World Affairs Brief, March 17, 2017 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.
Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).
This Week’s Analysis:
Analysis of Trump’s Latest Compromises
Trump-Russian Banking Connection is Fake Intelligence
Trump Wants to Cut UN Funds?
Mobocracy and Higher Education
Complain Loudly About New TSA Pat Down Procedures
Dutch Vote Defeats Anti-Immigration Party
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ANALYSIS OF TRUMP’S LATEST COMPROMISES
Trump supporters are reeling from the recent string of compromises and mistakes as more and more essential campaign promises fall prey to compromises. The biggest ones this week were his support for a bill that falls short of repealing Obamacare and expanding support for the globalist interventions in Yemen and Syria. He seems tired of vetting nominees and has rubber stamped a dangerous percentage of neocons and globalists for positions in the highest levels of his administration. Naturally, many conservatives are anxiously wondering if Trump has been compromised or if he is simply the victim of his own lack of principles and failure to understand the globalist threat. I’ve always maintained that Trump is not a plant within the movement. He lacks the verbal control skills to watch his own tongue, let alone follow the script of others. Like most populists, I think Trump wants too much to be liked and is trying to please the very establishment he claims to oppose. Sadly, it is also almost impossible for Donald Trump to admit error once he has signed on to a policy mistake and made it his own.
The best example of the latter is his replacement Executive Order on a temporary immigration ban from six countries instead of the original seven. It was unnecessary to name any specific countries at all, but Trump insisted in order to save face on the original order. Even though any offending language about religious preference was removed from the new order, two activist judges in two different states blocked the temporary ban yet again—not based upon anything in the ban’s wording, but on comments made by members of the Trump administration that they perceived as discriminatory. Legal scholars are rolling their eyes in disbelief that a judge would base a ruling on comments rather than on the wording of the law—judicial activism at its worst.
Opposition is clearly building against Trumpcare, from all sides. In trying to please everyone, he ends up pleasing no one. For the first time since the American Healthcare Act (AHC) started working through the committee approval process this week, three conservative Republicans voted against approval of the bill in the important House Budget Committee—GOP Reps. Dave Brat of Virginia, Gary Palmer of Alabama, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.
At least two dozen additional conservatives intend to vote against it when it comes for a vote unless amended, and that’s enough to kill it. Opposition by all Democrats is a given in both House and Senate, but in the Senate Mitch McConnell can only afford to lose 2 Republican votes if he is to pass the AHC—and 3 (Senators Paul, Cruz and Lee) have already said they won’t back it without significant changes.
The most important provision that has to be removed is the proposed 30% penalty for not maintaining continuous health insurance. That was a provision lobbied for by the insurance companies to replace the Obamacare mandate, which forces healthy people into the system to pay for those with expensive prior existing conditions. Even with those, it doesn’t keep premiums from rising by 2 or 3 times the former norm. Trump’s exaggerated promise that “you’re going to love” his replacement for Obamacare was doomed to fail, but the disappointing current legislation will be a cruel pill to swallow for supporters who hoped he would come through.
And then there are the liberal Republican Senators that won’t back the measure without a big expansion in Medicaid as a permanent fixture. This growing government health program, combined with the trappings of promising cheap insurance for everyone, will eventually end up causing a popular demand for a “single payer” government subsidized health system—especially after Trumpcare fails to lower premiums. By pushing for his own version of government healthcare, Donald Trump will be just as responsible as Obama for the coming government system that is evolving.
In trying to satisfy both liberals and conservatives, the Republicans will compromise and make changes to accommodate the largest factions. That guarantees that the Senate and House will pass differing bills which will then go through the “reconciliation process.” These reconciliation committees are often staffed by members of both houses that are compromisers, and I fear that the measures demanded by conservatives will be gutted in reconciliation. The result then goes before both houses as a simple yes/no vote, with no amendments.
In foreign policy, we are seeing the damage wrought by military hardliners surrounding the President as close advisors—particularly Defense Secretary Mattis and National Security Advisor McMasters. Despite campaign promises to stop globalist interventions around the world, the Trump administration is ramping up US military involvement in both Yemen and Syria. Evidence has recently surfaced in PJ Media that McMaster shares Obama’s views on Islam and terror.
Donald Trump’s new national security advisor, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, has made troubling remarks — such as “the Islamic State is not Islamic” — that one expects from the D.C. establishment. However a hearty endorsement that he gave to a 2010 book points to the totality of McMaster’s views on security issues as being worse than simply his parroting politically correct memes on Islam.
The book in question is Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat. Written by CDR Youssef Aboul-Enein, it was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2010. I read and reviewed it back in 2012 and found its claims — many of which the Obama administration followed to disastrous results — to be incorrect and problematic.
For starters, Aboul-Enein asserts that only “militant Islamists” — ISIS types who behead, crucify, massacre, and burn people alive — are the enemy. “Non-militant Islamists,” however, are not: “It is the Militant Islamists who are our adversary. They represent an immediate threat to the national security of the United States. They must not be confused with Islamists.”
