TGIF: Free Speech Restored?

Don't get accustomed to me praising Donald Trump, but exceptions will occur now and then. Trump is no principled friend of liberty, not by a long shot. Judging by most of his actions and words, he recognizes no impenetrable boundary between the government and the private sector, the market economy. We may infer that he sees the central government and the country itself as a company that he runs with few restraints. He seems to imagine himself as the chairman and CEO of the United States, with only a toothlessly subservient board of directors. I need only point to his trade and immigration policies to support this inference. It shows itself in many other ways.

Trump is a collectivist of the nationalist variety. He's a devotee of industrial policy, in which the central government aspires to guide the free-enterprise economy in lots of ways. For him, free-ish enterprise may be permitted when it doesn't conflict with his preferences—but only then. He decides. Put another way, he is an advocate of the corporate state in an earlier sense of the term. It doesn't mean that government does the bidding of large corporations. Rather, it means the nation-state is seen as a single organism with one set of interests. Society is the body (Latin: corpus), and the ruler—Trump—is the head.

But (cautious) credit should be given where it is due. Before that, however, something must be said about how even good things are done. Government by executive order and emergency declaration is ominous. The division of powers and the checks and balances among the three branches have at least the potential to stave off government threats to liberty. Those checks should be strengthened. The Department of Education and USAID, to name just two federal entities, should unquestionably be abolished! But is autocratic decree a good thing? It's certainly satisfying to see employees and supporters of those agencies panic over their closing, but the issue is bigger than that. The next president may undo any pro-liberty decrees and issue new ones inimical to liberty. Precedents matter.  An imperial presidency, one that can amend the Constitution unilaterally, does not serve freedom and the market economy.

Now for the credit. On Jan. 20, 2025, shortly after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" in response to one of the worst things Joe Biden and his administration did. They had effectively suppressed the speech of Americans by threatening—at least implicitly but in no uncertain terms—private social-media companies if they did not suppress lawful posts about the Covid pandemic and the Hunter Biden laptop. In other words, as a judge put it, Biden set up an Orwellian ministry of truth to crack down on dissent and inconvenient facts. Lawful speech was smeared as disinformation and misinformation, perhaps of foreign origin. Even true statements were to be suppressed, however subtly, if they undermined confidence in the government's objectives. Individuals were maligned.

That is not supposed to happen in a free society, where freedom of speech and press are enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, which theoretically, if not actually, restrains the exercise of government power. The government may not censor; therefore it may not use private firms to do what it may not do. The government's bad conduct was challenged in court, initially successfully, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the free-speech advocates, claiming they had no standing. (See Murthy v. Missouri.)

So kudos to Trump for issuing an executive order to prevent such misconduct from happening again. The executive order spoke the truth with its opening words:

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.  Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.  Under the guise of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.  Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.

The order goes on to declare that it is now the policy to

ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;

ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen; and

identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.

It then declares that "no Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to ... this order."

It also directs that the "Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of executive departments and agencies, shall investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order and prepare a report ... with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions to be taken based on the findings of the report."

Why did I give only cautious credit? Here's why: "Media outlets must not cave to Trump’s lawfare." As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), put it. "What happens to freedom of the press when the president can bully media outlets he doesn’t like into paying big money to end his meritless lawsuits against them? Buckle up. We’re about to find out." FIRE points with alarm to "Trump’s dictatorial appetite to use lawfare to silence or punish outlets that publish content he doesn’t like." 

This is ominous. With Trump, there will be no rest.

The Dems Are What They Claim to Hate

As I said in 2016 (or was it 2015?), I despise Trump and I despise most of the people who despise Trump. I will never forgive the Democrats for making it necessary for me to defend him against their lies.

TGIF: Tariffying Trade-Warmonger Trump

"The word tariff, properly used, is a beautiful word. One of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. It’s music to my ears." —Donald Trump

The once and possibly future president threatens to wage economic warfare against countries and companies everywhere if they don't knuckle under to his nationalist demands. He promises to impose tariffs on American firms that calculate that moving operations to Mexico or other foreign locations makes good business sense. He's also ready to strike at allied countries that irritate him by, say, slighting the dollar. (Watch or read his economic-policy speech.)

To his credit he promises to lower taxes on investment and to cut the regulatory burden. He also wants lower energy prices, which would be good all around, but exactly how matters. He's no laissez-faire advocate.

At any rate, Trump's determination to restore the American economy to what it was when much of the world lay in ruins after World War II suggests that, despite all the changes since then, he would much do more than de-tax and deregulate. For example, he promises to lure foreign companies here. Again, how? His government would no doubt play an active role in what should be private matters. He's already promising to make the taxpayers pay for business infrastructure projects. As he said about the audio industry, "It’ll be like it was 50 years ago." He won't be able to turn the clock back, but he can do much damage trying.

This is economic nationalism. He sees the world as an arena in which countries—as if they were companies—compete against one another: for one country to win, the others must lose. Powered by this worldview, Trump wants to be the CEO of the company known as the United States.

His vision is dangerously wrong. The world is not an arena in which countries compete with one another, where one nation's gain is the others' losses. That American manufacturers routinely buy foreign-made materials, tools, machines, and semi-finished products demonstrates this. We have a global division of labor in which capital, resources, and all kinds of goods have been able to move across national boundaries fairly freely as market forces require. As a result, world poverty has diminished unbelievably, and Americans are richer than ever. (The rough spots can be attributed to unabated domestic government intervention.) This progress has been in the making for about 80 years, but the liberalization responsible for it has been reversed recently—to the world's detriment.

Trump understands none of this, and he has no incentive to do so. Since entering politics, his demagogic promise has been to wreak vengeance on the world for, as he sees it, taking advantage of the United States. This is his aggrieved-nation shtick. The U.S. government has been the biggest bully since 1945, but Trump would have gotten nowhere politically had he promised to stop throwing America's weight around. Instead, he portrays the United States as a pitiful giant that has been everyone's chump. It's nonsense.

What's foreign to Trump's mentality is any notion of an unplanned, spontaneous market order built on individual freedom and choice, which is at the heart of sound economics. He must see himself as a hands-on CEO who can solve any problem. That's the last thing we need. He should read Leonard Read's "I, Pencil." (The video version is here.)

In a word, Trump is an economic warmonger, a not-too-distant cousin of a regular warmonger. As the old free traders said, "When goods can't cross borders, soldiers will."

It would be one thing if Trump were promising to shrink the government so much that businesses everywhere wanted to flock to these hospitable shores. But his "New American Industrialism" is an old-fashioned industrial policy in which he or his team of experts would pick winners to carry out his glorious vision. Which firms and industries get protected or subsidized and which don't? Those decisions would be made on a political, not an economic, basis. The problem is that Trump and his experts could not know what they would need to know to carry out their plan. Only the free market—through the unhampered price system—can produce that knowledge, which would be widely dispersed, often tacit, and therefore unavailable to a central bureaucracy. Even the great Donald Trump cannot defy the laws of economics.

