Donald Trump, Alone Against All

by Thierry Meyssan

DAMASCUS (SYRIA)

Alone, against his opposition, against his administration and against his allies, President Trump does not seem to be able to fulfil his campaign commitments. Three years after his election, the House of Representatives launched an impeachment procedure against him because he is fighting against the corruption of the Clinton clan.

 

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The polls were wrong in the last US and Australian federal elections. Hillary Clinton was favoured to win at a margin of 85 per cent to Donald Trump's 15 per cent. And Bill Shorten was expected to defeat Scott Morrison.

But what the polls perhaps didn't reveal was that conservative candidates in both countries had captured an unexpected electorate: women.

Hillary Clinton performed poorly among white women because, as some argued, she couldn't emotionally connect to voters.

Bill Shorten also lost women's votes, pushing them towards the Coalition.

Women are swinging elections in the US and Australia in ways analysts have struggled to predict. 

So, what is going on with female voters? Our two recent studies can help explain.

 

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-17/white-married-women-more-likely-t...

 

The simple sexist view could be that many women subconsciouly like macho blokes as the father of their kids...

Bret Stephens' foolish caricature of America only nurses our delusions about 'the good' we've done in the world.

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As for Freedom Man betraying the Kurds, Stephens may not have noticed, but it’s happened before, on multiple occasions. The title of a recent essay by Adam Weinstein in The New Republic could just as well have appeared in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s: “America Is Screwing the Kurds Yet Again.” 

Stephens correctly observes that his Freedom Man anecdote captures what many Americans “like hearing about themselves.” But it has never expressed who we actually are. To nurse such delusions is to falsify history. Doing so serves only to distract from the sequence of events that landed U.S. troops in the chaos of partially dismembered Syria in the first place. 

After 9/11, acting ostensibly pursuant to the idealistic tradition in which Stephens purports to believe, Freedom Man rode into the Middle East with guns blazing. That he meant well goes without saying. Yet in his wake came the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Freedom Man cannot absolve himself of responsibility for the war, pestilence, famine, and death that ensued in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere.

President Trump’s treatment of the Kurds qualifies as both indecent and immoral. Sadly, it’s also very much in keeping with Freedom Man’s habit of deserting “friends” no longer deemed useful. Whenever this occurs, newspaper columnists rush into print decrying the irreparable damage done to American credibility. Such fears always turn out to be overblown, as they will in this instance. 

Yet the issue that cries out for attention is not the danger to which Freedom Man has exposed the Kurds or the damage to American credibility. It’s Freedom Man himself that deserves a fresh look. 

If he ever existed, he has long since become a menace, both to America and to others. Indulging the delusions of journalists like Bret Stephens makes it that much more difficult for Americans to see themselves as they actually are and their country as it actually is. In the meantime, the havoc that Freedom Man commits in our name will continue. 

Andrew Bacevich, TAC’s writer-at-large, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, will appear in January.

It’s going to be a precarious balancing act, but only one nation can possibly help bring stability to the chaos unleashed in Syria by US President Donald Trump. That’s Russia.

Reports of a deal brokered over the weekend by Russia between Syrian government forces and Kurdish militia are a prelude to a wider effort by Moscow to achieve full peace in the war-torn country. That constructive role played by Russia is no doubt due to the mutual respect it holds among warring sides.

The deal brokered by Russia will allow the Syrian Arab Army to take over control of northern border areas with Turkey which were formerly under the control of the Kurds. Since Trump threw the Kurds under the bus last week and effectively green-lighted the incursion into Syria by Turkish forces, the Kurds have had to subsequently align with the Syrian government. Russia was crucial to facilitating the new alliance.

With the Kurdish areas returning to the control of the central government in Damascus – after five years of US-backed Kurdish occupation – that arrangement of a fully integrated Syrian territory is not just legally proper. It also could placate Turkey’s long-held demands for security regarding Kurdish militants, whom Ankara accuses of being “terrorists” trying to destabilise Turkey.

Russia and Iran have in recent days both warned Turkey to respect Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. With the Russian-backed Syrian army on the border facing Turk forces, it is a fair bet that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will think twice about escalating the incursion. Having had the Kurdish autonomous area dismantled and under control of Damascus again, the Turkish leader should feel assured to back off from further military action. Again, we may reasonably surmise that Russian President Vladimir Putin has quietly, but firmly, told Erdogan to calm down. Perhaps Putin is the only person whom the bullish Erdogan will heed at this point.

One thing is apparent though. The US and its European allies are a more than ever exposed as a hopeless bunch of losers whose criminal meddling and mischief in Syria, and more widely across the Middle East, leave them without a shred of credibility to resolve conflict.

“This is a monumental failure on behalf of the United States”, commented Aaron Stein of the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute think-tank, as quoted by Reuters.

Stein added that “it would be the Syrian government or Russia, not American sanctions, that could stop the Turkish operation… The only thing that will stop them is if the [Syrian] regime or the Russians move in significant numbers to where they stop”.

Washington and its European allies have created the entire bloody mess in Syria with their criminal, covert war for regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the war on that country erupted in March 2011 – with as many as 600,000 dead. The Americans and other NATO powers have secretly weaponised jihadist terror gangs for their regime-change plot – an intrigue which failed because of Russia’s military intervention from the end of 2015 in order to defend the Syrian nation.

 

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https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201910141077049052-russia-to-salvage-...

 

 

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Remember who started this mess: Obama. Clinton. Bush. Trump has thrown in the towel... Enough black-eyes for nothing...