Trump Tweeting Tough

Last night things did not go well for Trump and the GOP on the season premier of 60 Minutes. Worse, performance wise, than even the repeat whitewashing of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's refusal to answer basic questions about the telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the transcript of which was published last week.

The Republican Party appears to be shakily lining up behind the president with a "see no evil" defense, leaving it to the president himself to throw the haymakers. According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker in "Trump Was Repeatedly Warned That Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Was ‘Completely Debunked’":

Mr. Trump continued his bellicose attacks on his accusers. “I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason,” he wrote on Twitter. And he threatened the whistle-blower, who is protected by law from retribution. “Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!”

[snip]

The White House put out Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, to offer his defense on the Sunday talk show circuit. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Miller denounced the whistle-blower as a “deep-state operative” who is part of a cabal of “unelected bureaucrats who think they need to take down this president.”

Patrick Martin noted that

Trump took to Twitter Saturday morning to denounce his Democratic opponents as “savages,” listing by name Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and “AOC Plus 3,” a reference to four liberal Democratic congresswomen, all from minority backgrounds: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.

It was widely noted in the media that Trump had chosen to target two Jews and four women of color as “savages,” a word with longstanding racist connotations that he has generally reserved for Central American gang leaders. His tweets will undoubtedly be followed by a new volley of threats of violence from Trump’s ultra-right supporters directed against the targeted Democrats.

This week the American public is about to enter the maze of Ukrainian politics. I'll be surprised if Schiff can maintain a coherent focus (see "How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry" by Kenneth Vogel, Andrw Kramer and David Sanger):

Among the subjects covered in a subpoena sent Friday by House Democrats to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and demands for depositions from American diplomats was Mr. Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine this summer not long before his July 25 call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who defeated Mr. Poroshenko this spring.

Democrats are also looking into the recall in the spring of the United States ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer who was seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump by some of his conservative allies. On Friday evening, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, abruptly resigned, not long after receiving a summons from House Democrats to sit for a deposition in the coming week.

So far, so good. At the end of this both Trump and the permanent Washington Consensus are going to be weakened.

The American Public will Soon be much More Knowledgeable about Ukrainian Politics

It does appear as if the Democratic leadership in the House is attempting to pour impeachment through the funnel of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine. It's a dangerous strategy, particularly if the GOP refuses to go along, in that it will open up to broader public scrutiny the Obama administration's legacy in Ukraine, something that is already happening.

In other words, the desired outcome, Trump and Biden both hoisted on a Ukrainian petard, is still a distinct possibility.

Below are some key quotes:

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Democratic leaders “are eyeing a fast-paced investigation.” A meeting of the Democratic caucus “urged the leadership to keep the messaging around impeachment on national security and the Ukraine probe” led by Schiff, “not on the litany of potential Trump offenses investigated by other panels, including the House Judiciary Committee, which traditionally takes the lead in impeachment proceedings.”

Some senior Democrats, the Post reported, “are even arguing that other committees should forego potentially explosive hearings that could distract from the intelligence panel’s work.” There will be “very few hearings, if any,” according to a senior Democratic Party aide, with most of the investigation taking place in “closed-door interviews.”

[snip]

The Democrats are seeking to frame the Ukraine issue as an extension of their neo-McCarthyite anti-Russia campaign. Pelosi argued along these lines in an interview with MSNBC on Friday morning. After noting that she “prays for the president all the time,” Pelosi declared, without evidence, that “Russia has a hand in this.”

Joseph Kishore, "CIA sets terms for Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump’s crimes"

 ***

Mr. Volker, a widely respected former ambassador to NATO, served in the part-time, unpaid position of special envoy to help Ukraine resolve its armed confrontation with Russia-sponsored separatists.

[snip]

In recent months, the administration has lost John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; Fiona Hill, the top Europe official on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, all of whom sympathized with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

Peter Baker, "Kurt Volker, Trump’s Envoy for Ukraine, Resigns" 

***

The subpoena for documents is far-reaching and mirrors early voluntary requests sent to the State Department and the White House. It demands a full transcript of the July call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, a list of any State Department officials who listened to or received a readout of the call, and any records created by the department in relation to it. It also seeks any files related to efforts by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to push investigations into Mr. Biden or other matters involving Ukraine; and it calls for records related to the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily withhold $391 million in security aid from Ukraine.

Mr. Pompeo was given one week to produce the material.

Democrats presented their deposition requests as nonnegotiable, listing dates for early October appearances by officials who were either mentioned in a whistle-blower complaint released this week or are connected to American policy work in the region. They include Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine; Kurt D. Volker, the United States special envoy to Ukraine; George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs; T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a State Department counselor; and Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union.

Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "House Democrats Issue First Subpoena in Impeachment Inquiry" 

Why a Broad Impeachment Inquiry is a Good Idea

One criticism of the impeachment drive underway in the U.S. House of Representatives is that Democratic leadership is narrowing its focus solely to Trump's request that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. As Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept argues:

For House Democrats to wait this long and then impeach a reckless, lawless, racist, tax-dodging president only over his interactions with the president of Ukraine would be to effectively give Trump a clean bill of health on everything else. Going into an election year, Democrats would be unilaterally disarming — unable to offer further substantive criticisms of Trump’s crimes and abuses of power across the board. “Why didn’t you impeach him for it?” Republicans will ask.