What would Trump do if other countries tried to make their economies more hospitable to the world's businesses, say, through rigorous liberalization? Would he up the statist ante? The economic nationalist is not likely to back down.

No one should be surprised that Ludwig von Mises—the unparalleled champion of peace through full liberalism—had much to say about economic nationalism. In Human Action, he wrote: "Economic nationalism is incompatible with durable peace.... It is an illusion to believe that a nation would lastingly tolerate other nations’ policies which harm the vital interest of its own citizens."

Trump might endorse Mises's last sentence, but he'd be missing the point. Other countries would respond to Trump's program. If he responds in turn, he will hurt Americans for sure (and perhaps foreigners). Consumers will largely pay the tariffs and, along with import-using American manufacturers, face higher prices. That's the point!

Freedom in the economic sphere, as in all other spheres of life, is in the deepest interest of all citizens. Protectionism and other interference are not. One industry or firm may calculate that if it can win protection from the state, it will prosper even if others suffer. But protection granted to one interest will encourage others to ask for it too. Now the original gain begins to dissolve. As Mises put it in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,

A system which protects the immediate interests of particular groups limits productivity in general and, in the end, injures everybody—even those whom it began by favouring.... The greater the protection afforded to particular interests, the greater the damage to the community as a whole, and to that extent the smaller the probability that single individuals gain thereby more than they lose....

[I]f all particular interests were equally protected, nobody would reap any advantage: the only result would be that all would feel the disadvantage of the curtailment of productivity equally. Only the hope of obtaining for himself a degree of protection, which will benefit him as compared with the less protected, makes protection attractive to the individual. It is always demanded by those who have the power to acquire and preserve especial privileges for themselves. [Emphasis added.]

Why would they all lose? Because, as we've known at least since David Ricardo formulated the law of comparative advantage (or what Mises called the law of association), the division of labor and free exchange bring specialization that yields immense gains to all—even when an individual, group, or nation is less efficient than others at producing a whole range of goods.

Trump displays the words Made in the USA onstage. The wiser course is to specialize and to trade with others rather than trying to produce everything. Market price signals, not Trump, should be our guide. If the frontiers were closed to foreign goods, Mises wrote in Socialism, "Capital and labour would have to be applied under relatively unfavourable conditions yielding a lower product than otherwise would have been obtained."

Thus Trump's blustering warfare would shrink incomes and risk conflict by disrupting the signals that channel productive energies to where consumers most want them.

Trump: Another Special-Interest-Pandering Politician

Trump promises to slam a 100-percent tariff on [Update:] imported cars made in Chinese-owned factories in Mexico. He announced this not to a group of prospective car buyers but to a group of car makers. So what else is new? Car buyers, who outnumber the well-organized car makers but are not themselves organized, would have to pay more for cars they do not want if Trump got his way. That's the point.

This is America first? No, it is not. It is "An Interest Group Whose Votes I Want" First versus everyone else. That's always the case with protectionism. Stopping consumers from buying whatever they want helps some (in the short term) at the expense of the rest. Calling the favored group "America" is self-serving special pleading. Trump's good at that. He thinks he knows better than you.

Trump is just another special-interest-pandering politician. Many people are fine with that because they misunderstand markets and dislike foreigners. But as Adam Smith taught us long ago, the wealth of a nation is determined by the people's free access to the world's products and not by how much they are cut off from those products. We produce to consume. We don't consume to produce.

David Friedman cleverly points out that cars can be produced in two ways: the old-fashioned factory way and by, say, growing grain, loading it on ships headed to, say, Japan, and welcoming the returning car-laden ships. Both production methods are legitimate, and which one prevails should be left to free people making choices in a spontaneously ordered marketplace. Trump obviously never learned about the law of comparative advantage.

TGIF: Trump Loves NATO

Trump is either contentedly ignorant of the things he talks about or callously scornful of his adoring fans, whom he sees as rubes eager to swallow whatever he says. He could be both. Above all, Trump is a Trump supremacist.

Does he believe in NATO or not? (Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it!) Trump wants it both ways. He loves the response he gets at rallies when, populist-style, he seems to put NATO down as a freeloader on America. But he doesn't really put it down. He is a devout NATOist.

How can that be? Look at his record. He's called for expanding NATO to the Middle East! (He said it would allow the U.S. government to disengage, but how likely would that be?) During the Trump administration, North Macedonia joined the alliance. (Another country for potential American rescue, thank you very much.) And NATO members near Russia think Trump left the alliance stronger than it was before he took office. Yes, once or twice he threatened to pull the U.S. government out, but that's like the guy who starts to walk out of a car showroom in a bluff to get undercoating and rustproofing included in the price of the car.

So let's not play games. Trump loves NATO. It enables him to be a big cheese on the world stage. His fans say we should take him seriously, not literally. What does that mean? Trump is a shameless snake oil salesman. (That doesn't mean I think the alternative is better.)

Take the latest brouhaha. Trump has upset the usual suspects by saying that if a NATO member government were "delinquent" in paying "its bills," "I" -- he personally? -- would not protect it from an attack by, say, Russia. He even said he would "encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want." He's rather casual about other people's lives.

The first thing to notice is that he would protect members that had paid what he calls their "bills." He believes in NATO's mutual defense commitment. QED.

Under Trump (like any other president), Americans could be forced to fight for and/or materially assist other NATO governments that came into conflict with non-NATO countries. That's the point of NATO! An attack on one is an attack on all. The collective defense commitment under Article 5 -- which has been invoked only once, by the U.S. government after 9/11 -- provides wiggle room with the phrase "such action as [each member government] deems necessary," but still it expresses an intention for mutual defense. And, most importantly, the U.S. government's nuclear arsenal is in the background.

The next thing to understand is that Trump's talk about bills and dues is balderdash. NATO members don't pay dues. What Trump must be confused about is the members' agreement to try to raise their military spending to at least 2 percent of their GDP. That money does not go to NATO; it's part of their government budgets. This agreement is understood as a guideline, not a commitment. Members have no deadline, so they can't be delinquent. According to the Washington Post, using NATO figures, 11 of the 31 members have met the guideline. (Iceland has no armed forces.)

How does Trump know that 2 percent is the magic number? He doesn't. How does he know that striving for 2 percent by raising taxes or cutting other spending wouldn't destabilize one country or another? He doesn't. But the issue gives him another chance to pretend that the United States is the aggrieved party internationally. NATO members are taking advantage of America.

