America-firsters should support the president’s move to end U.S. involvement in Syria.
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primaries in a landslide by speaking honestly about the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Candidate Trump even said, “Elect me and you’ll find out who really did 9/11.” He hinted that the Saudis (close associates of the Bush family) were behind it. And he spoke of a “Deep State” that secretly orchestrates America’s wars.
For these and other reasons, many patriotic Americans chose to overlook Trump’s personal and political failings. They saw Trump as the second coming of the America First movement, and they hoped he would start pulling American troops out of the various quagmires in which they are slowly sinking, and instead focus on protecting America’s borders and the interests of its working people.
On all of these counts, Trump’s first two years were a disappointment. Instead of revealing the truth about 9/11, Trump continued the coverup. Instead of declassifying JFK assassination records on schedule, Trump cited “national security” and kept them secret. Instead of cracking down on the Saudis, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner became their bosom buddies and business partners.
Throughout his first two years Trump, guided by Kushner and his handlers, consistently put Israel, not America, first. Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s orders, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, shredded the nuclear deal with Iran, and declared economic war on Iran. He has let Israel continue stealing U.S. military and trade secrets and selling them to America’s biggest rival, China. Some even speculate that Trump is the tool of an Israeli effort to take down the United States as the world’s leading Zionist-puppet superpower and put China in its place. Netanyahu’s decision to grant China control of the port of Haifa, which ushers Chinese power into the Mediterranean, lends credence to that interpretation.
But just as patriotic America-first Trump voters were beginning to think they had been taken for a ride, the real Trump stepped up with a courageous decision that put him squarely in the crosshairs of the Deep State. On Dec. 19, Trump announced the rapid and complete pullout of U.S. troops from Syria.
The reaction from both the liberal and neoconservative branches of the Deep State was swift and shrill. The New York Times editorialized: “That abrupt and dangerous decision, detached from any broader strategic context or any public rationale, sowed new uncertainty about America’s commitment to the Middle East, its willingness to be a global leader, and Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief.” The hardline neocon-Zionist outlet Commentary ran an even more hysterical piece headlined “Trump’s Syrian Retreat: A Disaster in the Making.”
The claim made by the Times that Trump’s pullout lacked “strategic context or any public rationale” was false. Trump’s public rationale, of course, was that ISIS has been defeated. But the real reason or “strategic context” for the pullout is that the only U.S. proxies in Syria—radical Kurdish separatists—are inevitably going to clash with the Turkish as well as Syrian governments, and there is no good reason to put U.S. troops in the line of fire. No compelling U.S. national interest would be served by doing so.
Yes, the U.S. empire will suffer a public relations defeat by retreating abjectly from Syria and allowing the Russians, Turks, Iranians, and especially the Syrians themselves to hammer out a compromise settlement. And the Israeli Zionists will also suffer, since the victorious Assad government owes its existence to the Hezbollah and Iranian fighters who helped defeat Israel’s ISIS friends. Iran and Hezbollah presumably will not be leaving Syria, much less Lebanon, anytime soon.
But the retreat of the U.S. empire and its Zionist overlords could become a victory for the American republic—especially if Trump follows his instincts and pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan, too. According to Deep State asset Bob Woodward’s anti-Trump book Fear, Trump has wanted to pull out of both countries ever since he became president. Only continuous browbeating, trickery, and implied threats by Deep State partisans in and around the White House has prevented Trump from following his “isolationist” inclinations, Woodward’s sources suggest.
Does the Syria pullout represent the emergence of the real Trump? Will pullouts from Afghanistan and Iraq follow?
If Trump really wants to make America great again, he should follow these pullouts by bringing U.S. forces home from all overseas military bases and announce a New Deal-scale plan to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. Some newly repatriated troops could work on this infrastructure initiative, which could be paid for by nationalizing the Federal Reserve and issuing currency directly, rather than by borrowing it at compound interest from private bankers.
Will Trump dare defy the Deep State to such an extent? One can only hope.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.
If Donald Trump were the real deal he would abolish the illegal and usurious Federal Reserve System, the Personal Income Tax, and the IRS, and he would begin printing our own money interest free, as mandated by the US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, “Congress has the sole power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures”