Flynn Ouster Kills Foreign Policy Hopes Under Trump (Revision: Hope Resurrected)

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Only a Surprise Move Can Restore Detente with Russia

By Karl Pomeroy
Quemado Institute
February 16, 2017
Revised February 17, 2017 (See end of post.)

As many Russia watchers agree, the purging of President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn spells the end of any real clout the administration might have had in establishing friendly relations with Russia.

Flynn was an advocate of detente. Immediately following his resignation, Trump, with unprecedented hostility, tweeted, “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during Obama’s administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?”

Too soft? To imagine a nation being harder on Russia than the U.S. was during the ex-President’s term is to imagine World War III, which we might now be facing had Hillary Clinton won. So on the positive side, we achieved some respite by electing the Manhattan billionaire.

Just not as much as we hoped. (See revision at end of post.)

One grave danger, as always foremost on our minds at Quemado Institute, lies in a possible U.S. supported military buildup in Ukraine, further imperiling the Republics of Novorossiya. This is especially critical now, at a time when Kiev regime leader Petro Poroshenko has planned a meeting in the U.S. with President Trump. Now that Flynn is gone, who will bolster in Trump a reasonable stance toward Russia and Donbass?

But other dangers lurk. That Flynn’s attempted ouster succeeded is an invitation to further attack. Excerpts from articles by Paul Craig Roberts and Moon of Alabama further elucidate the problem:

 

The Trump Presidency: RIP (Excerpts)
By Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts Official Website
February 16, 2017

Trump challenged the Establishment without realizing that it is more powerful than a mere President of the United States.

Has Donald Trump overestimated his presidential power? The answer is yes. Is Steve Bannon, Trump’s main advisor, politically inexperienced? The answer is yes. We can conclude from the answers to these two questions that Trump is in over his head and will pay a big price. How large will the price be?

The New York Times reports that US “intelligence agencies … sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.” Former National Security Agency (NSA) spy John Schindler tweeted on Twitter that a senior intelligence community colleague sent him an email stating that the deep state had declared nuclear war on Trump and that “He will die in jail.”

It is possible that this will be the case.

At the end of World War II, the military/security complex decided that the flow of profits and power from war and threats of war were too great to be relinquished to an era of peace. This complex manipulated a weak and inexperienced President Truman into a gratuitous Cold War with the Soviet Union. The lie was created, and accepted by the gullible American people, that International Communism intended world conquest. . . .  By 1961 the overarching power of the military/security complex was apparent to President Eisenhower, a five star general in charge of the US invasion of German occupied Western Europe during the Second World War. The private power that the military/security complex (Eisenhower called it the military-industrial complex) exercised disturbed Ike so much that in his last address to the American people he said we must guard against its subversion of democracy:

[…]

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Eisenhower’s warning was to the point. However, it relied on “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” which the US does not have. The American population is largely insoucient, and is heading, across the ideological spectrum from left to right, to self-destruction.

The print and TV media, which serve as propagandists for the ruling military/security complex and Wall Street elites, make certain that Americans have nothing but bogus orchestrated information. Every household and person who turns on TV or reads a newspaper is programed to live in a false orchestrated reality that serves the tiny few who comprise the ruling Establishment. Trump challenged this Establishment without realizing that it is more powerful than a mere President of the United States.

This is what has happened: During Obama’s second term, Russia and its president were demonized by the military/security complex and the neoconservatives using the presstitute media. The demonization has facilitated the ability of the controlled presstitute media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest, to associate contact with Russia and articles questioning the orchestrated tensions between the US and Russia with suspicious activity, possibly even treason.

Trump and his advisors were too inexperienced to realize that the consequence of Flynn’s dismissal was to validate this orchestrated association of the Trump presidency with Russian intelligence.

Now we have the media whores and the political whores asking the question used to blacken President Nixon and to force his resignation: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Did Trump know that Gen. Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador weeks before Trump said he did? Did Flynn do the unspeakable—speak to a Russian—because Trump told him to do so?

The purveyors of fake news—the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the despicable liars are using irresponsible innuendo to entangle President Trump in a web of treason. Here is the New York Times headline: “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” What we are witnessing is a campaign by the deep state using their media whores to set up Trump for impeachment.

Those at work overturning the 2016 presidential election are so confident of their success that they publicly declare their preference for coup over democracy. The zionist neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol has expressed his preference for a deep state coup over democratically elected President Trump.

The liberal/progressive/left has aligned with the One Percent against the “racist, misogynist, homophobic” working class—the “Trump deplorables”—who elected Trump.

[…]

Now that Trump has been tainted with “associations with Russian intelligence,” the idiot Republicans, according to Bloomberg, have “joined calls by Democrats for a deeper look at contacts between President Donald Trump’s team and Russian intelligence agents Wednesday [Feb. 15], indicating a growing sense of political peril within the party as new reports surfaced of extensive contacts between the two.”

Of course, there is no evidence of such contacts, but facts are not part of the campaign to depose Trump.

Trump’s sacking of Flynn is being used as vindication by his opponents of their false charges that the President of the United States is compromised by Russian intelligence. Realizing the mistake, the White House has tried to counter its blunder by saying that Flynn was dismissed because Trump lost confidence in him, not because he did anything illegal or had connections to Russian intelligence. But none of Trump’s opponents are listening. And the CIA keeps feeding fake news to the presstitutes.

From the very beginning I warned that Trump lacked the experience and the knowledge to pick a government that would stand by him and serve his agenda. Trump has now fired the one person on whom he could have counted. The most obvious conclusion is that Trump is dead meat.

The effort of the American people to bring government back under their control via Trump has been defeated by the deep state.

