I have a plan, but I don’t want to ― look, I have a very substantial chance of winning, make America great again. We’re going to make America great again. I have a substantial chance of winning. If I win, I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is. Let me tell you, if I like maybe a combination of my plan or the generals’ plan, if I like their plan, I’m not going to call you up and say, we have a great plan. – Donald Trump, September 7, 2016
(Quoted from Igor Bobic’s article “Donald Trump Has A Plan To Defeat ISIS. No, He Doesn’t. Wait, He does…” Huffington Post, September 7, 2016)
The day before he shared with the world that he had a secret plan to defeat ISIL, Trump announced that on his first day of office he would give his generals an order to create a plan in 30 days to “soundly” defeat ISIL. On February 27th, a mere 8 days late, the Pentagon did complete a 30 day top secret strategic review. While top secret, we can assume it is just a tweak on the current strategy that is collapsing ISIL’s Caliphate. Anyway, it can’t be as good as Trump’s own secret plan.
Because now, less than 100 days in office, we can see Trump’s plan is coming close to fruition. ISIL is collapsing in both Iraq and Syria. Their position in Syria is so bad their enemies have started fighting each other (read Lizzie Dearden’s “Isis defeat in Northern Syria opens deadly new phase in civil war as rebel groups turn on each other” Independent, March 3, 2015). And in Iraq, Mosul, the crown jewel of the ISIL Caliphate is about to be totally cleared from their bizarre and hateful ideology, with the resultant celebrations. You can follow the collapse of ISIL’s land base in Iraq and Syria on the wonderful crowd-sourced site called Liveuamap. ISIL is so reactionary that they are clearly as intolerant, as murder-mad, and as schismatic (hating all other faiths, including all other Muslims) as the worst of history’s tyrants. So, no surprise, they were doomed once the various enemies of ISIL (actually, everyone else in the world, see the Newsweek article from 2014 pointing this out and predicting their current defeats) united to take back the territory they sized in the chaos of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war. Any support they had from regular people in the areas they occupied melted long ago under a shower of severed heads, mass rapes, systematic sexual slavery, genocide, destroyed antiquities, and constant persecution for how one dressed, what music one listened to, what games one played, and what beliefs one held.
So what is Trump’s plan? It is obvious. When Mosul falls he will claim the credit. When Raqqa is liberated, it will be because of him. And when ISIL completes their pivot (a real pivot, unlike Trump’s continual feints toward sanity) to emphasize attacks on the U.S. by neo-ISIL believers (indirectly recruited for the most part) and stages some significant attacks on the 50 states? Trump will blame Obama, of course.
Some might argue that real credit for the military defeat of ISIL in Syria and Iraq goes to… everyone else but ISIL and Trump. From Obama to Putin to Erdogan to Assad to the anarchist Kurds (see Seth Harp, “The Anarchists vs. the Islamic State” Rolling Stone, Feb. 14, 2017) and the “hippie” Syrians to even the slightly-less-crazy -than-ISIL warlords and fundamentalists, all united to free the victims of this insane, murderous cult. But we know, living as we do in the Looking Glass world of “Great Again” America, even though Trump doesn’t know shit about Syria or Iraq, he certainly does deserve the majority of the credit for this victory, as he will no doubt explain soon. And why? Because of the force of his personality, because of his historical (not to be confused with hysterical) will, and because of his secret plan.
After all, we now know that credit for the very healthy national debt level is totally Trump’s. As he explained in one of his many informative tweets:
The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.
-- Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump (5:19 AM- 25 Feb 2017)
So bigley true! Of course Obama was responsible for the $200 billion increase in the National Debt in his first month in office, just as Trump deserves all the credit for this debt level decrease of a modest $12 Billion in his first month (Binyamin Applebaum, “National Debt Dips. Trump Crows. Well, Sure, but…” The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2017). The same with job growth. Even thought the data was collected before Obama left office, Trump managed to create 227,000 new jobs! Before he was sworn in, his magical powers were getting people hired. Inae Oh explains how: “Trump Brags About Job Growth That Happened Under Obama” (Mother Jones, Feb. 3, 2017).
No surprise than that Trump deserves all the credit for the end of the ISIL Caliphate. This is indeed ironic, as Trump has already done more than anyone to sustain fundamentalist Islamist evil than any other individual in the 21st Century. With his bully (in so many ways) pulpit as the President of the United States, Trump has spewed out enough stupid racist, nativist, crap to validate every claim about America that Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Taliban, ISIL or a dozen other fundamentalist Islamist terror groups have ever made. And it doesn’t help that he lives a life of such mindless egotism, moral corruption, raging greed and self-promoting lies that every one of their caricatures of the depravity of Western Culture is validated. He is, after all, the elected President of the dominant power in the world with troops in over 300 countries and active participation in at least five wars (depends on your definition) and combat operations in at least five more.
