Pat Lang — Israel is trying to blow up the ME again

All in all, a bibi scam that is working well

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Israel is trying to blow up the ME again.
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)
At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

See also

Zero Hedge
"Explosive" Leaked Secret Israeli Cable Confirms Israeli-Saudi Coordination To Provoke War

Tyler Durden

Alastair Crooke — How Israeli/Saudi ‘Alliance’ Plays Trump

As novices to the world of Mideast intrigue, President Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner are being led by Israel and Saudi Arabia into a dangerous confrontation with Iran, explains former British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

Consortium News
How Israeli/Saudi ‘Alliance’ Plays Trump
Alastair Crooke | former British diplomat and a senior figure in British intelligence and European Union diplomacy, and presently founder and director of the Conflicts Forum

Alastair Crooke — Trump Tumbles into Saudi-Israeli Trap

Jared Kushner did his father-in-law few favors when he enticed President Trump into the endless Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” To this end, as one Israeli journalist put it, Trump’s advisers set up the Saudis to “embrace [him], and do the sword dance around [him], add a huge check for the arms deals – and [in return is expected to] create an anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian axis [around them].”

Yes, the iconic salesman (Trump), was himself sold a proverbial “bridge” (by his son-in-law, fueled by the conceit that having known Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for many years, Kushner was “ideal” for bringing peace to Israel). Trump in Riyadh thus paid full homage to the Sunni narrative that they – the Sunnis – are the innocent victims, and the Shi’a, the dark, nefarious, revolutionary, fifth-columnists, who must be driven back into their “pen.”

Trump has thus declared himself an explicit partisan in the geo-strategic power plays between the region’s northern-tier states and the Gulf states. Instead of remaining distant and “above” these Middle East conflicts, he has allowed himself to be persuaded to do the opposite: to dive in, on the Sunni side (perhaps partly to counterpoint with President Obama’s engagement of Iran).

Why? Well, the dollars (should they materialize), will be useful. But essentially, because Kushner persuaded his-father-in-law that flattering the Saudis and demonizing the Iranians, represented the entry price into the peacemaking process between Israel and the Palestinians, which if achieved, would constitute the Trump foreign policy “legacy” for history.

View from the snake pit: This is deal that is destined to blow up in DJT's face. It's bargaining with the devil.

We have here the eternal problem that the Arab leaders cannot afford to normalize without an Israeli concession to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians in turn will not make a gesture, until and unless, Israel halts settlement building, which the latter will not do.

Another reason to think that this plan will come to nothing (after being spun out as long as possible by Prime Minister Netanyahu) is that, while it is true that the Palestinians presently are weak and divided – paradoxically Netanyahu is even weaker. Any concessions to Abu Mazen, however banal, could bring down his government. Netanyahu’s right-wing sees no reason to make any – even symbolic – concessions to the Palestinians. Why should they? They are on the cusp of having it all....

The Trap

This – the Sunni-Israeli regional Alliance; the renewed peace process – is a trap into which Trump has been persuaded to enter. It is a trap, because once entered into, the peace process becomes formaldehyde to all other political processes. How often have we been told “you can’t do this; you can’t do that” because it might endanger the (vacuous) “peace process.”
A peace process gives Israel huge anesthetic leverage in the region – as always it has so done. It is a trap – because it ties Trump into trying to assuage the Irano-phobia of Saudi Arabia, which will prove to be just as insatiable as are Israel’s “security needs.”

These liabilities will undercut Trump’s possibilities for defeating ISIS and for détente with Russia. Russia has been trying to bring the Shi’a and the Turks to the negotiating table on Syria. Trump’s role was to be to help bring the Sunni side to the table – in order to forge a wider regional settlement. That will be less likely now, as Saudi Arabia levers Trump’s visit towards weakening Iran.

With Trump’s homage to the Sunni cause, it is more likely that the Sunni-Shi’a fissure will deepen, rather than its sore edges be reconciled. And, viewed from a pure realpolitik perspective, does Trump really believe that Saudi Arabia and its allies will succeed in weakening the Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq and Hizbullah alliance?

And Israel? The writing was plainly on the wall, as we now know, at those post-Six Day War Israeli cabinet meetings. The Americans did warn the Israeli cabinet that it would become progressively harder and harder for America to defend Israel’s hold over the disempowered, disenfranchised and dispossessed (and enlarging), Palestinian people – if Israel insisted on its “winner takes all” end of war policy....

