Defense Secretary James Mattis has been reported recently to be pushing for deeper direct US military involvement in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, and it seems he’s getting backing from top Pentagon brass as well, with the Central Command chief Gen. Joseph Votel today arguing that the US has “vital interests” in participating in the war.
Officials are falsely presenting the US as basically uninvolved to this point, despite US in-air refueling operations and naval participation in the blockade of ships to Yemen. Votel also focused heavily on the idea of Iran being involved in the war, despite no real evidence that is the case.
Votel’s argument was split into two parts, with one arguing that Iran is “destabilizing the region” and that the US has to confront them militarily, even if in this case it just means attacking Shi’ites with little but tangential ties to Iran’s own brand of Shi’a Islam. He also argued for more US involvement to disrupt to local al-Qaeda faction, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Which doesn’t make much sense either, since the Saudi invasion all but ignored AQAP for most of its invasion, and has instead focused on fighting Shi’ites to the exclusion of everything else. It was this invasion that resulted in Shi’ite factions losing substantial territory to AQAP in the first place, territory the Saudis largely have not recovered yet.
Any war is a serious Trump trap, even Yemen. Escalation means only staying to milk blood and treasure longer, not finishing faster. Finishing is no longer the goal of warfare, assured by MacKinderan geopolitics and dark economics.
Conventional thinking about war, that would colour Trump’s and likley Mattis’ notions of warfare and war profiteering, was that wars are fought to be concluded. However,’if you’re not winning, escalate till you do’, is obsolete.
Once upon a time wartime profiteering dovetailed neatly into peacetime spoils of victory under white market economics. Yet there’s always the problem of kickstarting the cycle again, instigating a new war to profiteer from, and not being integrated into war’s black market economy while it lasts from beginning to end.
Todays postmodern ‘long war’ thinking gets around that problem by removing the victorious white market part and making the black market an integral part of the formula. Against puny opponents like Yemen, losing can’t really happen (being forced to withdraw is not real losing; having to sign terms of unconditional surrender, that’s losing).
Postmodern war is more like a prolonged indefinite raid, mostly against the public treasury, incentivized by Deep State black marketeering about the war zone. There’s no incentive to make lasting peace let alone win the peace. The good postmodern war is a botched war that goes on and on. Mass starvation could also be sold (behind closed doors) as a necessary means to end problematic Yemeni populations and pick and choose the eventual so-called winners.
Trump’s enemies also still want him out of the way. As Trump slowly morphs into a war criminal as Obama did before him, the snowflake Deep State could even sell Trump out to the ICC at the Hague. Trump is no Obama; he can’t sell war and the delusion of renewal that usually accompanies a new administration didn’t happen at all. Trump is all but set up to become the Long War’s most spectacular scapegoat, carrying the sins of Bush, Obama, and his own, away in a tide of Trump hate that fundamentally changes nothing but feels good.
Then it won’t matter how long Trump stalls war with Russia, or how far he gets reorienting the American economy from warfare-welfare to infrastructure-entrepreneurship. It seems Trump is being prepared to be made an example of, and walk the walk of shame in tamed and broken humiliation into history.
Preferably taking some family members with him; Jared and Ivanka are official senior Presidential advisers.
The thinking is clearly there, with MSNBC Chris Matthews already comparing Trump’s family with Saddam Hussein’s mostly dead one. It was a big deal to end the line of Hussein, the sentiment was viciously tribal.
We need to commit genocide against the Shiites while bellowing, ‘we are great because we are good’.
Vital Votel seems to be as bad as any of his predecessors.
The Russia bullshit is really distracting everyone from what the idiot Trump is doing. He seems to just be trying to undue anything Obama did including half way decent sh*t like cutting off sales to the Saudis.