By ann summers

Much like the GOP and Trump have peddled the meme that PBO/HRC “created” ISIS, now DJT* has decided to capitulate (bend over backward, Ben Dover) to Putin, where the Syrian conflict will generate new memes for 45*, giving new life to trans-national terrorism.

Like outsourcing his suits to Indonesia and Mexico, the 2020 election this time will be outsourced to Malorossiya, Chechnya, ISIS, or Al-Q.

Trump has weighed in on the power struggle among Gulf States in ways that will have unintended consequences for decades. Hooray for Steve Bannon, dime-store Hegelian.

All that needs happen is a US flag carrying oil tanker to be sunk (with the attendant eco-spill to co-opt US liberals) in the Hormuz strait by “terrorists”; heck, do some Hollywood casting and make them an ISIS/Al-Q hybrid even if their identity is never determined because as the GOP likes to say, “nobody knows”.

We’ve seen this in several Trump trial balloons for US-Russian collaboration proposals, because if nobody knows, then Russian collusion/collaboration is OK, whether counter-terrorism and cyber-security, or propping up Assad for no real reason.

With three Hollywood executive producers in the WH, “nobody knows” is the national brand strategy.

Agent Orange does have that 007 fantasy, considering his “secret” meeting with Vlad, so becoming a global super-villain is only one minor step above being a WWE protagonist at least at the script level.

An Erik Prince wetwork team subcontracted to Chechens to execute one of these Trumpian projects would be boffo media historiography, even if the more spectacular media-worthy event would be airplanes crashing into the Istanbul Trump Tower Mall.

Trump will produce more conflict and never consider peace or peacekeeping, even as PBO policy has ensured the defeat of ISIS while withdrawing US troops. There will be more US troops somewhere, regardless of gender, soon with more private mercenaries

Sy Hersh on the Trumpian desire to “act presidential by bombing something”…

One reason for the Russian message to Washington about the intended target was to ensure that any CIA asset or informant who had managed to work his way into the jihadist leadership was forewarned not to attend the meeting.

I was told that the Russians passed the warning directly to the CIA. “They were playing the game right,” the senior adviser said. The Russian guidance noted that the jihadist meeting was coming at a time of acute pressure for the insurgents: Presumably Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were desperately seeking a path forward in the new political climate.

In the last few days of March, Trump and two of his key national security aides – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley – had made statements acknowledging that, as the New York Times put it, the White House “has abandoned the goal” of pressuring Assad “to leave power, marking a sharp departure from the Middle East policy that guided the Obama administration for more than five years.” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told a press briefing on March 31 that “there is a political reality that we have to accept,” implying that Assad was there to stay…

The internet swung into action within hours, and gruesome photographs of the victims flooded television networks and YouTube. U.S. intelligence was tasked with establishing what had happened. Among the pieces of information received was an intercept of Syrian communications collected before the attack by an allied nation. The intercept, which had a particularly strong effect on some of Trump’s aides, did not mention nerve gas or sarin, but it did quote a Syrian general discussing a “special” weapon and the need for a highly skilled pilot to man the attack plane. The reference, as those in the American intelligence community understood, and many of the inexperienced aides and family members close to Trump may not have, was to a Russian-supplied bomb with its built-in guidance system. “If you’ve already decided it was a gas attack, you will then inevitably read the talk about a special weapon as involving a sarin bomb,” the adviser said. “Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”…

The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its target: There had been no chemical warhead. And yet it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind. “The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,” the senior adviser said. “It’s typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want. Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’”…

They were dealing with a man they considered to be not unkind and not stupid, but his limitations when it came to national security decisions were severe. “Everyone close to him knows his proclivity for acting precipitously when he does not know the facts,” the adviser said. “He doesn’t read anything and has no real historical knowledge. He wants verbal briefings and photographs. He’s a risk-taker. He can accept the consequences of a bad decision in the business world; he will just lose money. But in our world, lives will be lost and there will be long-term damage to our national security if he guesses wrong. He was told we did not have evidence of Syrian involvement and yet Trump says: ‘Do it.”’…

“The Salafists and jihadists got everything they wanted out of their hyped-up Syrian nerve gas ploy,” the senior adviser to the U.S. intelligence community told me, referring to the flare up of tensions between Syria, Russia and America. “The issue is, what if there’s another false flag sarin attack credited to hated Syria? Trump has upped the ante and painted himself into a corner with his decision to bomb. And do not think these guys are not planning the next faked attack. Trump will have no choice but to bomb again, and harder. He’s incapable of saying he made a mistake.”