The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

"Quiet, quiet, piggy!"

 

So Trump responded to Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as "bin Salman", that's a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin "Mr. Vladimirovich"—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, "Āl Saud", House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son's father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News's Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post's Jamal Kashoggi:

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It's not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven't heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event,  as something that wouldn't be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that'll be the day.

Narratology: Jared the Spy

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Times (UK).

I realize there's an awful lot to think about at the moment, but this week-old piece by the estimable Vicky Ward (author of the 2019 Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), really shouldn't be allowed to wash away in the flood.

It offers a very plausible account, based on Ward's own sources, of exactly what the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund was paying for with their $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's new investment firm, in the context of a power struggle that had been going on in the kingdom since early 2015, when King Salman, who had been king for just three months, appointed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) as crown prince, and his own son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as deputy crown prince; namely, alleging that Kushner conspired with MbS to get him named crown prince and MbN thrown in prison in 2017, including by passing him classified material to which he had access thanks to the security clearance Trump insisted on giving him.

Which would make him guilty of more than just a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation, if true (Kushner has denied passing classified material to anybody)—like espionage, or the "espionage lite" of Section 951, in which

For the Record: Planked Salman

Once you've done a sword dance with a guy, you just can't stay mad. Screenshot from video by AP/Reuters via The Guardian.

Trumpy getting applause for tough talk aimed at the Saudi monarchy:

What Salman really said: Thanks for vetoing that nasty bill to cut off helping out with my Yemen war, Donald! You've been such a great little friend! Want to come over and touch my orb again? https://t.co/PdMlHXybTu

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2019

But impunity for the murderous Crown Prince (Salman, the father, is 83 and has been developing Alzheimer's dementia for a few years now and doesn't in fact rule the kingdom) who masterminded the killing of Jamal Kashoggi, and this (via news.com.au):

Watch this space

LMAO HOW DID WE MISS THIS pic.twitter.com/JXv2ionRqt

— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) November 30, 2018

Watching Putin and MBS and their bro enjoyment of each other, high fives and all, he's like, oh, you guys think I'm a nobody because I never get to kill a journalist. Just wait!

Hard to believe that at the last G-20 summit, as the story of the Trump Tower meeting of 9 June 2016 was being revealed to an astonished public, Trump was unable to restrain himself, no matter how bad it looked in the circumstances, from having semi-secret discussions with President Putin—people watched them interacting, but couldn't find out what was being said—and at the current G-20 summit pretty much the same thing is happening!

Or not.

On Thursday, Donald announces from on board the plane to Buenos Aires that he's canceling the long-planned formal sidebar conference he was supposed to have with Vladimir Vladimovich. Not, ostensibly, with any connection to that morning's new guilty plea from Michael Cohen, establishing that Trump and his agents were trying to put together a Trump Tower Moscow deal for at least six months after Trump said no such thing was going on (and two years after Junior claimed to think the discussion ended) and that Trump had thus being lying outrageously throughout the campaign every time, and there were dozens, he said "I have no business in Russia"—no, he was canceling the sidebar because of the news of Russian aggression against Ukrainian ships in the waters off Crimea.

Nightmares

Via.

A couple of truly bizarre misinterpretations in Mark Landler's New York Times account of the emperor's views on the murder of Jamal Kashoggi—first,

Mr. Trump, who had once condemned the Saudi leaders for perpetrating “the worst cover-up in history,” praised Saudi Arabia this weekend as a “truly spectacular ally,” even after the C.I.A. concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, ordered the murder.

"Condemned" is a very peculiar descriptor for Trump's initial remarks on the killing, and especially the cover-up—

Trust me, Clinton wouldn't have done this

MBS couldn't stop himself from cracking up during his March visit as Trump bragged on the "deal" he'd made with the cheesy visual aids his staff prepares for him. "Look! Airplanes!" Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP. Don't believe Saudi Arabia is America's generous pal. And his claim that MBS is giving the United States $110 billion worth of business is bullshit, as you probably know by now. As Yglesias writes today, Saudis are far more dependent on the US than the other way around; this special relationship has been out of date for many years.

A couple of years ago, during the presidential campaign, America was all exercised about the fact that the Saudi Arabian government seemed to have made donations, some of them possibly while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state, totaling over $10 million, conceivably as much as $25 million, to the charitable organization run by Clinton's husband and daughter, where the money would be used for things like buying AIDS drugs for patients in impoverished countries, microcredit for poor business owners, and programs to empower women and girls, which never seemed to get a mention in the news stories, along with the fact that Norway had put in approximately the same amount, and other countries donating smaller but still big sums included not just the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and Morocco and Algeria but also Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany.

They did sometimes mention that Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, was also vaguely rumored to have some funky business relationships with some other countries, as in this 20 August 2016 story by Amy Chozick (remember her?) and Steve Eder:

Toward the state-and-a-half solution

Still from Rona Yefman's 2006 video, "Pippi L. at Abu Dis", depicting Pippi Longstocking, strongest girl in the world, attempting to take down the Wall separating Israel from Palestine.

Has there ever been anything in history quite as overdetermined as Trump's insistence on recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital (he didn't say "undivided", which may be a clue that he or his writers didn't mean all that much anyway) of the Jewish state and agreement to move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv at some point in the future? There are so many competing ways of explaining why it had to happen that it might be be more useful to ask what could have stopped it.

First there's Jared Kushner, designated unofficially by the Emperor-elect as Middle East Peace Tsar way back in November 2016—