That's been his shtik since he started running for president in 2015. No demagogue would get far by ranting that the United States has bullied other countries long enough and it's time to stop. No, his pitch is that the United States has been trampled on by others long enough. That's how a populist rallies support. The fact is that for decades in foreign affairs, the U.S. foreign-policy elite has called the shots and others have knuckled under or else. As President George H. W. Bush said in 1990, "What we say goes." This power has been waning recently: other people will take only so much pushing around, and other power centers rise up.

One reasonably winces at Trump's invitation to Russia, although Russia is unlikely to be interested in accepting it or even capable of doing so. We wince because when a government, any government, crosses borders, innocent people die. It's not something even to joke about.

To point out Trump's buffoonery, however, is not to defend NATO. Decades ago, libertarians started calling for the U.S. government to leave the alliance and the others. That was during the Cold War. It was motivated by, among other things, an understanding that what looks like defense to you might look like aggressiveness to him. Glancing back and pronouncing NATO a success because World War III did not happen might be a post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy (after this, therefore because of this). We don't know what would have happened had NATO not existed or if it did, the U.S. government had not participated, especially if free entrepreneurship in security had been allowed to flourish. Maybe we were just lucky over 40-some years, especially concerning nuclear war, which would have ended the world.

Moreover, by what right does the U.S. government commit American individuals to fight or otherwise assist in another government's war? It is not an answer to say: "That's what governments do." That begs the question regarding the state's authority. I suspect Trump wouldn't understand.

TGIF: "America First" Need Not Be Antiwar

Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future.

We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they do. They also typically invoke the security interests of the American people. It's a small world, after all, they say, and what protects others also protects us. How often have you heard interventionists agitate for war solely on behalf of foreigners? Sure, national self-sacrifice might not be good politics, but that doesn't mean that people of the interventionist mindset don't mean what they say.

My point is not that they are right, but only that they, or most of them, are sincere (though misguided). I doubt if George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq was motivated solely by regard for the Iraqis or Israelis.  Not was Barack Obama's bombing and regime change in Libya carried out on behalf of the Libyan people only. In both cases the key policymakers and their supporters believed that these actions were also good for the American people, who had been told for decades that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi threatened them. The same can be said about the people who gave us the war in Vietnam. This is not to dismiss the malign influence of dishonest people who simply enjoy exercising power or who will profit from selling weapons to the government.  But I am suspicious of such single-factor explanations.

If I'm right about this, we must ask what today's America Firsterism is defined in contrast to. Aren't the two main competing approaches to foreign policy in reality both America first, although one may be unilateralist and the other multilateralist? One might respond that a true America Firster considers only the interests of America and no one else. But is that really such a big difference? Perhaps the difference is that American Firsters would want to see immediate benefits for Americans from intervention, while the neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists are willing to wait a little longer even if foreigners would benefit sooner. But now we're quibbling about time preferences among the interventionists.

Now let's talk about Donald Trump. (I wish we didn't have to.) Trump is regarded as the architect of today's America First faction, although I don't think he used the phrase (if he's used it at all) until critics smeared him with it. While Trump fans boast that unlike his two immediate predecessors, he started no new wars, I would caution against confidence that Trumpism equals noninterventionism. First, he didn't end any wars either, and he chose to keep American troops in key areas of Syria, namely, where the oil and wheat fields are. (They're still there.) Did he end any of America's covert wars? Or stop helping Saudi Arabia from making war on Yemen? Or refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine as Obama had done? No, he did not.

Moreover, he might have gotten us into new wars, with China and Iran, for example. He put tariffs on  Chinese imports, harming American consumers and intending to harm Chinese businesses. Trade wars can lead to other forms of warfare. Regarding Iran, Trump tore up Obama's so-called nuclear deal (Iran wasn't making a bomb) and reimposed economic sanctions. He ordered the assassination of a major Iranian military/political leader. No doubt he continued the covert and proxy war against Iran that the U.S. and Israeli governments have conducted for years. Finally, he reportedly nearly attacked Iran as his term drew to a close. It looks like we avoided a new war thanks only to contingent circumstances. Why should we be confident about a new Trump term?

Right-wing populists, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to oppose the establishment's foreign policy mostly because it consumes tax money they want the government to spend on domestic projects. That's hardly comforting to anyone who wants the government to do less and thereby consume far fewer scarce resources, which after all are produced privately.

Much more could be said against America First, for example,  that the term national interest has long been a cover for collectivism and coercion. America First is no guarantee of nonintervention. What we need is a commitment not to America First but to individual liberty first.

TGIF: Sam Harris on Saving Democracy from Voters

Neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris caused quite a stir recently by defending the social networks' conspiracy (his word) to suppress news coverage of Joe Biden's son Hunter's smoking-gun laptop shortly before Election Day 2020. Harris said the suppression was justified because Donald Trump was such a threat to America that he had to be defeated whatever the cost to the election's integrity.

In other words, according to Harris, such tampering is okay as long as he deems it necessary to save American democracy from the voters.

The social networks are privately owned, of course, but remember that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the FBI warned him, shortly before the New You Post broke the laptop story, that unspecified major Russian disinformation aimed at the election was about to surface. The authenticity of the laptop, with its damaging emails about Hunter Biden's lucrative business dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese entities while his father was the vice president, was known early on and has since been confirmed by others. Even the New York Times now concedes it. Allegations of Russian election tampering had as much merit in 2020 as they had in 2016, when Trump was portrayed by his critics as a Russian stooge.

But with or without prodding from the FBI, the social network operators, should not have suppressed the laptop story for a host of obvious reasons. These businesses acquired huge numbers of participants on the promise that they would be open forums. When they first began to interfere with that process, the networks let users down. To do this during a presidential election is a particularly egregious disservice. Why do people still depend on them for information? (No, this does not justify antitrust action.)

I leave it to others to debate whether Harris's assessment of Trump is accurate. I'm more interested in the principle Harris has set out.

Although I am as far from Trump fandom as anyone could be, the first question I would ask Harris is whether he considers himself the only person wise and trustworthy enough to decide if a candidate is sufficiently threatening to justify concerted suppression of unflattering information about the other candidate. If he says yes, then he's as self-centered as Trump. If he says no, he might do us the courtesy of spelling out how that decision would be made. Does he want a constitutional office created? How would the decider be chosen?

If he were to answer my questions, I would move on to this one: what makes him think that if his principle was adopted, he would like its future applications? Supreme Court justices have often disappointed the presidents who appointed them. For similar reasons, the decision makers anointed to carry out the Harris principle might somewhere along the way disappoint him. Harris must be a lousy chess player because he doesn't think even two moves ahead.

