Conrad Theodore Seitz

While Americans were transfixed by the bizarre turmoil in the White House, American diplomats at the UN have been actively trying to stop a multilateral proposal for a comprehensive cease fire in Yemen.  Instead they are pushing a pause without any humanitarian relief nor any mention of accountability for war crimes.  Read more in this article in the Guardian.

It seems that Nikki Haley is leaving her post as American ambassador to the UN and no longer has anything to say.  British diplomats trying to build a cease-fire proposal in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah were blindsided by an American counter-proposal after being promised American support for their efforts.  The American idea for a cease-fire has all the passages calling for humanitarian aid and accountability for war crimes stripped out, just as the Saudis want it.  The Americans even threatened to veto the British proposal.

This is the denouement of the Khashoggi incident– a peace offer in Yemen from the Americans, without any guarantees of humanitarian relief for twenty million starving Yemenis.  There has been no acknowledgement from the White House that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia ordered the assassination and post-mortem dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen with solid establishment ties who merely criticized the prince’s leadership style without calling for any upheaval.

Mohammed bin Salman is so sensitive that he orders the killing of a man who mildly criticizes him in public (not even saying anything personal or insulting, much less advocating his overthrow.)  He is so paranoid that he pursues this critic, who tries to escape his grasp by coming to America as a welcomed guest (not a bedraggled refugee.)  He engineers a plot to lure the man out of the US to a Saudi embassy in another country (Turkey) so he can be killed on Saudi soil.  He attempts to conceal the killing by having the body “disappeared.”

How can we associate with such a leader?  Only for vast sums of cash deposited in secret to the personal accounts of family members of the president.   Senators, not in on the payoff, are crying foul, to no avail.   Thus we see that the government is consolidating into an autocracy that follows the whims, for the personal cash benefit, of he who must not be named.  Our president doesn’t really believe in democracy.

He is betraying our democratic allies, supporting autocrats worldwide, and destroying our economy with capricious tariffs.  He has shown himself impervious to reasonable persuasion by the wisest men in his political party.  The only way to stop this catastrophe is to remove the autocrat.  Unfortunately, the mechanisms for orderly removal of the chief of state are unequal to the emergency.

In a simpler time, 1868 to be exact, a president was impeached (and acquitted) in a month.  So Americans should take heart.  We don’t have to wait two more years for another president.  All we need is Mueller’s smoking gun.  It only took Nixon three days to resign after the Oval Office tapes were made public.

SE Cupp, a conservative CNN commentator, described He who must not be named’s presidency as “decomposing before our very eyes” and said that He is “running America into the ground.”  She was speaking on her CNN show “SE Cupp Unfiltered” that runs on Saturdays.  She ran through a litany of misdeeds, from Mattis’ resignation to His inability to let go of his “beautiful wall” fantasy.  Her conclusion: “[he] is a terrible CEO” and a failure.

The last walk of Mattis, with his “stinging rebuke” that He was unable to read (because he can’t read) was the most significant resignation in a long week of departures.  He couldn’t understand what Mattis was saying in his (for Him) too-long letter that spelled out their disagreement on Syria and Afghanistan but left his disgust and remorse unspoken.

He had to have his aides read the letter and explain it to him, in short sentences.  His aides had to explain to him that Mattis was saying that he couldn’t follow His orders.  He was reportedly enraged when he finally understood what the letter was saying.

Let Mattis not overshadow the resignation of Brett McGurk, who has been single-handedly holding together a coalition of over seventy countries and other entities to fight the Islamic State.  Just last week, he made an important speech in which he emphasized American support for the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic forces now on the offensive against remnants of the Islamic caliphate in Syria.

He who must not be named made him look like a fool and a liar with His sudden decision to withdraw all troops from Syria within a month.  He made no effort to coordinate His policy with key State Department figures who had been working behind the scenes for years to hold together a fractious group of locals who were willing to fight and die with the weapons provided by US advisors.

Withdrawing support, money, and military advisors now will mean the collapse of the Syrian Democratic front against the Islamic State and the likelihood that they will be wiped out by the Turks, who regard them as rebels.

Don’t forget the third major resignation of the last week: Ryan Zinke, head of the Department of the Interior.  He leaves because the load of scandals and allegations that he has used his position for profit has become too great.

Finally, there is the departure of John Kelly, the chief of staff.  He is leaving because he can’t take it anymore.

