A Sectarian War
In other words, the US and its Sunni Arab allies launched a sectarian war against the Alawite-backed Syrian regime with the full knowledge that an Al Qaeda state in eastern Syria might well be the result. Yet now they blame Assad for defending himself against the Salafist onslaught and Russia for helping him. It is a case of launching a neo-medieval sectarian war and then crying foul when the other side dares to fight back.
One would think that cooler heads might inject a note of sanity before things get completely out of hand. But the opposite seems to be the case. The more temperatures rise, the more congressmen, journalists, think-tank experts, and other hangers-on conclude that it is advantageous to jump on the bandwagon and drive passions up even more. Pro-war frenzy leads to more of the same. The more reason is needed, the scarcer it becomes.
Indeed, it sometimes seems that the only halfway sane person left in Washington is Donald Trump, who, according to a strange report in Sunday's Washington Post, is fighting a desperate rear-guard action against neocons bent on ratcheting up tensions to ever higher levels.
Reporters Greg Jaffe, John Hudson, and Philip Rucker described a bizarre scene at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Florida resort last month in which aides were only able to persuade the president to expel 60 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Skripal poisoning by promising him that allies would toss out an equal number in Europe. When France and Germany only expelled four Russians each, Trump felt double-crossed. "I don't care about the total," he reportedly screamed when the aides tried to explain that the number expelled by all European nations would eventually approach the U.S. figure. "There were curse words," one official told the Post, "a lot of curse words."
Similarly, when Congress approved a new round of anti-Russian sanctions in July, the article says it took aides four days to persuade Trump to sign the bill even though it had cleared with a veto-proof majority that made it a virtual fait accompli. The Post said the same thing occurred when aides tried to convince him to sell antitank missiles to the Ukraine for use against pro-Russian separatists. "Why is this our problem?" he reportedly asked. "Why not let the Europeans deal with Ukraine?" When CIA Director Mike Pompeo, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis added their voices to the chorus, all the president could do was whine, "I just want peace."
Everyone Agreed -- Except Trump
Of course, when Donald Trump is the sole remaining voice of reason, then we're really in trouble. The infighting escalated even further on Monday after Haley vowed to slap still more sanctions on Russia for the crime of backing Assad. "They have done nothing but brutalize their people and destroy their land, all in the name of power," she said of the Baathists on CBS News' "Face the Nation." So Russia would have to pay the price.
Everyone agreed, Republicans, Democrats, and the corporate media -- everyone, that is, except Trump. Defying his neocon captors, he undercut Haley by declaring that sanctions would not be forthcoming after all. White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders was left to gamely assert that "the president has been clear that he's going to be tough on Russia, but at the same time he'd still like to have a good relationship with them."
Times columnist Michelle Goldberg was so flabbergasted by Trump's about-face that she wondered whether reports that Putin was using a secret "pee tape" to force him into line might not be true after all.
But of course -- who else would want an end to hostilities with Russia other than a crazy man or someone under duress? War with a nuclear power is something that no sane person really wants to avoid, right?
U.S. foreign policy is caught in a powerful contradiction. A military showdown with a fellow nuclear power is unthinkable. Yet pausing for a moment to consider where all this madness is leading is out of the question. Two forces are colliding, war on one hand and a general inability to think things through in a clear-headed way on the other.
It's a case of a herd of independent minds stampeding over a cliff -- not because someone is forcing them to, but because they don't know how to stop.
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