Still, Harris's remarks do raise an interesting dilemma. It's not a new conundrum: what if democracy looks to be on a suicide course? Does the "sacred" principle of majoritarianism, which libertarians as individualists abhor, extend to the principle itself? Or is it proper to cripple democracy to save it?

Small-d democrats might say, "Yes -- temporarily." But there's the rub. The future is uncertain. Temporary in intent is not necessarily temporary in fact. Governments taught us that long ago. We know that people don't like to give up power, as Lord Acton taught us. Power doesn't only tend to corrupt; it attracts the already corrupt. Wouldn't that suggest that democracy should never be suspended or tampered with in the present for fear that the winner of an election might suspend or tamper with it in the future? What say you, Sam Harris?

If this problem is addressed only after it arises, it's probably too late. The time to think about it is before a democracy with few real limits on power is launched. The War Games line, spoken by the computer after learning that nuclear war is futile, applies: "The only winning move is not to play."

It's not as if the original classical liberals and their libertarian descendants didn't warn us. Individualist political economists and social philosophers long ago pointed to the dangers of a democratic state with the power to meddle in all aspects of people's lives. For these thinkers, the whole point of laissez-faire in the age of democracy was to keep elected rulers, and thus the electorate itself, out of our private peaceful productive affairs so that the contest for political power would not become socially and economically disruptively cutthroat. When the government is just about omnipotent, everyone will want to get to their hands on it -- if only for defensive purposes.

Even if those pioneering political economists did not want to dispense with government entirely (a few did), they understood that society essentially runs itself without a heavy-handed state because people generally understand that their best interests are served through cooperation with others. Thomas Paine, for example, in Rights of Man wrote:

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.

Thus, at most, governments should be kept on a short leash, with their powers dispersed and their missions held to the barest minimum necessary to protect the peace, that is, individual rights. If we can eliminate the state altogether, even better!

What the good liberals didn't tell us -- because there's no magic formula -- is how to keep government to the bare minimum. Constitutions are no guarantee, are they? Today's libertarians are still working on cracking that nut. Most people are not going to read books on political philosophy or economics, even something as accessible as Frédéric Bastiat's The Law. So somehow we must strive to create a taboo against asking the government to do anything more than keep the peace in ways that respect everyone's rights. How do we do that?

TGIF: About Those January 6 Committee Extravaganzas

I admit it: I watched nearly every moment of the House committee extravaganzas on the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. I did more than that. I was transfixed. I couldn't even multitask.

Were the mislabeled "hearings" beyond all criticism? Of course not. They were choreographed, but only mildly so; the production effort lent an orderliness that I appreciated. I accept the point that the presentations had nothing to say about FBI-informant intrigue if it took place. Such mischief has occurred in the past, and if credible allegations exist, they should be pursued vigorously. Of course, it wouldn't let off the hook anyone who followed the directions of an agent provocateur. The same goes for other government misfeasance and malfeasance apart from Donald Trump's.

Still, even given all that, I see no good grounds for dismissing the presentations as worthless partisanship. The reason ought to be obvious. The presentations enabled us to watch senior White House, Justice Department, and Trump campaign lawyers and other key staff describe Trump's horrifying complacency as he entertained himself before, during, and after the violent outburst. Gruesomely riveting!

One need not be a small-D democrat to be concerned about what took place on January 6, 2021. The source of rational concern is not only the target of the violence. It is the violence itself. We've seen a good deal of domestic political violence in recent years, and I'm confident that no good would come from more. On the contrary, to the extent that violence becomes an acceptable political tactic, we will be in deep trouble. As Leonard E. Read, founding president of the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote in "On that Day Began Lies":

Consider the mob. It is a loose-type association. The mob will tar and feather, burn at the stake, string up by the neck, and otherwise murder. But dissect this association, pull it apart, investigate its individual components. Each person, very often, is a God-fearing, home-loving, wouldn’t-kill-a-fly type of individual.

What happens, then? What makes persons in a mob behave as they do? What accounts for the distinction between these persons acting as responsible individuals and acting in association?

Perhaps it is this: These persons, when in mob association, and maybe at the instigation of a demented leader, remove the self-disciplines which guide them in individual action; thus the evil that is in each person is released, for there is some evil in all of us. In this situation, no one of the mobsters consciously assumes the personal guilt for what is thought to be a collective act but, instead, puts the onus of it on an abstraction which, without persons, is what the mob is.

Apart from the direct threat from the violence, we must also consider the secondary threat: namely, that of the government's inevitable crackdown. If the violence becomes more widespread, average people will understandably demand safety, and the politicians will be only too happy to comply with less-than-discriminate force. A weak state response could prompt the emergence of a "strong leader," a Bonaparte, who promises to restore order forthwith.

This is why the peaceful transfer of power after elections is desirable. To be sure, representative democracy places a distant second to complete and authentic individualist, free-market liberalism, but it beats gangs fighting in the streets.

So think back now to January 6. Trump clearly lost the election. His 60 attempts to persuade judges that the election had been stolen had failed. (Many of the judges were appointed by Trump or other Republican presidents.) He was told repeatedly by senior officials that he had appointed, from the attorney general on down, including expert investigators in election security, that he had no case -- but to no avail. A conspiracy to perpetrate such an election fraud and its coverup would make any other alleged conspiracy look like child's play.

Undeterred, Trump merely brought in a small group of toadies led by the faithful Rudy Giuliani to press his worthless case. Trump insisted he actually won the election by a landslide and set out to gaslight the American people into thinking there was something to that claim. Considering the lack of proof and all the contrary information he had been given, we are entitled to conclude that Trump never actually believed that he had been reelected. This was no delusion; rather I suspect it was merely a grand Trumpian scam that would surely rake in lots of money; it was also a what-the-hell longshot at retaining power. He apparently didn't care about anything else. In other words, he was playing with fire. At best it was gross negligence.

When he got nowhere with his staff and the courts, he encouraged a mob, which he had every reason to think would be unruly, to gather in Washington, D.C., on the day that Congress was to certify the states' electoral counts. Trump and his small circle worked every angle, including encouraging supporters to fraudulently pose as alternative electors in their states and trying to convince Vice President Mike Pence that he could exclude Biden electoral votes or at least delay Congress's certification by sending the matter back to the states -- when no vice president has any such power. Pence deserves credit here. I shudder to think what might have happened in the streets had Pence slavishly done what Trump pushed him to do.

The mob assembled as Trump requested, and he lifted their hopes that they could "stop the steal." Informed that some supporters had weapons and so wouldn't go through metal detectors for Trump's speech, he told security to remove the detectors because "they're not here to harm me." Then he urged the mob to march to the Capitol. Tens of thousands did so, breaking through doors and windows and signaling that they meant to threaten or harm those who stood in their and Trump's way. Thwarted by the Secret Service in his wish to go to the Capitol, Trump went back to the White House and watched the show from his dining room.

