TRUMP-PUTIN LOVE AFFAIR

I don't know about you, but the thing that worries me the most about Donald Trump is his mysterious love affair with Vladimir Putin, the dictator, I mean president, of Russia.

Is it because Putin has said some nice things about Trump and flattery will get him everything?

Is it because Trump likes dictators (strong men)?

Maybe it is a combination of the two.

But how far will Trump go in this love affair.  He seems to favor what Putin wants: destruction of NATO (because countries haven't paid their fair share), a breakup of Europe letting Putin take the Baltic States, Poland and who knows how many other countries (if they haven't paid their share of NATO),?  Just how much is Trump in Putin's pocket?

This paramount worry is in addition to comments he has made about ISIS and killing families, etc.

I find Trump very scary on foreign policy.

ISIS POLICY BY AMERICA

My thought is that Obama is feeling for the minimum U.S. exposure to ISIS territory to accomplish its elimination.  He also insists that the locals participate in the erosion of ISIS.  I agree with this. ISIS seems to be steadily losing ground in Iraq with estimates of 20% loss in Syria.

He is also delaying a major move against Assad until some agreement is reached on a replacement for him.  We didn't do this in Libya with chaos resulting and two governments.  There are some encouraging signs of the two governments merging, however, and both dislike ISIS.  I am surprised that Republicans want to repeat the Libya experience in Syria where ISIS would almost certainly win in the short term.

With the recent election in Afghanistan, I think we got the best government one could hope for as both candidates have excellent credentials.  If they can't make it work, then I think there is really no hope.  Obama is raising the number of residual forces to be left in Afghanistan to help out, but again, the Afghans must do the heavy lifting.  Otherwise we are just another occupying force.

Tom Cotton (U.S. Senator, Arkansas) feels that we should have jumped to the final solution.  He must mean a surge, a large invading force.  A problem with this is that locals aren't participating plus our military has been at war for 15 yrs with surges in both Iraq and Afghanistan (one by Obama).

I agreed with the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan no matter how it came out.   We had to do something after 9/11. Iraq was diffenent and it put us in a quagmire of nation building.  As H.R. Haldeman said (by memory), "When the toothpaste gets out of the tube, it is very difficult to put it back in again."  What a mess!

OUR COLLECTIVE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN - II

Well, the latest from Donald Trump is that he issued a campaign statement calling on U.S. authorities to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on.”*

Many in the news media are beyond belief that Trump would propose this and in fact bar even American Muslims who are out of the country from reentering America (which is probably unconstitutional)  He no doubt includes this to eliminate those who have joined ISIS. Some in the news media feel this is the last straw.  But did they hear the applause after he said this?  I suspect that his poll numbers may increase as a result.

But I don't know, Cruse seems to be surging in Iowa and is now ahead of Trump in the polls. This is supposed to make me happy?  May the Saints preserve us! I hope he is just the flavor of the month?

Gloria Steinem said on Charley Rose the other night that "If Republicans had cancer and Obama was the only one who had a cure, the Republicans would probably refuse it." (Reconstructed as nearly as I can remember her comment.)**

* http://news.yahoo.com/trump-call-bar-muslims-u-111500000.html;_ylt=A0LEVivVTGdWNrcAQlUnnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--
** See Gloria Steinem on Charley Rose, December 4, 2015 "My Life On The Road" at http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60658259 but I couldn't bring it up.

CAN HE HOLD OUT?

(This post is written on December 7th, Remember Pearl Harbor 74 yrs ago)

Holy Cow, as recently as November 22, 2015,* I wrote a piece titled Our Collective Nervous Breakdown, and now we have had a terrorist attack in California with 14 people killed and 21 injured and people are ready to send a major ground force to the Middle East to destroy ISIS (polls say 57% in favor of this).  Please remember that on a average day in America around 30 people are murdered by guns and we accept that so the day in California could easily fit into a normal day.

So President Obama is grudgingly giving ground to these demands by first sending 50 special forces to Syria to do things and now maybe 200 more to Iraq to conduct raids, train, rescue, and generally do things against ISIS.  But so far, he is not panicing and sending a major force to "kill" ISIS.  First of all we are bound to lose many more troops in an ISIS ground war than are killed by terrorist attacks in America.  Even in response to 9/11 in which nearly 3,000 people died we lost almost twice as many troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan** as in this major terrorist attack.  In addition we had vastly more troops injured, many with life altering injuries including those whose brains got shook up by IED devices.  Some of these are essentially walking dead.

