Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Yesterday, President Elect Donald J. Trump was confirmed as our nation’s next president by the vote of the Electoral College – during which some “faithless” elector in Texas voted for Ron Paul and therefore deserves a medal or something. Also, yesterday Trump took the opportunity to use the context of two separate terrorist attacks in Europe to show he’s in no way, shape or form fit to be the next commander-in-chief of US military; just like the guy who holds that job title now.
“’ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad. These terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the earth, a mission we will carry out with all freedom-loving partners,’” Trump said in response to the terrorist attack in Berlin by a man who drove a truck into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in a public square. The suspect leapt from the cab of the truck and was arrested, according to an article carried by Yahoo News.
The other terror attack yesterday – one that has far more geopolitical implications – is the assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov at an art gallery in Ankara by Mevlut Mert Altintas, a member of Turkey’s riot police. Altintas shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria. Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria. Until these places are safe you will not taste any safety either,” in Turkish during and after the attack, just before being shot dead himself by Turkish police – according to an article carried by Yahoo News.
For their part, the Russian foreign ministry condemned the attack: “We strongly condemn this inhuman crime, which has the aim to undermine collective efforts to reach political settlement in Syria and the process of normalization of Russian-Turkish relations.”
And, because 2016 insists on being one of the weirdest and worst years in human history – apparently right up until the end – the most lucid of the above statements is the one attributed to a now-dead homicidal maniac who was waving a pistol around at the time he made the comments. Unbeknownst (I’m convinced) to Trump, but likely accounted for in some Machiavellian computation by Putin, yesterday’s attacks were another obvious and to-be-expected example of the ongoing backlash against the West’s foreign policies going back 15 years now.
For a decade-and-a-half we’ve wasted countless resources in both blood and treasure destabilizing the greater Middle East at the behest of Big Oil and other oligarchs. All we’ve gotten to show for it are far too many dead American kids from poor-to-middle-class families, and even more grievously wounded; ISIS establishing an actual physical caliphate in the hollowed-out remains of the nation-states the US has destroyed; an uptick in domestic terror attacks and a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president with more blood on his hands personally than Mohammad Atta had by late-morning 9/11/01.
For the last 15 years, the last eight of which under the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the US has engaged in non-stop terrorism throughout the Middle East. Obama has exported the drone war to countries far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan where George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern odyssey began. And yes, dear readers, odyssey is the right word. We get that word from Greek where it originated as a reference to the 10-year-long; peril-and-death-fraught voyage Odysseus took in returning home from the Trojan War, which itself took 10 years of mostly siege warfare to conclude – as the stories go. For 15 years, the West, led by the USA, has been fighting in the Middle East somewhere. We came, like the Greeks, after one person – only our Helen of Troy was actually the far more homely Osama bin Laden. Whether he died in Abbottabad or at Tora Bora years earlier is rather immaterial now; the consensus is that he’s dead. Yet, US military action goes on in the region unabated, indeed boiling over into other nations; Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Continuing the analogy, back at home in the USA we have defense contractors and other oligarchs all lying about the place, courting those in power – like so many Ithacan suitors chasing after Penelope. Only, here the analogy fails as Penelope can’t wait to hop into bed with one defense contractor after another. Worse yet, Trump has indicated time and again he’s not going to toss all these bastards out of his house once he returns either; to belabor my increasingly shaky analogy just a bit more.
No, on the contrary, Trump has pledged to “eradicate” ISIS specifically and Islamic terrorism generally from the planet; militarily, presumably. And, that, dear readers, is the whole problem. There is no military solution to the backlash against the West’s failed foreign policies in the Middle East going back several decades now. Military action is, of course, the main part of the problem. Obama has created more terrorists by murdering innocent people in the region than Osama bin Laden could have ever recruited personally to join al-Qaida.
Indeed, and quite obviously; the only solution to the problem of ISIS and Islamic terror generally is to totally and completely disengage from the entire region militarily. If a Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t bring himself to stop murdering people in the Middle East, there’s little reason to suspect a blowhard, reality-TV star will stop the bloodshed being committed there by US personnel and equipment; and therefore will do nothing to stop the bloodshed being committed globally by Islamic terrorists.
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