Repeated pleas by his staff that he call for an end to the riot fell on deaf ears. On the contrary, he tried to turn up the heat by condemning Pence on Twitter for his lack of courage. When his supporters chanted that Pence should be hanged, he was heard to say that maybe those supporters were onto something. Late in the day, when he finally made a video appeal to the rioters, he couldn't resist telling them: "We love you.... You're very special."

All in all, this was a sad day that capped a sad few months -- again, not because democracy is sacred, but because violence is uncontrollably toxic. Does the record establish Trump's legal liability for incitement to violence? I am not qualified to say. Moreover, we who distrust political power must be wary of vaguely defined offenses that originate in speech.

But Trump does seem to have left himself open to charges related to his failure to secure the Capitol despite repeated desperate pleas and to his obvious attempts to obstruct Congress. It was at least a dereliction of duty. (I highly recommend Walter Olson's "The Jan. 6 Committee’s Findings Have Met the Appropriately High Bar for Prosecuting Trump.")

Mob violence isn't the only thing to be feared in this world, but it ranks pretty high up there.

Trump and Netanyahu's Plan B

Trump and Netanyahu first tried to bribe the Palestinians into capitulating to the Israeli imposition. But the two men failed. So now they are executing Plan B: bribing the Arab states’ rulers to give up even the pretense of championing the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. In that, the two are succeeding.

Feds Out of Portland

Maybe no one would have noticed if Trump had sent in some FBI guys just to help guard the federal courthouse in Portland, but Trump lives by the motto "Be ominously obnoxious or go home." So he sends in unidentified agents from customs, the border patrol, and other such agencies to scoop demonstrators off the streets. Now he's threatening to do the same thing in other cities, including Chicago. State and local officials in Oregon and around the country are concerned.

Trump may like the optics in this election season. To many of us, however, it looks bloody fascistic. Let local communities work this stuff out. The last thing they need is an escalation of trouble compliments of an invading federal force.

L’etat C’est Moi!

Trump has vetoed Congress’s effort to keep him from going to war against Iran unilaterally. Nothing remarkable there. We’ve come to expect such things from the fraud who posed as an antiwar candidate.

What’s interesting is that Trump has reminded us of what a narcissist he is. That fact is so much a part of the landscape that it can be hard to notice these days.

In vetoing the bill passed under the War Powers Resolution, a 1970s post-Vietnam attempt to restore Congress’s exclusive power under the Constitution to make war, Trump said, “This was a very insulting resolution….”

Insulting? That’s why he vetoed it? Apparently Trump is incapable of seeing congressional action he doesn’t like as anything but personal. It’s hard to imagine another president saying this publicly. Other presidents would have pushed back (erroneously) against the constitutional war-powers argument, but they wouldn’t have made it personal, even if they suspected it.

As I’ve often said, Trump is a caricature of the establishment politician, and that’s why the establishment hates him.

Scott Horton Interview

Scott Horton and I talked about Trump's Joke of the Century "vision" for Palestine. Listen here.

TGIF: Trump Would Make Palestinian Subjugation Permanent

The fundamental flaw at the heart of Trump’s Palestine/Israel plan, presumptuously titled Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People, is that Trump -- like his predecessors -- believes that the Israelis are the aggrieved party and the Palestinians are the not-fully-human aggressors inherently unworthy of even the minimum trust accorded fellow human beings. You can see this premise throughout Trump’s corrupt blueprint for the future of Israel and Palestine.

But this premise has the aggressor and the victim roles switched in defiance of the facts. The Palestinians are the aggrieved party. They were dispossessed in 1948 and 1967 and then denied full and equal rights within Israel and all rights in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. We see Trump’s attitude in a key part of Peace to Prosperity, namely, section seven on security and the associated appendices.

Before we get to that, let’s start by recognizing that although Trump brags that the Palestine he envisions would be bigger than what the Palestinians now control under the Oslo Accords, he is blowing hot air in his typical way. The Palestinians control nothing. Whatever internal security the Palestinian Authority (PA) administers in part of the West Bank is merely the result of Israel having subcontracted to the Palestinian elite the dirty internal-security work that Israel used to have to do itself. But Israel is free to override the PA whenever it sees the need and take internal security into its own hands. This is not autonomy.

So if Palestinian control is to be doubled, as Trump says, it would be a doubling of zero. Moreover, as Jonathan Cook writes, Trump’s plan misleads when it touts that Palestine would consist of 70 percent of the lands Israel has (illegally) occupied since the 1967 war. Several decades ago the main Palestinian organization and spokespeople agreed to reduce their claim to only the occupied territories, a mere 22 percent of the Palestine they had inhabited for millennia. That stunning concession never got the notice is deserved. (Only Israeli “concessions” are described as generous.) Yet Trump is demanding that the Palestinians accept only 70 percent of the 22 percent -- which comes to 15 percent of the original territory the Israelis (that is, Zionists) took by force in what is called the Nakba, or catastrophe. And, Cook adds, that’s “after Israel has seized all the best agricultural land and the water sources.”

The security section and associated appendices make clear that in Trump’s (and Jared Kushner’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s) eyes, the Palestinians are the bad guys who deserve nothing less than the closest surveillance lest they commit mass murder because they (so it is alleged) hate Jews qua Jews. So, despite the apparent creation of a sovereign State of Palestine, the Trump plan in reality would create a gerrymandered archipelago of Palestinian towns that nevertheless would contain many "Israeli conclave communities" (see the map above) and be surrounded by the State of Israel. Palestinians would have highly limited home-rule, but ultimate control would remain with Israel. That state would have complete authority over Palestine’s borders, airspace, and even the electromagnetic spectrum. Palestine would have no access to the Jordan River, because Israel would annex the Jordan Valley (as it's about to do), or the Dead Sea. To quote the plan:

Upon signing the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, the State of Israel will maintain overriding security responsibility for the State of Palestine, with the aspiration that the Palestinians will be responsible for as much of their internal security as possible, subject to the provisions of this Vision. The State of Israel will work diligently to minimize its security footprint in the State of Palestine according to the principle that the more the State of Palestine does, the less the State of Israel will have to do…. [Emphasis added.]

As you can see, any so-called concessions are for Israel’s convenience and not out of respect for the Palestinians’ long-denied rights.

Of course, the Palestinians would be watched closely. Appendix 2B sets criteria for “Palestinian security performance,” and they contain an inducement: “As the State of Palestine meets and maintains the Security Criteria, the State of Israel’s involvement in security within the State of Palestine will be reduced.” That sounds like the League of Nations' old mandate, that is, colonial, system under which Great Britain ruled Palestine after World War I.

