The
Trumpster Sends The GOP/Neocon Establishment To The
Dumpster
By David
Stockman
March 04,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Contra
Corner"
-
Wow. Super
Tuesday was an earthquake, and not just because
Donald Trump ran the tables. The best thing was the
complete drubbing and humiliation that voters all
over America handed to the little Napoleon from
Florida, Marco Rubio.
So doing,
the voters began the process of ridding the nation
of the GOP War Party and its neocon claque of rabid
interventionists. They have held sway for nearly
three decades in the Imperial City and the
consequences have been deplorable.
It goes all
the way back to the collapse of the old Soviet Union
and the elder Bush’s historically foolish decision
to invade the Persian Gulf in February 1991. The
latter stopped dead in its tracks the first genuine
opportunity for peace the people of the world had
been afforded since August 1914.
Instead,
it reprieved the fading remnants of the
military-industrial-congressional complex, the
neocon interventionist camp and Washington’s legions
of cold war apparatchiks. All of the foregoing would
have been otherwise consigned to the dust bin of
history.
Yet at that
crucial inflection point there was absolutely
nothing at stake with respect to the safety and
security of the American people in the petty quarrel
between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait.
That spate,
in fact, was over directional drilling rights in the
Rumaila oilfield which straddled their respective
borders. Yet these disputed borders had no
historical legitimacy whatsoever. Kuwait was a just
a bank account with a seat in the UN, which had
been created by the British only in 1899 for obscure
reasons of imperial maneuver. Likewise, the
boundaries of Iraq had been drawn with a straight
ruler in 1916 by British and French diplomats in the
process of splitting up the loot from the fall of
the Ottoman Empire.
As it
happened, Saddam claimed that the Emir of Kuwait,
who could never stop stuffing his unspeakably
opulent royal domain with more petro dollars, had
stolen $10 billion worth of oil from Iraq’s side of
the field while Saddam was savaging the
Iranians during his unprovoked but Washington
supported 1980s invasion. At the same time, Hussein
had borrowed upwards of $50 billion from Kuwait, the
Saudis and the UAE to fund his barbaric attacks on
the Iranians and now the sheiks wanted their
money back.
At the end
of the day, Washington sent 500,000 US troops to the
Gulf in order to function as bad debt collectors for
three regimes that are the very embodiment of
tyranny, corruption, greed and religious fanaticism.
They
have been the fount and exporter of Wahhabi
fanaticism and have thereby fostered the scourge of
jihadi violence throughout the region. And it
was the monumental stupidity of putting American
(crusader) boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia that
actually gave rise to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the
tragedy of 9/11, the invasion and occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act and domestic
surveillance state and all the rest of the War Party
follies which have followed.
Worse
still, George H.W. Bush’s stupid little war
corrupted the very political soul and modus
operandi of Washington. What should have been a
political contest over which party and prospective
leader could best lead a revived 1920s
style campaign for world disarmament was mutated
into a wave of exceptionalist jingoism about how
best to impose American hegemony on any nation or
force on the planet that refused compliance with
Washington’s designs and dictates.
And most
certainly, this lamentable turn to the War Party’s
disastrous reign had nothing to do with oil security
or economic prosperity in America. The cure for high
oil orices is always and everywhere high oil prices,
not the Fifth Fleet.
Indeed, as
the so-called OPEC cartel crumbles into pitiful
impotence and cacophony and as the world oil glut
drives prices eventually back into the teens, there
can no longer be any dispute. The blazing oilfields
of Kuwait in 1991 had nothing to do with domestic
oil security and prosperity, and everything to do
with the rise of a virulent militarism and
imperialism that has drastically undermined national
security.
It is the
bombs, drones, cruise missiles and brutal
occupations of Muslim lands unleashed by the War
Party that has actually fostered the massive
blowback and radical jidhadism rampant today
in the middle east and beyond.
Indeed,
prior to 1991 Bin Laden and his mujahedeen, who had
been trained and armed by the CIA and heralded in
the west for their help in defeating
purportedly godless communism in Afghanistan, had
not declaimed against American liberty, opulence and
decadence. They did not come to attack our way of
life as the neocon propagandists have so speciously
claimed.
In fact,
the ever destructive Dick Cheney was the proximate
cause. In an act of monumental foolishness, it was
he who persuaded the Saudi King to permit stationing
of US troops on Arabian soil, thereby triggering a
revolt against the House of Saud by Bin Laden
and his Mujahedeen. The latter were then forced into
exile by the Saudi government in April 1991 and soon
metastasized into the fiendish scourge of al-Qaeda.
