The Trump presidency

[CRI]

Have we discussed his registration as a candidate for 2020 yet? Supposedly this is unusually early and supposedly also makes it more difficult for NGOs etc to criticise him. I've no idea how true the latter is, sounds dubious.

SNAP!

 

[mauvais]

Ha!

 

[treelover]

In the UK charities are now circumscribed in how and when they can campaign.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Had a bloke of FB defending Trump this very afternoon, saying at least he didn't bomb children. Originally replied "..yet!"

I'd tend to give the US military the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not deliberately targeting kids. Let's not forget Obama killed lots of kids in GWOT man hunting. It's in the nature of of airstrikes to kill bystanders no matter how precise.

One of Trump's orders I read does specify loosening the Rules Of Engagement. Obama has been doing that gradually anyway. The military will get more latitude for strikes and the kill chain will shorten. You can expect GWOT civilian casualties to ratchet up to 90s NATO levels 30% V 10-20% that CENTCOM doesn't admit too currently. That hike actually is not much different from the Saudis in Yemen or the "barbarous" Russians in Syria. As far as I know Trump hasn't (yet) ordered actual violations of the rules of war. If you look at Mosul IS are massacring civilians at a very high rate and it could be argued relaxing the RoE so the fight can be finished quickly really has a humanitarian basis.

Gen "Mad Dog" Mattis at the DoD might well resist an order to go against Pentagon thinking on these things which has been sensitive to civilian casualties particularly of obvious non-combatants. Some French airpower wonks would say over-sensitive. The Pentagon's rather delicate doctrine on Counter Insurgency may be more of a constraint on Trump than the risk of being accused of war crimes.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Thanks for the transcript link.

This is exactly the sort of rhetoric that resonates with those white supremacist Christian Trump supporters in the "heartland." They won't be shocked by it. They'll be thrilled. They won't see the irony of "never Hillary" because she was going to start a war, but backing Trump who's administration is desperately spoiling for one.

And poor Donald - some of his supporters are so worried about criticism he's getting, they've put out adverts, encouraging people to donate to "Defend Trump." (sound quality poor - sorry)

I'm going to watch this again before it gets too like reality.

 

[Kaka Tim]

They're not mutually exclusive, are they?

Well it shows that the ban being extended to green card holders was deliberate and not a result of incompetence.

 

[mauvais]

Well it shows that the ban being extended to green card holders was deliberate and not a result of incompetence.

Sure, but it doesn't mean it was done competently. It's not a particularly important point but I've read a lot of comment recently that seems to want to polarise actions into either clueless stumbling or darkest conspiracy. That inevitably shapes how one responds. Well given the evidence so far, it mostly seems to be both: deliberate malice by winging it.

 

[Kaka Tim]

Sure, but it doesn't mean it was done competently. It's not a particularly important point but I've read a lot of comment recently that seems to want to polarise actions into either clueless stumbling or darkest conspiracy. That inevitably shapes how one responds. Well given the evidence so far, it mostly seems to be both: deliberate malice by winging it.

Yeah - they dont actually give a fuck about the destructiveness or chaos their actions bring about - hence the sloppiness and disregard for detail.

 

[Raheem]

Well it shows that the ban being extended to green card holders was deliberate and not a result of incompetence.

I'm not sure anyone has suggested the whole thing was accidental, like it ended up being a travel ban because someone misplaced a decimal point.

Obviously, it's deliberate. But deliberate equals smart is a low bar.

 

[Casually Red]

I'd tend to give the US military the benefit of the doubt and assume they're not deliberately targeting kids. Let's not forget Obama killed lots of kids in GWOT man hunting. It's in the nature of of airstrikes to kill bystanders no matter how precise.

One of Trump's orders I read does specify loosening the Rules Of Engagement. Obama has been doing that gradually anyway. The military will get more latitude for strikes and the kill chain will shorten. You can expect GWOT civilian casualties to ratchet up to 90s NATO levels 30% V 10-20% that CENTCOM doesn't admit too currently. That hike actually is not much different from the Saudis in Yemen or the "barbarous" Russians in Syria. As far as I know Trump hasn't (yet) ordered actual violations of the rules of war. If you look at Mosul IS are massacring civilians at a very high rate and it could be argued relaxing the RoE so the fight can be finished quickly really has a humanitarian basis.

Gen "Mad Dog" Mattis at the DoD might well resist an order to go against Pentagon thinking on these things which has been sensitive to civilian casualties particularly of obvious non-combatants. Some French airpower wonks would say over-sensitive. The Pentagon's rather delicate doctrine on Counter Insurgency may be more a constraint on Trump than the risk of being accused of war crimes.