But as we’ll see, those criteria are hardly objective and leave plenty of leeway for Israel to give Palestine a failing grade -- which is exactly what we can expect.

We read that the “State of Palestine will have security forces capable of maintaining internal security and preventing terror attacks within the State of Palestine and against the State of Israel, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Arab Republic of Egypt,”  except that “these specific capabilities (i) may not (A) violate the principle that the State of Palestine in all its territory, including Gaza, shall be, and shall remain, fully demilitarized or (B) derogate the State of Israel’s overriding security responsibility, and (ii) will be agreed upon by the State of Palestine and the State of Israel.” (Emphasis added.)

And the kicker:

Should the State of Palestine fail to meet all or any of the Security Criteria at any time, the State of Israel will have the right to reverse the process outlined above. The State of Israel’s security footprint in all or parts of the State of Palestine will then increase as a result of the State of Israel’s determination of its expanded security needs and the time needed to address them. [Emphasis added.]

Just in case, of course, “the State of Israel will maintain at least one early-warning stations [sic] in the State of Palestine as designated on the Conceptual Map, which will be run by Israeli security forces. Uninterrupted Israeli security access to and from any early-warning station will be ensured.”
And: “To the extent reasonably possible, solely as determined by the State of Israel, the State of Israel will rely on blimps, drones and similar aerial equipment for security purposes in order to reduce the Israeli security footprint within the State of Palestine.” (Emphasis added.)

What a relief to know that Israel's security footprint will be reduced through Israeli aerial surveillance -- solely as determined by the State of Israel.

Let’s move on to the appendices, where some details are filled in.

Appendix 2C states that “Palestine will not have the right to forge military, intelligence or security agreements with any state or organization that adversely affect the State of Israel’s security, as determined by the State of Israel.” (Emphasis added.)

Israel of course would be free to make whatever agreement it likes, no matter how much it adversely affects the State of Palestine.

Moreover, a “demilitarized State of Palestine will be prohibited from possessing capabilities that can threaten the State of Israel."

That is obviously vague. Defensive (and deterrent) capabilities can be always be called threatening. Israel does this with Hezbollah in Lebanon all the time. I note for the record that Israel is not similarly “prohibited from possessing capabilities that can threaten” the State of Palestine.

Congruent with the above, “any expansion of Palestinian security capabilities beyond the capabilities existing on the date this Vision is released shall be subject to agreement with the State of Israel.” Thus the Israeli state would have to approve virtually any change inside Palestine because, after all, almost anything could be construed as related to Israeli security.

We are assured that “while the State of Israel will use its best efforts to minimize incursions into the State of Palestine, the State of Israel will retain the right to engage in necessary security measures to ensure that the State of Palestine remains demilitarized and non-threatening to the State of Israel, including from terrorist threats.” There’s another blank check.

Now regarding those criteria:

The State of Palestine’s counterterrorism system must encompass all elements of counterterrorism, from initial detection of illicit activity to longtime incarceration of perpetrators. Included in the system must be: intelligence officers to detect potential terrorist activity, specially trained counterterrorism forces to raid sites and arrest perpetrators, forensics experts to conduct site exploitation, pretrial detention officers to ensure the retention of prisoners, prosecutors and judges to issue warrants and conduct trials, and post-trial detention officers to ensure prisoners serve their sentences. The system should include stand-alone detention facilities and vetted personnel.

I’m assuming, in light of Israel’s and the United States’ record in the matter, that "all elements of counterterrorism" include mass surveillance of all kinds, road checkpoints, torture, use of informants, and indefinite detention without charge, trial, or any reasonable notion of due process.
Just so the Palestinians are clear about what is expected of them, “the breadth and depth of the anti-terror activities of the State of Palestine will be determined [by Israel] by”:

• The extent of arrests and interdictions of suspects, perpetrators and accomplices;
• The systematic and comprehensive nature of investigations and interrogations to root out all terror networks and infrastructure;
• Indictments and the extent of punishments;
• The systematic and comprehensive nature of interdiction efforts to seize weapons and explosives and prevent the manufacturing of weapons and explosives;
• The success of efforts to prevent infiltration of terrorists and terror organizations into the security forces of the State of Palestine.

Apparently, the Israelis will know the appropriate extent of all those things. But how? That’s not for us or the Palestinians to wonder about. But if the Palestinians fall short of expectations, you can bet the Israelis will maximize their “security footprint” inside the sovereign State of Palestine.
And speaking of vagueness, Palestine will be expected to “prohibit all incitement to terrorism.”

Considering what the Israelis have regarded as incitement in the past, this sounds as though the Palestinian government will be expected to limit free speech.

And just so there’s no misunderstanding:

During the negotiations the parties, in consultation with the United States, shall attempt to create acceptable initial non-binding metrics with respect to the Security Criteria that are acceptable to the State of Israel, and in no event less stringent than the metrics used by either the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or the Arab Republic of Egypt (whichever is stricter) with respect to the Security Criteria. Because security threats evolve, the metrics are intended to be used as a guide, and will not be binding. However, the establishment of such non-binding metrics will allow the State of Palestine to better understand the minimum goals they are expected to achieve, and take into account regional minimum benchmarks. [Emphasis added.]

To call the proposed Palestinian status one of indefinite probation with inherently subjective criteria interpreted by a sadistic probation officer would be a gross understatement

It’s clear to see that Trump’s plan is all about Israel (and its American partisans) and has nothing whatever to do with the rights of Palestinians to control their own destiny. All considerations appear subordinate to Israel’s alleged security concerns, but in fact, what really counts (since Israel faces no existential threat) is a pseudo-ethnic chauvinism. (I write pseudo because Judaism is a religion, not an ethnic or racial group, that is embraced by people of many ethnicities. See my Coming to Palestine.)

The Palestinians just don’t count. To the extent they would get anything out of Trump’s plan, it is to save Israel some trouble. Better to have Palestine elite do Israel's dirty work.

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays.

Trump Lays an Egg: The Israel/Palestine Vision

Trump's long-dreaded diktat to the Palestinians is now public. (See details here and here if you have the stomach for them.) The so-called plan of the century -- the "Vision" -- is pretty much what the early reports described, so I have little to add to what I wrote before. (My articles are here, here, and here. You can find more in my book Coming to Palestine.)

Suffice it say here that this "plan" is dead on arrival. The Palestinians will not be bribed by a $50 billion jobs program to give up their hope of full rights, which would never be achieved in Trump's proposed Palestinian "state," a  fragmented territory surrounded and border-controlled by Israel. That barely begins to describe how Trump envisions Palestine. Look closely at the map accompanying this article: those red dots represent an unspecified number of "Israeli conclave communities" scattered throughout what would be Palestine. (See this.) It would bear no resemblance to a sovereign country.

