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Is McMaster a disaster?

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Mentions of National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, seem to be be boiling over. Time for a roundup.

  • A letter has leaked, saying that McMaster explicitly let Susan Rice keep her security clearance, despite her role in possibly-criminal actions in letting the Obama administration use the intelligence apparatus to spy on domestic political opponents (Trump campaign).
  • McMaster has purged key Trump aides. And defended Obama holdovers, which we call Deep State.

    An ongoing staffing purge being conducted by White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has thrown the West Wing into chaos, according to more than half a dozen Trump administration insiders who told the Washington Free Beacon that McMaster has been targeting long-time Trump loyalists who were clashing with career government staffers and holdovers from the Obama administration…

    …sources… said that many of these actions against his supporters are being conducted without Trump’s knowledge…

    The Trump staffers fired by McMaster had repeatedly clashed with career government staffers and holdovers from the Obama administration on issues as diverse as military strategies for Syria and Afghanistan, whether to tear up Obama’s landmark Iran deal, the controversial détente with Cuba, the U.S. role in confronting Islamic radicalism, and the Paris Climate Accord, according to these sources.

    More purges are said to be on the way…

    The article names people who have been fired, and continues:

    “McMaster’s agenda is different than the president’s,” said one administration source with knowledge of the situation…

    One of the central flashpoints in this internal battle has been Iran and the future of the nuclear accord, multiple sources independently confirmed to the Free Beacon.

    NSC officials such as Cohen-Watnick, Harvey, and others had been making the case that Trump should scrap the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal over increasingly aggressive Iranian ballistic missile activity and mounting evidence Tehran is breaching the accord. McMaster, as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and top Obama-era State Department officials who worked on the deal, have aggressively urged maintaining it.

  • One of the staffers forced out was Rich Higgins, who wrote a controversial memo charging “that globalists, Islamists, and other forces within and outside the government are subverting President Trump’s agenda.”.
  • Other staffers fired appear to be pretty much anyone who is pro-Trump, pro-Israel, or anti-Muslim Brotherhood.

    According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews…

    Finally, there is the issue of how McMaster got there in the first place. Trump interviewed McMaster at Mara Lago for a half an hour. He was under terrible pressure after firing Flynn to find someone.

    And who recommended McMaster? You won’t believe this.

    Senator John McCain.

These articles could all be part of someone’s campaign for forcing out McMaster. (Chief of Staff Kelly? Bannon? Jared/Ivanka?) I mean, if it gets to our level – visible to ordinary bloggers – then something’s up.

And – if the substance is correct – the “someone” could have good reason.

UPDATE: George Soros and David Brock are on McMaster’s side. That’s a bad sign for McMaster.

Also, more articles on McMaster at this later post.

Trump gets ready to be on offense?

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News-wise, it’s been a busy few days. Following Scaramucci’s appointment a couple weeks ago to replace Sean Spicer (as WH Acting Communications Director), now DHS Secretary Kelly is appointed to replace Reince Priebus (as WH Chief of Staff). We also heard that AG Sessions is finally going to crack down on leakers.

Spicer and Priebus both came to President Trump via the Republican National Committee. In other words, though perhaps good human beings, they were traditional Swamp creatures. Rumors have swirled for months that Priebus had Spicer working more on behalf of Priebus’ reputation than Trump’s, and that Priebus was one of “the leakers” who have caused trouble for Trump. Even if that isn’t true, I still can’t say that the Priebus-Spicer team has done a wonderful job of advancing an America First agenda.

Politically, Trump is a “fighting” President and the combination of Scaramucci and Kelly says that he wants to stop playing defense and go on offense. Scaramucci seems more genuinely combative than Spicer and more adept at new media (getting Trump to do his first Periscope live stream, for example). General Kelly seems like an effective manager who really believes in Trump’s agenda in terms of America First, controlling the border, cracking down on gangs (MS13), and so forth.

The rumor mill says that NSA McMaster could be on his way out. He is said to be yet another leaker, who carries forward Obama policies and appointees rather more than he should. He apparently championed a Syria war, and Trump has apparently decided against a Syria war. We shall see.

Our favorite Senator, Lindsey McCain, still hates Trump passionately. Here is video of Lindsey Graham saying that Trump is an enemy of the Rule of Law who “turns democracy upside down”. And video of John McCain pumping fists with Chuck Schumer (D) when the Senate failed to repeal Obamacare on Friday.

