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      A Tale of Two Democratic Women

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      Michelle Obama’s husband, Barack, was president of the United States for eight years. In the eyes of many Americans and certainly the media, Michelle has aspired to and achieved a status of moralist-in-chief of the nation. Having focused on issues such as healthy eating habits to combat obesity during her husband’s two terms in the White House, the former first lady created a public persona that clearly promotes not power or influence, but what philosophers have, since Socrates, called the “good life.” In other words, ethics.

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      Speaking at the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, Michelle has assumed the mantle of moralist. Like the rest of the Democratic Party, she regrets what the United States has become during President Donald Trump’s tenure. She laments the degraded image of the nation offered for contemplation by today’s youth. She lists the visible scars that nearly four years of Trump’s leadership have left and that the younger generation must ponder.

      “They see an entitlement that says only certain people belong here, that greed is good, and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top, it doesn’t matter what happens to everyone else,” she said in a speech broadcast on August 17.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Winning is everything:

      The basic principle that guides the action of the entire political class in the United States and many other democracies, in which the goal of exercising power and having control of public resources trumps all other ethical or even pragmatic considerations

      Contextual Note

      No one more than Trump has emphasized the deeply-held American belief that life is all about competition. According to its dominant Protestant theology that innovated half a millennium ago by banishing purgatory, humanity falls into two categories: winners and losers. Michelle argues that this is too simplistic. She appears to reject this staple of US culture that clearly defines attitudes relating to war, sports and TV talent contests. 

      There is, after all, another dominant feature of US culture that in some ways mirrors and in other ways complements the logic of competition: public moralism. It implies boasting of one’s virtues and explicitly or implicitly condemning those who lack them. It has spawned cultural phenomena as diverse as the Salem witch trials, revivalist preachers, McCarthyism and today’s political correctness.

      Since the New England Puritans, the nation has always had a taste for a form of moralizing leadership often coupled with the triumphalism of representing a “shining city on a hill.” From its inception, the nation has insisted on believing in its moral superiority. The man who wanted to replace British rule with something better because he believed that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was, after all, an impenitent slave owner. But compared to the English crown, the new nation thrived on proclaimed ideals rather than inherited privilege.

      Which brings us to the ritual taking place this week that is repeated every four years in the US, the closest thing to a British coronation: the convention of one of the two reigning political parties. This year, the first truly unconventional convention takes place in an ambiance of technological hyperreality, a perfectly appropriate medium for its political hyperreality. What most of the speakers appear to be offering as they unanimously condemn Trump’s sins could be called  a version of “hypermorality.”

      As a moralist, Michelle knows what she is talking about. As a black woman, she understands the feeling of entitlement that successful white people may have, who understand that the system that supports them requires the deprivation and dependence of her own race. As a close friend of billionaires and someone who has become very wealthy herself, she is well placed to understand the ethos of those Americans who believe “greed is good.”

      Michelle has certainly seen Oliver Stone’s movie, “Wall Street.” She knows that people like Gordon Gekko who proclaim “greed is good” are fundamentally evil and capable of destabilizing the American system whose moral arc, like that of the universe itself, “bends towards justice.” In contrast to Park Avenue Trump and his ilk, she and her Democratic billionaire friends know that only some greed is good. In other words, greed is a product that should be consumed in moderation.

      Her critique of “winning is everything” is a bit harder to reconcile with her own family’s political ethos and that of the party she was addressing in her speech. Anyone who has experienced a political campaign knows that campaigns are about one thing only: winning. (Disclosure: This author was, in a remote past, on the campaign staff of a prominent Democratic personality known for his commitment to ideals, but even more so to winning.)

      Michelle may nevertheless have a point. In recent times, Democrats have excelled more at losing than winning. And yet they still manage to keep going. Her husband was a champion at winning, but he hasn’t been quite as successful in his quest to promote candidates capable of winning. Barack Obama pushed Hillary Clinton to run for office in 2016. It was thanks to his initiative that all the moderate candidates dropped out of the Democratic presidential primaries this year to back Joe Biden, effectively eliminating Bernie Sanders from what had begun to look like a potential dark horse victory. Despite his current lead in the polls, in November, Biden may face a humiliation similar to that of the “sure winner” Clinton in 2016.

      Historical Note

      When Michelle Obama condemns entitlement, she is denouncing the culture of inequality that exists in the US, an inequality that Donald Trump has frequently apologized for and sometimes actively promoted. She avoids mentioning another form of entitlement practiced by all US presidents, including her husband, that applies to the rest of the world. 

      This other form of entitlement contains the notion that certain people (Americans) know what values should regulate the lives of other less advanced people. America’s financial and military capacity helps those people to understand the value of that entitlement and sometimes punishes them for refusing to understand.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Like many Americans, Joe Biden believes that equality means the nation has the mission of imposing equality wherever it may be convenient to do so. This reasoning has been used to justify invasions, wars and imperial conquest. It even provided the pretext for the genocide of native tribes whose cultures, if permitted to persist, would not have been compatible with the notion of equality entertained by enlightened Europeans.

      The media agrees that Michelle made a powerful case against President Trump, whose guilt in the eyes of all Democrats is patent. Like most Americans, she has little idea of what Biden might do to cancel and replace Trump’s sins, turpitudes and errors. Treating the Democratic Party as her parishioners, she struck the fear of hellfire into their hearts when, prefaced by “trust me,” she boldly predicted that things would get even worse unless they elect Biden. Not too much about how things might get better.

      That job was left to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez — who endorsed Bernie Sanders for the presidency — to accomplish the following day in the 60 seconds the party generously allotted to her to speak her mind. AOC, as she is known, arrogantly took a full 90 seconds to speak about repairing rather than denouncing wounds, addressing “the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few” and listing the issues, such as health, education and the environment that affect people’s daily lives. 

      Rather than bemoan President Trump, she recognized that “millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises.” If granted 60 more seconds, she might even have given a few details about the programs she had in mind that effectively imply a systemic approach.

      Michelle and Alexandria have been the two stars of the first two days of the Democratic National Convention. An outsider may feel that their messages complement each other. Democratic insiders, including the Obamas, probably regret that they allowed AOC the 90 seconds that defined what the most dynamic elements of the party stand for.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

      by

      In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval.” 

      Bobby Chesney, writing for the website Lawfare, describes the order as a “blanket authorization for the CIA to conduct cyber operations against certain named adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—and potentially others.” Chesney remarks that some commentators cited expressed concern “that the reduced external scrutiny of CIA covert activities and the sped-up timeline for approvals will result in undue or unwise risk-taking.”

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      According to the authors of the Yahoo article, the directive was “driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA” but not subjected to political review. They cite a “former U.S. government official” who called the order “very aggressive.”

      The article tells us that once it had the authorization, the CIA went into action. “Since the [order] was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list,” Yahoo reports. 