Chris Hedges argument that revolution is the only way that Americans can reclaim their country continues to gain credibility. The words that doomed Trump when he declared war before he had his army assembled:

“There is nothing the political establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense. The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.” […]

Quemado Institute Comments

We suspect the “deep state” actions PC Roberts describes are being directed ultimately by the Rothschilds, and speculate they execute such actions through direct orders to NSA officials. This admittedly unsubstantiated scenario is beginning to emerge in our dialogue as a possible explanation for the mounting insanity that has overwhelmed the United States and the Western World.

.

The Dangerous Precedence of the Hunt Against Flynn, And Trump.
Show of Raw Power by the “Intelligence Community” is a Great Danger (Excerpts)
By Moon of Alabama

Global Research
February 16, 2017

Kicking Flynn out of his office has hurt Trump. His standing is diminished. The efforts against Flynn, mainly by the “deep state” in the intelligence agencies, were designed to change Trump’s declared foreign policy aims. They worked.

Yesterday the White House spokesperson said: “President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to deescalate violence in the Ukraine and return Crimea.” Today Trump tweeted: “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?”

That is a position Trump had not preciously taken. “Return Crimea” is a no-no to any current and future Russian government.

If Trump insists on this the prospective détente is already dead.

Damon Linker in The Week:

“The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America’s democratic institutions, not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn’s ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn’t the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.” […]

Robert Parry at Consortium News:

“Flynn’s real ‘offense’ appears to be that he favors détente with Russia rather than escalation of a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump’s idea of a rapprochement with Moscow—and a search for areas of cooperation and compromise—has been driving Official Washington’s foreign policy establishment crazy for months and the neocons, in particular, have been determined to block it…. Flynn’s resignation and its acceptance by Trump also prove that these tactics work and that ‘tough-guy’ Trump is not immune to them. The so-called permanent government of Washington and its complicit mainstream media—what some call the Deep State—have taught Trump a lesson and have learned a lesson, too. They now can be expected to redouble their march toward war and more war, ironically with progressives and leftists in tow.”

Justin Raimondo at Antiwar:

“Flynn was in the crosshairs of the War Party because he’s the most prominent of those around Trump who advocated for détente with Russia…. The Flynn resignation is just the beginning. As one Politico writer put it, it won’t stop there. They’ll move on to new targets, and they won’t rest until they’ve bagged their real target: the President of the United States.” …

Eli Lake for Bloomberg:

“[F]or a White House that has such a casual and opportunistic relationship with the truth, it’s strange that Flynn’s ‘lie’ to Pence would get him fired. It doesn’t add up. A better explanation here is that Flynn was just thrown under the bus.

“Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

“In the end, it was Trump’s decision to cut Flynn loose. In doing this he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end well. ‘First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,’ he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.”

Trump will now cave in on foreign policy: on Russia, on Syria and everywhere else the borg demands it. He has been put “on notice” and will either do as he is told to do or he will be the prey in an even bigger hunt.

It is alarming that the so-called left part of the U.S. policy is lauding the “deep state” for this open attack on the elected government. They are now justifying the methods that will one day be turned against themselves. Why do they fail to see this?

Quemado Institute Comments

Even stranger than the fact that Flynn’s “lie” to Pence would get him fired, is the fact that Trump’s own Vice President Pence would act in such a way as to undermine the President. Quemado Insitute warned the Trump election team, in an open letter posted immediately after Pence’s selection and sent to the campaign’s email address, that Pence was a neocon, and that his choice was a fatal mistake. We argued that, as the Establishment’s man, Pence would be more desirable to the elite than Trump himself as president, and that Trump was therefore setting himself up for removal from office. (Trump’s VP Choice a Betrayal: Open Letter to the Campaign Tream, July 26, 2016)

The Trump campaign team did not take well to our warning. We were not just removed from their mailing list without a reply. We were never again allowed to rejoin their mailing list, despite several attempts.

In other words, we were BLACKLISTED—Quemado Institute, one of Trump’s staunchest supporting platforms!

Is there hope? Of course. Donald Trump is not Hillary Clinton, with whom there would have been no hope. And we still have Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who met yesterday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in what Lavrov described as a productive meeting about cooperation in Syria.

Best of all, Trump is full of surprises. He may just surprise us yet.

Supporting Trump is more important today than ever. A coup to overthrow him and ensconce Pence as president would be far more deadly than a Trump administration, flailing or not. And the worst scenario would be civil war, under which life would not be fun.

Our President, and all of us, must strive for peace and unity.

Revision: Hope Resurrected – Trump’s Comeback on Russia

February 17, 2016 01:10 UTC:

President Donald Trump has delivered a positive surprise indeed! In his latest press conference, analysed at The Duran in Alexander Mercouris’s latest article Breaking: Donald Trump’s Press Conference, Trump is quoted as saying:

If we could get along with Russia, that’s a positive thing. We have a very talented man, Rex Tillerson, who’s going to be meeting with them shortly and I told him. I said “I know politically it’s probably not good for me.” The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles off shore right out of the water.

Everyone in this country’s going to say “oh, it’s so great.” That’s not great. That’s not great. I would love to be able to get along with Russia. Now, you’ve had a lot of presidents that haven’t taken that tack. Look where we are now. Look where we are now. So, if I can – now, I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But – but it’s possible I won’t be able to get along with Putin.

Maybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. And probably Putin said “you know.” He’s sitting behind his desk and he’s saying “you know, I see what’s going on in the United States, I follow it closely. It’s going to be impossible for President Trump to ever get along with Russia because of all the pressure he’s got with this fake story.” OK?

And that’s a shame because if we could get along with Russia – and by the way, China and Japan and everyone. If we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing……

All of those things that you mentioned are very recent, because probably Putin assumes that he’s not going to be able to make a deal with me because it’s politically not popular for me to make a deal. So Hillary Clinton tries a re-set. It failed. They all tried. But I’m different than those people.