I/III. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-looking-dirt-iran-looks-133800761.html
Trump is looking for dirt on Iran, and it looks like the run up to the Iraq war Business Insider Alex Lockie Business InsiderJuly 28, 2017 trump(Trump's approach to Iran looks a bit like Bush's approach to Iraq.Reuters/Carlos Barria) After failing to repeal Obamacare, Trump will likely target another cornerstone of Obama's legacy — the Iran deal. Trump could try to drum up intelligence on Iran cheating the deal, but other parties in the deal likely won't trust him. The attempt to form facts to fit the policy mirrors a dark chapter in US history — the 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Donald Trump campaigned on tearing up the Iran deal and repealing Obamacare, but with his efforts to reform healthcare once again defeated, he may look to sabotage the Iran deal in a way that resembles the run up to the Iraq war. "With Healthcare dead, Trump will be even more determined to kill Obama's top foreign policy achievement - the Iran Deal," Ilan Goldenberg, the Middle East security director at the Center for New American Security tweeted after Trump's healthcare defeat. But unlike healthcare, the Iran deal involves six countries and the US has a limited ability to act unilaterally — so Trump has been looking for dirt to increase pressure on Tehran. Every 90 days, the US has to confirm that Iran has complied with the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspections and not violated the terms of the deal. For the first six months of Trump's presidency, he has gone through with the procedure, albeit begrudgingly, according to the Associated Press. "If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago," Trump told the Wall Street Journal of the Iran deal. But Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk and an expert on nuclear proliferation, told Business Insider that like the IAEA, he sees no evidence of Iran violating the terms of the deal. The AP reported that Trump wants to drum up "foolproof intelligence" of suspicious activity at Iranian military sites to increase the scope of inspections — something that Iran would almost certainly push back on. If Iran refused the inspections, Trump would have good reason to exit the deal, bringing the other parties with him. "Demand more inspections and when Iran doesn't comply, blame Iran & use it as an excuse to walk away from the agreement," Tweeted Goldenberg. "If US can blame Iran then it can build coalition to reimpose sanctions and get a better deal." But the problem, according to Lewis and Goldenberg, is that none of the other nations involved in the deal believe Trump is acting in good faith. Intelligence exclusive to the US that suggests Iran is cheating on the deal will likely appear politically motivated, the experts concluded. "If real evidence turns up, I want us to be able to hunt that down, but everything [the administration] said makes it seem like it's a transparent and cynical effort to confront the Iranians," said Lewis. The selective search for intelligence on a Middle Eastern adversary's allegedly clandestine nuclear weapons program draws a dark historical parallel. U.S. Marine Corp Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad April 9, 2003. U.S. troops pulled down a 20-foot (six metre) high statue of President Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad on Wednesday and Iraqis danced on it in contempt for the man who ruled them with an iron grip for 24 years. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Iraqis earlier took a sledgehammer to the marble plinth under the statue of Saddam. Youths had placed a noose around the statue's neck and attached the rope to a U.S. armoured recovery vehicle. PP03040026 Pictures of the month April 2003View photos U.S. Marine Corp Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad April 9, 2003. U.S. troops pulled down a 20-foot (six metre) high statue of President Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad on Wednesday and Iraqis danced on it in contempt for the man who ruled them with an iron grip for 24 years. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Iraqis earlier took a sledgehammer to the marble plinth under the statue of Saddam. Youths had placed a noose around the statue's neck and attached the rope to a U.S. armoured recovery vehicle. PP03040026 Pictures of the month April 2003 More (US Marine Corps Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad April 9, 2003.REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic) In 2003, during the run up to the Iraq war, the US cherry-picked intelligence and represented Iraq as a state bent on building weapons of mass destruction. Former President George W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice famously said at the time "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." After Baghdad fell and the US took custody of Saddam Hussein, it found no smoking gun, and nothing capable of creating a mushroom cloud. "It’s exactly like Iraq," Lewis said of Trump's push for dirt on Tehran. "The facts