Trump To End Unconstitutional Syria War. Washington Heads Are Exploding

[devil21]

That's right, Trump has no say about anything and everybody that is opposing him is just putting on an act.

Still pushing the narrative that the President wields power, eh? He's a puppet to his bankers and billionaires cabinet. I thought it curious that at the same time he puts out this statement about pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan he also appoints a friggin' BOEING CEO, one of the biggest MIC war contractors in the world, as new SecDef. There's no consistency to his actions which tells me he's just doing what he's told to on a daily basis.

If that is true why has the Senate conspired to prevent him from making ANY recess appointments?

Because then he'd actually be making decisions on his own and that's not allowed. Duh.

Wouldn't he just appoint people that the other swamp creatures would approve of?

Perhaps he would but preventing him from making any appointments bolsters my point that he has no power.

Obviously there IS a faction war going on in the ruling class and Trump's side is more in line with our goals than his enemies.

Obviously? Because he's prevented from making any decisions on his own but yet you declare that as proof that he's making decisions on his own???

[devil21]

This about sums it up:
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trump-blank-bill/

On Friday, President Donald Trump tweeted out a single picture of himself sitting at the Oval Office’s Resolute desk with the caption: “Some of the many Bills that I am signing in the Oval Office right now. Cancelled my trip on Air Force One to Florida while we wait to see if the Democrats will help us to protect America’s Southern Border!” However, it appears the president was signing a blank piece of paper.

[Swordsmyth]

Still pushing the narrative that the President wields power, eh? He's a puppet to his bankers and billionaires cabinet.

If that was true he wouldn't encounter so much opposition or lose so many cabinet members.
He does have to play politics and cut deals but he isn't just a puppet.

I thought it curious that at the same time he puts out this statement about pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan he also appoints a friggin' BOEING CEO, one of the biggest MIC war contractors in the world, as new SecDef. There's no consistency to his actions which tells me he's just doing what he's told to on a daily basis.

He throws Mattis out early and picks the #2 man in the DoD to run it while he picks someone else, that doesn't indicate anything but how much he wanted to get rid of Mattis.

Because then he'd actually be making decisions on his own and that's not allowed. Duh.

Somehow they didn't feel the need to do it with other presidents.

Perhaps he would but preventing him from making any appointments bolsters my point that he has no power.



Obviously? Because he's prevented from making any decisions on his own but yet you declare that as proof that he's making decisions on his own???

They have denied him that one power but he has all the other powers of his office and he is beginning to use them more for things we want.

Just admit that there is a faction war going on and stop embarrassing yourself.

You only invented this new position so you could refuse to give him any credit for doing good things.

[Swordsmyth]

This about sums it up:
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trump-blank-bill/

It's called a photo op.

[devil21]

It just occurred to me what's going on here. What they're doing is completely privatizing the war industry. It's a good thing that it won't be taxpayers overtly funding war boondoggles. On the other hand, it means wars don't necessarily stop, they just go unreported.

Makes perfect sense now. Military SecDefs out, Boeing CEO SecDefs in. Blackwater coming back, which I'm sure Erik Prince being SecEd DeVos' brother is pure coincidence. So what this means is that Trump touts military coming home (yay Trumpgasm for small thinkers), while neglecting to mention that they will be replaced with Blackwater mercenaries, who in most cases are just the same troops wearing different unis and getting much larger paychecks. Instead of paid by taxpayers, they'll be paid by investors/Wall St.

Somehow they didn't feel the need to do it with other presidents.

Exactly. Because as I pointed out in my first post in this thread, this isn't normal status quo times. Big changes underway.

You only invented this new position so you could refuse to give him any credit for doing good things.

He's a PR guy, nothing more. That "photo op" is what powerless public relations officers do. Photo ops.

[Swordsmyth]

It just occurred to me what's going on here. What they're doing is completely privatizing the war industry. It's a good thing that it won't be taxpayers overtly funding war boondoggles. On the other hand, it means wars don't necessarily stop, they just go unreported.

Makes perfect sense now. Military SecDefs out, Boeing CEO SecDefs in. Blackwater coming back, which I'm sure Erik Prince being SecEd DeVos' brother is pure coincidence. So what this means is that Trump touts military coming home (yay Trumpgasm for small thinkers), while neglecting to mention that they will be replaced with Blackwater mercenaries, who in most cases are just the same troops wearing different unis and getting much larger paychecks. Instead of paid by taxpayers, they'll be paid by investors/Wall St.

Because they got tired of getting to use OPM?

Exactly. Because as I pointed out in my first post in this thread, this isn't normal status quo times. Big changes underway.