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Wish list:

      The designation of actions whose implementation by any normal human being is theoretically unrealistic, unaffordable or that would be considered immoral if carried out, but which can be immediately converted into an operational action plan by those who are given unlimited resources and held to zero accountability

      Contextual Note

      The scope of this secret order should not be underestimated. Yahoo cites “former officials” who explain that “it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations.”

      That is a serious innovation that potentially redefines and constrains the very idea of freedom of expression. According to Yahoo, the new powers granted to the CIA “open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

      Not only does this mean that the CIA may do whatever it chooses with no oversight and absolute impunity, but it also means that it can decide what type of expression can be suppressed and which people or groups can be either silenced or disrupted. Theoretically, the CIA’s brief is confined to overseas operations, but by including the right to target everything from media and charities to “individuals affiliated with these organizations,” the scope of such opaque operations appears limitless.

      Historical Note

      At a moment in history when the Democratic Party, despite a lack of any serious evidence, has not stopped its four-year-old campaign of complaining about real or imaginary Russian meddling in US elections via social media, this story about US meddling apparently proved embarrassing enough for its preferred media to largely ignore it.  

      Embed from Getty Images

      And yet the fact that Donald Trump, the incarnation of political evil, granted the CIA the power not just to disseminate propaganda or spread lies — as Russia is accused of doing — but to conduct “aggressive offensive cyber operations” against media, charities and individuals suspected of any form of complicity with an adversary should shock any American who still believes in democratic principles and that antique notion of “fair play.”

      Lawfare calls it “a major story.” But the revelation doesn’t seem to have shocked many people in the mainstream US media. Bonnie Kristian in Newsweek picked up the story and worried, with good reason, that the unaccountable actions of the CIA “could tip the balance of U.S. relations with one of these targeted nations into outright war.” Fox News also reported it, with a tone of general approval, seeing it as part of a “strategy to bolster the government’s defenses against foreign adversaries.” 

      The major outlets identified as the “liberal mainstream” preferred to let the story rot on the sidelines. The New York Times apparently thought it wasn’t news fit to print. The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC treated the story with benign neglect, having more urgent news to promote. This may seem paradoxical since these outlets will usually jump on any item that reveals Trump to be a dangerous wielder of absolute power. In this case, he specifically overturned a safeguard the previous administration had put in place.

      In its permanent campaign to undermine President Trump, the liberal media might have been tempted to pounce on the story for another reason linked to electoral politics. Siladitya Ray, in an article for Forbes, cites a former State Department attorney and national security expert, Rebecca Ingber, who complains of Trump’s hypocrisy. “It’s rich that the President who claims the ‘deep state’ is working to undermine him is happy to delegate such broad authority to cause destruction — it’s almost as though he’s not *really* all that concerned with tight presidential control over the national security state when it’s not about his own personal interests,” Ingber tweeted.

      Ingber is right to point to the paradox, but she unwittingly reveals why the liberal media preferred to ignore the story. The big four mentioned above (The Times, The Post, CNN and MSNBC) have become active promoters of the intelligence community, to the point of complicity, if not hero worship. The two cable TV channels employ former heads of the CIA (John Brennan) and National Intelligence (James Clapper) as their “experts” on everything to do with intelligence, including assessing risks coming from abroad. This of course means that the last thing they would be inclined to warn about or even deign to mention is accrued power to the intelligence agencies.

      In an article for Axios, Zach Dorfman, who is the lead author of the Yahoo story, offers what he sees as the historical perspective. “The big picture: Some officials emphasize that Trump-era shifts in U.S. offensive cyber operations are part of a natural evolution in U.S. policies in this arena, and that many changes would have been granted under a new Democratic administration as well,” he writes.

      This can be interpreted in two ways. One reading is that Dorfman wants us to believe that we have entered a troubled period of history in which people’s democratic rights have been canceled and therefore action may be needed to return to true democracy. The other is the idea that we simply must accept the fatality of a “natural evolution.” 

      This suggests that it has little to do with Trump. Any responsible president from either party would, for the sake of security, do the same thing. It’s the logic of what Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter in the Harvard Business Review describe as “the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”

      By now we know how this plays out. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader at the time, remarked in 2017 about what Americans believe concerning the political economy. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” she said. National security merits a similar remark: We’re cybercriminals, and that’s just the way it is.

      Dorfman’s second conclusion is probably close to the truth — or, as Trump likes to say when referring to embarrassing facts, “It is what it is.” Any president would do the same thing. It’s the system that requires it, not the chief executive. The same is certainly true in Moscow. Some may describe that as proof of the fact that it is pretty much a level playing field, which is probably true. It’s just that it’s a very brutal sport.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Pandemic Voting Needs America’s Full Attention

      by

      There is an increasing din in America that this self-congratulatory cradle of democracy is not up to the primal task of planning and implementing a free and fair presidential election in a couple of months. So sullied are we by the institutional failure to hold Trump’s government accountable for anything that there is a growing suspicion that the Trump cabal just might be able to thwart the coming electoral storm by undermining the electoral process at every turn.

      The first checkpoint for the nation on the road to Election Day is to see if anyone has learned anything from the national pandemic response disaster. The same Trump playbook that has left more than 170,000 dead souls in its wake is being dusted off again. And this time, it is the presidential election that is going to take a massive hit if Americans do not collectively and forcefully demand something better.

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      Remember back in early April, less than five months ago? By then, it had become obvious to virtually every public health official and every identified Democrat in America that the coronavirus pandemic was a serious threat to the health and well-being of the nation. All but Trump and his minions demanded a national plan to limit the spread of the disease that included development of treatment protocols, adequate and timely availability of supplies, a uniform and aggressive national testing program with contact tracing, and the federal funding necessary to do all of this. The nation is still waiting for that plan.

      Fast forward to August, now less than three months before the scheduled November 3 presidential election. Even while death and disease ravage large parts of the nation and subvert economic and social well-being, there is an urgent national need to prepare for and ensure a free and fair election process. 

      This should be obvious, even to Republicans who show little interest in free and fair elections. It should be equally obvious that an efficient and uniform national plan for mail-in balloting, early voting and a reduced number of polling places is more critical in this election cycle than ever before, including national standards and the federal resources to ensure compliance. So, why isn’t it happening?

      Human Loss

      The reason is as simple as it has been with the pandemic response: A venal cabal led by an ignorant narcissist will not use the institutions of the federal government to confront urgent problems unless any proposed solutions are sure to work for them and can be defined in politically advantageous terms. Neither human cost nor institutional integrity is part of the calculus.