With His sudden action to name Patrick Shanahan, Deputy Secretary of Defense, as acting Secretary effective January 1 and Kelly’s previously announced effective date of the first of January, He will be alone in the White House.

There is no precedent for this flight of “stable” conservatives from an unstable “conservative” president* who insists on playing to his base while selling out the country for his own profit.  We suppose that He thinks he is clever by naming Shanahan, who has business connections to Boeing (where he spent his entire career from 1986 until his appointment in July 2017), and that this will help him with the military.

It is possible, though, that with Mattis gone, He has lost the control and respect of the military.  Most soldiers revere Mattis and would follow him anywhere.  With Mattis no longer following His orders, He loses that automatic obedience that the Warrior Monk would command.  Thoughtful soldiers may be tempted to refuse unlawful orders from their Commander in Chief.

Just now I noticed that Michael Flynn has been dinged for not disclosing that he was a paid Turkey lobbyist before he was on His team.  What if this is one of Turkey’s payoffs for supporting Flynn and the president*?  It certainly could be a quid pro quo for not rendering Mr. Gullen to the Turks– give them the Kurds instead.  We are witnessing another betrayal of the Kurds that echoes the incidents that surrounded the end of the war to liberate Kuwait.  Remember that Bush the Elder was the architect of this genocide– one of many the Kurds have suffered over the years.

It is already to late to impeach Him.  The destruction of the Kurds will play out inevitably if His decision to remove our troops from Syria stands.  There is only thirty days or less to go before the US military is taken from its stabilizing position between the Kurds, the Turks, and Assad.  The only thing we can do is try to raise a stink that rivals the one that forced His decision to reverse His child-removal policy on our Southern border– maybe that will get Him to change His mind.

I suspected, but I have definite confirmation now.  He who must not be named has a property in Istanbul in development– a forty-story hotel/business complex.  Here is the official web site for this property.  This is a gross conflict of interest and I cannot see how this is not a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against “emoluments”– whatever those are, I think they include multimillion dollar conflicts of interest in foreign countries!

Mattis is said to have told troops overseas recently to

 “hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”

He’s too hawkish, especially on Iran, for Obama’s taste, but I like him.  Check out this pictorial history of “Saint Mattis of Quantico” from the Business Insider web site.

(graphic image courtesy of pixabay.com)

8

Retired four-star general James Mattis resigned from the government on Thursday with a letter that, some say, implies the president is treasonous.  He has been in the Marines for forty-four years, since he was eighteen (counting the two years, from 1969-71, that it took him to get an undergraduate degree in history) but did not see action until Kuwait.  He advanced rapidly through command and was in every important battle in the Middle East, including the pacification of Iraq and both battles over Fallujah.  He was famously said to have told the Iraqis he was meeting for the first time (after sending his tanks and artillery back to the US) in a peace conference: “I come in peace.  I didn’t bring any artillery.  But I’m begging you: don’t fuck with me– or I’ll kill you all.”  He was known as “the Warrior Monk” or “Mad Dog Mattis.”

This is a guy that would never quit, never give up, and he couldn’t handle being that man’s defense secretary.  Calling combat troops to the border with Mexico wasn’t enough to make him throw up his hands.  Trying to end the military’s acceptance of gays and transgender people wasn’t enough to stop him.  But he who must not be named was too much.

The real import of the news over the last week has probably been lost in a torrent of bad news, from the stock market dropping to Jim Mattis resigning, but here’s what is really important about what happened:

He who must not be named was on the phone with the President of Turkey when he decided to help him out by withdrawing the US troops that Turkey’s president saw as blocking him from attacking the armed Kurds (known as peshmerga) with whom the US military was embedded.  Turkey considered the rebel peshmerga to be terrorists and wanted to wipe out any armed Kurds and subjugate any disarmed ones.  Coincidentally, Turkey has descended into open authoritarianism since the failed uprising of a year ago and has demanded that we turn over a refugee, a cleric named Gullen, to them for supposed complicity in the uprising.

So the fact that he who must not be named is proceeding in abandoning the battlefield in Syria is a huge concession to both Russia and Turkey, for different reasons, for which we get in return… less than nothing, because we will lose thousands of Kurdish assets, who will be crushed between the Turks and Syrian government forces.  Those who survive will escape to notional Kurdistan and lick their wounds.  They will swear never to trust the Americans again.