“Former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats confirmed as Director of National Intelligence“, March 15.
Coats is strongly anti-Putin.
Coats is anti-Iran and pro-Israel, a recipient of AIPAC funds.
Coats is strongly anti-Russia. See also this.
Trump has filled high offices of his administration with men and women who strongly believe in the neocon vision of U.S. world dominance. They want to remake governments and reshape countries. They cannot accomplish this as a rule because they cannot manufacture or impose the legitimacy that states require, but they don’t understand or accept this limitation. The U.S. winds up being a constant presence and partner in these futile attempts, constantly infusing resources of many kinds, constantly facing new problems, constantly involved in shoring up their creations. Ukraine is a recent example. Obama started that and Trump continues it: “Trump expects Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine: White House”.
Nikki Haley provides another example of this futile aspiration: “Getting Assad out is not the only priority. So what we’re trying to do is obviously defeat ISIS. Secondly, we don’t see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there. Thirdly, get the Iranian influence out. And then finally move towards a political solution, because at the end of the day this is a complicated situation, there are no easy answers and a political solution is going to have to happen.”
Her oversimplified road map is a recipe for another Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, not to mention Somalia, Yemen and Haiti. The so-called “political solution” involves a new government and a new state. That’s where the insurmountable or at least very costly obstacles come in. A state cannot be stable without acceptance by the peoples living there. That’s the origin of legitimacy and stability. It also has to be acceptable to its neighbors and stronger states that are nearby. In the case of Syria, that includes Iran, Russia, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel; also, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. What makes Haley and neocons think that they can construct legitimacy out of this when prior attempts have nearly always failed in other countries?
The ongoing U.S. attempt, through allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to remake Syria shorn of Assad has created the long Syrian war, which has proven to be exceedingly damaging to the world. The U.S. vastly over-estimated the rise and power of a moderate democratic force in Syria and it vastly under-estimated the infusion of fundamentalist forces such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, financed and supplied by anti-Assad neighboring states with their own political agendas. The U.S. brought on only heartbreaking damage to Syrians by its efforts to alter Syria’s government.
Trump and his team now blunder into Syria even further in support of the neocon agenda, which time and again creates so much chaos that the Russians now think that “controlled chaos” is the U.S. goal. (See Lavrov’s remarks.) Chaos certainly is the result, controlled only by a continual and very costly drain on American resources: Empire first, America last.
There is an unsubstantiated rumor or tip from one source that one member of Trump’s neocon team (H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor) is suggesting as one option an infusion of 150,000 U.S. ground forces in Syria.
8:31 am on April 10, 2017