      As with the federal government’s pandemic response, there is readily at hand the time-honored way to deflect federal government responsibility in America. Make a speech about the urgent problem and then consign responsibility for solving the problem to state and local “laboratories.” This is always done with a pious nod to the US Constitution.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The result has been a patchwork and often conflicting response to gun violence, educational deficits, poverty, health-care reform and infrastructure inadequacies, to name a few. So, Florida, do your own pandemic response. So, South Dakota, bring on the motorcycle madness in the midst of a pandemic. And then just to top it off, make sure that the federal messaging gives each state the right to define “freedom” for its own denizens in a nation with no internal borders. Does this make any sense? Of course not.

      After an initial burst of Trump testosterone and the conjuring of miracles, someone told Trump that if he took charge of the nation’s pandemic response like a real president, he would also bear responsibility if it didn’t work out. And that playing golf while people were dying on your watch would be difficult for someone actually in charge. Back in April, that quickly ended any effort to design and implement a national pandemic response plan.

      So now, it is time to apply the same “logic” to the upcoming presidential election. Someone has told Trump that he is losing the election because he failed to implement a national response to the pandemic. From there, it was a short crossed wire to the message that you can’t lose if there is no election.

      Back to 50 States

      What will save the day for Trump and his minions? That same 50 “laboratories” strategy that has undermined the national pandemic response will now be unleashed to ensure that electoral freedom rings. All Trump has to do this time is the same thing he did in April: undermine any cohesive message, create institutional confusion, and provide neither standards nor resources to ensure a free and fair election. In short, pass the problem to the states and localities and do everything possible to ensure chaos.

      And then, for an insurance policy, appoint a political hack to run the US Postal Service into the ground just when it will be needed most. (Remember the once-proud Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, now reduced to offering compromised pandemic “guidance” as soon as some unnamed Trump acolyte gives them the nod.)

      Even while running around the rest of the world telling other countries that voting and fair elections are singular components of democracy, America has never had a national plan that even begins to address its most fundamental democratic failure, pathetic voter turnout. Further, there are almost no national standards that control voting practices and procedures, even for national elections. In this ambiance of neglect, voting in each of the 50 states has been blighted to some degree by gerrymandering, voter suppression measures and dubious procedures that have thrived to undermine the equity of the US election process.

      The nation does not have the luxury of electoral neglect this time around. In the 2016 presidential election, only a little over 55% of the voting-age population actually bothered to vote. Think about that and how easily chaos thrives when so many don’t care enough to resist. Many will argue that there are lots of reasons for low voter turnout, from ignorance of process to impediments to voter registration and actual voting. Whatever the reason, we are back again to 50 states, 50 voting systems, 50 different sets of impediments to voting and a relatively mobile population.

      Thus, any attempt to undermine the voting process has a lot of entry points and almost no up-front vigilance. It seems that counting the votes of those who do vote is much more important than ensuring that most eligible voters can actually vote.

      The Playbook

      The Trump election playbook is clear: incite division and chaos, divert responsibility to the states and localities, undermine the credibility and capacity of the US Postal Service, repeatedly and falsely disparage the integrity of mail-in ballots, and most importantly, provide daily conflicting messages that will be gobbled up by the press. And this doesn’t even get to Trump’s open-door policy to foreign influence in the election process.

      If somehow Trump seems to have won the election, he will heroically claim victory after having vanquished all the impediments to such an unlikely event and quickly forget that he rigged the election. If Trump seems to have lost the election, he will angrily announce that he cannot honor the results of a rigged election and quickly forget that he was the one who tried to rig it in the first place. The surest path to avoiding either of these outcomes is a forceful institutional response, quickly setting forth a national plan for ensuring a free and fair election. That will have to come from Congress and be reinforced by the media.

      America cannot allow the 50-state “solution” to overwhelm what is left of the country’s democratic foundation. That is the same “solution” that now has over 170,000 corpses crying out for something better. 

      *[A version of this article was cross-posted on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Is Trump Preparing a Pre-Election Surprise?

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      In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly predicted the outcome of presidential elections stretching back to 1984. Trump was so delighted with Lichtman’s unorthodox prediction that, after the election, he sent a congratulatory note. Last week, Lichtman applied his model to this year’s presidential election. Biden narrowly beat Trump in seven out of the 13 categories.

      With three months to the election, Trump doesn’t have much of a chance to reverse any of the determinations in Lichtman’s test. Of the seven categories that he lost to Biden, the president can’t change the results of the 2018 midterms, erase the numerous scandals that have beset his administration, suddenly acquire the kind of charisma that attracts people outside his narrow base, eliminate the social unrest that has accompanied his rule or magically revive a cratering economy.

      Okay, on that last item, Trump is indeed trying to bluff the economy into a recovery and, in the absence of congressional action on another stimulus bill, use the limited powers of his executive orders as a magic wand. Wall Street might be fooled, but the tens of millions of unemployed are not.

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      Which leaves the two foreign policy keys in Lichtman’s model. The first, avoiding a foreign policy disaster, tips in Trump’s favor. To my mind, pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization all represent foreign policy fiascos, but Lichtman has in mind a screw-up on the order of the Iraq invasion in 2003.

      The second foreign policy key is achieving a major global victory. This, Lichtman points out, Trump has failed to do. Trump is well aware of Lichtman’s model and track record. He knows that he only has to flip one key to change Lichtman’s prediction. What are the prospects that the president will pull out the stops in an effort to achieve some grand foreign policy success in the final 100 days? Is Donald Trump preparing an October surprise?

      The Hibernating President

      To put it mildly, Donald Trump has not been the most engaged president in US history. He doesn’t pay attention to his briefings. He plays golf while a pandemic rages throughout the land. He has only a vague understanding of the world that exists beyond the global archipelago of Trump Organization holdings.

      Most recently, in discussing the explosions in Beirut, Trump falsely opined that it was “a bomb of some kind.” It was yet another flight of fancy from a president who prefers to make things up instead of hewing to the facts or keeping his mouth shut. “Yet aside from some initial concern among Lebanese officials, Trump’s assertions were largely met with a collective global shrug,” reports The Washington Post.

      The president who shook up the foreign policy consensus by meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, forging a new economic relationship with China and embracing a cadre of autocrats in the Middle East has seemingly gone into hibernation. The world knows quite well how royally Trump has screwed up the US response to the coronavirus. Global leaders see the blood in the water. They’re expecting a change in White House occupancy come November.

      Seasoned observers of the international scene have concluded that, with little geopolitical leverage, Trump will not be able to pull off any major foreign policy success in the days leading up to the election. There’s little time or political commitment on the ground to push through a peace agreement in Afghanistan that hastens the withdrawal of American troops. The much-vaunted Middle East peace deal that Jared Kushner presented to the UN in February is dead on arrival. Any meetings with North Korea, much less a surprise deal, are off the agenda between now and November. Denmark is not interested in selling Greenland.

      That doesn’t leave a lot of options for a president struggling with a raft of domestic issues that are likely to prove more influential in the long run at the polls. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a foreign policy success has to be something constructive. Donald Trump is much better at destroying things than building them. He has already asked foreign leaders — in Ukraine, in China — for help in destroying Joe Biden’s reputation. He has looked the other way as Russia has worked to destroy American democracy. For an encore in November, Trump may well be planning something even more destructive.