The yanks and Brits very deliberately bombed out Iraqs water infrastructure and sewage treatment facilities. They targeted these sites deliberately in order to cause the very obvious repercussions of blowing them up. Filthy water, streets flowing with raw sewage . Disease and misery on a mass scale . Bacteriological warfare against civilians is what it was . After blowing it all up they actively prevented either it's repair or access to medicine and vaccines to combat the diseases . For 8 years . Around a million or so died, half of them children .
This was all deliberate. Those are the wests rules of engagement .

 

[Rimbaud]

Rogue POTUS Staff (@RoguePOTUSStaff) on Twitter

I don't think there are any smarts in this administration. If this account is real, it looks like it is bedlam inside the White House. Trump screaming "don't they know I'm the fucking President?!?", Priebus on the verge of a nervous breakdown, (just watch his Meet the Press interview, his voice keeps breaking like a teenage boy and he sounds like he is going to cry) Bannon leading a witch hunt against leakers and whistle blowers, and Ryan, Pence and Priebus increasingly suspicious of Trump's relationship with Putin to the extent that they insist on monitoring his contact. If that is true, Trump isn't going to last long at all. I'm starting to think this is more farce than tragedy.

 

[1%er]

Yes he basically had to fudge it as the "Muslim Ban" he talked about on the campaign trail was undeliverable BS.

It would have been very tricky constitutionally to discriminate by sect.

Basically the countries listed are folk the US has bombed or will bomb. The list is hastily constructed and in fact a legacy from Obama. A blanket ban on Iraqis is a bit odd from an anti-terrorism point of view as while Iraqis might have good cause to want to blow up Americans there's quite a close security relationship with the ISF not unlike that with Egypt.

It doesn't actually address the known perps of previous attacks on US soil in anyway but never mind. Most US security folk think this whole thing is bullet to the foot that'll enable terrorists but The Donald will run his mouth to please the crowd and that's what came out. Trump is a man who obviously really worries about his ratings and it has pleased his base.

I give him some credit. It was the best Trump could do to please his voters given real world constraints. He didn't actually go the full retard and try to ban wealthy GCC folk who may really hate America but are very good for American business. The arms deals with GCC countries alone are massive earners.

It was rushed out without the usually professional government agency scrutiny to be seen to have done something promised. The Trump Team probably realise to some extent that it's really stupid and it'd get shot down in flames if they followed due process. It's a very sloppy piece of work legally. A lot of these orders are either very badly flawed or utterly vacuous. It's exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of Hill greenhorns in alien territory. Now it's going to get gutted by legal challenges and they'll blame "the swamp" and the media for not being able to deliver.

I'm reminded of Paul Bremer winging it in Baghdad with the headless chicken CPA in 03. Wet behind the ears GOP Campaign staffers trying to build a new country according to free market party dogma and without a world of Arabic. Delusion everywhere and great slabs of tax dollars being pissed away. DC has become The Emerald City on the Tigris.

Which countries are not on the list (yet) and why is interesting, if we are to believe it is the Muslim Ban that is being portrayed in much of the press. It seems clear that this is a rushed Order and as you say many of the countries come from Obama's time. I feel American Foreign policy flying off in a very different direction over the next couple of years, clearly very good for some and not so good for others. One thing is for sure, Trump is going to put the word count of Urban75 up for a while

You couldn't visit the old DDR if you had an Israeli stamp on your passport then.

Not on the list as I only wanted countries where the blanket ban is still in place (Oh and I didn't know ).

For balance and accuracy I should point out that you can transit through the UAE but not leave the airport, you can apply to the Ministry of Internal Security for an entry visa to Pakistan and the Ministry of Home Affairs in Malaysia, so at least two of the countries with blanket bans allow Israeli citizens to apply.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Well it shows that the ban being extended to green card holders was deliberate and not a result of incompetence.

Consider this exchange:

...
Talk drifted to the subject of immigration. Trump mentioned that he wasn't in favor of sending home foreign students who come to the US to study.

"We have to be careful of that, Steve," said Trump. "You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country." He seemed to expect that Bannon would agree that foreign students were "our talented people."

Bannon appeared to demur.

"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think..." he began. He then offered this thought: "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society."

Some might see the tiniest implication that if too many tech CEOs are from some part of Asia, civic society might be threatened. Disrupted, even.
...

I've worked in California including Silicon valley on and off for the last couple of decades. Its best brainpower is mostly Asian; a lot of them are long term residents on Green Cards. Back during the dotcom boom "the smell of innovation was the smell of curry". They often work for multinationals where travel is essential. It looks out across the wide Pacific not the narrow Atlantic. There are not a few Persians scattered about the Bay Area doing very nicely. There are plenty of Muslims happily adapted to the American way. It's great economically but really ain't Bannon's white bread "civic society" of pure yeoman stock. It's probably his nightmare vision of the US's future.