So can President Obama hold out against the calls for a large military expeditionary force to combat ISIS?  He has about 14 months to go in his presidency.  Time will tell.  In the meantime, we will have something like 12,000 people in America murdered by guns and perhaps 18,000 committing suicide with guns.  We will have about 30,0000 American killed in automobile accidents.  But of course, these are just normal life in America.  In contrast we probably will have a good deal fewer than 100 killed by terrorists.  These, however, are intolerable.

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2015/11/our-collective-nervous-breakdown.html
** I did support the war in Afghanistan because I felt we had to do something in response even if it was a failure, but I have never understood why we went into Iraq.

CAN SUNNI ARABS FIGHT SUNNI ARABS?

We see situations that call for Arab Sunni Tribes to fight Arab Sunni tribes, but it rarely occurs no matter how awful the Arab Sunni Tribe may be (e.g ISIS though ISIS may take over them).  There was a period in the Second Iraq War where some Arab Sunni Tribes did fight the Sunni insurgents I believe but were handsomely paid to do so.  However, in Syria, we seem to be able to get many Arab Sunni recruits to fight  Bashar al-Assad (who is not Sunni) but have great difficulty getting any Arab Sunnis to fight ISIS, even though many of the ISIS fighters are foreigners.  Yes the Kurds will fight ISIS with gusto, and they are Sunnis but not Arab Sunnis.

WAR

I have written before that , if I had to summarize my life in one word, it would be WAR.  We used to have a break between wars: WW-I to WW-II, WW-II and Korea, Korea and Vietnam, Vietnam and 9/11..  But now it seems to be a continuum where there is a short period of a lowered war effort (like now) only to shortly have a resurgence, and we seem to be seeing the early stages of escalation now from a president who vowed to end our wars.  Both Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham are proposing we need to go back to major war in the Middle East to defeat ISIS.  Actually this is an odd view where there is a split in the Republican Party because Rand Paul and Donald Trump are agin' it.  I wonder what historians will eventually say about this period?  Perhaps it will be called the 30 Years War or maybe 50 Years War.  I don't know.  So how long can we stay at war when only about 1% of the population does the fighting, but the costs of the war are done on borrowed money.  Will it eventually lead to the destruction of America as a Great Power?

SOME MYTHS HELD BY CONSERVATIVES

Perhaps the biggest myth held by conservatives is that denigrating  Muhammad was not the trigger for the diplomatic outpost attack in Benghazi even though there were demonstrations throughout Islamic nations.  We have had two 9/11s since Benghazi that appear to have been peaceful.  Where are the embassy attacks since Benghazi?  Besides, the sainted President Reagan had two embassy attacks, both worse than Benghazi and also had the Marine Barracks disaster to boot; yet conservatives forgive him for these.

Another myth is that if we had left 10,000 or 15,000 troops in Iraq everything would be fine there.  They are apparently unaware that President Bush did exactly that in Afghanistan when he pivoted to war in Iraq.  The Taliban had been pushed into Pakistan where they regrouped and came back stronger than ever.  Only a brutal dictator can keep Iraq together.

Then there is the Red Line in Syria over poison gas.  When Obama drew the Red Line in Syria if Assad didn't comply he would bomb Assad's retreat.  Assad offered to give up his poisons weapons in exchange for not bombing him and Obama accepted it.  If conservatives wanted to say that just getting rid of the poisonous gases was insufficient, they would have a valid point, but they feel that bombing Assad would gotten rid of him.  Though undoubtedly we could have destroyed many buildings, killing Assad was unlikely.  He undoubtedly would have been in a bunker  And if we did kill Assad, wouldn't ISIS take over?  We have the example in Libya of what happens if we aid a mob in helping take out a brutal dictator.  At best you have chaos and ISIS sympathizers seem to be taking over Libya.  President George H.W. Bush realized this when he had Saddam's troops on the run in Iraq in the Kuwait War and stopped the U.S. advance.

It could be that conservatives actually know all the above and are just using their arguments for political purposes, but I suspect many really believe these myths.

SCOTT WALKER FOR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, said what many believe to be a faux paus at the CPAC meeting.  Walker said with regard of groups like ISIS, “If I can take on a 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Though on the face of it the comment is silly, what the critics don't understand is that breaking a union makes a hero of a Republican candidate for president, especially if it is a Civil Service union it seems.  A large part of of Ronald Reagan's stature among Republicans was his breaking of the Air Controller's Union.  In fact the comparison of Walker to Reagan is ongoing now.*

I'm not surprised that Walker is now the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, and I wouldn't be surprised if he is successful.  A second notch in his belt is that Wisconsin just became a Right To Work state.  The weird thing is that the so-called disaffected white male worker who votes Republican goes along with this sort of things.  They really think that every man for himself allows them to individually negotiate a good  living.  So as the unions decline so do workers wages.