Misguided
and despicable as their attack was, it was motivated
by revenge and religious fanaticism that had never
previously been directed against the American
people. That is, not until the Washington War Party
decided to intervene in the Persian Gulf in 1991.
Yes, the
wholly different Shiite branch of Islam centered in
Iran had a grievance, too. But that wasn’t
about America’s liberties and libertine ways of
life, either. It was about the left over liability
from Washington’s misguided cold war interventions
and, specifically, the 1953 CIA coup that installed
the brutal and larcenous Shah on the Peacock Throne.
The
whole Persian nation had deep grievances about that
colossal injustice—-a grievance that was
wantonly amplified in the 1980s by Washington’s
overt assistance to Saddam Hussein. Via
the CIA’s satellite reconnaissance, Washington had
actually helped him unleash heinous chemical warfare
attacks on Iranian forces, including essentially
unarmed young boys who had been sent to the battle
front as cannon fodder.
Still, with
the election of Rafsanjani in 1989 there was every
opportunity to repair this historical transgression
and normalize relations with Tehran. In fact, in the
early days the Bush state department was well on the
way to exactly that. But once the CNN war games in
the gulf put the neocons back in the saddle the door
was slammed shut by Washington, not the Iranians.
Indeed at
that very time, the re-ascendant neocons explicitly
choose to demonize the Iranian regime as a surrogate
enemy to replace the defunct Kremlin commissars. Two
of the most despicable actors in the post-1991
neocon takeover of the GOP—-Dick Cheney
and Paul Wolfowitz——actually penned a secret
document outlining the spurious anti-Iranian
campaign which soon congealed into a full-blown war
myth.
To wit,
that the Iranian’s were hell bent on obtaining
nuclear weapons and had become an implacable foe of
America and fountain of state sponsored terrorism.
But there never was an Iranian nuclear weapons
program, as the 2007 National Intelligence Estimates
by 16 US security agencies documented, and the
recent IAEA inspection report confirmed.
Not long
thereafter in 1996, these same neocon
warmongers produced for newly elected Israeli prime
minister, Bibi Netanyahu, the infamous document
called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy For
Securing The Realm”.
Whether he
immediately signed off an all of its sweeping plans
for junking the Oslo Accords and launching regime
change initiatives against the Baathist regimes in
Iraq and Syria is a matter of historical debate. But
there can be no doubt that shortly thereafter this
manifesto became the operative policy of the
Netanyahu government and especially its virulent
campaign to demonize Iran as an existential threat
to Israel. And that when the younger Bush took
office and brought the whole posse of neocons back
into power, it became Washington’s official policy,
as well.
After 9/11
the dual War Party of Washington and Tel Aviv was
off to the races and the US government began its
tumble toward $19 trillion of national debt and an
eventual fiscal calamity. That’s because the neocon
War Party sucked the old time religion of fiscal
rectitude and monetary orthodoxy right out of the
GOP in the name of funding what has in truth become
a trillion dollar per year Warfare State.
There were
several crucial moments along the way—–the first
being the sacking of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill
by the White House praetorian guard led by Karl
Rove. His sin was having the audacity to say that
the Afghan and Iraqi wars were going to cost
trillions, and that stiff tax increases and painful
entitlements cuts were the only way to make ends
meet.
Right then
and there the GOP was stripped of any fiscal
virginity that had survived the Reagan era of triple
digit deficits. Right on cue the contemptible Dick
Cheney was quick to claim that Reagan proved
“deficits don’t matter”, meaning from that point
forward whatever it took to fund the war machine
trumped any flickering Republican folk memories of
fiscal prudence.
The great
Dwight Eisenhower left office at the height of the
cold war in 1961, warning the American public about
the insatiable appetites for budgets and war of the
military industrial complex. At the same time,
however, his final budget attested to his
conviction that $450 billion in today’s purchasing
power (2015 $) was enough to fund the Pentagon,
foreign aid and security assistance and the needs of
veterans of past wars.
Thanks to
the GOP War Party and neocons we are spending more
than double that amount—upwards of $900 billion—–for
those same purposes today. Yet unlike the nuclear
threat posed by the Soviet Union at the peak of its
industrial vigor, we no longer have any industrial
state enemy left on the planet; we have
appropriately been fired as the world’s policeman
and have no need for Washington’s far flung imperium
of bases and naval and air power projection; and
would not even be confronted with the domestic
policing challenges posed by highly limited and
episodic homeland terrorist tempests had Washington
not turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen,
Somalia and others into failed states and economic
rubble.