That doesn't explain it, if he was just a puppet they would just tell him who to appoint with recess appointments, he is part of an insurgent faction among the ruling class and they are trying to limit what he can accomplish for that faction in any way they can.
Fortunately for us that faction is more aligned with our interests than the old guard.

He's a PR guy, nothing more. That "photo op" is what powerless public relations officers do. Photo ops.

It's what all politicians do.

[devil21]

Because they got tired of getting to use OPM?

Are you dense? My first post in this thread was about "the why".

That doesn't explain it, if he was just a puppet they would just tell him who to appoint with recess appointments, he is part of an insurgent faction among the ruling class and they are trying to limit what he can accomplish for that faction in any way they can.
Fortunately for us that faction is more aligned with our interests than the old guard.

Cool story bro.

It's what all politicians do.

Which should be a clue to you as to what politicians, in general, are. Surely you're not naive enough to think that most politicians aren't owned by the corporations, bankers and special interests that dump millions into their campaign accounts and foundations, are you?

[Swordsmyth]

Are you dense? My first post in this thread was about "the why".

No that wouldn't explain anything, they would still use the US military for as long as possible and then shift to China or some other country for their new imperial host, they wouldn't switch to using their own money of their own free will EVER, if that is what they are doing it is because Trump and his faction are cutting that deal with them as a compromise instead of just shutting the wars down entirely.

Cool story bro.

Cooler than yours.

Which should be a clue to you as to what politicians, in general, are. Surely you're not naive enough to think that most politicians aren't owned by the corporations, bankers and special interests that dump millions into their campaign accounts and foundations, are you?

All politicians would have to do photo ops etc. if corporations and oligarchs didn't exist.
Yes politicians need powerful supporters so they do things that those powerful supporters want but they don't always do everything that one or all of their supporters want.
Even if you want to claim that Trump is just a catspaw he is a catspaw of someone who is part of an insurgent faction of the ruling class and since we see Trump and not his owner and the catspaw is part of the cat then when we speak of Trump we are speaking of the owner who is making these decisions and when we vote for Trump in 2020 we will be voting to keep that owner in power through his catspaw Trump.

[devil21]

No that wouldn't explain anything, they would still use the US military for as long as possible and then shift to China or some other country for their new imperial host, they wouldn't switch to using their own money of their own free will EVER, if that is what they are doing it is because Trump and his faction are cutting that deal with them as a compromise instead of just shutting the wars down entirely.




Cooler than yours.





All politicians would have to do photo ops etc. if corporations and oligarchs didn't exist.
Yes politicians need powerful supporters so they do things that those powerful supporters want but they don't always do everything that one or all of their supporters want.
Even if you want to claim that Trump is just a catspaw he is a catspaw of someone who is part of an insurgent faction of the ruling class and since we see Trump and not his owner and the catspaw is part of the cat then when we speak of Trump we are speaking of the owner who is making these decisions and when we vote for Trump in 2020 we will be voting to keep that owner in power through his catspaw Trump.

My story is based in economic and geopolitical fact, instead of 3rd grade reading level Tweets.

Your posting schedule is remarkably consistent every single day. Never too busy doing anything else for a single day, not even on weekends. It's like you're paid to post here for ~12 hours a day, every day. Most people go on vacations, or do stuff around the house, or go out to dinner with family/friends. But not you. Always here, every day within a 2 hour time frame.

[Swordsmyth]

My story is based in economic and geopolitical fact, instead of 3rd grade reading level Tweets.

Your story is based on whatever convenient conspiracy theory allows you to pretend to be better and smarter than everyone else and give nobody any credit for anything good they do while hating America first and cheering for any enemy of America no matter how evil their regime.

Your posting schedule is remarkably consistent every single day. Never too busy doing anything else for a single day, not even on weekends. It's like you're paid to post here for ~12 hours a day, every day. Most people go on vacations, or do stuff around the house, or go out to dinner with family/friends. But not you. Always here, every day within a 2 hour time frame.

I'm not paid, I wouldn't take a job that required the time I put into my contribution to this site and liberty politics.
I also do have more variation in my posting pattern than you claim.
You are just jealous that my position in life allows me to fit my posting activities in between everything else in my life.

[devil21]

Your story is based on whatever convenient conspiracy theory allows you to pretend to be better and smarter than everyone else and give nobody any credit for anything good they do while hating America first and cheering for any enemy of America no matter how evil their regime.

You have your CIA talking points down pat, don't you? It's posts like those that give you away. You didn't miss a single CIA buzzword!

I'm not paid, I wouldn't take a job that required the time I put into my contribution to this site and liberty politics.
I also do have more variation in my posting pattern than you claim.
You are just jealous that my position in life allows me to fit my posting activities in between everything else in my life.

