By Philip Giraldi

The prize for the truly awful story of the week goes to the appointment of AIPAC monster to head Pentagon planning for the Middle East.

The extension of the nuclear arms agreement between Russia and the United States and the decision to stop directly supporting the war on Yemen may have been the only good news items to come out of Washington last week. The really bad news came when President Joe Biden warned Russia that “the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyber-attacks, poisoning its citizens, are over.” It was an empty threat full of innuendo that virtually guarantees four more years of Russiagate or something like it. It was an odd statement considering that it has been Washington doing all of the provoking during the Donald Trump administration, much of it instigated by Democrats who are still looking for a scapegoat for the defeat of Hillary in 2016.

The mainstream media hasn’t been reporting many second-tier stories because of the still playing out double impeachment saga combined with the lingering debate over who actually won the election. Whether Trump personally incited a riot or something worse depends on one’s point of view, but what is really sad to watch is the efforts being made by a “woke” Democratic Party leadership and a frenzied media to destroy Trump’s life and businesses even though he is no longer in office, a revenge scenario that goes well beyond previous political vendettas. Worse still, the attempts being made to render White House employees and Trump supporters unemployable or even try to send them to jail based on convoluted interpretations of legislation reflects a level of vindictiveness not seen since the Catiline Conspiracy in Republican Rome.

Well, the incident on January 6^th wasn’t exactly a replay of the storming of the Bastille, but as it is all we have it will have to make do. Were those folks wandering around inside the Capitol Building tourists who had gotten separated from their tour guide or were they confused citizens from the Dakotas who had a couple of stamps remaining on their hunting licenses allowing them to bag a Democrat or two? They would have been better advised to set up a couple of feeder bait sites under the Rotunda loaded with Benjamins and the Congress-critters would have arrived in droves. And that guy who stole Nancy Pelosi’s podium only had to announce that he was holding a Black Lives Matter meeting and good old Nancy would have arrived tout suite on her knees with an African kente cloth stole draped around her neck. Alas, we may never know the truth about what actually happened on that fateful day, but the speculation will keep us going for months more.

There is a definite paucity of actual fact-based news that might make sense to a third grader, particularly given the decline in American public education, which now only teaches about the holocaust and racism. Consequently, I have fallen into the habit of saving links to stories during the week and then deciding on the weekend which are worthy of special recognition for being particularly ridiculous.

There were some really absurd articles last week. A particularly fascinating story describes what is going on at the Pentagon, which is frantically sneaking more soldiers into Syria and canceling any reduction in force in Afghanistan until the situation stabilizes, a policy move by Biden that reverses one of the few good things that Trump initiated. Unfortunately, the withdrawal from Afghanistan should take another twenty years or so to finish.

But the really interesting development is the new mission of the U.S. Army, which will soon be halting training and other bellicose activity to ease the transition into a full-time military force dedicated to making sure that everyone observes diversity. It is a long overdue move that the entire nation can be proud of, plus the U.S. will as a result be made safer from the Chinese, Iranian and Russian threats. The tricky part is identifying those soldiers who think racist thoughts, even if they never perform a racist act, because they are guilty of not conforming to “woke world.” They will have to be identified by special trained psychologists before being dishonorably discharged and made unemployable as they are not fit to mix with decent people.

Paul Kersey reports some of the details, how the “Pentagon [has ordered] a ‘stand down’ in [the] next 60 Days” to identify and address the problem of extremists in the military. It should be observed that soldiers who kill civilians are not the extremists in question because killing is what soldiers are supposed to do. It is instead “white people in the U.S. Military who display an insufficient loyalty to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Tolerance. [They] are [the] domestic enemy, and unworthy as individual[s] of defending our nation against the only threat our elite have united to defeat: that, of course, being whiteness.”

And for those apostatizing white supremacist civilians who don’t want to get left out when the diversity train rolls into their town, the Democratic Party is looking into setting up Truth Commissions to make sure that anyone who ever entertained a racist thought or used the “N” word will not be missed.

Make no mistake, an army that really knows what is important is surely great news. It will be an excellent return on the taxpayers’ trillion dollars annual investment, particularly as the Constitution was written by a bunch of slave holders and is no longer worth swearing an oath of allegiance to. But perhaps of more interest to foreign policy wonks is what is going on in some of the other Pentagon offices dedicated to finding new enemies so there will always be a supply of wars to fight after everyone in Afghanistan and Syria is exterminated.