[snip]

Do these Democrats take the public for fools? Few would dispute the uniqueness or seriousness of these Ukraine revelations. But are they really saying “everybody understands” Trump’s quid pro quo with the president of a foreign country, and the details of the specific case involving Hunter Biden, but not the illegal payment of hush money to a porn star? Or all of the corrupt behavior on display in front of their eyes? The brazen self-dealing? The daily violation of the emoluments clause?

[snip]

Read a history book. In 1868, Andrew Johnson became the first president to be impeached and, in his case, the House of Representatives adopted 11 articles of impeachment, ranging from his violation of the Tenure of Office Act to his attempt to “disgrace” Congress. A little over a century later, in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee passed three lengthy and detailed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, covering obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The first of those articles even cited Nixon’s “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” and his efforts “to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.” (Sound familiar?)

Andre Damon of World Socialist Web Site agrees about the folly of a narrow impeachment focus:

House Democratic leaders have made clear that they are keeping their impeachment investigation narrowly focused on the “national security” issues raised by Trump’s effort to recruit Zelensky into his factional battle with the Democrats.

They are seeking to exclude from the investigation Trump’s vicious persecution of refugees on the southern border, his misappropriation of Pentagon funds to build his border wall in defiance of Congress, and his broader moves to turn the United States into a personalist dictatorship.

“I think we need to focus on what this very clear threat to national security and to our Constitution is,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell told the Washington Post. “We are going to focus on this particular matter,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said.

Neither Hasan nor Damon mention Yemen, which should be included as an impeachment article. U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen was never approved; in fact, Congress opposed U.S. involvement by invoking the War Powers Act. How can U.S. fight in a war based solely on presidential fiat? It can't.

Another fruitful line of inquiry that could be pursued in a broad impeachment investigation is the entire trip down the DNC hack rabbit hole. Both the whistle-blower complaint and the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation show Trump's interest in locating the holy grail DNC server in Ukraine. The conspiracy theory, as Craig Murray helpfully explains this morning in "Heroes, Villains and Establishment Hypocrisy," is that Crowdstrike, the shadowy cyber-security firm burrowed in the roots of Russiagate, spirited the hacked DNC server off to Ukraine:

As far as I am aware, the BBC have not reported at all the other thing Trump was asking Zelensky about – Crowdstrike. Regular readers will recall that Crowdstrike are the Clinton linked “cyber-security” company which provided the “forensic data” to the FBI on the alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers – data which has been analysed by my friend Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who characterises it as showing speeds of transfer impossible by internet and indicating a download to an attached drive. The FBI were never allowed access to the actual DNC server – and never tried, taking the DNC’s consultants word for the contents, which itself is sufficient proof of the bias of the “investigation”.

Crowdstrike also made the claim that the same Russia hackers – “Fancy Bear” – who hacked the DNC, hacked Ukrainian artillery software causing devastating losses of Ukrainian artillery. This made large headlines at the time. What did not make any MSM headlines was the subsequent discovery that all of this never happened and the artillery losses were entirely fictitious. As Crowdstrike had claimed that it was the use of the same coding in the DNC hack as in the preceding (non-existent) Ukraine artillery hack, that proved Russia hacked the DNC, this is pretty significant. Trump was questioning Zelensky about rumours the “hacked” DNC server was hidden in the Ukraine by Crowdstrike. The media has no interest in reporting any of that at all.

I know it's unlikely. Pelosi and Hoyer would sooner pull the plug on the whole impeachment process than risk a runaway train. But there's still a small chance at this point that a committee chair can make a stink and demand other issues be included.

Ukrainegate is Not Russiagate

UPDATE: The whistle-blower complaint has been released.

****

It is now becoming clear that transcript of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation released yesterday was edited. According to Charlie Savage, Michael Schmidt and Julian Barnes in "Whistle-Blower Is Said to Allege Concerns About White House Handling of Ukraine Call":

[T]he whistle-blower complaint went beyond Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Zelensky. It also dealt in part with the unusual manner in which White House officials handled internal records describing the call. The atypical proceeding heightened internal concerns about the content of the call, the two people said.

Bowing to pressure, the Trump administration permitted members of the intelligence committees and congressional leaders to read a copy of the complaint, which remains classified, late on Wednesday.

Its allegations were “deeply disturbing” and “very credible,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said after emerging from reviewing the complaint.

After reading it, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee told reporters that it contained far more information that reinforced their mounting concerns. They could disclose very little, but several of the lawmakers said it discussed other witnesses.

Granted that the on-the-record quotes are from odious Russiagater Adam Schiff, this is not Russiagate. It's too bad to see outlets like RT and blogs like Moon of Alabama dismiss the impeachment drive as more of the same. What the whistle-blower complaint appears to allege is White House records were altered to remove or obscure portions of the call. It also appears that
the whistle-blower complaint Justice Department memo, signed by Steven A. Engel, the head of its Office of Legal Counsel, was edited:

Mr. Engel’s memo, dated Sept. 24, said in a footnote that it was a revision of an original from Sept. 3, and that the department had “changed the prior version to avoid references to certain details that remain classified.”