      War With Iran

      Donald Trump has not tried to conceal his antipathy toward Tehran. He has done everything short of war to bring down the Iranian government. He withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal. He applied harsh sanctions to squeeze the Iranian economy. Two years ago, he provided the CIA with new authority to intensify a cyberwar against the country. And, to kick off 2020, he orchestrated the assassination of a top Iranian official, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.

      Bizarrely, Trump continued to maintain throughout that he still held out hope of negotiating a new deal with Iran. But last week, Brian Hook, the instrument of that policy of continued engagement with Iran in the midst of a punishing cold war, stepped down. Hook was something of a moderate in the very skewed politics of the Trump administration. Indeed, compared to his successor, Hook’s a veritable peacenik.

      Replacing Hook as special envoy to Iran is Elliott Abrams. Fresh from his failures to promote regime change in Venezuela, Abrams will likely apply his extremist philosophy to his new portfolio. The first opportunity takes place this week as the administration pushes the UN to extend the arms embargo on Iran due to expire as per the terms of the nuclear deal. It’s part of an effort to destroy any chance of a Biden administration returning to the status quo ante with Iran.

      Abrams is assuming his new position at a fraught moment. An explosion took place last month at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. It was but one of several such mysterious “accidents” that are likely the result of covert Israeli operations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is anxious about the prospect of Joe Biden winning in November and resurrecting some version of the Obama administration’s détente with Iran. So, Netanyahu is getting in his licks while he can, though even he is not interested in a full-scale war with Iran.

      For hawks in the United States who were disappointed that the Bush administration didn’t march into Tehran after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latest turmoil in the region is encouraging. “Iran has been in a weakened state, its economy hobbled by U.S. sanctions and its regime facing domestic discontent, including a massive protest campaign last fall,” writes Jonah Shepp in New York magazine. “Those protests raised hopes among Iran hawks in the U.S. that their dreams of regime change might soon be realized.”

      A war with a major Middle Eastern power is probably not on Trump’s agenda. After all, he’s been pushing for a withdrawal of US forces from the region. And in June 2019, after Iran shot down a US drone, Trump decided not to retaliate, even though a number of his advisers were urging him to do so. But this time, an election beckons, Trump is down in the polls, and desperate times call for desperate measures. It wouldn’t be the first time that Donald Trump rolled the dice in one last bid for the jackpot.

      What about China?

      After experimenting with North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, the Trump administration has decided that China is the most useful adversary to distract attention from the president’s many failures. Just last week, the administration placed new restrictions on TikTok and WeChat, two Chinese social media applications. Microsoft has been in negotiations to acquire part of TikTok’s business, a deal Trump’s actions potentially disrupt.

      The administration also announced new sanctions against 11 Chinese and Hong Kong officials over the imposition of the recent national security law in the former British colony. Included in the list is Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive. Other recent US sanctions targeting China have focused on the treatment of the Uighur minority, on cybersecurity and for transporting Iranian oil. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is visiting Taiwan, a previously unheard-of breach in diplomatic etiquette since US officials have studiously ignored Taiwan for four decades.

      Embed from Getty Images

      These actions take place against an ominous backdrop: the US closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston in July, high-level complaints about Chinese actions in the South China Sea and the ongoing attempts to draw together security allies from India to Australia into an Indo-Pacific alliance against China. And don’t forget the speech by Mike Pompeo last month in which the secretary of state essentially declared the end of engagement with China because it failed to induce “the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.” Actually, Nixon was more interested in driving a further wedge between Beijing and Moscow and opening China up for business. That kind of change is exactly what happened. Democracy and human rights were never really much of a consideration for either Nixon or Henry Kissinger — just as they’re of little interest to Pompeo or Donald Trump.

      Pompeo’s speech and the various punitive measures directed at Beijing all amount to a fundamental shift in US policy: not just skepticism about engagement but support for regime change inside China. As with Iran, Trump is probably not thinking about starting a war with China. But a skirmish in the South China Sea that produces a rally-around-the-flag surge in support of the president could certainly fit the bill for an October surprise.

      The US military seems to be preparing for such a contingency, with Pentagon chief Mark Esper effectively drawing a line in the water near China. “The secretary said that the U.S. military is positioning forces to counter Chinese behavior and support U.S. policies, revealing that the U.S. conducted more freedom-of-navigation operations challenging unlawful movement restrictions and excessive claims in 2019 than it has any year in the past four decades,” writes Ryan Pickrell in Business Insider.

      Surely, you might be saying, Donald Trump wouldn’t pick a fight with China or Iran just to win an election. Wouldn’t the potential casualties, if nothing else, stay his hand? But remember, this is a president who has already dismissed more than 150,000 American coronavirus deaths as “it is what it is.” What’s another few thousand deaths to guarantee four more years?

      *[This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Israel-UAE Deal: Arab States Are Tired of Waiting on Palestine

      by

      The August 13 announcement of normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates breaks the quarter-century standstill in Arab-Israeli relations and shows that Arab states will no longer hold their interests hostage to the long-dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. President Donald Trump made the announcement of the establishment of relations between the two countries from the White House, suggesting that his administration played an instrumental role in the action. He referred to a call the same day with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates.

      The exact American role in the deal — other than giving the agreement a name, the Abraham Accord, in honor of the prophet important to both Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity — is unclear.

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      What is most apparent is that the two countries, which have had substantial informal interactions in fields like trade, technology, health and security for years, have finally moved to normalize those ties. The immediate upshot is that for the first time in nearly 26 years, an Arab state has formally recognized the Jewish state. Moreover, the UAE becomes the first Arab nation that has relations with Israel but no shared border. Egypt and Jordan, which each share borders with Israel, established ties in 1980 and 1994, respectively.

      Why Wait?

      Previously, Arab states, including the UAE, held out the prospect of normalized relations on condition of the establishment of two states, Israel and Palestine, along the borders that existed prior to the 1967 War. With its decision today, the UAE is saying it is no longer willing to wait for such an outcome, especially when its own interests are advanced by opening formal ties with Israel. Despite the Trump administration’s announced “deal of the century” — officially Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People — to much fanfare in June of last year, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have made no headway since Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed year-long effort six years ago.

      The UAE extracted one apparent concession from Jerusalem: Netanyahu will suspend annexation plans for the West Bank. That gives the Emirates the political cover it needs not only for its own population — by now probably agnostic on the whole Israel-Palestine dispute — but also for other Arab states, especially those more likely to criticize Abu Dhabi’s decision (likely few outside the usual pariahs). In fact, aware of the benefits that accrue to normalizing ties with the nation now considered the most powerful and technologically advanced in the Middle East, other Arab nations are now more likely to follow the UAE’s lead.

