Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.
—R. Kipling, The Naulahka
“Here we go, again…”
–R. Charles
Once upon a time, there was a president of the United States, home of all that is good and true. But in spite of presiding over all that goodness and truthiness, the leader was troubled: his approval ratings were circling the drain. And so he began to regale his subjects with details of an evil dictator in the Middle East, who had used chemical weapons on his own people. He began to beat the drums of war, proclaiming the dictator must be dethroned. His minions began to strum the strings of fear with details of frightful weapons until the people cried (almost) as one, “this will not stand!” And so began the war in Iraq.
Had you there for a moment, didn’t we? Well, as the Hog would have thought we could have told you, ol’ Rud got it right about hustling the East. However, he had nothing on Brother Ray. The son of a Drumpf in the White House, obviously counting on the non-existent memory of the American people, is following the time-honored stratagem of creating a foreign diversion to distract us from his domestic troubles. Only thing is, who’da thunk it would have happened less than three months in? Truth to tell, not even this swinish sultan of cynicism.
It was probably inevitable. Let’s see, so far, Flynn resigns, his putative successor declines, Sessions recuses, Nunes recuses, Bannon is “banished” from the NSC, health insurance bill fails, Mexican wall looks more like a pipe dream, investigators are closing in on Russian connections…what’s a president to do? Nothing a few (well, okay, 59) cruise missiles lobbed into that Eden we call Syria can’t take care of. The hounds are at the door, so let’s stir up a hornets’ nest. Talk about your brilliant foreign-policy ideas.
But guess it wasn’t enough to commit an act of war against the Middle Eastern country. UN envoy Nikki Haley declared the US is prepared to do even more. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, signaling a flip-flop from Trump’s previous declarations that the US would not be pulled into the Syrian civil war, now says there is “no room for [Syrian President Bashar Assad] to govern the Syrian people.” And Recep Erdogan, the president of Turkey, and another dictator with significant domestic trouble, expressed the hope that Trump would take military action.
Ah, but you say, what about Assad’s gas attack on the helpless civilians? We must start with the immutable principle that nothing this administration says is to be believed. Nothing. For example, we are told the gas contained sarin, a powerful neurotoxin. The source of this information? Um, well, it’s Turkey. Whose president has sort of an ax to grind. The Hog’s sources tell him that if indeed sarin was used, it would be extremely hazardous for the first responders to be handling bodies, survivors, and even their clothing with bare hands. But just the mention of sarin conjures up images of, oh, WMDs!! To hell with the truth, man, there is a dictator to be dealt with! And then there’s Assad…
Scott Adams, who writes the Dilbert comic strip, points out how convenient it is for the administration that Assad seemingly chose this moment to commit suicide by Trump. But you gotta hand it to DT, who is a master of misdirection. Something else happened yesterday that was headline-worthy, but was relegated to the back pages by the missile attack. Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and lead attack dog for the White House, recused himself from the Russia investigation. The “investigator” became the investigated for, get this, illegal disclosures of classified information. (“House Intelligence Committee:” there’s Hog’s oxymoron of the day). We may not have hit the mother lode of irony yet, but we’re surely getting close. Trump and his fellow travelers hounded Hilary Clinton about her casual handling of classified information. Turns out that’s only a problem when the other fellow (or woman) did it.
But the beating drums of war overshadowed the Nunes news. Newnes nus? Whatever. Coinkydink? You decide. At any rate, the Hog bets nothing as rash as a missile attack would have happened were Steve Bannon still in charge of the NSC. Ahem.
Lost in all the patriotic blather is the fact that this direct attack on Syria fundamentally changes the conflict from a proxy war between the US and Russia to a more direct conflict involving America. We already have hundreds of boots on the ground (as “advisors”) in Syria. Sound familiar? Can you say Vietnam? There are doubtless more than a few Russian boots tramping around too. Both of us are staging air strikes (which, by the way, probably kill more civilians every day than died in the gas incident). And both are heavily invested in supporting various factions in a war that has already lasted six years.
Mr. America First has taken less than three months to lead us to the brink of another Middle Eastern war. And we are now indisputably closer to armed conflict with Russia, which might have a few nukes lying around. Worst of all, this adventurism takes place at a time when North Korea, a nuclear power with its own domestic problems (including an unhinged authoritarian leader, where have we seen this before) is rattling the nuclear saber across the Pacific. In response, the newly Bannon-less NSC has presented Trump with options that include putting American nukes in South Korea, or killing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un! I guess once you get into dictator-killing mode, you might as well go whole hog, so to speak.
And over in Moscow, there is another dictator waiting, one who in his own right has slaughtered and murdered quite a few. Let’s get busy, America! The authoritarian regimes are out there proliferating while we are obsessing over Kardashian mammaries! Where are our priorities?
We can be sure that neither the Israelis nor the Japanese are sleeping any easier over these developments. Nor should we be. Edging ever closer to that mother lode, Trump proclaimed that the missile assault was part of an effort “to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria.” Ah, yes, let’s have another war to end all wars. Or as the Army major said in 1968, “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Maybe that’s going to be the strategy in Syria.
Worth remembering in this pea soup fog of lies and distortion is that all it took to trigger World War I was the assassination of a single Austrian Archduke by a nationalist from Serbia, part of the Balkans, another garden spot. What do we think might happen as a result of, say, a nuclear exchange between North and South Korea? Here’s a hint: Einstein said something like this: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Why, oh why are we mucking about in these godforsaken places? The Hog refers the gentle reader back to a previous blog, in which it was suggested that contrary to the presidential protestations, there is a problem “down there.” And we don’t mean Australia. Both Trump and Pooty show serious signs of insecurity about their respective equipment, and probably with good reason: even with tweezers and a microscope, you’d be lucky to come up with one good johnson between them (although, based on Trump’s loving pro-Putin pronouncements, that’s likely where you’d find it: between them). The Russian dictator (hear that Don? Dictator!) is constantly running around half-naked, doing manly things. And Trump wears his garish red tie a foot too long, stylishly keeping his suit jacket open to display this bright crimson phallic symbol draped down to his crotch.
George Carlin said it: “To me, war is nothing but a whole lot of prick-waving…War is just a lot of men standing around in a field waving their pricks at one another…It’s called dick fear.” Unfortunately for us, our crotch-grabbing president seems to have embraced “the bigger dick foreign policy theory,” and there are plenty of other dangerous men out there who seem more than willing to join the contest to see who is, er, has the bigger dick. And, as with all such contests, we know who’s going to get screwed.