And now this bigoted Ivy League Irish-American backed by a wingnut Hedge Fund billionaire that poured millions into Trump's campaign gets a chance to really fuck with their lives by insisting folk with Green Cards get included in this ban. It doesn't apply to most of them but that's a message that that precious bit of paper can be torn up overnight on a whim. It occurs to me he might even have gone off reservation and pushed an agenda that's actually beyond Trump's making a buck worldview.

 

[bimble]

Consider this exchange:
I've worked in California including Silicon valley on and off for the last couple of decades. Its best brainpower is mostly Asian; a lot of them are long term residents on Green Cards. Back during the dotcom boom "the smell of innovation was the smell of curry". They often work for multinationals where travel is essential. It looks out across the wide Pacific not the narrow Atlantic. There are not a few Persians scattered about the Bay Area doing very nicely. There are plenty of Muslims happily adapted to the American way. It's great economically but really ain't Bannon's white bread "civic society" of pure yeoman stock. It's probably his nightmare vision of the US's future.

And now this bigoted Ivy League Irish-American backed by a wingnut Hedge Fund billionaire that poured millions into Trump's campaign gets a chance to really fuck with their lives by insisting folk with Green Cards get included in this ban. It doesn't apply to most of them but that's a message that that precious bit of paper can be torn up overnight on a whim. It occurs to me he might even have gone off reservation and pushed an agenda that's actually beyond Trump's making a buck worldview.

Yes, that was a really telling exchange. Trump is a businessman at heart, I suppose. Bannon's vision is 'spiritual' , not pragmatic.

 

[teqniq]

 

[krtek a houby]

Such cowardice. Very disappointed but not surprising.

 

[redsquirrel]

Well past the threshold for being debated in Parliament. Given that Corbyn is advocating cancelling his visit to the UK too, and the huge strong feeling against Trump, I think it will actually be debated for sure and there is a very good chance of him not being allowed in. In fact, I would be surprised if they didn't at least delay his visit until x and y conditions are fulfilled.

More likely the ban will have been modified/dropped by the time his visit is due. I mean one day and it's already been revised for Green Card holders. It'll run for a while and then after some time they'll claim that it was always a short term solution which has done it's work and so no longer needed.

EDIT: And now there's the "clarification" that the ban doesn't apply to UK dual citizens not travelling from the seven.

 

[CrabbedOne]

The yanks and Brits very deliberately bombed out Iraqs water infrastructure and sewage treatment facilities. They targeted these sites deliberately in order to cause the very obvious repercussions of blowing them up. Filthy water, streets flowing with raw sewage . Disease and misery on a mass scale . Bacteriological warfare against civilians is what it was . After blowing it all up they actively prevented either it's repair or access to medicine and vaccines to combat the diseases . For 8 years . Around a million or so died, half of them children .
This was all deliberate. Those are the wests rules of engagement .

Funny you seem to approve of things like that when it's the Syrian revolt being crushed. Military action often kills indirectly such as in a starvation siege or an aid convoy bombing. The R+6 in Syria has probably clocked up over half a million civilians killed counted that way. But no matter this is pointless whattaboutery.

We don't tend to count the incidental deaths. Maybe we should. We should think carefully about killing people by whatever means. The strangling sanctions on Saddam's Iraq probably caused much more excess morbidity in that period than any military action back then. You can make that an argument for regime decapitation based on that. A bad one but I've seen it done.

What airpower is for is killing people and destroying enemy infrastructure. Our laws of war allow a lot of very nasty behaviour including killing civilians. If it's a "command centre" you can bomb it. In Libya that was any head Qaddafi might have been crapping in. It's what you do mostly in state on state wars. Though we are not shy of bombing IS infrastructure and supply lines that civilians in the Caliphate rely on.

American COIN doctrine is really a very different approach that evolved over the Iraq war. The elaborate reference manuals like FM-3-24 are available. It's this way not because of any innate moral superiority but because cruder methods failed to reduce a peculiarly savage insurgency. They actually increased it. It took half a decade to evolve in places like Tel Afar and Ramadi. I remember reading a bootleg CIA manual from the the El Salvador period. Killing the voter (elaborately) wasn't so frowned on then much like Old Skool Russian ways we see now. Looking at our wars is arguable if this 21st century innovation works. It's rooted in Frog tache d'huile shit taught at Westpoint that failed as well but there it is.

US military doctrine unlike law or the moral compass of the public is real hard to shift. There is a precedent: the US Army clung to doctrine and tactics designed to hold up a vastly superior Soviet tank army in the Fulda Gap all through Vietnam. Yes those daft, kinetic search and destroy missions on a sea of Hueys. This was despite repeated harsh Presidential pressure demanding population centric programs like the pretty successful COORDS that the Army Staff systematically undermined. It's been blamed for the US losing that war.

