by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Donald Trump is out to prove that he is as bloodthirsty as Hillary Clinton and better than anyone at brinksmanship. Has he gone “play-crazy,” or is it the real thing? “By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a ‘puppet’ and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.”

Trump Competes With Hillary in U.S. War of Lies and Terror Against Syria

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Trump joins the War Party with the fervor of a convert.”

Donald Trump is the very embodiment of why the undeserving rich must no longer be allowed to reproduce themselves, as a class. They are the fuse that, if not removed, will ignite a fiery doom for the species. Decisively kettled in the White House by a bipartisan War Party that feared he might weaken the momentum of the Obama-Clinton military offensive in Syria, Trump appears to have opted to outdo his tormentors in mad brinksmanship.

On Monday, seemingly out of the blue, the White House announced that the U.S. had “identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.” Press secretary Sean Spicer provided no substantive details, only a warning that if “Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price."

Amazingly, nobody seemed to have broken the potentially apocalyptic news to the Pentagon, and even the White House National Security Council behaved as if it were out of the loop. The New York Times, a ferocious proponent of regime change, ever ready to amplify and embellish the wildest fictions about Syrian government use of chemical weapons “against its own people” -- and they have all been fictions -- spent the whole day in fruitless search for authoritative voices to flesh out the story. Not until Tuesday did the Pentagon release a statement, weakly claiming that the U.S. had observed “what looked like active preparations for a chemical attack” at the Syrian air base that Trump bombed on April 6, in supposed retaliation for the non-existent Syrian sarin gas attack on an al-Qaida-controlled town in Idlib province. But even the warmongering Times could see that the Pentagon was ad-libbing, attempting to “shore up” the surprise White House statement of the day before. “That statement,” wrote the Times, “appeared to take defense officials off guard. An official with the United States Central Command, which oversees combat operations in the Middle East, said Monday night that he had ‘no idea’ what the White House statement was referring to.”

“The ‘play-crazy’ gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor.”

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon. However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.

Psycho-babble masquerading as political analysis is usually useless, but Trump is a babbler who is acting psycho. Hillary Clinton gives the impression of being more disciplined than Trump, but is nevertheless criminally insane, a howling homicidal fiend who would have issued an unacceptable ultimatum to the leaders of Syria and Russia long before hitting the 100-day mark in her presidency. The world might have been a cold cinder by now, had Hillary been allowed to return to the White House. The planet’s epitaph would read: Humans evolved, Clinton became president, everybody died.

There is no good way out of terminal crisis for U.S. imperialism, other than to surrender to the verdict of history – which, for the imperialist, is an unthinkable horror that drives them to risk suicide while routinely murdering millions. “Better dead than Red” remains the imperialist maxim, even though their antagonists are mainly capitalists, these days. It is actually quite logical that the heads of both imperial parties are bonkers, and that the politician considered by millions to be the “progressive” alternative is also an imperialist pig -- the only kind of animal that is allowed on this farm.

“Hillary Clinton is a howling homicidal fiend who would have issued an unacceptable ultimatum to the leaders of Syria and Russia long before hitting the 100-day mark in her presidency.”

Donald Trump was always pretty dumb, but there was a time less than a year ago when he was sufficiently in control of his meager faculties to understand, in a twisted ”cracker” kind of way, that Barack Obama was “the founder of ISIS” and his co-founder is Hillary Clinton. That’s an essentially correct statement, in that President Obama and his secretary of state unleashed such a torrent of weapons and money to favored jihadists that the emergence of ISIS, impatient to establish a caliphate on captured territory, was both inevitable and predicted. The Defense Intelligence Agency tried to set off the alarms in 2012, in cables that were declassified years later. The DIA analysts reported that the security situation in Iraq, in particular, was deteriorating:

“This creates the ideal situation for AQI [al Qaida in Iraq, which became ISIS] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters [meaning, Shia Muslims]. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

“Thus,” in an article titled “Yes, Obama and Clinton Created ISIS – Too Bad Trump Can’t Explain How It Happened,” we wrote: “a year after Obama and his European and Arab friends brought down Libya’s Gaddafi and shifted their proxy war of regime change to Syria, U.S. military intelligence saw clearly the imminent rise of ISIS -- and that ‘this is exactly’ what ‘the West, Gulf countries and Turkey...want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.’”

Last summer, Trump perceived the basic outlines of the U.S.-sponsored jihadist wars in Libya and Syria. But, the not-so-tough-little-rich-boy finally recanted under the relentless assault of the War Party, and is now “all in” with every lie about Russia and the Syrian state. Trump joins the War Party with the fervor of a convert, guaranteeing an even bloodier mess than usual.

“President Obama and his secretary of state unleashed such a torrent of weapons and money to favored jihadists that the emergence of ISIS, impatient to establish a caliphate on captured territory, was both inevitable and predicted.”

Trump hopes that his dramatic conversion will compel the Democrats and corporate media to release him from purgatory. At this point, he craves “normality” – which, under imperialist terms, requires that he wage endless warfare abroad. (Trump is far more comfortable waging domestic wars against Blacks, Mexican immigrants and Moslems.)

Most of the world knows full well that the U.S. and western Europe have grown dependent on Islamic jihadists to buttress imperial interests in the Muslim world. In 2015, a BBC-commissioned poll found that 81 percent of Syrians believe the U.S. created the Islamic State. An even higher percentage of Iraqis think so.

The people of Syria and Iraq are intimately familiar with the political-theological movements that have emerged from the madness imposed on their societies by the United States. The people of the United States have easy access to the truth of their country’s criminal role in the world -- the evidence is everywhere, and not really hidden -- but choose to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism” because it infers that they, the citizens of empire, are also exceptional creatures.

Black folks used to be largely immune to such essentially race-based delusions, but the Obama presidency altered many Black people’s perceptions of their relationship to imperial power. Only three Black congresspersons (Barbara Lee-CA, John Conyers-MI, and Bobby Rush-IL) are among the five Democrats and eight Republicans that have co-sponsored Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s Stop Arming Terrorists Act (H.R. 608). The bill prohibits the use of federal funds to assist “Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or any individual or group that is affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups,” and would halt all U.S. assistance to governments that aid such groups.

Gabbard’s bill would outlaw Washington’s policy in Syria and render U.S. arms sales and aid to the Sunni Gulf monarchies and Israel illegal.

It is too fine and elegant a bill to ever become law in the belly of the beast – which is why the genuine Left should make support for Gabbard’s legislation a litmus test for politicians, to weed out the beasties.