Trump’s Version of Russian Roulette
He pulls the trigger and other people die
by Mike Meyer
Jesus H. Christ on roller skates, Trump just got rolled by Erdogan and Putin and the Kurds are paying the price. Well, the US is paying a huge price for stupidity and backstabbing allies and that bill may well bankrupt the US. Our word is worthless, now.
Allow a mentally unstable psychopath in the most powerful position on the planet and you are playing Russian roulette. Trump keeps pulling the trigger and the chambers have been empty but our luck has run out.
Oh, yeah, in this game the gun is pointed at us not at Trump’s head.
As of last Friday there were enough directly impeachable admissions on public record to remove Trump, and Pence as an accomplice, but, of course, there is nothing that can really be done. We need to be careful and move very slowly.
Unfortunately impulsive psychopaths don’t care. Destabilizing the Mideast based on the desires of Trump’s buddies, Putin, Erdogan, or any other wannabe dictator, is too good to pass up. He can get them to polish his ego. That’s all that matters.
Even Lindsey Graham was forced to say this is a disaster. Of course he had to pull his head out of Trump’s ass to do it but, although it doesn’t mean anything, at least he said it.
This is a lot to accept but if you support an incompetent idiot you deal with what you get. Trump declared via Twitter (where else):
“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),”
Did I miss something? I wasn’t aware of the last time that Donny Trump destroyed the Turkish economy. Oh well, in his mind, I suppose. Does he even know where Turkey is located?
As the above referenced Economist article states, the whole Syrian opposition, and US sponsored Kurdish defense against ISIS thing, was unsustainable and doomed. That Obama failed to remove Bashar al-Assad made something like this inevitable at some point. Throw in an unstable and impulsive Trump, already under heavy attack for criminal and impeachable acts, and the worst possibilities become very real.
The assumption is that the Kurds, armed and trained by the US will have to make a deal with Bashar al-Assad to survive. The Kurds are tough, well armed, so we are looking at a very nasty war that the Kurds can’t win against the Turkish military. But maybe a Turkish, Kurdish, Syrian war? We’re already dealing with 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey that will be shoved back into northern Syria?
We can no longer avoid the bigger picture brought, ironically, into focus by Trump’s impulsive confusion. We’re already dealing with millions of refugees created indirectly by the climate crisis in areas subject to a century or more of political abuse and exploitation. All of these are symptoms of the catastrophic failure created by Western collapse.
It’s tiring to say but as incompetent and delusional as Trump is the disasters that he is creating are the result of decades of greed, ignorance, and refusal to recognize our human responsibility to ensure security, rights and wellbeing of all people.
We are being forced to recognize this as we all face the next centuries of hardship and refugee-hood. Correcting this will take more than the removal of a small coterie of low level criminals bent on authoritarian wins.
I never thought I would say this but the end had better be near. Excuses and obfuscations don’t cut it anymore.
Trump is delivering the coup de gras to the dying American Empire and, maybe, to the US itself. And that doesn’t consider massive human suffering and death in the Middle East. Without drastic change this will only get worse, fast.