      Moreover, nations recognizing Israel are also more likely to earn Washington’s — and especially this administration’s — favor. In the case of the UAE, which already enjoys close ties with the US, that won’t mean a great deal immediately. Down the road, however — that is after the November election — it could mean attractive baubles like a free trade agreement or expanded security ties, regardless of who comes out on top in the American election.

      A Boon to Bibi in Troubled Times

      Traditionally, when nations establish diplomatic relations, they open embassies in respective capitals. For Israel, that will mean a new embassy in Abu Dhabi, and probably a consulate in Dubai as well, given its economic prominence in the country. But the UAE must decide where to locate its embassy. Will it be in Tel Aviv, where most nations of the world have had their embassies after Israeli independence in 1948, or in Jerusalem, Israel’s official capital and where the US relocated its embassy in February of 2018? Other nations also have opened embassies in Jerusalem, but no other major country. By setting up an embassy in Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi would implicitly recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, effectively a double win for Israel. That decision will be a thorny one for the wealthy Gulf state. It may wish to hold out for further concessions than just the annexation postponement.

      Annexation has been on indefinite hold since early last month when Netanyahu failed to act on previous pledges, reportedly because of Washington’s cold feet. Taking it off the table now is, therefore, hardly a sacrifice for Netanyahu. Even in Israel itself, it was viewed with mixed emotions.

      The ever-wily Bibi turned what had looked to be a political loss into a fairly significant foreign policy win for the Jewish state. And he needed it. Since early summer, thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets, mostly in Jerusalem, to protest against Netanyahu and call for his departure. Most of those critics are on the political left, which poses little threat to his continued rule. But he is also facing heat from his right, which presents far more of a threat. The conservative prime minister has historically drawn his support from the powerful right of Israel’s political spectrum, which dominates Israel’s electorate. So, getting this victory today — recognition by a major Arab state — allows him to again show his remarkable ability to advance Israel’s interests.

      That’s doubly important in view of the declining state of affairs between him and his erstwhile partner in government, Benny Gantz. Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, a budget dispute between him and Gantz, and the recent surge in COVID-19 infections in Israel have cast a shadow over the unity government. Were it not for today’s announcement and Gantz’s declining political support within Israel, a new election, which now seems likely, Netanyahu’s 11-year reign might have been facing its denouement.

      Nothing for the Palestinians, Even Less for Iran

      Pointedly, in the entire announcement event at the White House, Palestine was not mentioned. Trump was accompanied by a parade of other administration officials, whose involvement in the accord was never made clear. None of them referred to either Israel-Palestine relations or to the annexation postponement. This is bad news for President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinians. The annexation postponement is a mere short-term sop, and they know it. Given the ambitions of those on Israel’s political right, annexation will be a fact of life. A Joe Biden win in November might stall it, but only for a while. A Trump victory will make it inevitable and likely soon.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The real message to Abbas is that Arab governments are tired of waiting. The UAE has made the first move. Other Arab states are likely to follow suit in the near future. Two in particular, Qatar and Oman, have already shown interest in expanded ties with Jerusalem for the very same reasons as the UAE.

      The announcement’s unspoken message to Ramallah is to get on with it — to negotiate and settle with Israel while there’s still some chance for an independent Palestinian state. The previous Arab conditions to the normalization of ties with Israel have exceeded their shelf life. Arab states are moving on. Abbas and the Palestinians need to do the same. Even a Biden victory won’t change this.

      Iran was briefly mentioned in the proceedings, by former administration Iran point man, Brian Hook, who resigned earlier this month. He needn’t have done so. Tehran can’t be pleased with the decision of the Emirates, which are located barely 25 miles across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran. Israel is likely to gain greater cooperation and coordination with the UAE armed forces, which already maintain very strong ties with the US. In addition, Israel will likely gain a prime observation perch for intelligence gathering on the Islamic Republic.

      Today’s announcement amounts to a significant setback for Iran. It may go too far to say that Washington’s dream of an Arab-Israeli anti-Iran alliance is in the works. But if one other Gulf state acts similarly, that’s exactly how the Trump administration will portray it — and how Iran may come to view it. That may be a good thing for the US, Arab nations and Israel, even if the likelihood of such an actual alliance is remote.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Future Doesn’t Look Good

      by

      Let me be blunt. This wasn’t the world I imagined for my denouement. Not faintly. Of course, I can’t claim I ever really imagined such a place. Who, in their youth, considers their death and the world that might accompany it, the one you might leave behind for younger generations? I’m 76 now. True, if I were lucky (or perhaps unlucky), I could live another 20 years and see yet a newer world born. But for the moment at least, it seems logical enough to consider this pandemic nightmare of a place as the country of my old age, the one that I and my generation (including a guy named Donald J. Trump) will pass on to our children and grandchildren. 

      Back in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, I knew it was going to be bad. I felt it deep in my gut almost immediately and, because of that, stumbled into creating TomDispatch, the website I still run. But did I ever think it would be this bad? Not a chance.

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      I focused back then on what already looked to me like a nightmarish American imperial adventure to come, the response to the 9/11 attacks that the administration of President George W. Bush quickly launched under the rubric of the “global war on terror.” And that name (though the word “global” would soon be dropped for the more anodyne “war on terror”) would prove anything but inaccurate.

      After all, in those first post-9/11 moments, the top officials of that administration were thinking as globally as possible when it came to war. At the damaged Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost immediately turned to an aide and told him, “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” From then on, the emphasis would always be on the more the merrier.

      Bush’s top officials were eager to take out not just Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda — whose 19 mostly Saudi hijackers had indeed attacked the US in the most provocative manner possible (at a cost of only $400,000 to $500,000) — but the Taliban, too, which then controlled much of Afghanistan. And an invasion of that country was seen as but the initial step in a larger, deeply desired project reportedly meant to target more than 60 countries.

      Above all, President Bush and his top officials dreamed of taking down Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, occupying his oil-rich land and making the US, already the unipolar power of the 21st century, the overseer of the greater Middle East and, in the end, perhaps even of a global Pax Americana. Such was the oil-fueled imperial dreamscape of Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and the crew (including that charmer and now bestselling anti-Trump author John Bolton).

      Who Woulda Guessed?

      In the years that followed, I would post endless TomDispatch pieces, often by ex-military men, focused on the ongoing nightmare of our country’s soon-to-become forever wars (without a “pax” in sight) and the dangers such spreading conflicts posed to our world and even to us. Still, did I imagine those wars coming home in quite this way? Police forces in American cities and towns thoroughly militarized right down to bayonets, MRAPs, night-vision goggles and helicopters, thanks to a Pentagon program delivering equipment to police departments nationwide more or less directly off the battlefields of Washington’s never-ending wars? Not for a moment.

