I will start with the second part of the headline: Are we a second, a minute, a day away from the last war, or are we in a burly comedy of global proportions? To be clear, I mean Trump’s comedy, not the CIA’s, the State Department’s, the Pentagon’s, etc.
As you know, I’ve written about the various actions and measures Trump has taken, but I have never talked about Trump himself. Why? Because I’m still confused: Is he a veritable and hypocritical merchant, another mega-villain, or a character in a drama of Shakespearean proportions, playing the role of both the king and the madman?
I have three very serious reasons to go for the last variation, but what is going to happen now in the Syrian crisis could give me a fourth sound and completely convincing argument. If the U.S. goes ahead and attacks, then there is no hope: The total war will be a matter of minutes, hours or days, and only a miracle, which is in God’s hands, will be able to calm the situation and return things to normal. If, despite his flamboyant and conclusive statements, Trump “turns it over,” then this would confirm my theory of what he does and how he acts to sabotage a much stronger deep state than himself, speaking in purely technical terms.
Until then, I’ll let Tucker Carlson speak below about the wickedness, irresponsibility, contempt and hatred of the people in the West in his most important monologue ever. You can listen to the audio of the translated speech while reading it:
“Leaders on both sides of the aisle in Congress, in the media, in our intelligence services, and virtually every overfunded think tank in Washington have suddenly aligned tonight on a single point of agreement. America must go to war in Syria immediately. Bashar Al Assad cannot continue to lead that country. He must be overthrown.
“Assad is an evil man, they tell us. His latest crime is a chlorine gas attack carried out over the weekend by his forces against a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. Assad’s poison gas suffocated children. Pictures of the aftermath of that are all over the internet and they are horrifying. Assad is a monster. That’s the official story. Almost everyone in power claims to believe it. The push to war in Syria, by the way, has united politicians from both sides. Lindsey Graham and Howard Dean typically agree on very little, (not much at all) but today they are both calling for war in Syria. Graham is demanding massive attacks on the Syrian military. Dean is going even further than that. On Twitter, he called the president ‘a wimp’ for merely sending thousands of troops and launching tons of bombs at Syria. That’s not enough for Howard Dean, who as you may remember once ran for president as the peace candidate. Tonight, he wants total war in Syria.
“Television pundits of course strongly agree. This morning the foreign policy team over on MSNBC explained that it’s far more important for American troops to fight in Syria than it is to secure our own border here in America. Trump has to take action in Syria, everyone nods sagely. That ought to make you nervous.
“Universal bipartisan agreement on anything is usually the first sign that something deeply unwise is about to happen if only because there is nobody left to ask skeptical questions. And we should be skeptical of this, starting with the poison gas attack itself.
“All the geniuses tell us that Assad killed those children, but do they really know that? Of course, they don’t really know that; they’re making it up. They have no real idea what happened. Actually, both sides in the Syrian civil war possess chemical weapons. How would it benefit Assad using chlorine gas last weekend? Well, it wouldn’t. Assad’s forces had been winning the war in Syria. The administration just announced its plans to pull American troops out of Syria, having vanquished ISIS. That’s good news for Assad. About the only thing he could do to reverse it and to hurt himself would be to use poison gas against children. Well, he did it any way they tell us. He’s that evil!
“Please. Keep in mind this is the same story they told us last April. Do you remember that? It was almost exactly a year ago that the new administration announced it was no longer seeking to depose Assad from power? Regime change was no longer our policy. So the usual war chorus in Washington started yelping and went berserk and days later, Assad supposedly used sarin gas against civilians in Syria! There was video! We bombed a Syrian air base in response to that. At the time, this show asked what seemed like the obvious question: Are we really sure that Assad did that? It seems weirdly timed and counterproductive to him. ‘Shut up,’ they explained, ‘of course we’re sure! What an unpatriotic question!’ But of course they were lying.
“Two months ago the Secretary of Defense admitted that actually we still have no proof that Assad used sarin gas last year. The story, it turns out, was propaganda, designed to manipulate Americans, just like so much of what they say. We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.
“Just for the sake of argument let’s assume they’re not lying this time. Let’s assume Assad did just use chlorine gas against kids. He’s perfectly capable of that, by the way, I’m not defending his moral character. Let’s say he did do it. Would that be worth starting a new war? Overthrowing Assad’s regime in Syria would result in chaos. Many thousands would die. In fact, we might likely see the genocide of one of the last remaining Christian communities in the Middle East, and we ought to care about that. Some of the dead, of course, would be American servicemen. A new war would cost us tens of billions of dollars, maybe hundreds of billions. Would it make America safer? Would it make the region more stable? Let’s see, how exactly did regime change work in Iraq and Libya?
“’That doesn’t matter!,’ say our moral leaders on CNN and everywhere else. Atrocities like this cannot be tolerated!
“OK, but let’s be real; we do tolerate atrocities like this all the time. For example, there’s a devastating famine killing children in Yemen right now. The Saudis are causing that famine. Should we drop tomahawks on Riyadh in response? Not until it’s on YouTube apparently. When you conduct foreign policy by viral video, pictures are essential, but in real life, Syria is a highly complicated place.
“With Assad gone who would run it exactly? Do we have another strongman in place to install or is it our hope that a stable democracy will magically appear in the wake of this protracted civil war?
“And who exactly are these moderate rebels you’re always hearing about, the ones that we’re supporting with your tax dollars? Well a lot of them turn out to be Islamist crazies. For example, the city where the chemical attack just occurred is mostly controlled by the Army of Islam, a radical group that has called for establishing an Islamic state under Sharia law in Syria. That group’s founder called for exterminating all Shia Muslims and Alawites from the country but we’re supposed to wage a new war on this groups behalf! Why is it that exactly?
“Back in 2013 when the Syrian civil war was still in its early days, one onlooker weighed in on Twitter. Here’s part of what he wrote: ‘We should stay the hell out of Syria, the rebels are just as bad as the current regime, what will we get for our lives and billions of dollars? Zero!’ In another tweet, he said, ‘Let the Arab League take care of Syria. Why are these rich Arab countries not paying us for the tremendous cost of such an attack?’ And in yet another tweet he said, ‘What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long-term conflict?!’ Of course you know who wrote that. It was Donald Trump, and he was right, and that’s one of the reasons he got elected president.
“Now the same people who brought you a dying American middle class, undefended American borders and endless, pointless wars in countries you could not find on a map, are telling the president he’s got to depose Assad for reasons that are both unclear and demonstrably dishonest. And by the way, it may happen.
“Before it does Congress ought to consider a brand new constitutional amendment. Let’s call it the Lindsey Graham Amendment. Here’s what it would say: ‘Congress shall topple no government until it finishes rebuilding the last government it toppled, and furthermore, talk show generals shall be required to personally visit the battlefield of every war they advocate for.’ That would have an immediate and positive effect! Let’s hope it passes.”
*Editor’s note: The United States, the United Kingdom and France launched an airstrike in Syria targeting Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons on Feb. 14, 2018.
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