[The following rant was written in response to Tom Gallaher’s piece, “Joe Biden, Don’t Let Trump Run as the Anti-War Candidate!”]
It has apparently escaped sheepherder Gallagher’s attention that Donald Trump has “walked the (anti-war) walk” a hell of a lot more consistently than Barack Obama did — which, of course, isn’t saying much, considering how Obama needlessly resuscitated the moribund GWOT agenda and expanded it from two wars (that he’d vowed to end) to seven.
Certainly, Trump is no peacenik. He’s escalated the New Cold War that Obama, intelligence operatives, and neo-McCarthyite Democrats launched over the last few years (ably assisted by the fecklessly Russiagating corporate media). He’s also continued President Obama’s “pivot to China,” ringing China with warships, missiles, and bases. And he’s scrapped treaty after treaty, including the INF.
But Trump has also fought the neocons, tooth and nail, especially John Bolton (neocon #1), who he eventually fired.
And he’s repeatedly attempted to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria (and talked of doing so in Germany and South Korea).
And he’s occasionally made some feeble attempts at international diplomacy: in the Koreas, with the Russians, and with regard to Syria.
But most significantly, it has somehow escaped Gallagher’s attention that the modern holocaust of Middle Eastern Muslims has dramatically slowed under Trump’s presidency.
How can anyone claiming to be “liberal” or “anti-war” deny this fact? Who the hell are these “liberals” who have systematically erased these millions of civilian deaths, pitching them into the Memory Hole — like the worst Good Germans of the last Holocaust?
Consider the abysmal records of Trump’s three immediate predecessors (who didn’t initiate this holocaust but most assuredly put it into overdrive):
1. Bill Clinton — Per the WHO and other credible international organizations, President Clinton’s draconian, potable water-denying sanctions condemned “well over a million” Iraqi civilians to death, the vast majority of whom were babies and toddlers. As The Guardian has reported, Denis Halliday, the Irish career development worker who oversaw the program at the U.N., asserted (after resigning in disgust, along with two colleagues) that Washington’s sanctions satisfied “the definition of genocide.”
2. George W. Bush — As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies have written, citing peer-reviewed articles and credible studies, America’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq (enthusiastically championed and facilitated, on the Democratic side, by one Joseph Biden) has claimed the lives of some 2.4 million human beings: “…our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion.”
Ironically, that article appeared in Common Dreams, one of today’s most vocal cheerleaders for the Democrats who took over the neocons’ bloody agenda after Bush/Cheney drove it into a ditch.
3. Barack Obama (the most tragic case of all) — Although Obama campaigned in 2008 as the “liberal” who would “end” Bush’s wars, he instead became the “centrist” (right-winger) who would needlessly rescue and expand the neocon agenda that Bush/Cheney had utterly discredited and demolished. He would continue “The Redirection” of the GWOT (first reported in 2007 by Seymour Hersh) shifting tactics from large-scale, boots-on-the-ground operations to: “pinprick” missile attacks; dramatically escalated drone strikes (killing 90% civilians per Akbar Ahmed’s acclaimed book, “The Thistle and the Drone”); and the use of Salafist militant proxies — creating, along with our despotic Gulf allies, a second Mujaheddin Army, for the purpose of overthrowing the governments of Libya and Syria.
Those operations resulted in two failed states, open-air slave markets, over ten million refugees, and well over 500,000 deaths: https://invitation2artivism.org/a-striking-lack-of-empathy-part-iii-the-neocons-keep-killing-americans-keep-snoozing-syriasly/
Don’t get me wrong: Donald Trump is an obvious (too obvious) monster and a truly deplorable human being.
He is every bit as racist and proto-fascist as the Republicans I grew up fearing and loathing (and the Democrats who would make the GOP’s worst nightmares of welfare “reform” and The New Jim Crow come true).
But although he’s loosened the rules of engagement, with appalling results in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, it is nonetheless true that, under Donald Trump, the U.S.-led genocide has slowed to “mere” scores of thousands of deaths (including Yemen, where Trump has simply continued the war begun by Bush and escalated by Obama).
Finally, while it might seem crass to reduce this discussion to numbers, one has to admit that the numbers are, frankly, staggering: Trump’s three immediate predecessors are the butchers of no less than FOUR MILLION human beings, nearly all of whom were Arab-Muslim civilians.
That’s two-thirds the number of Jews that Hitler killed in the West’s previous Holocaust.
(For obvious reasons, these Muslim casualties are not discussed in our corrupted Fourth-Reich nation… except in the extreme margins of our political discourse. But that doesn’t change the historical record.)
My question for the sheepherders: Do these millions of lives matter — at all?!!
In the land of Trump Derangement Syndrome, populated almost entirely by warmongering, Russia-obsessed “liberals,” one has to ask: Did these millions of human beings never exist?
Or have they simply been disappeared into the crematoria of the current Reich — built and maintained by Democrats and Republicans alike?