferiors’ bayonets in their bellies, always has been a most enjoyable experience. Blair, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Gates-Soros-Davos billionaires, and the rest of the Globalist clique are blithely and arrogantly striding down a path marked “Pointy Ended Road,” their trip having been blessed, ironically, by the applause-craving and hell-on-earth-creating Bishop of Rome. They will arrive at that road’s dead end, hopefully soon, to find that the great unwashed understand all too well that progressives intend to impose a global tyranny on formerly free peoples, and they will be shocked to find themselves in a fight to their well-merited deaths. No cavalry will come to their aid, of course, because such forces always are composed of the children of the people they mean to rob of their wages and property, and then enslave.

Endnotes

1. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1651-1700/john-locke-essay-on-government/chapter-13-of-the-subordination-of-the-powers-of-the-commonwealth.php
2. Edmund Burke, Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777. https://archive.org/stream/burkeworks02burkuoft/burkeworks02burkuoft_djvu.txt
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/george-w-bush-warns-against-isolationist-tendency-in-us/2017/03/01/ec72da3e-feff-11e6-9b78-824ccab94435_story.html?utm_term=.cf5f815ab61a 2 March 2017
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/tony-blair-against-populism-the-center-must-hold.html?ref=opinion