What he misses here is something that nobody in the media sees—that ISIS is so totally virulent and scripted in its violence against everyone, including Muslims that they can’t even be classified as “radical Islamic terrorists,” —not because their isn’t radical Islam, but because these terrorist are not trying to create a Califate, but rather to help breed extreme fear of the phony war on terror. Real terror organizations are fighting for a cause and they specifically make sure that people in that cause are not harmed. ISIS harms everyone, even Muslims. That can only mean that ISIS is the blackest of false flag operations meant only to stir up universal fear of terrorism, and NOT to create anything beneficial.
This theme, which the author expresses in convoluted language — at one point he urges the reader to appreciate the “the divisions between Militant Islamists and between Militant Islamists and Islamists” (p.176) — permeates the book. In reality, all Islamists share the same ultimate goal of global Islamic hegemony. They differ in methodology — but not in their view of us as the enemy to be crushed.
We’ve already seen the outcome of cooperating with “Non-militant Islamists” during the Arab Spring. The Obama administration cast aside decades of U.S. policy and support for secular Arab autocrats and made cozy with the Muslim Brotherhood. What followed is well-known: the Arab Spring quickly turned into the “Islamic Winter.” This culminated with the rise of the Islamic State, in large part due to Obama’s policies, both active (aiding Islamic terrorists by portraying them as “freedom fighters,” in Libya and Syria) and inactive (pulling all U.S. forces out of Iraq despite the warnings, and disposing of a 30-year ally of the U.S., the secularist Mubarak, for the Brotherhood in Egypt).
Of course, he misses the biggest point—that US and British intelligence created ISIS out of nowhere by simply rebranding about half of the Syrian rebels which had been brought in, funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Worse, Trump is building bridges to Saudi Arabia, the prime source of funding and weapons for US backed terrorists. Bloomberg relished the scene, noticing that “Trump Wins Saudi Praise for ‘Turning Point’ After Meeting Prince.”
Saudi Arabia, seeking to breathe life into its decades-old alliance with the U.S., claimed “a historic turning point” in bilateral relations after President Donald Trump welcomed Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House.
“Relations had undergone a period of difference of opinion,” a senior adviser to the crown prince said in a statement after Tuesday’s meeting. “However, today’s meeting has put things on the right track, and marked a significant shift in relations, across all political, military, security and economic fields.”
Sunni Arab leaders are embracing Trump with praise the president isn’t finding from other U.S. allies in the world, reflecting an eagerness to reset ties after feeling shunned by President Barack Obama, who crafted the 2015 nuclear deal with their Shiite rival Iran. The Saudi statement said Trump had a “great understanding” of the bilateral relationship. The president and the prince “share the same views on the gravity of the Iranian expansionist moves in the region,” the adviser said.
The foregoing describes succinctly how Trump fell into this neocon trap. Trump is told by numerous neocon advisors, before and after the election, that Iran is the real problem, the “number one terrorist supporting nation,” even though it’s a lie. US and British intelligence, colluding with Israel, are the number one terror sponsors in the world. They created al Qaeda, ISIS and all the Syrian rebels, none of which are moderate. In fact, new evidence appeared this week from Iranian and Iraqi sources that documented how US special operations helicopters rescued two ISIS commanders from the battle for Mosul and transferred them deeper into Syria.
Commander of Asa’eb al-Haq Movement affiliated to the Iraqi popular forces of Hashd al-Shaabi said that… US forces have carried out a rapid heliborn operation and evacuated two commanders of ISIL terrorists from Western Mosul in Northern Iraq.
Javad al-Talaybawi said that the US forces carried out the heliborne operation in one of the Western neighborhoods of Western Mosul, evacuating two senior ISIS commanders to an unknown location after the commanders came under siege by Iraqi government forces in intensified clashes in Western Mosul.
“Americans’ support and assistance to the ISIS is done openly to save their regional plan in a desperately attempt,” al-Talaybawi underlined.
Al-Talaybawi had warned late in February that the US forces tried hard to evacuate ISIS commanders from the besieged city of Tal Afar West of Mosul.
After photos surfaced in the media displaying US forces assisting ISIS terrorists, al-Talaybawi said that the Americans were planning to take ISIS commanders away from Tal Afar that is under the Iraqi forces’ siege.
In the meantime, member of Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Commission Iskandar Watut called for a probe into photos and footages displaying US planes airdropping aid packages over ISIS-held regions.
Watut further added that we witnessed several times that US planes dropped packages of food stuff, arms and other necessary items over ISIS-held regions, and called on Iraq’s air defense to watch out [for] the US-led coalition planes. Eyewitnesses disclosed at the time that the US military planes helped the ISIS terrorists in Tal Afar region West of Mosul.