Every day. 12 hours a day, non-stop. EVERY DAY.

[Swordsmyth]

You have your CIA talking points down pat, don't you? It's posts like those that give you away. You didn't miss a single CIA buzzword!



Every day. 12 hours a day, non-stop. EVERY DAY.

[devil21]

So you're a true believer then? By "helping" Trump (Abaddon), you're forwarding Revelation toward Jesus returning, like any other Zionist does. What if he's already here?

[Swordsmyth]

So you're a true believer then? By "helping" Trump (Abaddon), you're forwarding Revelation toward Jesus returning, like any other Zionist does. What if he's already here?

LOL

Your drivel doesn't even deserve a response.

[devil21]

LOL

Your drivel doesn't even deserve a response.

That was a response.

[Swordsmyth]

That was a response.

Which was more than your drivel deserved.

[AZJoe]

Matt Taibbi : Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war

So we’re withdrawing troops from the Middle East. GOOD!

What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion? Five-and-a-half?

For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point of abject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention. …

talking heads on TV are going crazy. … cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads. … Bill Kristol, on MSNBC, that “liberal” channel that somehow seems to be populated round the clock by ex-neocons and Pentagon dropouts. Kristol, who has rarely ever been in the ballpark of right about anything — he once told us Iraq was going to be a “two month war” …

Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor. The real line is between a war party, and everyone else. …

The departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — a standard-issue Pentagon toady who’s never met an unending failure of a military engagement he didn’t like … is now being celebrated as inspirational

You’ll hear all sorts of arguments today about why the withdrawals are bad. … But we don’t exactly have a plan for staying in the Middle East, either, beyond installing a permanent garrison in a dozen countries, spending assloads of money and making ourselves permanently despised in the region as civilian deaths pile up through drone-bombings and other “surgical” actions. …

The Afghan conflict became the longest military engagement in American history eight years ago. … our occupations do not work, as everyone outside of Washington seems to understand. …

What polls we have suggest voters want out of the region in increasing numbers. A Morning Consult/Politico poll from last year showed a plurality favored a troop decrease in Afghanistan, while only 5 percent wanted increases. Polls consistently show the public thinks our presence in Afghanistan has been a failure. …

You could see the Beltway beginning to lose its mind back in the Republican primary race, when then-candidate Trump belittled America’s commitment to Middle Eastern oil states. …

military contractors spent $72 million on what was supposed to be an Iraqi police academy and delivered a pile of rubble so unusable, pedestrians made it into a toilet. … SIGIR found we spent over $60 billion on Iraqi reconstruction and did not significantly improve life for Iraqis. … the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, concluded last year that at least $15.5 billion had been wasted in that country between 2008 and 2017, and this was likely only a “fraction” of financial leakage. …

The Department of Defense has been a money pit for decades. It has trillions in expenditures it can’t account for, refused an audit for nearly 30 years and then failed this year (as in failed completely, zero-point-zero, not producing any coherent numbers) when one was finally funded. …

[US] leaders are utter tools who’ve left a legacy of massacres and botched interventions around the world.

NATO? That’s an organization whose mission stopped making sense the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. … Instead, we continued after the Soviet collapse to maintain a global military alliance fattened with increasingly useless carriers and fighter jets, designed to fight archaic forms of war. NATO persisted mainly as a PR mechanism for a) justifying continued obscene defense spending …

We’d go into a place like Afghanistan with no real plan … it was always basically Team America: World Police with supporting actors. …

This has all been a giant, bloody, expensive farce, and it’s long since time we ended it.

We’ll see a lot of hand-wringing today from people who called themselves anti-war in 2002 and 2003, but now pray that the “adults in the room” keep “boots on the ground” to preserve “credibility.”

Part of this is because it’s Trump, but a bigger part is that we’ve successfully brainwashed big chunks of the population into thinking it’s normal for a country to exist in a state of permanent war, fighting in seven countries at once, spending half of all discretionary funding on defense. It’s not. It’s insane. And we’ll never be a healthy society, or truly respected abroad, until we stop accepting it as normal. …

[AZJoe]

[AZJoe]

[AZJoe]

[AZJoe]

Justin Amash:

[AZJoe]

[AZJoe]

Tulsi Gabbard:

[AZJoe]

Reactions To Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Plan Say More Than The Plan Itself

As soon as Trump announced via Twitter his intent to withdraw troops from Syria, everyone has been losing their minds. Virtually every liberal media outlet has reacted hysterically, with the New York Times … condemning the decision, along with multiple CNN and MSNBC releases and Rachel Maddow going full Rachel Maddow … Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Jeanne Shaheen, Tom Cotton, Angus King and Joni Ernst wrote Trump a bipartisan letter … Hollywood celebrities like Bette Midler, Mia Farrow and Cher burst out of their dust pods of irrelevance to scream at everyone that limitless US military expansionism is glorious and desirable. Max Boot, the legendary Man Who Is Always Wrong About Everything, declared that Trump is giving a “gift to Iran, Russia, ISIS, and Assad” by exiting.