      Who doesn’t remember those 2014 photos of what looked like an occupying army on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of a black teenager and the protests that followed? And keep in mind that, to this day, the Republican Senate and the Trump administration have shown not the slightest desire to rein in that Pentagon program to militarize police departments nationwide. Such equipment (and the mentality that goes with it) showed up strikingly on the streets of American cities and towns during the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Even in 2014, however, I couldn’t have imagined federal agents by the hundreds, dressed as if for a forever-war battlefield, flooding onto those same streets (at least in cities run by Democratic mayors), ready to treat protesters as if they were indeed al-Qaeda (“VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS”), or that it would all be part of an election ploy by a needy president. Not a chance.

      Or put another way, a president with his own “goon squad” or “stormtroopers” outfitted to look as if they were shipping out for Afghanistan or Iraq but heading for Portland, Albuquerque, Chicago, Seattle and other American cities? Give me a break! How un-American could you get? A military surveillance drone overhead in at least one of those cities as if this were someone else’s war zone? Give me a break again.

      Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d live to witness anything quite like it or a president — and we’ve had a few doozies — even faintly like the man a minority of deeply disgruntled Americans but a majority of electors put in the White House in 2016 to preside over a failing empire.

      How about an American president in the year 2020 as a straightforward, no-punches-pulled racist, the sort of guy a newspaper could compare to former segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace without even blinking?

      Admittedly, in itself, presidential racism has hardly been unique to this moment in America, despite Joe Biden’s initial claim to the contrary. That couldn’t be the case in the country in which Woodrow Wilson made D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the infamous silent movie in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue, the first film ever to be shown in the White House. Nor the one in which Richard Nixon used his “Southern strategy” — Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had earlier labeled it even more redolently “Operation Dixie” — to appeal to the racist fears of Southern whites and so begin to turn that region from a Democratic stronghold into a Republican bastion. Nor in the land where Ronald Reagan launched his election campaign of 1980 with a “states’ rights” speech (then still a code phrase for segregation) near Philadelphia, Mississippi, just miles from the earthen dam where three murdered civil rights workers had been found buried in 1964.

      Still, an openly racist president (don’t take that knee!) as an autocrat-in-the-making (or at least in-the-dreaming), one who first descended that Trump Tower escalator in 2015 denouncing Mexican “rapists,” ran for office rabidly on a Muslim ban and for whom black lives, including John Lewis’, have always been immaterial? A president now defending every Confederate monument and military base named after a slave-owning general in sight, while trying to launch a Nixon-style law-and-(dis)order campaign? I mean, who woulda thunk it?

      And add to that the once unimaginable: a man without an ounce of empathy in the White House, a figure focused only on himself and his electoral and pecuniary fate (and perhaps those of his billionaire confederates). A man filling his hated “deep state” with congressionally unapproved lackies, flacks and ass-kissers, many of them previously flacks (aka lobbyists) for major corporations. (Note, by the way, that while The Donald has a distinctly autocratic urge, I don’t describe him as an incipient fascist because, as far as I can see, his sole desire — as in those now-disappeared rallies of his — is to have fans, not lead an actual social movement of any sort. Think of him as Benito Mussolini right down to the look and style with a “base” of cheering MAGA chumps but no urge for an actual fascist movement to lead.)

      And who ever imagined that an American president might actually bring up the possibility of delaying an election he fears losing, while denouncing mail-in ballots (“the scandal of our time”) as electoral fraud and doing his damnedest to undermine the Post Office that would deliver them amid an economic downturn that rivals the Great Depression? Who, before this moment, ever imagined that a president might consider refusing to leave the White House even if he did lose his reelection bid?

      Tell me this doesn’t qualify as something new under the American sun. True, it wasn’t Trump who turned this country’s elections into 1% affairs or made contributions by the staggeringly wealthy and corporations a matter of free speech(thank you, Supreme Court). But it is Trump who is threatening, in his own unique way, to make elections themselves a thing of the past. And that, believe me, I didn’t count on.

      Nor did I conceive of an all-American world of inequality almost beyond imagining. A country in which only the truly wealthy (think tax cuts) and the national security state (think budgets eternally in the stratosphere) are assured of generous funding in the worst of times.

      The World to Come?

      Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the pandemic yet, have I? The one that should bring to mind the Black Death of the 14th century and the devastating Spanish Flu of a century ago, the one that’s killing Americans in remarkable numbers daily and going wild in this country, aided and abetted in every imaginable way (and some previously unimaginable ones) by the federal government and the president.

      Who could have dreamed of such a disease running riot, month after month, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on the planet without a national plan for dealing with it? Who could have dreamed of the planet’s most exceptional, indispensable country (as its leaders once loved to call it) being unable to take even the most modest steps to rein in the COVID-19 disease, thanks to a president, Republican governors and Republican congressional representatives who consider science the equivalent of alien DNA? Honestly, who ever imagined such an American world? Think of it not as “The Decameron,” that 14th-century tale of 10 people in flight from a pandemic, but the Trumpcameron or perhaps simply Trumpmageddon.

      And keep in mind, when assessing this world I’m going to leave behind to those I hold near and dear, that COVID-19 is hardly the worst of it. Behind that pandemic, possibly even linked to it in complex ways, is something so much worse. Yes, the coronavirus and the president’s response to it may seem like the worst of all news as American deaths crest 160,000 with no end in sight, but it isn’t. Not faintly on a planet that’s being heated to the boiling point and whose most powerful country is now run by a crew of pyromaniacs.

      It’s hard even to fully conceptualize climate change since it operates on a time scale that’s anything but human. Still, one way to think of it is as a slow-burn planetary version of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      And by the way, if you’ll excuse a brief digression, in these years, our president and his men have been intent on ripping up every Cold War nuclear pact in sight, while the tensions between two nuclear-armed powers — the US and China — only intensify and Washington invests staggering sums in “modernizing” its nuclear arsenal. (I mean, how exactly do you “modernize” the already-achieved ability to put an almost instant end to the world as we’ve known it?)

      But to return to climate change, remember that 2020 is already threatening to be the warmest year in recorded history, while the five hottest years so far occurred from 2015 to 2019. That should tell you something, no?

      Embed from Getty Images

      The never-ending release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has been transforming this planet in ways that have now become obvious. My own hometown, New York City, for instance, has officially become part of the humid subtropical climate zone and that’s only a beginning. Everywhere temperatures are rising. They hit 100 degrees (37.7 C) this June in, of all places, Siberia. (The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of much of the rest of the planet.) Sea ice is melting fast, while floods and mega-droughts intensify and forests burn in a previously unknown fashion.

      And as a recent heatwave across the Middle East — Baghdad hit a record 125 degrees (51.6 C) — showed, it’s only going to get hotter. Much hotter and, given how humanity has handled the latest pandemic, how will it handle the chaos that goes with rising sea levels drowning coastlines but also affecting inland populations, ever fiercer storms, and flooding (in recent weeks, the summer monsoon has, for instance, put one-third of Bangladesh underwater), not to speak of the migration of refugees from the hardest-hit areas? The answer is likely to be: not well.

