Literary Corner: Threats

Q: How can you tell whether Trump is at a church service or partying with Jeffrey Epstein? A: He doesn't bite his lower lip in church.

New Year Greeting

by Donald J. Trump

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq is,
& has been for hours, SAFE!
Many of our great Warfighters,
together with the most lethal
military equipment in the world,
was immediately rushed to the site.
Thank you to the President &
Prime Minister of Iraq for their
rapid response upon request....

....Iran will be held fully responsible
for lives lost, or damage incurred,
at any of our facilities. They will pay
a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning,
it is a Threat. Happy New Year!

Isn't that great, not a Warning but a Threat? I wonder if Trump knows how the words are used in English.

Your close friend Jong-un is still laughing over how you threatened him with "fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen" and ended up giving him everything he wanted with nothing in return for the US.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2020

This is the latest phase of a crisis going back about two months of attacks on Iraqi military bases where Coalition forces are stationed, some or all of which the US blames on a particular Shi'ite militia, the Kita'ib Hizbullah, which has Iranian connections, and has been designated a terrorist group by the US, but is also one of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) that are an official part of Iraq's armed forces. The attacks have mostly been more or less harmless, until last Friday, at a base near Kirkuk, when a number of people were hurt and one US contractor was killed. Taking an Israeli-style approach, the Trump administration decided to punish them swiftly and disproportionately, and put on a series of airstrikes on Kita'ib Hizbullah facilities killing some 25, leading to the mobbing of the US embassy in Baghdad.

Robert Ford, a retired U.S. diplomat who served five years in Baghdad and then became ambassador in Syria, said Iran's allies in the Iraqi parliament may be able to harness any surge in anger among Iraqis toward the United States to force U.S. troops to leave the country. Ford said Trump miscalculated by approving Sunday's airstrikes on Kataeb Hezbollah positions in Iraq and Syria — strikes that drew a public rebuke from the Iraqi government and seem to have triggered Tuesday's embassy attack.

“The Americans fell into the Iranian trap,” Ford said, with airstrikes that turned some Iraqi anger toward the U.S. and away from Iran and the increasingly unpopular Iranian-backed Shiite militias. (US News)

It's a singularly bad move at a singularly bad time. Iraqis have been in a state of rage with their government for months, partly because of its servile dependence on Iran (which is in turn related to the inability of US to provide a counterbalance, and I don't mean a military one), and it's as if the US government had been sitting around asking itself, "Let's see, what can we do to make Iran more popular in the Baghdad bazaar?"

I'd like to think Trump actually does know what "threat" means, but who knows? All sorts of our friends are really kind of worried that Trump might be starting a war in Iraq, or possibly Iran—our fascist friend Binyamin Netanyahu could clearly use a war just now, as he faces his third election in two years unable to form a government and under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, and is asking the speaker of Parliament to grant him immunity because, as far as I understand his argument, it's his patriotic duty to stay out of jail:

"I intend to ask the Knesset speaker to let me implement my right, my duty and my mission to continue serving you for the future of Israel," Netanyahu said at press conference in Jerusalem. "There are people, who unlike me, did commit grave crimes and they have life-long immunity. They are just on the right side of the media and the left wing," he added.

(although when asked before April's election if he'd contemplate such a step, he'd said "What? No way! The answer is no," since the best way to prevent a trial would be "the facts themselves").

Anyway I predict there will be no war, in spite of Netanyahu's needs. Whether Trump knows it or not, he utters threats for the same reason as those inexperienced parents, as a substitute for thinking about it and making an informed decision, and the likelihood of a sustained action or peace process or any kind of productive approach is around zero.

Seth Frantzman at Daily Beast is probably right in supposing that Iran's aim is to get US troops out of Iran and Syria, as Trump has always claimed he wants, but it looks as if they're also interested in making it look less like an informed decision than a defeat.

I can imagine in the short term that Trump will angrily pull all the US troops out of Iraq and park them in Syria, where they can watch the Russians and Iranians conquering Idlib and the Turks pressing the Kurds until Erdoğan or Putin orders him to send them back to Iraq next spring. Or maybe he'll try to flood the whole region with US troops for a much wider non-war—it was just announced yesterday that he's ordered a battalion of 750 infantrymen to Kuwait immediately in response to the crisis, and 3000 more ready to go, added to the 5,200 US troops already in Iraq and 1,200 in Syria, so that we'll have double the number of troops in the region as we had at the end of 2016 (about 5,000 in Iraq and 400 in Syria)—maybe as the stupider senators like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham praise Trump for his "decisive" "action" we'll be up to 20,000 or more by election time.

Iraq is latest iteration of what is the one pattern in Trump foreign policy:
1.) Over-the-top rhetoric
2.) Blow up existing agreements or relationships (esp. those promoted by Obama)
3.) Chaos ensues
4.) Intervene (at high cost) to avoid further disaster
5.) Declare victory

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) January 2, 2020

Except by the time the dust settles it's always clear it was a failure, to those who are still paying attention.