Best-Case Scenario: Impeachment Hearings Doom both Trump and Biden

What's clear is that Trump doesn't want the full whistle-blower complaint revealed. Trump is willing to provide a transcript of his telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump will meet today at the United Nations, and he's willing to negotiate on the whistle blower providing testimony to congress, but as of now he is only considering the release of the complaint in redacted form. My guess is that there is a name or a description of an particular event that needs to be blacked out in order to prevent further inquiry.

When U.S. involvement in Ukraine is opened up to public scrutiny it is not going to play well for either party. Compared to Nixon scuttling peace talks with Vietnam in 1968, Trump's efforts to drum up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden seem insignificant. Trump sees impeachment as a "positive" for him. Newt Gingrich has declared “It is a win-win for Trump.” World Socialist Web Site encapsulates impeachment as

[A] significant escalation in the conflict within the US ruling elite between two right-wing factions: the Democrats, aligned with sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, and the Trump White House, which is turning to ever-more personalist and dictatorial forms of rule, based on fascistic appeals to the military, the border patrol and the police.

That being said, I think some good can come out impeachment hearings, depending on how much information is revealed about what the Obama administration was up to in Kiev. A best-case scenario is that hearings doom both Biden and Trump. It might be a bit of an outlier, but it could happen.

Trump Relishes Impeachment over Ukraine

The latest chapter in the Trump (non) impeachment saga is that

"President Trump personally ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before he pressed the new Ukrainian president to investigate the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate, two senior administration officials said Monday."

The story, in a nutshell, is that Trump wants the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen an investigation into Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky paid Joe Biden's son Hunter -- what for is not clear -- but Trump implies that it was to get the vice president to sack the Ukrainian public prosecutor who was pursuing money laundering and other charges against Zlochevksy.

Last week's reporting on this was actually better than what has been reported this week (see "Acting Intelligence Chief Refuses to Testify, Prompting Standoff With Congress" by Julian Barnes and Nicholas Fandos). The Trump administration is refusing to turn over a whistle-blower complaint on the Ukrainian affair to Adam Schiff's House Intelligence Committee.

The law is clear on this. Congress is entitled to see the report. Congress has an oversight function. What Trump is doing is a violation of the separation of powers.

But Trump is playing Br'er Rabbitt here. He wants to be impeached. He'll split the careerist neoliberal Dems from the progressive Dems and highlight the party leadership's fecklessness -- something he has already accomplished. Plus, he'll spotlight Joe Biden's corruption, not to mention the coup swamp politics of the Obama administration in Ukraine.

U.S. Cyber Command: Hastening the End of the Internet as We Know It

This morning David Sanger and Julian Barnes review U.S. cyber-warfare capabilities in "The Urgent Search for a Cyber Silver Bullet Against Iran":

The question circulating now through the White House, the Pentagon and Cyber Command’s operations room is whether it is possible to send a strong message of deterrence with a cyberattack without doing so much damage that it would prompt an even larger Iranian counterstrike.

[snip]

In war games — essentially online simulations — held before the attack on the Saudi oil fields, officials have tried to figure out how Iran’s increasingly skillful “cyber corps” would respond to an American cyberattack. These Iranian fighters have already racked up a significant record: wiping out 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, freezing operations at American banks with a “denial of service” attack, and crippling a Las Vegas casino. Last year, they began to study the ins and outs of election interference, according to private experts and government studies of the 2018 midterms.

When General Nakasone was nominated for his job, he acknowledged that one of the biggest problems facing Cyber Command was that it had not cracked the deterrence problem. Nations that are attacking the United States via cyber “do not think much will happen to them,” he told Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska. “They don’t fear us.”

In his first 18 months in office, General Nakasone has raced to bolster Cyber Command’s authority to act preemptively — and its preparations to respond to attacks. New, classified directives given to him by Mr. Trump, and built upon by Congress, allow Cyber Command to place “implants” of malicious software inside foreign networks without lengthy approval processes that run up to the president. Congress has called such efforts part of “traditional military authority.” 

Iran has reportedly been a major target — no surprise, since General Nakasone was a key player in designing a plan called “Nitro Zeus” to shut down Tehran and other Iranian cities in the event of a war. The idea was to put together an attack so devastating that Iran might surrender without a shot being fired.

We already know from the Snowden revelations that the U.S. has booby traps in the energy grid of close ally Japan. And we got an idea from Venezuela this year what it looks like when those booby traps go off (interestingly, Sanger and Barnes make no mention of the largest power outage in Venezuelan history). So Nitro Zeus should not be a surprise to us.

What should also not come as a surprise to us is the disappearance of the internet as we now it following significant hostilities between the U.S. and Iran or the U.S.and China or the U.S. and Russia.

Gulf Monarchies Displeased with Trump

The narrative has begun to shift in relation to the attack on the Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia. No longer is the story primarily about the U.S. blaming Iran for the Houthi attack and what the mighty U.S. military response will be; now it is all about U.S. weakness.

David Kirkpatrick and Ben Hubbard's "Attack on Saudi Oil Facilities Tests U.S. Guarantee to Defend Gulf" spotlights this weakness:

That Iran would seek in some way to attack Saudi oil production, though, was hardly unexpected. Experts had predicted for months that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against Iran’s oil sales would drive it to lash out against the oil production of Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf States.