      And I could go on, but you get the point. This is not the world I either imagined or would ever have dreamed of leaving to those far younger than me. That the men (and they are largely men) who are essentially promoting the pandemicizing and over-heating of this planet will be the greatest criminals in history matters little.

      Let’s just hope that, when it comes to creating a better world out of such a god-awful mess, the generations that follow us prove better at it than mine did. If I were a religious man, those would be my prayers.

      And here’s my odd hope. As should be obvious from this piece, the recent past, when still the future, was surprisingly unimaginable. There’s no reason to believe that the future — the coming decades — will prove any easier to imagine. No matter the bad news of this moment, who knows what our world might really look like 20 years from now? I only hope, for the sake of my children and grandchildren, that it surprises us all.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Brain Malfunction Affecting the US and Its Respectable Media

      by

      Ever since Dwight Eisenhower denounced the military-industrial complex in no uncertain terms, the intelligence community (IC) can be seen as the literal brain of an immense, tentacular but poorly-structured system of economic and political governance. The clandestine nature of its activities within an officially democratic system of government means that this reality will never be publicly acknowledged. 

      Without IC, the Democratic Party could not have entertained the nation for four years with the Russiagate show. One of the unintended consequences of the media’s obsession with alleged Russian interference in US elections has been to highlight both the central role of the IC brain and its fatal weaknesses. 

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      The New York Times and The Washington Post have relied on the IC to provide the substance of unending streams of stories revealing the functions of the brain. MSNBC and CNN have rivaled against each other to recruit and then display the insight of former intelligence chiefs, presenting them as paragons of objectivity.

      The NY Times provided an example of this last week in an article by Robert Draper concerning the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a classified report on Russiagate. A close reading of Draper’s analysis reveals some of the subtleties both of how the IC brain works and how The Times has become the voice of that brain.

      Here is an example in which Draper quotes veteran national intelligence office, Christopher Bort: “The intelligence provided to the N.I.E.’s authors indicated that in the lead-up to 2020, Russia worked in support of the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as well. But Bort explained to his colleagues … that this reflected not a genuine preference for Sanders but rather an effort ‘to weaken that party and ultimately help the current U.S. president.’”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Genuine:

      In the language of intelligence agencies, the official interpretation of facts that should be retained to the exclusion of the facts themselves

      Contextual Note

      Draper and Bort want Americans to understand that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is committed to one thing alone: maintaining their man, Donald Trump, as the US president. If Russia speaks kindly of Senator Bernie Sanders, it can only be a tactic to comfort Trump’s reelection. It certainly cannot be the hope that, if elected, Sanders might be less rigid than past presidents — including both Trump and Barack Obama — in terms of his Middle East policy, for example. Elections are not about concrete issues. They are only about personalities and loyalties.

      As the brain of the system, the IC has the role of defining acceptable and unacceptable codes of behavior for itself and for the population as a whole. It can define, for example, what is “genuine.” Unlike moral codes, the behavioral code it defines is a single ethical criterion called “interest.” This is particularly evident in the realm of foreign policy, where actions can always be justified as the defense of “American interests.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The system’s most obvious feature is the nature of what fuels it: money. But the IC doesn’t understand money as an allocated budget measured in dollars and cents. Instead, money exists in a far more abstract sense, taking it beyond any form of traditional reckoning. The IC uses unlimited amounts of unaccounted-for means of payment to conduct operations designed precisely to optimize the national and global environment in ways that will boost the production of unaccounted for streams of profit.

      The profit will ultimately accrue to the commercial beneficiaries of the system. These are the famous “American interests,” though they are never specifically named. The system functions as a community structure but with no dimension of personal kinship. In its opaqueness and focus on money, it resembles the mafia, but devoid of the cumbersome sense of honor that can sometimes get in the way of straight business.

      The IC has traditionally steered clear of electoral politics. Because the US is technically a democracy, the IC must play the role of the influencer rather than a manipulator. The task of manipulation has been confined to the media, essentially privately-owned tentacular structures whose role is to orient and stabilize an ideology and worldview shared by the population. Influenced by the brain, the media define what is normal (good and reassuring), what is tolerable (not so good but non-threatening) and what is extreme (to be banished or shamed). Such a system is designed to ensure the stability that will permit the perpetuation of profits for the entire corporate class, of which the media is a part.

      In normal times, the IC prefers to remain invisible. But Trump’s election victory in 2016 forced the Democratic Party and its sympathizers in the media to bring it into the spotlight. Together, they provided the American public with four years of Russiagate entertainment. They also revealed how close the ties are between the Democratic Party and the brain of the oligarchic system.

      Historical Note

      In a Foreign Affairs article published on August 5 bearing the title, “There Is No Russian Plot Against America” and the subtitle, “The Kremlin’s Electoral Interference Is All Madness and No Method,” seasoned analyst Anna Arutunyan examines the history of Russia’s purported interference in the 2016 US presidential election. In contrast with Christopher Bort, who, among other things, claimed to know that Russia did not have “a genuine preference for Sanders,” the author warns that “ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent.”

      Arutunyan notes that the intelligence community has unearthed plenty of evidence of “activities of Russian actors with ties to the Kremlin during the 2016 election.” But the IC possesses “comparatively little information about the real impact of these measures on the election’s outcome—and still less about Moscow’s precise objectives.” In other words, the brain is doing only half its job. It fails to see the connection between what it sees as causes and the reality of the effects produced.

      The author concludes that the campaign to subvert the 2016 election was essentially “a series of uncoordinated and often opportunistic responses to a paranoid belief that Russia is under attack from the United States and must do everything it can to defend itself.”

      Concerning the motives, Arutunyan describes a chaotic environment encouraging the “activities of this or that activist, or special forces group, or businessmen and entrepreneurs—these people are always active in fields like this. It’s what they do.” And what do they want? “They are trying to earn money or political capital that way,” she writes. 

      As for the 2020 election, she speculates: “If there is another Russian operation, expect contrarian messages targeting both candidates’ campaigns and highlighting generally divisive issues such as the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic. The messaging will not be coherent, and it will have no further purpose than to provoke arguments.”

      Could this be Vladimir Putin’s ultimate stroke of genius? The Russian president understands how to exploit, with the least amount of effort, the fact that Americans love nothing more than to argue, insult, cancel, shame and, by any other means possible, put in their place fellow Americans who don’t agree with them. It requires far less effort than dialogue or debate. Addressing the issues implies listening, revising one’s judgments, seeking nuanced understanding of complexity, and finally agreeing on collaborative actions adapted to the nature of the challenge.

      If the 2020 election continues to focus on nothing more than the increasingly visible inadequacies of the two candidates — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — their failure to understand the historical context in which they are living and their lack of vision for the future, Putin’s strategy will have paid off. 