were being fitted around the policy." The major difference in this case, according to Lewis, is that the US is unlikely to invade Iran. In some ways, Trump has been more straightforward. He does not like the Iran deal, and he seeks to discredit it so he can eventually scrap it. Iran NavyView photos Iran Navy More (REUTERS/Fars News/Hamed Jafarnejad) After all, Iran is openly antagonistic towards the US. Iran frequently harasses US Navy ships sailing around the Arabian Gulf. In fact, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy said point blank that "one of the IRGC navy's operational goals is to destroy America's Navy." Iran supports Syrian President Bashar Assad and has been behind attacks on US and US-backed forces in Syria. But Lewis warned that nuclear technology is old, and if Iran wanted to, even with the return of heavy sanctions abated by the JCPOA, it could build a nuclear weapon surprisingly quickly. II/III. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/28/16059486/trump-speech-police-hand Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency The president of the United States is explicitly encouraging police violence. Updated by Dara [email protected] Jul 28, 2017, 4:10pm EDT Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images In a speech to law enforcement officials in Long Island on Friday, the president of the United States delivered a clear and chilling message: He thinks that unauthorized immigrants are subhuman, and that law enforcement should treat them accordingly. The ostensible villains of Trump’s speech: the transnational criminal gang MS-13, which started in California but has taken root in El Salvador and whose members have been fingered in a string of high-profile killings in Long Island. Trump described MS-13 members as “animals” who “have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields.” But the president has never been particularly scrupulous about differentiating “good” and “bad” immigrants. The lurid details of MS-13 crimes ended up underpinning a theme Trump has used before — that the US is “besieged” by migration (largely, in reality, of children and families) out of Central America: You say what happened to the old days where people came into this country, they worked and they worked and they worked and they had families and they paid taxes and they did all sorts of things, and their families got stronger and they were closely knit. We don't see that. Failure to enforce our immigration laws had predictable results. Drugs, gangs, and violence. Of course, Trump claims that thanks to his administration — one of whose first priorities was to “unshackle” immigration field agents to give them more latitude in going after unauthorized immigrants — the rule of law is being restored. But Trump’s idea of the “rule of law” is mostly about looking and acting, in his own words, mean. Just like it’s important to have “a rich guy at the head of commerce,” he said, it’s important to have “rough guys” as ICE agents: I saw some photos where Tom [Homan, the acting head of ICE]’s guys, rough guys, they're rough, I don't want to be — I don't want to be, you know, say it because they'll say that's not politically correct, you're not allowed to have rough people doing this kind of work. At one point, Trump literally instructed the assembled police officers not to protect the heads of suspects who were under arrest and were being loaded into police cars: When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don't be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over. Like, don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody. Don't hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay? Follow David Mack ✔ @davidmackau Here's the president of the United States encouraging police officers to be rough with people they arrest 12:06 AM - Jul 29, 2017 1,258 1,258 Replies 4,605 4,605 Retweets 4,266 4,266 likes Twitter Ads info and privacy It’s the closest Trump has come since inauguration to his infamous calls for violence against protesters at campaign rallies during the presidential primary. The themes aren’t new — they’re literally the oldest trick in Trump’s book — but they’re increasingly explicit. That’s a very bad sign. Demonizing immigrants brought Trump to victory. Now it’s the theme he returns to whenever he’s struggling. Back in 2015, Donald Trump launched his journey toward the presidency by winning surprising support for a single, powerful theme: Unauthorized immigrants are dangerous criminals who are invading America and coming for your family. RELATED Donald Trump's drive for "law and order" undermines the rule of law Under Trump, rank-and-file law enforcement will have more power than ever Trump's administration is a horrifying success Trump’s concern with immigration has always primarily been with crime. He won early political allies in Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona and the “Angel Moms” whose children were killed by unauthorized immigrants. The vision of America promulgated in his most important speeches — his more-Nixonian-than-Nixon speech accepting