“We saw several packages dropped out of a US army aircraft in the surrounding areas of the city of Tal Afar in Western Nineveh province and six people also came out of a US plane in the ISIL-controlled areas,” the Arabic-language media quoted a number of eyewitnesses as saying.
The Iraqi army says that the US army is trying to transfer the ISIL commanders trapped in areas besieged by the Iraqi army to safe regions.
It is no wonder that Iran and Iraq are being targeted by globalists. They, along with the Russians, know that the US is secretly supporting terror, for conflict creation purposes. Iran is being targeted for blowing the whistle on US duplicity and because it has its own weapons industry and thus is the only Middle East nation capable of countering the globalist intervention in Syria.
What this suppressed report above also indicates is that the dark side of government has control of certain US Special Forces troops and helicopters and are still operating even though the President of the United States has not authorized these operations in support of ISIS, and is ignorant about them. Of course, he only knows what his briefers tell him and what he reads on the internet in the early morning hours. Apparently he missed this story or he would be hopping mad. Naturally, if he did read it and brought it up to his advisors, they dismiss the story as Iranian and Iraqi propaganda. Still the stories persist because they are true.
In short, because Trump has bought into the idea that Iran is the “bogey man,” anything can be sold to Trump in the Middle East if it can be viewed as hurting Iran, and it can be perceived as fighting the phony war on terror. That’s why Trump is getting deeper into the battle for Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels overthrew the globalist regime in Yemen that was supplying weapons to US-backed terrorists.
I’m not saying the Iranian Ayatollahs are friends of liberty. They are not. But like the Russians, they are directly thwarting the globalist agenda in the Middle East, which is partially helpful to the anti-globalist cause. Eventually, Russia intends to strike the West more broadly and establish their own version of a globalist government, which won’t be good either.
As the Washington Post points out, Trump is going to resume military weapon sales to the Saudis after Obama claims to have halted those sales due to multiple massacres of civilians in Yemen:
The State Department has approved a resumption of weapons sales that critics have linked to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, a potential sign of reinvigorated U.S. support for the kingdom’s involvement in its neighbor’s ongoing civil war.
The proposal from the State Department would reverse a decision made late in the Obama administration to suspend the sale of precision guided munitions to Riyadh, which leads a mostly Arab coalition conducting airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
While the U.S. military has provided support to the Saudi-led air campaign since 2015, including aerial refueling for Saudi jets and a U.S. advisory mission in the Saudi operations headquarters, the Obama administration sought to scale back that support last year amid alleged Saudi strikes on civilian targets.
Of course, this was only done by the Obama Administration to assuage public opinion over the US backing a merciless Saudi regime. In fact, the Saudis already had enough inventory of these weapons so the “cut back” didn’t really stop their war in Yemen. Military sales would have resumed in due course anyway before the Saudis ran out of bombs.
In like manner, the media and Trump foolishly paint Obama as “soft on Iran” because of the Iran nuclear deal. But this was not a deal meant to help Iran, or establishment peace with the West. It was just the opposite—a future trap (with conditions Iran is bound to violate) set to justify an attack on Iran, once Syria was subdued. Even though none of the parties signed the agreement, it was put into a binding Security Council resolution that automatically authorizes a war against Iran should a violation be detected.
One of the psychological twists in the deal was that by Obama appearing to be “soft on Iran” Republicans and Trump would take up the opposite position, not realizing such action is exactly what the globalists really want. In the end, Republicans will be blamed for the war, not the globalists.
In furtherance of these militaristic goals, Trump has authorized more Special Forces in both Yemen and Syria, which the Syrian government rightly opposes. No nation has the right to invade the territory of another unless threatened directly by that nation. If the US claims to be helping to fight ISIS in Syria, they should have no trouble getting permission. Sadly, that isn’t the real goal.
Trump has also fallen into the trap of furthering the globalist agenda by backing a tougher military stance against terror—which he can’t really fight unless he traces terror back to its origin in the dark side of the CIA and MI6 in Britain. Will Grigg of Liberty News Daily comments on how Trump has also loosened the rules against civilian casualties in Counter-Terror Operations:
Donald Trump’s most insistent and frequently repeated campaign promises was to unshackle the military and intelligence agencies in pursuing counter-terrorism operations worldwide. As President, Trump is making good on that promise, which was regarded as problematic by some of his libertarian and traditionally conservative supporters.
According to the New York Times, The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids, and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq…. Already, President Trump has granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces of Yemen to be an `area of active hostilities’ where looser battlefield rules apply,” continues the Times account. “That opened the door to a Special Operations raid in late January in which several civilians were killed, as well as to the largest-ever series of American airstrikes targeting Yemen-based Qaeda militants, starting nearly two weeks ago,” administration officials disclosed to the paper.
Mr. Trump is also expected to approve a similar Pentagon request to designate some parts of Somalia as a battle zone subject to similarly emancipated rules of engagement.
All of this comes at a time when the Trump administration is preparing a budget that will reallocate funds from diplomatic initiatives to the military.
