COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY W JAMES ANTLE III IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE (AND QUICKLY REMOVED BY EDITOR)
“A Hawkish Impeachment
“Democrats have inadvertently supplied the template for undermining a future antiwar president”
Sorry, I see nothing genuinely anti-war about Trump.
I wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and I am someone who closely follows world affairs through many information sources.
In the beginning, despite the bad taste his personality left in the mouth, I supported him for exactly the reasons of decreasing war and improving relations with Russia.
He has done nothing worth mentioning towards either goal.
I know he has a powerful establishment warning and telling him not to do this or that, but still he makes himself out as tough guy, a rather foul-mouthed one, one who can stand up to anyone, so where are his results?
He has given away, with no legal authority, a good part of Palestine to the most war-mongering government on earth.
He has started new severe hostilities with the government of Iran, a government which threatened no one and is widely known to have met its every obligation under the nuclear agreement Trump arbitrarily tore up, an act again in favor of the world’s most belligerent government.
He has launched war-like sanctions against Iran, causing its innocent people great deprivation and harm, and he accompanied these with serious military threats – the movement of fleets and nuclear bombers – and he even used the indefensible word, “obliterate,” towards Iran’s 80 million people.
He appointed some of the most belligerent men in America to high posts – Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo – from which they did little but threaten and lie.
He has almost turned sanctions and tariffs into a new form of war.
He overthrew an elected government in Bolivia and tried exactly the same in Venezuela, causing great harm to millions of ordinary citizens. He has also stolen Venezuela’s assets abroad, just as he’s stolen Syria’s oil, and laid a deadly blockade causing much hardship for millions.
He completely supports the government of Israel’s unrelenting oppression of millions of Palestinians, never saying a word about matters like the outright ambush killing of several hundred in Gaza.
He loyally supports a murderer Crown Prince. His own CIA Director told him the Prince was responsible for Khashoggi’s grisly murder, but Trump just smiles broadly and is photographed shaking hands with the man, and sells him literally tens of billions of dollars in weapons, certainly a tool for peace in the region, as we see with the killing of thousands of women and children in Yemen.
The favored Prince has also been busy on the home front with violent attacks on Shia Muslim minorities and a huge increase in executions, including even the execution of teenagers.
Trump never says a word against the mass killer running Egypt either. It just happens that Israel is rather fond of Field Marshall el Sisi just as it is of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. Israel’s government likes Arab neighbors who suppress their people.
Trump’s antics in Syria have been close to absurd. He bombed people a couple of times on the basis of clearly falsified chemical-weapons incidents. He withdrew in the northeast only to reoccupy with armored strength Syria’s oil fields, making sophomoric jokes about liking to steal oil. Of course, what he’s really doing is accommodating Israel yet again, to weaken Syria for its postwar rebuilding.
The War in Afghanistan has been a disgrace from the beginning, and Trump still has yet to do one real thing to end it. He talks of a withdrawal, but this reportedly involves a rather small fraction of the American troops there who have done nothing but kill peasants for eighteen years. It’s a cheap gimmick for his election. Not a genuine policy.
Trump of course has threatened many others, from North Korea to Nicaragua and Cuba.
He has continued running tanks up against the Russian border in Europe. He destroyed the INF Treaty, an important part of the international architecture for peace in Europe. He has worked tirelessly to militarize space with the creation of a new branch of America’s military, the so-called Space Force.
This is an anti-war President? You sure could have fooled me.
He has been killing and bombing and threatening and sanctioning for all of his three years. Indeed, with sanctions, he has almost created a new form of hybrid warfare, and he’s using it against almost everyone, traditional friends and opponents, creating animosities and instabilities that could easily break out into new wars.
On the nature of Trump's impeachment, see this just posted:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/12/21/john-chuckman-comment-further-thoughts-on-trumps-impeachment-and-the-extreme-divisions-now-characterizing-american-society/
