Gareth Porter provides some history of how Obama got into the regime-change business in Syria. In Porter’s view, Obama resisted meddling up to a point, but then he “placated” the national security state. His “no” to intervention became a limited “yes”. If placation is the reason, why did he give in? Was he weak? Yes, to an extent, he was; but that’s not all that goes on in situations like this. The national security state has ways of cornering a president, and I’m not referring to blackmail and threats of assassination. I’m referring to political pressures that can be applied to any president who goes against them. We’ve seen this very clearly with the pressures against Trump.
The CIA and Pentagon people who favor more military expenditures and activities in foreign countries can create media pressures against any sitting president. They can do this through several means. (1) Leaks to their confidantes in the media. The Washington Post is a CIA bastion, for example. They can create a story of a president’s weakness against “enemies” or make it seem as if he’s going against Israel, for example. In this way they threaten the president’s political support in the country. The media have leaders and many newspapers pick up what the Post says. (2) Speeches and comments by figures in the foreign governments who want the military equipment. (3) Editorials and opinion pieces against the president by neocon writers, and they are everywhere. (4) They can rouse their allies in Congress to make some public statements that support their side. (5) They can find unhappy allies within a president’s close circle and get such persons to sabotage the president. (6) They can go public themselves and go against a president to varying degrees. (7) They can fabricate reports, dossiers and create rumors.
A great deal of the “news” of this sort, the commentary on what a president does, is intentionally orchestrated. It is piled on. Presidents depend on polls and public opinion. They also depend on support from people in Congress who support them, but those people can be easily induced to keep quiet when their man is attacked. When a president finds himself seemingly isolated with media and others against him and his position, he will think it imprudent and a political losing game to give a categorical “No”. He’ll shift. He’ll placate the opposition. He will especially do this if he is on the weak side as Obama was in foreign affairs or if he places higher priority on some domestic aim and doesn’t want to see it jeopardized.
If this is the way things work, then it explains why Trump is attacking certain media and why he’s using tweets to communicate.
8:55 am on July 30, 2017