As telling other nations how to behave backed up by the 101^st Airborne division has become a wonderful indoor board game in this age of Coronavirus-19, my favorite article for the past week has to be the news that Honest Joe Biden has appointed yet another Zionist harpy to his team of war planners in an apparent attempt to keep Nuland, Sherman, Haines, Rice, Power and Neuberger company. Her name is Dana Stroul and she will be running the Pentagon’s Middle East Desk, making her the senior policy official focused on that region. Indications are that her eagle eye will be fixed on those major malefactors Iran and Syria.

Stroul has been whisked away from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where she has been the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fellow in the Institute’s Beth and David Geduld Program on Arab Politics. WINEP is the think tank founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in an attempt to demonstrate that hatred of all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East is somehow an American vital interest, so it is perhaps odd to consider that the organization would even allow Arabs to have politics. Stroul had worked at the Pentagon and had also co-chaired the Syria Study Group set up by Congress prior to landing at WINEP.

Stroul, who believes that there is a threat to the U.S. from “Iranian nuclear ambitions and support for terrorist groups throughout the region,” also has had some interesting ideas about what should be done to Syria, some of which was laid out in a final report that was presented to Congress in September 2019 by the Syria Study Group.

The report states that “From the conflict’s beginning in 2011 as a peaceful domestic uprising, experts warned that President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal response was likely to have serious, negative impacts on U.S. interests. Given Syria’s central location in the Middle East, its ruling regime’s ties to terrorist groups and to Iran, and the incompatibility of Assad’s authoritarian rule with the aspirations of the Syrian people, many worried about the conflict spilling over Syria’s borders… The threats the conflict in Syria poses—of terrorism directed against the United States and its allies and partners; of an empowered Iran; of an aggrandized Russia; of large numbers of refugees, displaced persons, and other forms of humanitarian catastrophe; and of the erosion of international norms of war and the Western commitment to them—are sufficiently serious to merit a determined response from the United States. The United States and its allies retain tools to address those threats and the leverage to promote outcomes that are better for American interests than those that would prevail in the absence of U.S. engagement. The United States underestimated Russia’s ability to use Syria as an arena for regional influence. Russia’s intervention, beginning in 2015, accomplished its proximate aim—the preservation of the regime in defiance of U.S. calls for Assad to ‘go’—at a relatively low cost. Russia has enhanced its profile and prestige more broadly in the Middle East.”

One immediately notes the incoherence of the argument being made. To make U.S. presence in Syria palpable to the long-suffering American public, it is necessary to attempt to establish a threat against the United States even though in this case there is none. And the repeated citation of “interests” without credibly explaining what interests might compel invading and occupying a foreign country is completely lacking in any detail. Stroul also several times cites the heavy terrorist threat, ignoring the fact that the existing terrorists are being sustained by Israel and by the United States, while President Bashar al-Assad has the overwhelming support of most of the Syrian people. Reports are that Syrians are returning home after a refugee crisis caused by the United States and its allies. And we all know that the last refuge of a scoundrel is to play the Russian card, which Stroul does, as well as surfacing that perennial demon Iran. U.S. support of Israeli bombing attacks are also just fine in her opinion, even though they are a clear violation of the “international norms of war” that she pretends to defend.

Stroul inevitably supports U.S. retention and what she curiously refers to as “ownership” of the one third of Syria that is “resource rich.” That includes the Syrian oil producing region now occupied by U.S. troops as well as by what she euphemizes as “Syrian Democratic Forces.” She observes that it also includes the country’s best agricultural land, which, if denied to the government in Damascus, could be used as leverage to bring about regime change. Starving Syrians are not Stroul’s concern so she consequently opposes any form of international relief or reconstruction funding for the Syrian people and supports U.S. pressure on international lenders through the worldwide banking system to deny Damascus any money to rebuild.

So, the prize for the truly awful story of the week goes to the appointment of this monster daughter of AIPAC to head Pentagon planning for the Middle East, joining a sterling cast of characters at State Department and in the intelligence community. Also, if one includes the account of a diversified U.S. Army where soldiers will now be encouraged to snitch on each other over privately held views, one has to ask “Can it get any worse?” Judging from Joe Biden’s list of appointments so far, it will, yes it will.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.