While taking credit is the key part of Trump’s secret plan to defeat ISIL, refusing responsibility when the butcher’s bill comes in is just normal operating procedure. And it will come due soon. America will pay the price for Trump’s racist bile, his attacks on Muslims, his immigration crack-downs, and the unleashing of ICE at home and the U.S. military abroad.
After less than two months in power, Trump has destroyed any illusions any fools had that he would cut back on U.S. military operations (aka “adventures”) or funding. His proposed budget is a massive 10% increase (Shannon Pettypiece and Jennifer A. Douhy “Trump to Propose 10% Defense Increase in Budget Plan, Aides Say” Bloomberg Politics, February 26, 2017 ), and out in the empire, drone strikes are running at over 4 times the rate of the Obama administration (Micah Zenko “The (Not-So) Peaceful Transition of Power: Trump’s Drone Strikes Outpace Obama” Council of Foreign Relations, March 2, 2017) and can now be ordered up by the CIA and regional military commanders as Paul McLeary explains in a recent article in Foreign Policy (March 14, 2017).
We can expect further escalations of military operations, and perhaps even a whole new war front (Iran?). This will foster a whole new generation of fundamentalist Islamist madness…this time unleashed not just against fellow Muslims across the Middle East, but with more attacks on Europe and a particular focus on the best target now, the U.S. of A. Because Trump’s response to an ISIL attack on the United States states will be the best thing that has happened to fundamentalist extremist Islamist madness since the last Republican president lied his way into an invasion of Iraq. Experts and former jihadists agree, Eiza Mackintosh explains in CNN Politics, ”Trump’s ban is boon for Isis recruitment” ( January 31, 2017).
Despite Trump’s blustering, analysis clearly shows that since 9/11 most supporters of extreme Islamist fundamentalism in the U.S. come to this commitment after they move here. There is a fine article about this by Uri Friedman in the Jan. 30, 2017 issue of The Atlantic “Where America’s Terrorists Actually Come From”. Our immigration system already seems relatively effective at keeping ISIL, Al Qaeda, Taliban and other dangerous militants out of the U.S. But through their experience living here and through the interweb (internet, social media, etc.) some Muslims and others chose this dark path. Of course, this is the same formula that produces the much more common Christian fundamentalist racist misogynist terrorists in the U.S., as the New America Foundation reported, way back when Obama was President (Julia Craven “White Supremacists More Dangerous to America Than Foreign Terrorists, Study Says” Huffington Post, June 24, 2015). Under the reign of Trump such white-on-other attacks have increased, even according to Homeland Security, as Lizzie Dearden reports in “Donald Trump’s election victory is driving ‘domestic terrorism’ in the US, says Homeland Security Report” (The Independent, March 3, 2017). And this is just the beginning.
So that’s where we are now, living in such interesting times.
A few notes on reality.
1) While the media is still paying attention to Trump’s promise to have the general create a plan in 30 days to defeat ISIL, it now seems to have forgotten Trump’s own secret plan, which he announced with his normal clarity, in the quote at the start of this article.
2) I prefer the term ISIL (from the direct translation of their Arabic name: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) to ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) or Daesh, their Arabic name. For one thing, I honor the Goddess Isis. For another, ISIL, which started in U.S. prisons in Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s officers were forced into an alliance of survival with Islamist militants, extends way beyond Iraq and Syria, where they will soon be reduced to a guerrilla struggle.
3) I use the term Islamist for fundamentalist woman-hating sectarian Muslim terrorist groups. As I explain in my book Peace, War and Computers (Routledge 2005, fn. 2, pp. 175-6). While “not widely used in the United States” it is “common in the rest of the world and in the professional literature. It refers to radical, fundamentalist, and extremist Muslims who put their religion at the cent of their politics. It is used…to differentiate this minority perspective from the majority of Muslims/Islamic faithful.”
4) As the brilliant anthropologist Diane Nelson has pointed out, “Terror is a relationship.” I argue in Peace, War and Computers (Routledge 2005, pp. 3-10) that “War has become indistinguishable from terror.” Understanding that terror is integral to war, that it is perpetuated by both states and non-state actors, and that it is a relationship, not a thing, will help us understand how to deal with it.