the Republican nomination, his “American carnage” inauguration address — is unusually dark for a successful politician in this country. In Trump’s rhetoric, America was no longer great not because it was in some graceful decline, but because it was under siege from the forces of disorder: unlawful immigrants and lawless protesters. In six months in the presidency, Trump’s already established a pattern: When his agenda is floundering, he returns to the theme that first made him a popular figure. It’s an opportunity for him to brag (with some basis in reality) about how much he’s accomplished as president, since his administration really has been able to make strides in expanding enforcement. He’s trotted out acting ICE Director Homan for press briefings twice in the last month: first at the end of June when it became clear that the health care bill the House of Representatives had passed wouldn’t make it through the Senate, and then this week, as it became doubtful that the Senate would pass a health care bill at all. Returning to the theme of scary immigrant criminals is also a chance for Trump himself to return to the vibe of his campaign rallies: tough talk before an adoring crowd. So on Friday, the day after the Senate’s last-ditch effort at passing a bill was defeated in a stunning late-night vote, Trump was in Long Island. Obamacare got a passing reference; the methods by which MS-13 members supposedly torture and kill Americans were addressed in gory detail. The heroes of Trump’s America are law enforcement — the beat cops in America’s supposedly crime-ridden “inner cities,” the ICE agents tasked with deporting unauthorized immigrants. His biggest policy accomplishments (and certainly the ones his administration brags about most) have been “unshackling” these officers, giving them less oversight and fewer directives to allow them to fight “bad hombres” the best way they see fit. The implication has always been that it’s acceptable, even necessary, for them to be a little rough, a little cruel, a little “not nice” — that upholding law and order required bending the former to ensure the latter. Now, that implication is explicit. Trump’s rhetoric isn’t dangerous because it’s likely to become federal policy. There’s not going to be a directive ordering federal law enforcement officers to slam suspects’ heads into car doors during arrests. (Trump remains impressively insulated from the reality of policymaking. On Friday, he described MS-13’s presence in Long Island as “a new phenomenon”; the George W. Bush administration was conducting ICE gang sweeps on the island a decade ago.) It’s dangerous because, at best, it successfully communicates to law enforcement agents that their moral superiority to the “animals” they apprehend justifies or even mandates violence. At worst, it communicates that message more broadly to the most fervent of the white supremacists who number among the president’s supporters. Either way, it sends a clear message to Latinos in America — both unauthorized immigrants who are liable to be arrested by ICE at any time and might be falsely accused of gang membership in the process, and legal immigrants and citizens who nonetheless might “look like a gang member” to the wrong person based on the color of their skin. Trump is telling them there is no one who can keep them safe. And his audience greeted the message with thunderous applause. III. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/29/16053710/trump-chief-of-staff-priebus-scaramucci The Trump administration’s chaos has reached an astounding new level The chief of staff is out. The president publicly mocks his AG. The new communications director viciously attacks his coworkers. Updated by Andrew [email protected] Jul 29, 2017, 10:50am EDT SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty The level of chaos in President Trump’s administration right now is astounding — even for him. The White House chief of staff is out — after the new communications director went on a profane, public rant insulting him. (Naturally, the communications director is still in.) The president has been publicly berating the attorney general in an apparent effort to get him to resign, while rumors fly that Trump wants to fire the special counsel investigating his campaign. The press secretary has quit, and there are yet more rumors that either the Secretary of State or the (second) National Security Adviser could be next. And that’s all in just over a week. All of this is clearly borne out of the president’s frustration with how his administration has gone so far. Trump is unpopular, his legislative agenda has stalled, and his presidency could be in serious legal danger from the Russia investigation. So he very clearly (and understandably) wants to make changes. But the way he’s going about it — by publicly humiliating officials who have long supported him but are now out of favor — is downright deranged. And it will make his problems far worse in the long run, as competent and qualified people will choose to stay far away rather than risk similar disgrace. Amazingly, it’s not