Israel would annex the Jordan Valley to the east of Palestine and the areas of the exclusively Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- all of it territory having been acquired through war, which is illegal under international law. (See the "conceptual maps" here.) Netanyahu calls the term occupied territories a "big lie" because, he says, it is the land "where our patriarchs prayed, our prophets preached and our kings ruled." But that is the big lie. One has no valid claim to land that others live on because one's imagined ancestors lived there in ancient times, especially when the most likely descendants of the Israelites and Judahites are today's Palestinians and most Jews descend from converts.

Under Trump's Vision, Israel would have unified Jerusalem as its capital (it has it now), although Palestinian would have East Jerusalem as its capital -- yeah, that's incoherent. Of course, Israel would not be required to recognize that Palestinians were robbed of their land in 1948 and 1967. The refugees would gain neither the right of return nor compensation.

To quote the official document: "The State of Israel and the United States do not believe the State of Israel is legally bound to provide the Palestinians with 100 percent of pre-1967 territory (a belief that is consistent with United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 [WRONG!]). This Vision is a fair compromise [sic], and contemplates a Palestinian state that encompasses territory reasonably comparable in size to the territory of the West Bank and Gaza pre-1967."

But the Palestinians and much of the world believe, with good grounds, exactly what the "State of Israel and the United States do not believe" about the land that Israel conquered by war. The International Court of Justice nearly 20 years ago declared the occupation of the territories and the Jewish settlements illegal.

As for the size of the proposed Palestinian "state," Yuma Patel of Mondoweiss commented, "While Trump boasted that his plan would promise a contiguous Palestinian state, doubled in size from its current form, the 'conceptual map' released by his administration shows a fragmented and dwindling territory, connected by a series of proposed bridges and tunnels." (Again, look at the "conceptual map.")

Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump's shameless team of zealous Jewish nationalist-chauvinists, led by son-in-law Jared Kushner, have conspired to keep the Palestinians under the thumb of the so-called state of the Jewish people. That is intolerable.

As outrageous as Trump's diktat is for its details, we should not overlook Trump's presumptuousness in thinking it is his place to come up with a plan to settle the conflict between Palestine and Israel. It is not his place. A settlement is to be negotiated between the parties -- without the American and Israel condescension that is always directed at the Palestinians, as though any discussion of their predicament is a favor to them for which they should be eternally grateful. In fact, bona fide negotiations would begin with an Israel apology to the Palestinians for the massive land theft and oppression it has perpetrated over so many decades.

Trump, who is unable even to disguise his contempt for the Palestinians, will be responsible for the tragedy that the future surely holds.

The Stable Genius Is Good at Names

So, Trump wants to add Middle Eastern nations (so far unspecified) to NATO so that the alliance can be more involved in the region. We need another obligation to go to war there like a hole in the head. That's very peculiar for a Putin marionette who supposedly dislikes NATO, which by the way has grown already during his tenure. One always proposes larger missions for useless organizations. Such is the incoherence we've come to expect for the 45th occupant of the White House.

According to Politico, Trump said to reporters while describing in a call with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

I think that NATO should be expanded, and we should include the Middle East. Absolutely ... because this is an international problem.... And we can come home, or largely come home and use NATO. It’s an international problem. We caught ISIS. We did Europe a big favor.

So, I have actually said that I think the scope of NATO should be increased. And they should be looking for ISIS. We will help. But right now the burden is on us, and that has not been fair.

He went on:

NATO, right, and then you have M-E, Middle East. You call it NATO-ME. What a beautiful name. I'm good at names.

No, uh, if you add the two words, Middle East, at the end of it, because that's a big problem. That’s a big source of problems. And NATO-ME, doesn’t that work beautifully, Jon? "NATO" plus "ME."

NATO-ME -- as though America hasn't done enough damage in the region. This is our "stable genius" at work in the White House. Heaven help us.

Presidential War Power

"It is, however, insane and intolerable that peace depends on the restraint of the Islamic Republic and an American president given to rage-tweeting war-crime threats," the Cato Institute's Gene Healy, who studies presidential power, writes in "Trump the Decider."

"No one fallible human being should be entrusted with the war powers now vested in the presidency. Now, more than ever, Congress needs to do everything in its power to reclaim its authority over war and peace."

By what authority did Trump order the drone-assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and key Iraqi militia commanders in Iraq, all former allies in the fight against ISIS? Writes Healy:

For now, the official rationale is classified. In terms of public justification, all we have is some hand-waving by Trump’s national security adviser about the president’s "constitutional authorities as commander in chief to defend our nation" and the 17-year old Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq (2002 AUMF). Neither comes close to vesting the president with the power to set off a whole new war.

The 2002 AUMF authorizes the president to use military force in order to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and enforce various UN resolutions "regarding Iraq." Unless "45" is going to break out the presidential sharpie and change the "q"s to "n"s, that’s not going to cut it. Neither will the 2001 AUMF, as I’ve explained at length elsewhere (See: "Repeal Old AUMFs and Salt the Earth").

Healy disposes of the "self-defense" rationale for Trump's act of war without a congressional declaration of war. I'd only add that if no US troops were in Iraq, they would not be subject to attack by anyone there.

The Grammar of the Soleimani Assassination

By now we've heard enough official explanations of Trump's assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and others to realize they are all nonsense. (And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now admits it.) Trump killed Soleimani because, egged on by his unsavory friends Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has it in for Iran. So when the opportunity to pull off the murder-by-drone came along, he took it. It's not as though he thought he needed a special justification. It's good to be the king -- er, president.

Most official explanations have entailed some sort of threat to US military or diplomatic personnel, "interests," or "assets." And sometimes one US official has had no idea what another is talking about. Trump said four embassies were threatened, but his secretary of defense said that was news to him. Other explanations tie the killings to the breach of the US embassy in Baghdad that occurred after Iran and the US had exchanged strikes in Iraq that took the lives of 25 Iraqis and one American. In other words, it was retribution not prevention. (Killing Iran's top general while on a peace mission to Iraq seems, let's say, disproportionate to the temporary embassy breach in which no one was killed or injured.)

If all this is confusing, don't worry about it: Trump says none of it matters.

But I want to focus on the the initial claim, namely, that Soleimani had been planning "imminent" attacks of some unspecified nature. This, by the way, is debunked by an NBC report that the assassination was planned seven months ago. But we'll let that go right now.

Since no such attacks occurred, we are entitled to dismiss Trump's claim. Had attacks been imminent, why would anyone believe that killing Soleimani would stop them? Assassinating him would seem more likely to guarantee them. They were imminent after all.