      The big question facing electors today seems to be: Which of the two men is the most cognitively impaired? Which has the worst history of corruption? Neither appears to want to focus on the concrete measures required to address the issues that Americans are struggling with today, whether it’s race, the economy or health care. 

      On the other hand, there will be plenty of room for arguments. But the satisfaction of a good dispute may not appease those about to be evicted or deprived both of the prospect of finding a job and, in the midst of a pandemic, the guarantee of health care that would accompany it.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      A Double Twist in Russiagate

      by

      The New York Times never tires of finding new pretexts to repeat the same message. Its journalists have been regularly updating it with the same lack of substance over the past four years. The latest iteration, published on August 7, bears the title, “Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says.”

      In the very first sentence, the author, Julian E. Barnes, presents it as breaking news, the release of a “first public assessment” of a never-to-be-doubted source: “intelligence officials.” The intelligence revealed turns out to be little more than confirmation of the theme familiar to Times readers: “that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President [Donald] Trump.”

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      In their vast majority, Times readers are anti-Trump and mostly lifelong Democrats. For a moment last year, The New York Times seemed to admit the failure of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election to validate its favored thesis. In March 2019, The Guardian sensibly published an op-ed with the title, “Enough Russia: after Mueller, it’s time for Democrats to focus on America.” Its subtitle read: “With this distraction finally out of the way, it’s time to deal with issues that the majority of the electorate actually cares about.”

      Now, 18 months on, The Times, faced with the serious task of getting Joe Biden elected and defeating Trump, cannot avoid returning to its past habits. Still, to keep a stale story alive and make it look like news, something new had to be added. It needed a twist. Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, revealed the scoop. It isn’t just Russia. It’s also China and Iran. In other words, Russiagate on steroids.

      The senator framed it by saying that William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular, also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system.” King spoke in reference to a statement made by Evanina on August 7 regarding the release of an intelligence report over foreign interference in this year’s US presidential election.

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Undermine:

      Call into question the political credo all upstanding citizens of a powerful nation are required to recite and adhere to because failure to affirm their faith would endanger the complex political systems, potentially causing it to implode

      Contextual Note

      Any serious journalist with a sense of logic should question King’s reasoning when he asserts that foreign powers are “trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system.” After all, in the age of social media, anyone and everyone can try to meddle. Trying doesn’t imply succeeding. But the jump from “meddle” to “undermine” poses a more fundamental logical problem.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The three foreign nations cited — Russia, China and Iran — certainly have the capacity to meddle. Everyone does. That reality existed even before social media. Furthermore, meddling is what all reasonably solid national structures are expected to do. Why else would they have intelligence services? What does the CIA do?

      But can they undermine? That requires more than simply trying to meddle. Undermining means hollowing out the ground below to destabilize the structure. It requires means that go well beyond spreading rumors and publishing lies. For the past four years — as The Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, admitted in private — there has been no causal link established between Russians “trying to meddle” and the effective undermining of American democracy. Publications that encourage the belief that meddling is tantamount to effective undermining are guilty, at the very least, of faulty logic.

      The real irony in this attempt to produce new scoops with stale news is that the real scoop of this entire four-year drama emerged two days later. On August 9, a whistleblower, Steven P. Schrage — a former White House, State Department and G8 official — came forward in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News to put the entire Russiagate narrative in a new perspective, essentially validating President Trump’s thesis known as “Spygate.” Although Fox News can legitimately be suspected of pro-Trump bias, this is an important emerging story covered by the respected investigative journalist, Matt Taibbi.

      At the end of the Fox News interview, Schrage makes this interesting comment: “This is about officials undermining our democracy and it needs to be known long before the election.” If what he describes is true, this is not a case of meddling from afar but, as he says, actively undermining the workings of US democracy from the inside.

      Historical Note

      The latest intelligence report that The New York Times used as the basis of its story attempts to create a new historical perspective. Building on the belief embraced by the Democratic Party for the past four years that there is a secret link between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the intelligence community now adds China and Iran to the list of meddling nations.

      The designation of three villains may harken back to George W. Bush’s 2002 strategy when he launched the trope of a three-pronged “axis of evil.” It worked for President Bush on the eve of his invasion of Iraq in 2003. It led to the successful multiplication of unsuccessful wars in the Middle East, a fact that has dominated the trajectory of US history ever since. Because the uncertainty of facing off against a single enemy entails the risk of losing — a humiliation the US endured in Vietnam — having three enemies to choose from strengthens the case of a power that wishes to project its strength, fearlessness and unparalleled spirit of domination. 

      As a candidate for the presidency in 2000, Bush had demonstrated his keen awareness of having at least one identifiable enemy when he said, in his inimitable style: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

      Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, under the Clinton administration, the US no longer had an identifiable enemy. Bush provided three in 2002. The IC now wants to make sure that we have three today, with China replacing North Korea, a nation with whom Trump seems to have made some kind of peace.

      The intelligence community’s report is embarrassingly vague on all its findings. But that doesn’t seem to bother The Times. We read, for example: “They may also seek to compromise our election infrastructure for a range of possible purposes.” A sentence relying on “may” can be logically extended to state the opposite with the same degree of truth: Then again, they may not.”

      The Time mentions that the report “was short on specifics, but that was largely because the intelligence community is intent on trying to protect its sources of information.” Who needs specifics? And there is a noble intention of “trying to protect” sources. “Trying” is like “may.” It admits of its opposite.

      The Times itself acknowledges the lack of substance in the report. “Outside of a few scattered examples, it is hard to find much evidence of intensifying Chinese influence efforts that could have a national effect.” This sudden critical acumen may be due to the fact that the intelligence community finds that China would prefer meddling in favor of Joe Biden, assessing that “China prefers that President Trump … does not win reelection.” The Democrats should be alarmed. What would happen if Biden were to win the election and the Republicans spent the next four years complaining that it was all due to Chinese meddling?

      The article is filled with sentences containing the verb “try.” “Russia tried to use influence campaigns during 2018 midterm voting to try to sway public opinion, but it did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure,” The Times reports. And what about “nevertheless” alongside “could try” in the following sentence? “But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting process or take steps aimed at “calling into question the validity of the election results.”

      If anything, the report makes clear that the intelligence community, like The New York Times, is “trying” very hard to get across its message. It is easy to identify its targets. As Matt Taibbi notes, “The intelligence leak claiming Russia supported Bernie Sanders over Vice President Biden in 2020’s critical Nevada Democratic caucuses, shows how our national security powers could just as easily be deployed against Democrats as against Republicans.”

      Steven P. Schrage perhaps deserves the final thought: “Nothing excuses foreign meddling in U.S. elections. Yet it is hypocritical and absurd to use that as an excuse to hide abuses by U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and political officials against our own citizens.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More