Scaramucci but Priebus who was ousted after Scaramucci’s rant Take the profane, violent tirade that newly minted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci recently delivered to New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza. “Unprofessional” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Scaramucci mocked his coworkers, calling Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac” and saying Steve Bannon was “trying to suck [his] own cock.” He threatened to “fucking kill all the leakers” in the administration. He (falsely) accused Priebus of leaking his financial disclosures and claimed to have called the FBI and Department of Justice on him (the White House chief of staff!). Finally, Scaramucci openly admitted, at the end of the conversation, that he was planning to “start tweeting some shit to make this guy [Priebus] crazy” — and then did so: Naturally, then, the person who was ousted from the administration on Friday was not Anthony Scaramucci but instead Reince Priebus. And amazingly enough, Trump may have come away from this controversy not with a lower opinion of Scaramucci but of Priebus. One Trump adviser “said Mr. Trump was dismissive of Mr. Priebus for not returning fire” at Scaramucci, the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas and Michael Bender report. This White House has featured back-stabbing and knife-fighting since the very start, but now the president seems to have given the green light — his subordinates should attack their rivals as viciously as possible, and they’ll face no consequences for it whatsoever. The president himself will publicly drag his longtime supporters like Jeff Sessions Or take the president’s tweets and public statements about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his oldest supporters who’s been truly committed to his policy agenda. In recent days, Trump has mocked Sessions as “beleaguered,” said he’s “very disappointed” in Sessions, criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia probe (saying he would not have nominated Sessions if he’d known he would do that), and complained that Sessions isn’t sufficiently investigating Democrats. This raises very serious questions about the president trying to politicize the Justice Department, and about whether he’s trying to get rid of Sessions so a new attorney general can shut down the Russia investigation. Additionally, because he’s not content just complain about policy disagreements, Trump has gone out of his way to portray Sessions’s very character as petty. Sessions was the first US senator to endorse Trump’s presidential campaign, doing so in February 2016 at a moment when Trump was toxic to practically every other elected Republican. In doing so, Sessions was risking his own career — Josh Green reports in his new book The Devil’s Bargain that Sessions feared that Republican leaders would retaliate against him. One would think that Trump, who constantly talks about the importance of “loyalty,” would reward such loyalty. Instead, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, the president rewrote history to portray Sessions as a self-interested climber who endorsed him because of his big crowds: When they say he endorsed me, I went to Alabama. I had 40,000 people. He was a senator from Alabama. I won the state by a lot, massive numbers. A lot of the states I won by massive numbers. But he was a senator, he looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ’What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement. But I’m very disappointed in Jeff Sessions. In doing so, the president has sent the message loud and clear — your past loyalty to Donald Trump will mean nothing if you displease him about something later on. “If he [Sessions] can get treated that way, what about the rest of us?” a sitting Cabinet secretary asked Erick Erickson. How is the White House going to fix itself? Trump has appointed John Kelly, a retired general who he initially picked as Secretary of Homeland Security, as his new chief of staff — reportedly because he wanted someone he felt was “strong” in contrast to Priebus, who he deemed “weak.” But while Priebus surely was an ineffective chief of staff, that was the case in large part because Donald Trump made him so. Trump prefers to have free-form, unstructured interactions with his many staffers and outside advisers. His policymaking process has been chaotic, and can be upended by a presidential tweet at any time. Trump’s son-in-law occupies a high-ranking, unaccountable White House post with which he can circumvent the chief of staff at any time. It’s possible that some of these problems could be fixed, or at least ameliorated, under Kelly. But there’s a larger problem: a culture that is set from the very top, from Donald Trump. It’s a culture in which aides are positively encouraged to viciously attack each other, and to fear that they could lose the president’s favor at any moment. And it’s a culture that should make us all fear what will happen when this White House faces a serious crisis. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