Consortium News
Trump Tumbles into Saudi-Israeli Trap

Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum and a former British diplomat who was a senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy 

Gareth Porter — The Kissinger Backchannel to Moscow

Major U.S. media outlets insinuate that President Trump’s advisers are traitors for secretly talking to Russians, but they ignore the history of Henry Kissinger doing the same thing for Richard Nixon, writes Gareth Porter.

Kissinger is at least an informal Trump adviser, which account in part for Trump's foreign policy realism. I would not be surprised if it was his idea. This report casts a whole new light on the matter if Kissinger was actually involved. He had done it himself when named the prospective national security advisor after Nixon was elected and before he was inaugurated.

But the real issue is this:

But Moss warns that the underlying political crisis in American society is a formidable obstacle to any shift by Trump in relations with Russia. Trump “feels he won the election fairly and that unelected bureaucrats are working against him,” Moss observed, but “The people who suspect possible collusion between the Trump and Russian interference in the election may feel Trump is an illegitimate president.”

Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn are obviously no Kissingers. But the insinuations from Brennan and others that Trump’s advisers may have somehow crossed the line into treason is itself the crossing of a dangerous line into McCarthyism. And the mainstream U.S. news media is participating enthusiastically in the campaign to impugn the loyalty of Trump’s advisers, even though there is still no public evidence to support such suspicions.

This is an extra-constitutional crisis in the works, that has morphed into a soft coup.

Consortium News
The Kissinger Backchannel to Moscow
Gareth Porter, independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism

Jim Lobe — Bannon Down, Pentagon Up, Neocons In?

Balanced article on US politics relative to international relations and foreign and military policy.

LobeLog
Bannon Down, Pentagon Up, Neocons In?

Jim Lobe

Sarah Ellison — The Inside Story Of The Kushner-Bannon Civil War

It's more about the reality show than the title. Weekend read.

Hate-watching is a key element of reality television: viewers get a surge of superiority and catharsis when watching characters they do not respect but in some strange way are drawn to. “It’s incredibly satisfying to hate-watch [Trump],” Shapiro said—and the same goes for watching members of his staff. Senior West Wing aides, like the president himself, exhibit a trait that is essential for a successful reality-TV show: they are largely unself-aware, not fully realizing “how they are perceived, because they will keep stumbling into the same mess over and over again, and they are really easy to place in a cast of characters,” said UnReal’s Shapiro. They are, in part, reliable caricatures of themselves.

Vanity Fair
The Inside Story Of The Kushner-Bannon Civil War

Sarah Ellison

Daily Beast — Steve Bannon Calls Jared Kushner a ‘Cuck’ and ‘Globalist’ Behind His Back

The Trump coalition coming apart at the seams?

"Steve thinks Jared is worse than a Democrat, basically," another official close to Bannon said. "[Steve] has a very specific vision for what he believes, and what he shares [ideologically] with Trump. And he has for a long time now seen [Jared] as a major obstacle to achieving that."…

“Jared Kushner, perhaps the one presidential aide who cannot be fired, is now in regular text message communications with Joe Scarborough,” Roger Stone, a former longtime political adviser to Trump, claimed on Alex Jones’s show. “Many of the anti-Steve Bannon stories that you see, the themes that you see on [MSNBC’s] Morning Joe, are being dictated by Kushner. …

“Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell: the three big-government liberals tightening their hold on the White House,” influential right-wing radio host Mark Levin warned on Twitter on Wednesday night.

Trouble in Trumpland? All the popular support Trump has comes from the Trumpistas. If he loses them, he has no base. Game over.

The Daily Beast
Steve Bannon Calls Jared Kushner a ‘Cuck’ and ‘Globalist’ Behind His Back
Donald Trump’s two closest aides are fighting “nonstop” and often “face-to-face,” officials say — and it’s even uglier in private.
Asawin Suebsaeng

Tom Boggioni — Trump hands everything to Jared Kushner because he’s already ‘lost faith’ in his other hires: GOP insider

“Something that someone pointed out, no matter how smart you are and how much experience you have, one person should not be doing all of these things,” Gangel continued. “A Republican source who is really watching the White House closely said that he did not think this was about Jared grabbing power. He said he thought it was about Donald Trump has lost confidence in a lot of people around him.”

“And what does President Trump do when he loses confidence? He pivots to the people he knows the best, so the pivot to Jared,” she concluded.