The Bush
era War Party also committed an even more lamentable
error in the midst of all of its foreign policy
triumphalism and its utter neglect of the GOP’s
actual purpose to function as an advocate for sound
money and free markets in the governance process
of our two party democracy. Namely, it appointed Ben
Bernanke, an avowed Keynesian and big government
statist who had loudly proclaimed in favor of
“helicopter money”, to a Federal Reserve system that
was already on the verge of an economic coup d’état
led by the unfaithful Alan Greenspan.
That coup
was made complete by the loathsome bailout of Wall
Street during the 2008 financial crisis. And the
latter had, in turn, been a consequence of
the massive speculation and debt build-up that had
been enabled by the Fed’s own policies during the
prior decade and one-half.
Now after
$3.5 trillion of heedless money printing and 86
months of ZIRP, Wall Street has been transformed
into an unstable, dangerous casino. Honest price
discovery in the capital and money markets no longer
exists, nor has productive capital been flowing into
real investments in efficiency and growth.
Instead, the C-suites of corporate America have been
transformed into stock trading rooms where business
balance sheets have been hocked to the tune of
trillions in cheap debt in order to fund stock
buybacks, LBOs and M&A deals designed to goose stock
prices and the value of top executive options.
Indeed, the
Fed’s unconscionable inflation of the third massive
financial bubble of this century has showered
speculators and the 1% with unspeakable financial
windfalls that are fast creating not only an
inevitable thundering financial meltdown, but, also,
a virulent populist backlash. The Eccles Building
was where the “Bern” that is roiling the electorate
was actually midwifed.
And
probably even the far greater political tremblor
represented by The Donald, as well.
Yes, as a
libertarian I shudder at the prospect of a man on a
white horse heading for the White House, as Donald
Trump surely is. His rank demoguery and poisonous
rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, refugees, women,
domestic victims of police repression and the spy
state and countless more are flat-out contemptible.
And the idea of building a horizontal version of
Trump Towers on the Rio Grande is just plain nuts.
But here’s
the thing. While spending a lifetime as a real
estate speculator and self-created celebrity, The
Donald apparently did not have time to get
mis-educated by the Council On Foreign Relations or
to hob knob with the GOP inner circle in Washington
and the special interest group racketeers they
coddle.
So even as
The Donald’s election would bring on a thundering
financial crash on Wall Street and political
upheaval in Washington—–the truth is that’s going to
happen anyway. Look at the hideous mess that US
policy has created in Syria or the incendiary corner
into which the Fed has backed itself or the fiscal
projections that show we will be back into trillion
dollar annual deficits as the recession already
underway reaches full force. The jig is well and
truly up.
But a
nation tumbling into financial and fiscal crisis
will welcome the War Party purge that Trump would
surely undertake. He didn’t allow the self-serving
busy-bodies and fools who inhabit the Council on
Foreign Relations to dupe him into believing that
Putin is a horrible threat; or that the real estate
on the eastern edge of the non-state of the Ukraine,
which has always been either a de jure or de facto
part of Russia, was any of our business.
Likewise, he has gotten it totally right
with respect to the sectarian and tribal wars of
Syria and Iraq and Hillary’s feckless destruction of
a stable regime in Libya.
Even his
bombast about Obama’s “bad deal” with Iran doesn’t
go much beyond Trump’s ridiculous claim that they
are getting a $150 billion reward. In fact, it was
their money; we stole it, and by the time of the
next election they will have it released anyway.
Besides,
unlike the boy Senator from Florida who wants to be
President so he can play with guns, tanks, ships and
bombs, The Donald has indicated no intention of
tearing up the agreement on day one in office.
Most
importantly, The Donald has essentially proclaimed
the obvious. Namely, that the cold war is over and
that the American taxpayers have no
business subsidizing obsolete relics like NATO and
ground forces in South Korea and Japan.
At the end of the day, the reason
that the neocons are apoplectic is that Trump would
restore the 1991 status quo ante. The nation’s
self-proclaimed greatest deal-maker might even take
a leaf out of Warren G. Harding’s playbook and
negotiate sweeping disarmament agreements in a world
where governments everywhere are on the verge of
fiscal bankruptcy.
He might
also come down with wrathful indignation on the Fed
if its dares push toward the criminal zone of
negative interest rates. As far as I know, The
Donald was never mis-educated by the Keynesian
swells at Brookings, either. No plain old
businessman would ever fall for the sophistry and
crank monetary theories that are now ascendant in
the Eccles Building.
When it
comes to the nation’s current economic
wreckers-in-chief, Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer,
he might even dust off on day one the skills he
honed during his ten year stint on the Apprentice.
Indeed, the
sound of “your fired!” in that context would echo
with high approbation down the pages of history.
Worse
things could surely happen.
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