The rulers of those Arab states had previously accused President Obama of trying to pull back from the American commitment to the region. They faulted him for negotiating a 2015 deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions without further constraining its military or other activities. And the Gulf leaders were outraged when Mr. Obama called off a planned strike against Syria, an Iranian ally, for using chemical weapons against civilians.

Now some prominent voices in the Arab Gulf States accuse Mr. Trump of an even greater betrayal. “Trump, in his response to Iran, is even worse than Obama,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates.

Instead of reversing the perceived pullback as Gulf leaders had expected, Mr. Abdulla argued, President Trump let down his Arab partners by failing to respond more forcefully to Iranian aggressions.

The United States has said that Iran was behind naval mines that damaged five oil tankers in the Persian Gulf this spring, and in June Iran boasted of shooting down an American surveillance drone. Yet President Trump did little in retaliation for the tanker attacks and called off a planned airstrike against Iran in response to the downing of the drone.

“His inaction gave a green light to this,” Mr. Abdulla said. “Now an Arab Gulf strategic partner has been massively attacked by Iran — which was provoked by Trump, not by us — and we hear Americans saying to us, you need to defend yourselves!”

“It is an utter failure and utter disappointment in this administration,” he added.

Moon of Alabama thinks the crisis over the Aramco attack has subsided for now, but that another crisis will emerge with the next Houthi attack. Craig Murray thinks it insane that the Western powers have become embroiled in the Sunni-Shia shadow wars.

I am still of the opinion that Trump, who is completely boxed in now because of his maximum pressure campaign against Iran and his pulling out of the JCPOA, will have to respond. Though as a developer Trump screwed many a partner, he needs money to win reelection. He can't alienate the Saudis, Emirates and Adelsons by pulling an Obama Damascus about-face. A cyber-attack fits the bill.

It's called "Nitro Zeus"

Senior officials said they were looking at cyberoptions, which would cause few or no casualties and would be considered a “proportionate response.”

American war plans have long included such options against Iranian oil production facilities, a feature of a plan called Nitro Zeus, developed years ago to cripple Iranian infrastructure without resorting to bombing.

The secret cyberattack in June wiped out a critical database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm to plot attacks against oil tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to covertly target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, at least temporarily. Iran spent months trying to recover lost information and restart some of the computer systems — including military communications networks. It is not clear whether it has succeeded.

"Trump Weighs Retaliation Against Iran and Names National Security Adviser" by Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt

With Trump trying to have it both ways -- naming a super-hawk to be his national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, and reviewing lists of Iranian targets at the same time he laments the folly of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East -- the "secret cyberattack" seems to be the preferred option, particularly with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif announcing on CNN that there will be an all-out war if Iran is targeted by a military strike. Presumably, a "secret cyberattack" would not prompt an all-out war. But, while ratcheting up pressure on Iran, it merely kicks the can down the road. Eventually there will be a reckoning. Hopefully it will be when Trump fails re-election next year and the U.S. returns to the JCPOA.

Look for a Massive Cyber-Attack on Iran Rather than a U.S. Missile Strike

The latest from Reuters (see "Saudi Arabia promises concrete proof Iran behind oil strikes") shows how overnight the speculation that the Aramco attack originated from southwest Iran is settling into an official casus belli:

A U.S. official told Reuters the strikes originated in southwestern Iran. Three officials said they involved cruise missiles and drones, indicating a higher degree of complexity and sophistication than initially thought.

The officials did not provide evidence or explain what U.S. intelligence they were using for evaluating the attack that cut 5% of global production.

Yesterday The New York Times presented this as unvarnished speculation:

One theory gaining traction among American officials is that the cruise missiles were launched from Iran and programmed to fly around the northern Persian Gulf through Iraqi air space instead of directly across the gulf where the United States has much better surveillance, one senior official said. In the hours before the attacks, American intelligence detected unusual activity at military bases in southwest Iran that would be consistent with preparations for strikes, another senior American official said.

Pompeo is in Saudi Arabia today to coordinate statements with the House of Saud. It appears a foregone conclusion that there will be a punitive strike on Iran. The question is what kind of strike. According to NYT:

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have presented Mr. Trump with an array of military options — presumably both bombing targets such as the missile-launching sites and storage areas as well as covert cyberoperations that could disable or disrupt Iran’s oil infrastructure.

How does Iran respond? As I see it, the U.S. cannot risk a missile strike. There are too many soft targets in the region. The Iranian reply will demand a further response from the U.S., and there goes Trump's reelection.

So a cyber-attack seems likely, particularly if the U.S. is able to replicate what it did in Venezuela earlier this year when it collapsed the national power grid.

War with Iran Appears Inevitable

Trump is being roundly criticized (see "With Oil Under Attack, Trump’s Deference to Saudis Returns" by Peter Baker and David Sanger) for his tweet granting U.S. war powers to Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!”

[snip]

The notion of the United States doing the bidding of the Saudis has a long, bristling history. Critics complained that Saudi Arabia effectively hired out the American military to protect itself from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and reverse his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The Saudi government even forked over $16 billion to reimburse the United States for about a quarter of the cost of the war that followed in 1991 — along with Kuwait, the most of any country.

The resentment felt over the years by American officials crossed the ideological spectrum, summed up pithily in a leaked 2010 cable by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The Saudis, Mr. Gates told the French foreign minister at the time, always want to “fight the Iranians to the last American.”