Hence my view of Mattis as a restraint to Trump's amour fou with atrocity.

 

[Lord Camomile]

 

[Nylock]

The comment thread following that onion piece is pretty dismal...

 

[CRI]

The POTUS has an itchy trigger finger, methinks.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Seems ligit but all the social media news story caveat apply.

 

[coley]

Ta for that

 

[coley]

On Lawfare Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas
The author is quite supportive of other controversial post-9/11 legal moves but sees this one as uniquely awful in more than one way. It's probably very harmful in term of terrorism, the relevant professionals weren't even consulted on that and is so full of legal holes there'll be an ACLU frenzy of litigation. It's already facing a stay. It's a wishy-washy attempt to make good on essentially bigoted campaign bragging that he'd ban Muslims. It's not like he wasn't warned that this was wrongheaded and now he bungles it.

Trump should publicly fire whoever was involved in drafting this. They've made him look like an incompetent, over promoted, buffoon in his first week as a Lawmaker. If this was a large multinational corporation with a contractual problem the board might well be considering replacing a CEO who let that happen on his watch.

But was anybody else involved in the drafting of it?

 

[coley]

Not sure ke really thought this through

But is he capable of thinking 'anything' through? It's like the US has elected the typical pub bore.

 

[coley]

Yes. In the short term he will win. But in the longer term - the years, not months, he will see this brief victory turn to ashes.

Years? At this rate, months, and that's being generous.

 

[Casually Red]

Funny you seem to approve of things like that when it's the Syrian revolt being crushed. Military action often kills indirectly such as in a starvation siege or an aid convoy bombing. The R+6 in Syria has probably clocked up over half a million civilians killed counted that way. But no matter this is pointless whattaboutery.

We don't tend to count the incidental deaths. Maybe we should. We should think carefully about killing people by whatever means. The strangling sanctions on Saddam's Iraq probably caused much more excess morbidity in that period than any military action back then. You can make that an argument for regime decapitation based on that. A bad one but I've seen it done.

What airpower is for is killing people and destroying enemy infrastructure. Our laws of war allow a lot of very nasty behaviour including killing civilians. If it's a "command centre" you can bomb it. In Libya that was any head Qaddafi might have been crapping in. It's what you do mostly in state on state wars. Though we are not shy of bombing IS infrastructure and supply lines that civilians in the Caliphate rely on.

American COIN doctrine is really a very different approach that evolved over the Iraq war. The elaborate reference manuals like FM-3-24 are available. It's this way not because of any innate moral superiority but because cruder methods failed to reduce a peculiarly savage insurgency. They actually increased it. It took half a decade to evolve in places like Tel Afar and Ramadi. I remember reading a bootleg CIA manual from the the El Salvador period. Killing the voter (elaborately) wasn't so frowned on then much like Old Skool Russian ways we see now. Looking at our wars is arguable if this 21st century innovation works. It's rooted in Frog tache d'huile shit taught at Westpoint that failed as well but there it is.

US military doctrine unlike law or the moral compass of the public is real hard to shift. There is a precedent: the US Army clung to doctrine and tactics designed to hold up a vastly superior Soviet tank army in the Fulda Gap all through Vietnam. Yes those daft, kinetic search and destroy missions on a sea of Hueys. This was despite repeated harsh Presidential pressure demanding population centric programs like the pretty successful COORDS that the Army Staff systematically undermined. It's been blamed for the US losing that war.

Hence my view of Mattis as a restraint to Trump's amour fou with atrocity.

You're talking utter nonsense . Half a million children alone...perhaps many more..we're estimated to have died from the Iraq sanctions . The anti govt SOHR estimates 15,000 or so children have been killed in Syria by all sides combined . That includes indiscriminate rebel shelling of cities and no warning car bombs, IS rampages, Turkish shelling, western air strikes .

Utter nonsense .

 

[coley]

Supporters will see liberal coastal elites and media standing in his way. The immediate hope lies in the courts and mass protests. Went to one of my US senator's town hall meetings today held in a high school cafeteria. 3,500 turned out and it became essentially an anti Trump rally. Normally this event would draw only a few hundred. The energy is there to resist but the Dem party is beaten and disorganized and will take a while to get it's shit together but will eventually.

But as you and others have mentioned Trump and his supporters will twist this 'resistance' into Trumps doing his best but those liberal pussies are thwarting him, interesting ( and possibly horrible times ahead)

 

[gosub]

Years? At this rate, months, and that's being generous.

Days. The airports now clogged, the legal system clogged by morning...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Days. The airports now clogged, the legal system clogged by morning...

Speaking purely parochially, it would be fantastic if this were all overturned tomorrow. It would make the British govt's exemption look even more craven and absurd.