Why does John McCain love Obamacare?

UPDATE – Not so much on offense? Scaramucci has just resigned. This is probably not great, if Trump wants a forward communication strategy. And it’s probably something that Kelly wanted.

So, we would have a scenario where Scaramucci is brought in, takes out Priebus (by means of a conflict that I didn’t go into, above), makes room for Kelly to come in, and then Kelly says “I’m the boss – you’re done”?

UPDATE: A report says yes, the above is what Jared and Ivanka wanted. Scaramucci was just their blunt instrument for removing Priebus; Bannon, Kelly and others were never going to stand for having Scaramucci around.

Also, if you believe Jack Posobiec’s sources on Capitol Hill, McCain defeated the latest Obamacare repeal just to screw Trump and Rand Paul. Totally unprincipled.

U.S. to stop arming jihadists; Deep State hardest hit

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President Trump has decided that the CIA will stop arming the so-called “moderate” (but really jihadist) Syrian rebels.

With the end of the CIA program, U.S. involvement in Syria now consists of a vigorous air campaign against the Islamic State and a Pentagon-run train-and-equip program in support of the largely Kurdish rebel force that is advancing on Islamic State strongholds in Raqqa and along the Euphrates River valley.

More on the Kurds in a moment. Trump’s move should help to maintain the Syria cease-fire, defeat ISIS and defuse Mideast tensions. In my view, it is as sensible as Obama’s original decision to arm the jihadis was not. Naturally, the U.S. Deep State – which wanted tensions (or even a Syria ground war) – hates the move and besmirches it as pro-Putin, “Russia won”, etc.

In news that is not so good, we’ve also had a flurry of items about the growing rift between Turkey and the West. Turkey remains a NATO ally, but Erdogan is on bad terms with the European Community, and it doesn’t help that the U.S. (or NATO) organized a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016.

So, the Kurds would seem to be a major issue. Decades ago, Western powers drew the borders of Turkey, Syria and Iraq in such a way as to divide the Kurds. Ever since, they’ve dreamed of getting together in a new Kurdistan. That the U.S. would have armed the Syrian Kurds (starting under Obama), sets off alarm bells in Turkey.

UPDATE: Julian Assange on ISIS, key U.S. allies, and the Clintons. Here’s the idea.

  • Saudi Arabia and Qatar wanted Syria regime change and funded the jihadis.
  • Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund ISIS (who, I keep saying, are much the same people as the Syria jihadi-rebels). And, per her leaked emails, Hillary definitely knew it.
  • Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund the Clintons.
  • Could all this be why Hillary wanted to bomb Syria and do Syria regime change so much? And not-so-much to bomb ISIS?

Also, Julian Assange noting how the CIA paid ISIS salaries. He excerpts a Financial Times article, deep inside which is this: “One rebel commander, who asked not to be named, said U.S. support had been waning for months, but noted that the rebels had been given their salaries as normal last month.”

UPDATE: Just learned about SOFREP, a news service by Special Forces veterans. And they had a report in 2016 saying that, yes, Obama’s CIA was absolutely, positively making the Special Forces train jihadis in Syria and delivering advanced weapons to the jihadis, in violation of U.S. law against aiding terrorists.

Did Hillary lose by being a warmonger?

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My intuition has long said yes. I mean, Hillary’s support for destroying Libya and Syria and creating aggressive confrontation with Russia is part of why I don’t like her. People who want peace seem to have preferred Trump, in 2016.

Last week, a new study came out which showed that Hillary may have lost PA, MI, WI by being a warmonger.

A new study attributes Donald Trump’s victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an “opportunity to express that anger at both political parties.”…

The study…found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered “even a modestly lower casualty rate,” all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton… “Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice,” Kriner and Shen write. “This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat.”

How America armed terrorists in Syria (and ISIS)

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I recommend Gareth Porter’s June 22 article on The American Conservative, How America Armed Terrorists in Syria. It tells a story that I already knew (at a high level) – supported by a wealth of details that I didn’t.

In the rest of this post, I’ll share my notes on that and some other articles, re-telling the story with many fewer details. But it will still be a long post. First, a couple of things to keep in mind:
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