Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, Iraq Redux?
May 21, 2020Tomgram: Bob Dreyfuss, Iraq Redux?
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I'm taking the Memorial Day weekend off. (If, however, you want to read an appropriate piece for that holiday, check out Erik Edstrom's recent "Celebrated to Death, Memorial Day Is Killing Us.") The next TD piece will be on Tuesday, May 26th. Tom]
Let me quote a rare good guy and once-upon-a-time leader on this increasingly godforsaken planet of ours, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. He recently wrote: “What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security... The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water, and a clean environment and caring for people’s health... I’ll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics, and political thinking.”
How true, and here’s the sad truth: we are getting a rethinking of sorts in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. As TomDispatch regular Bob Dreyfuss suggests today, that rethinking -- by the president of the United States, no less -- involves security, but only the future security of one man (and you know just who he is) in a world where he could be blamed for so much harm. At a moment when the United States and China, the two great powers on what looks to be an economically broken planet, should be working together to restore global health and well-being, Donald Trump has decided that he no longer even wants to talk to his former “friend,” that “incredible guy,” Chinese President Xi Jinping. (“Right now, I don’t want to speak to him.”) As Reuters reports, he’s even threatening to cut all ties with China, which, if done, could make the protectionism of the Great Depression era look like the good old days. Meanwhile, he’s begun bragging that his administration, which has been spending money “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal that goes with it at a pace equal to that of the other eight nuclear powers combined, is developing a new “super duper missile” that will leave China (and Russia) in the dust.
Honestly, for the president of a nation that’s become the global epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis, the urge to dump full responsibility for whatever’s happening, pandemic-related or otherwise, on the Chinese seems to have become overwhelming. (Mind you, the Chinese leadership hasn't exactly been a model of moderation when it comes to ludicrous charges and vitriolic claims aimed at the U.S. on the subject of the coronavirus.) As Dreyfuss explains today, the idea that everything happening to The Donald can be blamed on a lab in Wuhan, China, should bring to mind one of the lesser moments in our recent past, the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq based on the fakest of “intelligence.” And count on this: when it comes to Donald Trump & Co., everything that’s happened so far is only the beginning. Tom
Let me quote a rare good guy and once-upon-a-time leader on this increasingly godforsaken planet of ours, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. He recently wrote: “What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security... The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water, and a clean environment and caring for people’s health... I’ll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics, and political thinking.”
How true, and here’s the sad truth: we are getting a rethinking of sorts in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. As TomDispatch regular Bob Dreyfuss suggests today, that rethinking -- by the president of the United States, no less -- involves security, but only the future security of one man (and you know just who he is) in a world where he could be blamed for so much harm. At a moment when the United States and China, the two great powers on what looks to be an economically broken planet, should be working together to restore global health and well-being, Donald Trump has decided that he no longer even wants to talk to his former “friend,” that “incredible guy,” Chinese President Xi Jinping. (“Right now, I don’t want to speak to him.”) As Reuters reports, he’s even threatening to cut all ties with China, which, if done, could make the protectionism of the Great Depression era look like the good old days. Meanwhile, he’s begun bragging that his administration, which has been spending money “modernizing” the U.S. nuclear arsenal that goes with it at a pace equal to that of the other eight nuclear powers combined, is developing a new “super duper missile” that will leave China (and Russia) in the dust.
Honestly, for the president of a nation that’s become the global epicenter of the Covid-19 crisis, the urge to dump full responsibility for whatever’s happening, pandemic-related or otherwise, on the Chinese seems to have become overwhelming. (Mind you, the Chinese leadership hasn't exactly been a model of moderation when it comes to ludicrous charges and vitriolic claims aimed at the U.S. on the subject of the coronavirus.) As Dreyfuss explains today, the idea that everything happening to The Donald can be blamed on a lab in Wuhan, China, should bring to mind one of the lesser moments in our recent past, the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq based on the fakest of “intelligence.” And count on this: when it comes to Donald Trump & Co., everything that’s happened so far is only the beginning. Tom
The Wuhan Hoax
Covid-19 and Trump’s War on the U.S. Intelligence Community
By Bob DreyfussThere’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 -- maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue -- was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.
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