Among those who seemed to share the sentiment in the past was a New York businessman and television entertainer named Donald J. Trump.

“Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won’t, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth-$ trillion!” he tweeted in 2014.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has made Saudi Arabia his closest ally in the Middle East other than Israel, and has strongly supported its multifront struggle with Iran for dominance in the region. He has also left little doubt about the primacy of money in the relationship, openly citing the value of arms contracts in explaining why he would not criticize the Saudi government for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing.

Trump is merely tweeting the obvious. Saudi Arabia is one of two foreign powers that control U.S. foreign policy, Israel being the other. The U.S. continues to cover up Saudi responsibility for 9/11.

With the Houthis warning that more attacks could come at any moment, and most of the Trump administration signaling that a retaliatory strike against Iran is in the works, the question becomes how large of an Iranian response will there be. Iran has been promising for months a gigantic counter-attack. It might not be as gigantic as advertised, but it will definitely be an escalation, so much so that Trump will have to escalate even more.

Trump is doomed. Congress will be forced to impeach. The electorate is almost uniformly opposed to a war on Iran.

No Peace Dividend from Bolton's Firing

The Saudis major oil processing facility, the largest in the world, Abqaiq, was struck and damaged Saturday by a swarm of Houthi drones. Aramco has suspended production there and at another struck refinery, Khurais.

The debate now is over who is responsible. The Houthis have claimed responsibility, and the Iranians have denied it, but the U.S. is blaming Iran:

The government released satellite photographs showing what officials said were at least 17 points of impact at several Saudi energy facilities from strikes they said came from the north or northwest. That would be consistent with an attack coming from the direction of the northern Persian Gulf, Iran or Iraq, rather than from Yemen, where the Iranian-backed Houthi militia that claimed responsibility for the strikes operates.

The Saudis, however, have not, as of yet, publicly blamed Iran. And Trump appears to be deferring to al-Saud about what to do next.

The Saudis are obviously reticent to blame Iran and escalate military tension in an already hair-trigger environment because The Kingdom would be Iran's primary target, along with the myriad U.S. bases spread across the region. If Trump chooses to flex U.S. muscles and let fly a punitive one-off attack on Iran, something he opted out of in June after the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, Armageddon will be the likely result. Iran will take the opportunity to break out of the box Trump has put it in.

Any direct military conflict with Iran will guarantee that Trump is a one-term president. War with Iran is hugely unpopular, and that's a bipartisan sentiment.

If it looked for a moment like firing Bolton meant Trump would parade as a peacemaker for the next 18 months, no such luck.

Clearly the trajectory here is for Trump to strike Iran. He'll try to limit it to a one-off, but Iran will respond. Then we're on the escalation elevator.

The Fifth Democratic Presidential Debate

For all of those, myself included, who are confident of a 2020 Blue Wave last night's Democratic presidential debate in Houston should prompt a reassessment. What was on display was an aged, sclerotic party mouthing the same exhausted decades-old now-completely-meaningless platitudes. It's a party in thrall to a bankrupt centrism whose most zealous adherents are the 1%.

Where to begin? Why not the standard-bearer? That Joe Biden continues to top the polls is a very bad sign for the Democratic Party. Last night he repeated his performance of previous debates and primarily spouted gibberish. It comes in a gush. Most of it is nonsense, or of a sense internal to Biden's addled brain. That Biden continues to top the polls shows that either polls are entirely worthless or that a significant plurality of respondents know next to nothing about the current state of political affairs.

Bernie Sanders shit all over the bed last night in a dramatic display of fawning cowardice when Univision's Jorge Ramos asked him why he hasn't criticized Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Bernie responded by calling Maduro a "murderous tyrant." As Max Blumenthal tweeted,

If a performative Miami ambush journalist like Ramos can make Bernie parrot Bolton with a few provocations, imagine what the Beltway blob can do once it oozes its way into his administration.

That's why you need Tulsi Gabbard in the debates. Presumably she would have stepped in and repeated her mantra about no more regime change wars; at which point she could've reminded the millions of viewers about Uncle Sam's rich legacy of coups and dirty wars in South America, including George W. Bush's failed ouster of Hugo Chavez and the more recent failed coup of Juan Guiado.

Elizabeth Warren is being declared the winner. But to me she seemed tweaked out, a twitchy and insincere version of her previous debate performances. Kamala Harris, who is also being touted as a winner of last night's debate, was slick and utterly unbelievable.

All in all a very bad night for Democrats.

Erdoğan Pledges to Settle One Million Refugees in Syrian Buffer Zone

Carlotta Gall had a must-read article the other day, "Turkey’s Radical Plan: Send a Million Refugees Back to Syria." Turkey is cracking down on Syrian refugees within its borders. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promises to build new cities and resettle one million Syrians in the "safe zones" Turkey is negotiating with the United States. The safe zones, or buffer zones, are in U.S.-backed Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria, a.k.a., Rojava. As Gall notes,

The United States and Turkey agreed in principle last month to establish a jointly patrolled zone for refugees along the border but they are still negotiating the details and major differences remain.

Mr. Erdogan wants the zone to be 20 miles deep and run for 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border east of the Euphrates. The United States has limited Turkey’s access to a few miles.