That word “gift” appeared again and again and again and again. The New York Times … Victoria Nuland … And all the rank-and-file consumers of mass media are now parroting that talking point at every opportunity …. because they hate Trump and they were taught to repeat a specific line in order to criticize him.

The thing about this “gift” idea … is that they all have as their premise the assumption that Syria belongs to America. … tentacle porn aficionado Kurt Eichenwald even compared the withdrawal to a homeowner giving away their home … there is this one bizarre assumption that is going completely unquestioned: that Syria is America’s property … But Syria is not America’s property, and the US has never had any right to be there at all. …

If China invaded the US and occupied a third of its territory in order to counter Canadian and British influence we’d be looking at World War Three that very day, but doing exactly that in a disobedient Middle Eastern country is looked at as so normal and routine that any apparent deviation from that strategy is regarded with shock and outrage. … the ridiculous power-serving double standard … a claim to moral authority by a government which literally armed terrorists in Syria. …

The most powerful military force in the history of civilization inflicts violence and domination with total impunity and total disregard for national sovereignty, demanding total respect for its own borders and total compliance from all nations outside its borders. Nations which obey are absorbed into an alliance that is so tight and streamlined it can effectively be called an empire, while nations which disobey are invaded, occupied, disrupted and destroyed. …

[AZJoe]

Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy

the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria … hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. … the collective freakout … the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out. …

In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation’s armed forces are engaged in daily military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. … In an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is what’s abnormal. …

It is absolutely bat $#@! crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending. It is absolutely bat $#@! crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. …

the analogy of … people are sleepwalking through life, so … the TV … turns them into a bunch of mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited military bloodbaths around the world. … People aren’t sleepwalking, they are being duped. Duped into insanity … But the people doing

[Swordsmyth]

Tulsi Gabbard:

I see that she is back to pretending to be anti-war.

[Zippyjuan]

March- 2018. Trump: Troops to leave Syria "very soon".

President Trump says U.S. troops will leave Syria 'very soon'

Friday, March 30, 2018
WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump delivered a freewheeling speech in Ohio Thursday that veered far off the intended topic of infrastructure.

The president said U.S. troops will be leaving Syria very soon. It's an announcement that seemed to come as a surprise to top officials in his administration.

The president's comments caught the pentagon and the state department completely off-guard, and seemed to even go against his own policy of foreshadowing military movements.

President Trump made a promise of a troop withdrawal from Syria.

"We'll be coming out of Syria, like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon. Very soon. We're coming out," President Trump said.

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.npr.org/sections/paralle...re-on-the-rise

Under Trump, U.S. Troops In War Zones Are On The Rise
December 1, 2017

Since President Trump came into office, U.S. troop numbers have been edging up in the three countries where the U.S. is most deeply involved in fighting — Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. forces totaled just over 18,000 in these three countries at the end of last December, just before President Obama completed his term, according to the Pentagon's Defense Manpower Data Center.

The combined figure was about 26,000 as of the end of September, the most recent data available from the Pentagon.

Neither President Trump nor the military likes to talk about troop numbers. A Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Rob Manning, said multiple factors can be influence the figures, such as troop rotations, the changing nature of military missions and the political sensitivities of the host country.

He told reporters not to place too much stock in the quarterly figures put out by the Defense Manpower Data Center.

"The DMDC numbers are not the official deployment count," he said. "There are several other things that go into those numbers, it is a snapshot in time."

Yet these figures point to a troop presence in multiple countries that is substantially higher than Pentagon officials acknowledge.

For example, Pentagon spokesmen often cite a figure of around 500 U.S. forces in Syria. But the Pentagon report on manpower puts the number at 1,720.

In Iraq, Pentagon officials generally put the number of U.S. forces at around 5,000. The report puts it at 8,892.

When President Trump outlined his plan for Afghanistan in August, he authorized additional forces, and the numbers there have risen from 11,000 at the end of last year to more than 15,000 recently.

[Swordsmyth]

https://www.npr.org/sections/paralle...re-on-the-rise

That's a nice OLD article.

[Zippyjuan]

That's a nice OLD article.

Noting that I deliberately included the date for it. Trump was for more involvement before he was for less involvement. In March he said he would reduce troops in Syria. In December he is saying the same thing while nothing changed between the two statements. He says a lot of things he doesn't really do and changes his mind often.