But let's go a step deeper -- into the grammar, or logic, of all this. I realize that people can use words in differing ways, but I can't shake the thought that if you are planning to do something, the planned action cannot be imminent. If you tell me something is imminent, I take that to mean the planning is over; execution is next. (Pun unintended but noticed.)

So I would advise that the next time the government tells you it's killed someone because he was planning an imminent attack, it's lying.

Drop Everything and Read this Article!

"How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda" by Nathan J. Robinson is an extraordinarily important article. I cannot recommend it too highly. Read it now!

TGIF: Trump’s Escalation Imperils Innocents

While an eerie, surreal calm has fallen over US-Iranian relations, I wouldn’t assume we’re out of the woods yet. Trump had no reason to be confident that Iran’s response to his most recent escalation of violence would be little more than symbolic. Although he’s accepted that response more or less passively for now, with Trump, things can turn on a dime. Who can tell what determines his mood at any given time?

Contemplating Trump’s January 3 escalation of the previously relatively low-level conflict with Iran, one might be struck by how casually the US government (and others of course) treat innocent bystanders. That was among my first thoughts on hearing of the Trump-ordered drone assassinations of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani, Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and others in Iraq.

By innocent bystanders, I don’t mean the commander of Iran’s Quds Force or the leaders of Iraq’s Shi’ite militias, which are part of the Iraqi security establishment, all of whom were allies of US forces in the fight against the Islamic State. (Remember the Islamic State, don’t you?, which the US had fertilized the ground for by declaring open season on Syria’s ruler and Iranian ally Assad?) I take as a given that no one among the rulers and military leaders of countries in the Middle East has clean hands. The same can be said for the rulers and military leaders from powers outside the Middle East that have intervened in the region. The case for nonintervention has never depended on the presence of good guys in any particular conflict. That case stands  even when the targeted figures have been less than discriminating about whom they order shot. Interventionism is based simply on 1) the wisdom of keeping “one’s own” government on as tight a leash as possible and 2) the knowledge that the law of unintended horrific consequence is always in effect. After all we’ve lived through since 2001 -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, among others -- must we really be reminded of this?

By innocent life I’m also not even referring to American military and diplomatic personnel. Americans in Iraq may indeed be killed, injured, and captured as a result of Trump’s assassinations, but they are hardly innocent. On the contrary, they are there because Bush II ordered an invasion force into Iraq and his successors have carried on the operation and have extended it beyond Iraq. Absent that program (or something equally insane), we would not now be at this juncture.

No, the innocent lives I’m talking about are Iraqi and Iranian (among others) -- lives that Americans have been treating like garbage for years: the lives, that is, of foreigners. I realize that for many, and maybe most, Americans, foreign lives don’t rank high on their list of concerns. It’s the prerogative of history’s presumed chosen nation to put itself first and only, and indeed it has. You’ll often hear how many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq (or Vietnam), but rarely how many Afghans and Iraqis (or Vietnamese) were murdered by Americans. Nor will you hear how America’s economic warfare against Iranians and others have cost countless lives because of its effect on food and medical supplies.

So my thoughts are with the overlooked innocent foreign lives that are on the line. Consider their predicament of powerlessness: they won’t even be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election. (Not that the one “cherished” vote that each American 18 and older possesses is worth terribly much.) I’m beginning to see why foreigners might want to “intervene” in American elections: it’s so easy for them to be on the receiving end of America’s lethal militarist imperial foreign policy; they certainly have an interest in the outcome of US presidential elections. The only country to blame for providing an incentive for foreign election intervention is the United States itself. 

The threat to innocent Iranians from a war with the US -- whatever form it may take -- doesn’t take much imagination. One need only look up the US record of civilians deaths in the region and beyond to see what I mean.

But let’s not overlook the potential Iraqi victims. After all, Trump had the arrogance to assassinate the Iranian Soleimani on “friendly” Iraqi soil, and Iran’s missile response (though it apparently was bloodless) also occurred there. The battleground, if it eventuates, could mainly be in Iraq. (But let’s not forget Syria.)

By the way, Soleimani flew to Iraq after Trump had urged the Iraqis to facilitate a de-escalation of tensions between Iran and US best buddy Saudi Arabia. Soleimani had flown openly to Iraq’s international airport to deliver his response to a Saudi proposal at a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. That’s when he was killed by the American drone strike ordered by Trump. Who says? Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi does.

Thus did Trump add dishonor to murder.

With the killing of the top Iranian military/political operative and Iraqi militia leaders -- again, all of them US allies against the Islamic State -- fragile Iraq could spin out of control, with grave consequences for regular innocent Iraqis, Shi’ite and Sunni. Iraq is mostly Shi’ite, of course, but it has pro-Iranian and not-so-pro-Iranian factions, not to mention Sunni Arab and Kurdish populations. How much influence Iran should have in Iraq’s internal affairs is a contentious matter there. (Since 2003 the US strangely has favored the pro-Iranian factions over their more nationalist rivals.) If Trump’s lethal strike ignites a civil war, no doubt he’ll be safe and sound at Mar-a-Lago or in the White House. So it’s no big deal to him. Small comfort for the bystanders thousands of miles away.

But even if the strike ends up uniting Iraqis against the US presence, the results could still be deadly to bystanders as the cycle of violence intensifies. Moreover, as veteran war correspondent Patrick Cockburn points out, with the shift in US attention from the remnants of ISIS to the Iraqi Shi’ites and Iran, “The biggest cheer in Iraq after the US drone strike [that killed Soleimani et al.] will have come from ISIS commanders in their isolated bolt-holes in the desert and mountains of Iraq and Syria.”
Sure, some American military and diplomatic personnel may bite the dust too, but that would just give Trump another pretext to order his military into heroic action. So no big deal. He’ll be adored at rallies, and maybe he’ll throw in a photo op with a Gold Star family or two.

I’m not worried about Trump. I worry for the innocent bystanders.

TGIF -- The Goal Is Freedom -- appears occasionally on Fridays.

About that Air Base in Iraq

After the Iraqi parliament (sans Sunni and Kurdish members) voted to oust US troops from Iraq, Trump said, "We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before, ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame. We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”

Trump threatens economic warfare as casually as other people announce their intention to go shopping. We couldn't count the number of times he's done so. At any rate, it seems like a strange way to treat a presumed friend that the US government created. What's a few more miserable Arabs anyway?

As for demanding money "back" for the airbase, that is even more bizarre. The US government didn't buy the base for the Iraqis; it was for the American power elite and military-industrial complex. Were Iraqis free to reject it when the base was first proposed? The US government made a risky "entrepreneurial" decision when it built the base, so if access is denied, well, tough luck. It was an "investment" gone bad. You know about such things, don't you, Mr. Trump?