American and Turkish troops conducted their first joint patrol of a small zone on Sunday.

But Syria has already called the plan a violation of its sovereignty and Russia emphasized the need to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity. The Kurds oppose the deal but have reportedly pulled back heavy weaponry from part of the border area.

American officials are focused on preventing clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces.

Because Erdoğan is not getting what he wants he has started to threaten Europe again with an influx of migrants. The EU has given Turkey billions since 2015 to warehouse migrants and prevent another crisis that led to Brexit and the ultra-nationalism of Pegida and Matteo Salvini.

The U.S. is trying to square the circle here. It is likely using airfields in Rojava to conduct "mystery airstrikes" against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon. The U.S. needs the Kurdish shadow state to keep doing what it is doing, and it can't have a Kurdish shadow state without Kurdish support. So eventually there is going to be some sort of eruption. 

Bolton Firing and Russiagate Resuscitation Proof of Rising People Power

My interpretation of Trump's termination of national security adviser John Bolton is that the president is not sanguine about his reelection. Trump ran to Hillary's left on issues of war and peace, but there's little hope that he will be able to do it again in 2020 (though he should be able to muddy the waters if Biden ends up being the Democratic Party's nominee).

I opined this past spring that Bolton would have to be kept in employment well into 2020 to guarantee access to Sheldon Adelson's casino coffers for the presidential election campaign. Trump either thinks fundraising won't be a problem or he feels that Bolton's regime-change foreign policy has become too much a drag on his brand. Likely it is a combination of both.

In any event, Trump's foreign policy, minus any of the peace overtures, was crafted by John Bolton. We should know fairly quickly if things are going to be any less bellicose under the new national security adviser based on the number of provocations in the Middle East. Recently there have been reports of "mystery airstrikes" killing members of the Iraqi popular mobilization forces on the Syrian border.

Trump might be frightened of losing the election, but so too are the grandees on the national security state. How else to interpret the frontpage resuscitation of Russiagate? After the most ardent of MSNBC/CNN viewers have moved on with their lives following Mueller's popcorn fart, the CIA is calling them back with old promises that it was rock solid human intel from a Putin loyalist within the walls of Kremlin that proves Russia stole their election.

As Andre Damon concludes,

In the name of combating “Russian meddling,” politicians pressured American technology firms to undertake the most onerous program of political censorship in the history of the internet in the US. Accounts with millions of followers were deleted overnight, while Google manipulated search results to bury left-wing viewpoints.

There was a massive effort to poison public opinion against Julian Assange, the courageous publisher and exposer of war crimes. He was slandered by the Democrats and the Times as a Russian agent who colluded with Trump, setting the stage for his imprisonment.

More information will no doubt emerge about the background and possible motivations of Smolenkov. But regardless, the fact that the source behind allegations the newspaper breathlessly proclaimed as fact had serious credibility problems makes clear that the Times made no serious efforts to question, much less validate, its chosen political narrative.

This newspaper functions as a clearinghouse for unquestioned, unexamined dispatches from within the American intelligence apparatus. Its role in promoting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not an aberration, but its modus operandi.

"Really a Right Wing Coup"

Chaos descended on parliament in the early hours of the morning as it was prorogued. Craig Murray writes this morning that what's happening in Westminster is "Really a Right Wing Coup":

Nothing in the Fixed Term Parliaments Act alters the constitutional position that the Prime Minister must be able to command a majority in the House of Commons.

It was unconstitutional of Elizabeth Saxe Coburg Gotha to appoint Boris Johnson as Prime Minister when it was absolutely plain at the outset he had no majority in the House of Commons. This is not hindsight, I said so at the time. Now it has been proven that he has no majority in the House as he has been defeated six times out of six on major votes on the most important issues of the day. he has never won an important vote on anything as Prime Minister. Whether or not these are characterised as “confidence issues” is irrelevant. The man Johnson has never had a Commons majority. I can think of nothing more unconstitutional – and I think it can absolutely be characterised as a coup – than for the Queen to appoint a Prime Minister who has no majority support in the Commons, and then prorogue Parliament precisely because the executive has no majority. This is not even a government which has lost its majority – it has never had one and ought never to have been appointed.

Rather than prorogue Parliament, the Queen should have obliged Boris Johnson to resign and asked the Leader of the Opposition to see whether he could form an administration that could command a majority. That would be the constitutionally correct course of action. The monarch is not neutral in this and is acting unconstitutionally, abusing her power.

Let me put it this way. Does anybody seriously contend that Jeremy Corbyn would be appointed Prime Minister by the Queen in a situation where he had no parliamentary majority, and would remain in No. 10 despite losing 6 successive Commons votes and never winning one, and that the Queen would prorogue Parliament for him to get round the fact that he had no majority? Of course not. It is unthinkable. We are witnessing a right wing coup specifically in favour of Boris Johnson.

Now it is being whispered that Johnson might be open to a modified backstop in Northern Ireland, which makes no sense since the main selling point of his campaign to be prime minister was his opposition to the Irish backstop.

Now that a snap election won't take place until after Halloween, crash out or no, the Tories look to be headed for a shellacking.