* http://humanevents.com/2015/03/06/attacks-on-scott-walker-remind-of-reagan/

WHO WILL SUPPLY BOOTS ON THE GROUND?

What a lot of people don't do is review what has happened in Libya.  When we supplied air cover for the the mob there, we had all the ducks in a row.  Everyone was lined up, including the Arab League.  Well the mob won with our help, and we now see that a mob doesn't necessarily result in a going government.  Libya is a mess and as nearly as I can tell the Muslim religious right is gaining ground there.

But ISIS is more complicated than Libya.  We want to get rid of ISIS and so does Iran and presumably dictator Assad of Syria.  Sounds good doesn't it, except we are not really friendly with Iran because we think they want to get THE BOMB.  We also have said that Assad must go.  We must proceed without appearing to support either Iran and Assad.

As for Iraq, we have given air support to the Kurds who have long appeared friendly to us and are willing to fight (and we have also given air support to them before.).  I am less certain about the Shiites, but some of their forces do seem to respond if we supply the air cover.  I assume that a lot of the Sunnis in Iraq are getting fed up with the brutality of ISIS, but their resistance may be half heated unless there is an Iraq government that will share power with them.  We did give some air support for Iraq forces in Anbar Province, a Sunni province.

On Morning Joe this morning, Joe Scarborough indicated that the Arab League seems to have come on board with regards to ISIS.  Obama has also gotten quite a few other countries lined up so I guess he feels he can now proceed.  I had thought that Assad in Syria had seriously depleted the Free Syrian Army that I guess we can support; however, I heard one report of recent Free Syrian Army victories over ISIS.  These poor guys are having to fight on two fronts, but Obama indicates they are the ally of choice to supply the boots on the ground in Syria.  Perhaps if we help arm them and give them air cover they can do better and increase in size but others need to help in both Iraq and Syria.

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

There are those who feel that if we had left a residual force in Iraq that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi politics would have been much better.  Well, I am far from convinced even disregarding the fact that Milaki wanted us to leave.  After we beat Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, in Afghanistan we did leave a residual force that varied between 10,000 and 20,000 troops, and the Taliban came back stronger than ever, although Al Qaeda remained subdued in Afghanistan but grew elsewhere.  I suspect that President Obama is closer to the truth in saying that if we had left 20,000 troops there, there would just have been that many more Americans at risk.

It was really depressing that, after 8 years of training, that the first time the Iraqi army was tested, it just disbanded and turned over all the equipment to ISIS.  A woman reporter who interviewed a number of the troops that took tail said that all the deserters said they woke up in the morning and all the leaders were gone.  They feel that the officers and non-coms were bribed to disappear.  Some speculated that some of the leaders actually were given positions in ISIS.  Somehow this sort of corruption sounds realistic.  I also suspect that with time the Sunnis of Iraq will get tired of the ruthless Islamic religious right and start to rebel against them.

One hopes that the Iraqi army and militias can keep ISIS out of southern Iraq where most of the oil is.

As I have said elsewhere, I think we are trying to push something in Iraq that isn't there short of there being a ruthless dictator.*  Opinion seems to be gravitating towards supporting the Kurds to become independent of Iraq.  I presume this makes Turkey a bit nervous because there is a Kurdish part of Turkey contiguous with the Iraqi Kurds that might like to join them in a Kurdistan.

*http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/07/syria-vs-libya.html

I'VE HEARD THIS TUNE BEFORE.

OK, there is this unpopular government we tried to prop up that has an insurgency, thousands of government troops (one estimate is 90,000 police and troops) just melted away before the onslaught.  I'm plenty old enough to remember Vietnam that had a similar story and the minority eventually won, or did they.  Vietnam (or at least southern Vietnam) seems to have become a valued trading partner.

The case of Iraq and Syria may be different in that the insurgency , called ISIS,* seems to be Sunni religious fanatics bound to establish Islamic sharia law.  As I write this, the insurgency is advancing on Baghdad.  We'll have to see how the government troops react there.

Will ISIS try to take over the entire Iraq area, including the Kurdish area and the majority Shiite area?  Will Iran feel compelled to enter the fray to support the Shiite area?   And to what extent will the U.S. re-enter the fray? We'll just have to see.

*ISIS stands for Islamic State Of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria and Lebanon) said to be an al-Qaeda group: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10892898/Iraq-crisis-Q-and-A-Who-or-what-is-ISIS-Is-it-part-of-al-Qaeda.html