I'm not sure that this is completely correct. Trump has never trusted anyone outside his inner circle, so this is characteristic behavior for him. Obviously, Trump's inner circle can't occupy all the offices that need to be filled and Trump is filling them for various reasons, many of them political.

When it comes down to where the rubber hits the road, Trump will either manage things himself or use his circle of trust, the inner core of which is Ivanka and Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. But I don't think that Trump will use Steve Bannon as an intermediary or courier. That will fall to Ivanka and Jared. Bannon will play the role of adviser and strategist and as such have the inner track.

As an outsider, Trump really has no choice since he has not built a circle of trust within government and the people he has brought in are not in his inner circle either. Loyalty is key, and loyalty is tested in the fire of experience. It's too early in the administration for others to have been tested.

So I don't think it is as much a loss of confidence, as it is of confidence not yet having been gained from loyalty under fire. This is a dicey path that Trump has chosen and the slightest mistake can be quickly become magnified — especially with an intel community that has shown itself to be less than loyal, an opposition party calling for impeachment already, several factions of his own party not on board with him, and a hostile press bent on delegitimizing him and declaring his presidency failed already.

Raw Story
Trump hands everything to Jared Kushner because he’s already ‘lost faith’ in his other hires: GOP insider

Tom Boggioni

Robert Parry — The Neocons’ Back-Door to Trump

Is Iran the next Iraq, Syria, and Libya? Robert Parry thinks so.

This blame-Iran “group think” has remarkable similarities to the one that rationalized the disastrous war in Iraq, i.e., that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda and was likely to give the terrorists his hidden WMDs. That fake analysis ignored the fact that the secular Hussein was a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda’s fundamentalists and they hated him, too.

So, although the Saddam-allied-with-Al-Qaeda lie was obvious to anyone who knew anything about Middle East politics, it was repeated endlessly by supposedly in-the-know Washington insiders to justify President George W. Bush’s bloody invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis along with nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and spread chaos across the strategic region.

Now, we see a similar self-deception about which country is the principal sponsor for terrorism and other troubles. The truth is that Iran as a Shiite-governed nation is on the opposite side of the region’s sectarian divide from Al Qaeda and Islamic State, the two major Sunni terror groups that have taken aim at the United States and Europe.…

Many analysts view the Iraq fiasco as the worst strategic blunder ever made by the US, worse than Vietnam even.

"Doing Iran" would dwarf both as monumental strategic blunders and could set the stage for another global war.

And, yes, the New York Times again.

The tell will be whether Trump names arch-neocon Elliott Abrams deputy secretary of state, as is expected.

Consortium News
The Neocons’ Back-Door to Trump

Robert Parry

Sarah Lazare — Paper Owned by Trump's Son-In-Law Runs Alarming Op-Ed Calling for FBI Crackdown on Anti-Trump Protests

File under "It can't happen here."

The New York Observer, a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, published an opinion piece Friday calling for the FBI to launch a coordinated crackdown on nationwide anti-Trump protests, mobilizations and recount efforts.

Titled “Comey’s FBI Needs to Investigate Violent Democratic Tantrums,” the article was written by Austin Bay, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and adjunct professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer in 2006 for roughly $10 million and currently operates as the outlet’s publisher.
Bay’s opinion piece appeals to FBI director James Comey to “conduct a detailed investigation into the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election’s aftermath,” including a “thorough probe of the protests—to include possible ties to organizations demanding vote recounts.”

“The hard left’s violent reaction to Donald Trump’s election is vile and dangerous,” writes Bay. “Peaceful protests? No, the demonstrators vandalize and destroy. They have two goals: intimidating people and sustaining the mainstream media lie that Donald Trump is dangerous.”...

Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, the media watchdog magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, told AlterNet that Bay's op-ed is one of the most disturbing things he has seen since the election. “To have the incoming ruler’s son-in-law using his paper to call for the federal police to investigate protests against the ruler, that is pretty far gone,” he said. “It struck me as a ‘first they came for the communists’ moment.”

“He ties up this conspiracy of protesters, people seeking recounts and George Soros into one vast conspiracy that the FBI ought to get to the bottom of,” Naureckas continued. “It shows you the outlines of how you would justify a complete crackdown on dissent. It’s frightening.”…

AlterNet
Paper Owned by Trump's Son-In-Law Runs Alarming Op-Ed Calling for FBI Crackdown on Anti-Trump Protests
Sarah Lazare