What is happening here is that the paradigm that has reigned in Western capitals since 1979 has lost its legitimacy. A super-majority of citizens in countries where neoliberal/neoconservative government has held sway for the last four decades have had enough. We are at that point where the ruling elite will resort to a soft coup.

Can the dialectic of history be held at bay by a tiny elite, even if that elite appears to have a monopoly of power?  I don't think so. But the dialectic, though it cannot be stopped in its tracks, can be co-opted, misdirected, subverted.

Tories to Refuse to Ask EU for Brexit Extension + NFL Week 1

The Brexit news this morning is that parliament will be suspended this evening after the "no crash out" bill becomes law and Johnson's second attempt at snap elections is defeated. Parliament will not return until October 14. The press is now floating the idea that Johnson will refuse to ask the European Union for an extension as the new law mandates, or that he will formally make the request but attach a side letter outlining the government's rejection of that request.

Yves Smith, without any acknowledgement that she underestimated the potency of the opposition and the canniness of Jeremy Corbyn, still thinks, that Boris Johnson is in the driver's seat: "So while the Brexiteers have made lots of own goals, and Johnson is entirely capable of scoring more, it is too soon to write them off for dead." This despite continuing defections from his cabinet and internal polling that shows the Tories headed for another poor election performance.

At this point I think Johnson's only hope is an assist from Emmanuel Macron and a French refusal to allow for another Brexit extension. It's a possibility but a remote one.

****

The first week of the National Foot League's centennial season began on Thursday with a horrible game in Chicago between the Bears and the Packers. Green Bay upset Chicago. I watched maybe a quarter of the game, switching back and forth between it and Amazon Prime's "The Boys." Mitch Trubisky did not look good.

Having an injured a calf muscle that made walking to and from the kitchen difficult, a Sunday of immobility in front of the television was about all I was capable of. That's what the NFL is really all about -- pacification, consumption. At least in the first game, Rams vs. Carolina, another lackluster match-up, I learned that Cam Newton has gone vegan; too bad it didn't improve his play, which, like Trubisky's, was flat. Los Angeles won more easily than the score would reflect.

The afternoon game was another spiritless affair, with the hometown Seahawks receiving a gift from the gods in the form of a one-point win over the improved Cincinnati Bengals. Seattle looked terrible.

I didn't waste much time with the Sunday night game, a blowout of the Pittsburgh Steelers by the defending Super Bowl champ New England Patriots. I saw one Patriots offensive series -- Brady making short passes which gashed the Steelers defense -- and that's all I needed.

Last year NFL ratings rebounded after a two-year precipitous decline. My prediction for the 2019 season? Television viewership will resume its descent.

Blue Wave 2020

Signs clearly point to another Blue Wave in 2020, none of which, to my mind, are bigger than the implosion of the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson. 

Johnson went "Full Trump" once he became prime minister, promising a crash out from the European Union on October 31, and was rewarded by losing control of parliament. BoJo now governs with a majority of minus-21. The bill delaying a crash out will become law on Monday, and Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, and Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, will determine when new elections are held, not Johnson.

Remember, three years ago Johnson fronted the successful Brexit campaign for Tory Leavers, prefiguring Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton five months later. For Johnson now to be reduced to a chained, buffoonish zombie in the run-up to a presidential election year augurs ill for Trump.

Another ill omen for the faux-populism of Johnson and Trump is the new M5S-DP government that took office yesterday in Italy. Matteo Salvini, the Italian Trump, made a huge blunder when he collapsed the M5S-League coalition government in order to trigger snap elections. Apparently Salvini could not foresee that the existential enemies of the Five Star Movement and the Democratic Party would nestle down together to keep him out of power.

Whatever hopeful, "Big Tent," anti-establishment, anti-war vibe which filled the Zeitgeist three years ago, uniting Alex Jones conservatives with Jacobin-reading leftists and giving us Brexit, Trump and an Italian government led by Beppe Grillo's M5S, no longer exists. It has been replaced by a rump hard-shell anti-immigrant Know Nothing nationalism overshadowed by an approaching anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal, anti-war Blue Wave. 

Former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg is predicting a Blue Wave in 2020. But for the most part he is an outlier in the mainstream. Mainstream media continues to stem the tide. For instance, Disney's FiveThirtyEight is forever trying to explain away the progressive tilt of the Democratic Party.

Keep your eye on the UK general election. Great Britain is the Potemkin village for global neoliberal representative democracy. Tories and Blairites have run the show since the 1970s. For that to change in the next few months would be truly amazing.

Johnson Defeated. Labour in Control.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, whose votes Mr. Johnson needs to call an election, has said repeatedly that he will not agree to an election until the law stopping a no-deal Brexit is on the books. That way, Mr. Johnson would be denied the wiggle room to, say, schedule an election after the Oct. 31 deadline for leaving the European Union and letting Britain crash out of the bloc without a deal.

Benjamin Mueller, "Parliament’s Next Brexit Brawl: When to Hold Elections"

We are at that part of the Brexit "Walking Dead" story where the zombie has actually been commandeered by a human being, put on a leash and guided this way and that.

Boris Johnson, suffering three defeats yesterday in parliament -- two on the bills blocking a crash out; one on snap elections -- is done, kaput. After a feeble attempt to block the anti-crash out bill in the House of Lords, Johnson allies have capitulated; the bill is supposed to clear the chamber by the end of the week.

