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Is Impeachment Now Inevitable?
October 10, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
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Declaring for impeachment also gives Biden a way to deflect questions about what son Hunter did for that $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company, while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point man battling corruption in Ukraine.

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848.
Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment in the party he professes to lead.
Several factors surely influenced Biden’s change of mind.
Beset by gaffes and mental lapses while campaigning, which rivals like Cory Booker have seized upon to imply that Biden, at 76, is losing it and may not be up to the demands of the presidency, the former vice president has been on a steady slide in the polls.
This week, he was displaced as Democratic front-runner by Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And the $15 million Biden boasts of raising in the third quarter was eclipsed by the $25 million raised by Warren.
Moreover, with Bernie Sanders hospitalized after a heart attack, the possibility of a stampede to Warren as the socialist-progressive flag-bearer of the party has become real.
Biden concluded that he could not remain ambivalent and allow his rivals to appear tougher on Trump, especially when the cause of impeachment unites and animates the party and media establishment as powerfully as it does.
By taking his stand, Biden has made the question — Where do you stand on impeaching Trump? — the big issue in Tuesday’s Democratic debate.
Declaring for impeachment also gives Biden a way to deflect questions about what son Hunter did for that $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company, while Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point man battling corruption in Ukraine.
So it was that Biden came to tell a rally in New Hampshire:

“To preserve our constitution, our democracy, our basic integrity, he should be impeached. … He’s shooting holes in the constitution … we cannot let him get away with it.”
With polls showing a majority of Americans favoring an inquiry, and a Fox News poll showing a majority favoring Trump’s conviction and removal, impeachment appears inevitable.
What is Trump’s defense strategy?
Earlier this week, with a defiant letter from White House counsel Pat Cipollone dismissing the House inquiry as a fraud and a farce, Trump seemed to signal a strategy of massive resistance.
Wrote Cipollone: “Your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections. … The Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it.”
By Wednesday, however, Trump had backed away from Armageddon.
His new position: If the full House votes to open an impeachment inquiry, and he is given the same rights and protections Richard Nixon was given in 1974, he, Trump, would respect House subpoenas, while retaining the right to challenge them in the Supreme Court.
Thus, as Nancy Peℓσѕι and House Democrats seek to ram through a bill of impeachment by Thanksgiving, based on Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s president, Trump is preparing for siege warfare.
As Trump has himself conceded, impeachment is probable, even if the outcome of this historic collision between the president and Congress, which will decide the fates of Peℓσѕι, Trump and Biden alike, is, as of yet, undetermined.
Yet in this struggle, Trump is not without assets.
The first is Adam Schiff, who has become the prosecution’s face in the impeachment battle. This is good news for the White House. For Schiff’s visceral hatred of Trump and desire to see him impeached, convicted, deposed, disgraced and imprisoned is a matter of record.
As long as Schiff heads up the impeachment inquiry, many will see it as simply a savage, partisan and vindictive exercise.
Then are also two potentially explosive inquiries into the roots of the Mueller investigation that are well-advanced. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been looking into allegations that the FBI and DOJ abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to launch the probe and kick-start the Russia investigation.
The Horowitz report is expected to be released within weeks.
U.S. Attorney John Durham has also spent months investigating the origins of the counter-intelligence investigation of Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
Among Durham’s questions: Were intel agents of Britain, Italy and Australia enlisted to spy on Americans by U.S. intelligence agencies? For any counterintelligence operation against a presidential campaign would have required a signoff by then-President Obama.
Administration officials have also told Fox News that when Robert Mueller met with Trump in May 2017, Mueller was pursuing the open post as director of the FBI, something the former special counsel denied under oath during his congressional testimony.
Emails released this month through a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch indicate Mueller knew he could be named as special counsel if he wasn’t chosen as FBI director.
Russiagate consumed the first three years of Trump’s presidency. “Ukrainegate” and impeachment give promise of dominating the fourth.

https://buchanan.org/blog/is-impeachment-now-inevitable-137603

Is Putin the New King of the Middle East?
By Patrick J. Buchanan


 

"If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United States of America, 6,000 miles away?"


"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's Telegraph. The article began:

"Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the US."

"Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of a Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role," said the Financial Times.

The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is us.

Before concluding that Trump's pullout of the last 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is America's Dunkirk, some reflection is needed.
 

Yes, Putin has played his hand skillfully. Diplomatically, as the Brits say, the Russian president is "punching above his weight."

He gets on with everyone. He is welcomed in Iran by the Ayatollah, meets regularly with Bibi Netanyahu, is a cherished ally of Syria's Bashar Assad, and this week was being hosted by the King of Saudi Arabia and the royal rulers of the UAE. October 2019 has been a triumphal month.

Yet, consider what Putin has inherited and what his capabilities are for playing power broker of the Middle East.

He has a single naval base on the Med, Tartus, in Syria, which dates to the 1970s, and a new air base, Khmeimim, also in Syria.

The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med — Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf.

We have the world's largest economy. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's, and not a tenth the size of ours.

And now that we are out of Syria's cινιℓ ωαr and the Kurds have cut their deal with Damascus, consider what we have just dumped into Vladimir Putin's lap. He is now the man in the middle between Turkey and Syria.

He must bring together dictators who detest each other. There is first President Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles, from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq.

Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year cινιℓ ωαr, who is unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish troops.

Reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable Syrian and Turkish demands is now Putin's problem. If he can work this out, he ought to get the Nobel Prize.

"Putin is the New King of Syria," ran the op-ed headline in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred thousand Syrians are dead from the cινιℓ ωαr. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted, and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe.

If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United States of America, 6,000 miles away?

Wednesday, two-thirds of the House Republicans joined Nancy Peℓσѕι's Democrats to denounce Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and dissolve our alliance with the Kurds. And Republican rage over the sudden abandonment of the Kurds is understandable.

But how long does the GOP believe we should keep troops in Syria and control the northeastern quadrant of that country? If the Syrian army sought to push us out, under what authority would we wage war against a Syrian army inside Syria?

And if the Turks are determined to secure their border, should we wage war on that NATO ally to stop them? Would U.S. planes fly out of Turkey's Incirlik air base to attack Turkish soldiers fighting in Syria?

If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war for them — against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran — why does Congress not declare those interests and authorize war to secure them?

Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values.

If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and treasure to keep his Russia's toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have gone under without him.

Who dares wins. Now let's see how Putin likes his prize.
 

Imperial Capital but America-First Nation
October 25, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 4.96 Stars!
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Is America still the world’s last superpower with global policing obligations? Or should we shuck off this imperial role and make America, again, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, “a normal country in a normal time”?

“Let someone else fight over this long blood-stained sand,” said President Donald Trump in an impassioned defense of his decision to cut ties to the Syrian Kurds, withdraw and end these “endless wars.”
Are our troops in Syria, then, on their way home? Well, not exactly.
Those leaving northern Syria went into Iraq. Other U.S. soldiers will stay in Syria to guard oil wells that we and the Kurds captured in the war with ISIS. Another 150 U.S. troops will remain in al-Tanf to guard Syria’s border with Iraq, at the request of Jordan and Israel.
And 2,000 more U.S. troops are being sent to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom from Iran, which raises a question: Are we coming or going?
In his conflicting statements and actions, Trump seemingly seeks to mollify both sides of our national quarrel:
Is America still the world’s last superpower with global policing obligations? Or should we shuck off this imperial role and make America, again, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, “a normal country in a normal time”?
In Middle America, anti-interventionism has carried the day. As Trump says, no declaration at his rallies is more wildly welcomed than his pledge to end our Middle East wars and bring the troops home.
But in this imperial capital, the voice of the interventionist yet prevails. The media, the foreign policy elite, the think tanks, the ethnic lobbies, the Pentagon, the State Department, Capitol Hill, are almost all interventionist, opposed to Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds. Rand Paul may echo Middle America, but Lindsey Graham speaks for the Republican establishment.
Yet the evidence seems compelling that anti-interventionism is where the country is at, and the Congress knows it.
For though the denunciations of Trump’s pullout from Syria have not ceased, one detects no campaign on Capitol Hill to authorize sending U.S. troops back to Syria, in whatever numbers are needed, to enable the Kurds to keep control of their occupied quadrant of that country.
Love of the Kurds, so audible on the Hill, does not go that far.
While surely loud, the neocons and liberal interventionists who drown out dissent in D.C. appear to lack the courage of their nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr convictions.
In 1940-41, the anti-interventionists of “America First” succeeded in keeping us out of the world war (after Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September of 1939 and Britain and France went to war). Pearl Harbor united the nation, but not until Dec. 7, 1941, two years later — when America First folded its tents and enlisted.
Today, because both sides of our foreign policy quarrel have powerful constituencies, we have paralysis anew, reflected in policy.
We have enough troops in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from overrunning Kabul and the big cities, but not enough to win the war.
In Iraq, which we invaded in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein and install a democracy, we brought to power the Shia and their Iranian sponsors. Now we battle Iran for political influence in Baghdad.
Across the Middle East, we have enough troops, planes and ships to prevent our expulsion, but not enough to win the wars from Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan.
Bahrain in the Persian Gulf is the home base of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. We have 13,000 troops and a major air base at Al Udeid in Qatar. U.S. Army Central Command and 13,000 U.S. troops are in Kuwait. Trump has sent more troops to Saudi Arabia, but it was the “infidel” troops’ presence on sacred Saudi soil that was among the reasons Osama bin Laden launched 9/11.
To the question, “Are we going deeper into the Middle East or coming out?” the answer is almost surely the latter.
Among the candidates who could be president in 2021 — Trump, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders — none is an interventionist of the Lindsey Graham school. Three are anti-interventionist and anti-war, which may help explain why Democrats are taking a second look at Hillary Clinton.
According to polls, Iran is first among the nations that Americans regard as an enemy. Still, there is no stomach for war with Iran. When Trump declined to order a strike on Iran — after an air and cruise missile attack shut down half of Saudi oil production — Americans, by their silent acquiescence, seemed to support our staying out.
Yet if there is no stomach in Middle America for war with Iran and a manifest desire to pull the troops out and come home, there is ferocious establishment resistance to any withdrawal of U.S. forces. This has bedeviled Trump through the three years of his presidency.
Again, it seems a stalemate is in the cards — until there is some new explosion in the Mideast, after which the final withdrawal for America will begin, as it did for the exhausted British and French empires after World War II.
That we are leaving the Middle East seems certain. Only the departure date is as yet undetermined.

https://buchanan.org/blog/imperial-capital-but-america-first-nation-137653