Johnson is now taking his demands for new elections to the public, and it is a mighty perverse poetry. The Tory Party, guided since June of 2017 by the single imperative to avoid another general election, is unable to bring one about.

But, please, make no mistake. Johnson's demand for a people's vote is yet another ruse. He wants to lock in a crash out under cover of a snap election. That's why the opposition is completely correct to wait until the anti-crash out bill is signed into law before agreeing to an election.

It's taken a long time to get here, but let's savor it for a moment or two.

UK Parliament to Pass "No Crash Out" Legislation Today

This morning Niqnaq re-posts Politico's "London Playbook" for an hour-by-hour breakdown of what will be today's historic happenings. Yesterday, if you managed somehow to miss it, Boris Johnson lost control of parliament. Today, the rebellious parliament plans on passing "No Crash Out" legislation, legislation which will instruct Johnson to seek another postponement in Brexit.

Johnson responded with a call for new elections. The conflict today will be over if and when those are elections to be held. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn wants to make sure the "No Crash Out" bill is passed before supporting Johnson's snap elections. If "No Crash Out" goes through, we should see Labour voting for new elections.

Yves Smith, per usual, is unusually pessimistic: "Even though Boris Johnson may wind up being the shortest-lived Prime Minister evah, the press coverage on Parliament’s efforts to stop a no-deal Brexit is generally out over its skis."

Smith's strength, as well as her weakness, is that she generally cannot imagine the defeat of the neoliberal world order. So, in the case of Brexit, she sees Labour performing poorly in a general election; and, assuming that Johnson fails to get his vote for snap elections through parliament, Boris will continue to occupy Number 10 as a rotting zombie, a prime minister of smashed party unable to govern.

The great failing of Smith's take on things is that she doesn't mention Johnson's purge of 21 anti-crash out Tory MPs. Craig Murray believes that Johnson has "radically changed" the Conservative Party, the ramifications of which will be felt for generations.

Murray is not nearly as pessimistic as Smith regarding Labour's chances. I tend to dismiss blank anti-Labour predictions because the last general election, June 2017, it was the same. We were told that Labour was headed for a historic rout. But what actually happened was that Theresa May lost her Conservative Party majority and she had to cobble together a coalition with the votes of the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Don't count Labour out.

Obscuring the Obvious about who Ultimately Controls al-Hawl

What's interesting about Vivian Yee's "Guns, Filth and ISIS: Syrian Camp Is ‘Disaster in the Making’," a description of the al-Hawl refugee camp (or "Al Hol detention camp," as The New York Times describes it), a place where the survivors of the caliphate have been concentrated, is that the United States is barely mentioned, and when it is, it is as a concerned third party.

Yee mentions the United States twice: once at the beginning and once at the end of her story:

The daily ordeals of overcrowded latrines and contaminated water, limited medical care, flaring tensions between residents and guards, and chronic security problems have left the residents embittered and vulnerable. A recent Pentagon report that cautioned that ISIS was regrouping across Iraq and Syria said Islamic State ideology has been able to spread “uncontested” at the camp.

[snip]

The Pentagon report said local forces did not have enough resources to provide more than “minimal security,” allowing extremist ideology to spread unchecked.

Al-Hawl is located in northeast Syria and is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a  proxy army that would not exist if not for the United States.

The U.S. as guarantor of the SDF is therefore ultimately responsible for al-Hawl. This is pretty basic. The Times' obscuring of the obvious might be due to the Pentagon's need for an excuse to hold onto the large chunk of territory it illegally occupies in northeast Syria.

AfD Bogeyman Finishes Second in Saxony and Brandenburg

Yesterday elections were held in two states of the former East Germany, Saxony and Brandenburg (see "German Far Right Makes Election Gains, but Falls Short of Victory" by Melissa Eddy and Katrin Bennhold). Predictions were rife in the mainstream press of victory for Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. It didn't turn out that way. In Saxony, Angel Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came out on top with 32% of the vote, compared to AfD's 27%. In Brandenburg, the CDU's GroKo partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), won with 26%, compared to AfD's 24%. The AfD saw its vote increase by 18% in Saxony and 12% in Brandenburg from the last election in 2014. 

All in all an impressive performance if short of outright victory. The other parties refuse to govern in coalition with AfD. So long as this shunning holds, AfD will have to win significantly more votes before it can implement its unremarkable policy prescriptions.

In Saxony and Brandenburg, the AfD campaigned on the broken promises of economic development of East Germany post-reunification. Katrin Bennhold published a story on Saturday (see "German Elections Reveal, and Deepen, a New East-West Divide") which chronicled her visit to Forst, "a once prosperous textile hub on the Polish border that lost thousands of jobs and half its population after the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Bennhold interviewed a number of Forst residents soured on the false promises of capitalism:

“There is a sense that things are decided over your head, that you have no say in anything,” said Diana Sonntag, a restaurant owner and mother of six.

“We in the East are familiar with that,” she said. “We’ve been there before.”

Under Communism, the party called the shots, she said. Now the market does. “I’ve come to realize that everything they taught us about capitalism all those years ago is true,” Ms. Sonntag said. “Politics is just for show. Money rules.”

One would be hard-pressed to find a more succinctly accurate description of electoral democracy in the Western world.