Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense 

By David Goldman, Asia Times

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism.

“We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin.

 

Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime.

 

Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions for the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the American empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination. The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well.

Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Common sense, to be sure, isn’t enough. Trump can’t swap spit with Vladimir Putin and let the witches’ kettle of the Middle East boil along by itself without dire consequences. As Bret Stephens complained Aug. 11 in the Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s loudest supporters make a motley virtue of their ignorance. “There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness,” Stephens wrote. I knew the late Irving Kristol, who trained and promoted most of the cadre who ran the first Reagan Administration, and Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal–brilliant men from whom I learned a great deal, some of which I had to unlearn afterwards.

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense, and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much, but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

“It isn’t just that the emperor has no clothes,” I wrote in a review of Angelo Codevilla’s brilliant 2014 book To Make and Keep Peace. “The empire has no tailors.” Three administrations of Bush father and son have produced a monotone Establishment of functional foreign policy morons.

 

One can’t find many prominent national security officials to oppose the signators of the anti-Trump letter because a whole generation of functionaries has been bred from the same stable. America will have to learn foreign policy from scratch. For my money, I’ll take the rough-edged outsider over the recidivist failures.

David Paul Goldman is an American economist,[1] music critic, and author, best known for his series of online essays in the Asia Times under the pseudonymSpengler. Goldman says that he writes from a Judeo-Christian perspective and often focuses on demographic and economic factors in his analyses; he says his subject matter proceeds “from the theme formulated by [Franz] Rosenzweig: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie, and unadaptable Islam.”[2]On March 14, 2015, Goldman and longtime Asia Times associate, Uwe Von Parpart, took control of Asia Times HK Ltd.

According to the Claremont Review of Books, the “Spengler” columns in the Asia Times have attracted readership in the millions.[6] His analyses of global events have become highly regarded. Former C.I.A. National Intelligence Council Vice Chairman Herbert E. Meyer said, “Ask anyone in the intelligence business to name the world’s most brilliant intelligence service, and we’ll all give the same answer: Spengler.

 

David P. Goldman’s ‘Spengler’ columns provide more insight than the CIA, MI6, and the Mossad combined.” [7] Goldman concealed his identity under the “Spengler” pseudonym until 2009, when he revealed his identity in the Asia Times article, “And Spengler is…” and the First Things article “Confessions of a Coward”.

August 10, 2016 | 11 Comments »

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  1. Hillary Aide Cheryl Mills OK’d Oil Deal That Put $500K In Bill’s Pocket
    http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/09/exclusive-hillary-aide-cheryl-mills-okd-oil-deal-that-put-500k-in-bills-pocket/#ixzz4GxyjwFtV

    Trumps two words which summed it all up: CROOKED HILLARY
    those words also explain the motive behind Hillary’s intentional espionage which sent info to the muslim brotherhood to murder ambassador stevens and the CIA soldiers. Perhaps it was a false flag kidnapping that went bad when the russians, iranians and syrians caught wind of it from the same server “drop box” and turned it into murder. Hillary and Huma just meant to give Stevens itinerary to the MB for a false flag kidnapping ……… in order to trade him for the WTT blind sheik who Morsi wanted…. but the same hackable server delivering that info gave the others a chance to turn it into a debacle. The info re Stevens purchasing and shipping arms to syria through Turkey was used by the russians to blackmail obama to accept Putins “chemical weapons plan” and back out of invading Syria under the pretext of chemical WMD. I am sure Putin is still blackmailing Obama and the clintons.

  2. The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense, and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in.

    poor and disappointing “journalism” from spengler. Rendering Trump as an unlearned interloper is just a naive and superficial analysis… an unlearned interloper could NEVER have accomplished beating ALL the GOP establishment candidates AND the corrupt bought media. He is definitely NOT unlearned, he had little political experience but his “learning” in other areas made him the winner.

    Painting the main characteristic of the “establishment” against him as simply being predictable is another misleading assertion… they are in fact a deceitful criminal cabal.

    They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work.

    they are much more, they are a cabal of criminal,s and criminal enablers, who have caused us great damage at benefit to themselves… in china they would have likely been executed for what they have done over decades and are still doing now

    Three administrations of Bush father and son have produced a monotone Establishment of functional foreign policy morons.

    if they were only morons we would not be in such a mess and would not have to worry so much only about a monotone establishment….. and its bigger than the bushes… it includes the clintons AND the donors to both parties. The biggest misleading narrative is that its all coincidence, error, mishap, failed policies, mistakes…. and yet to me it looks like those who pulled the puppet strings made out like bandits…. no mistake or failed policy where they are concerned. Sometime back it was determined that 80% of gains in income went to 20% of the population and I am sure that these so called “failed policies” have skyrocketed those figures. That is why all of every kind of establishment is out to destroy Trump.

  3. Common sense, to be sure, isn’t enough. Trump can’t swap spit with Vladimir Putin and let the witches’ kettle of the Middle East boil along by itself without dire consequences.

    actually, that describes the obama, clinton, kerry policy that obtains right now. Obama negotiated the US out with putin… and obama is handing it over to the regional players. But why ascribe that policy to Trump.. his only policy is to destroy IS, about which the journalists and media ill informed him, and to keep americans out of wars of no benefit. Then again … what dire consequences does spengler refer to which are not already there… and for who are those consequences dire? Spengler needs to elucidate because for me, chaos in the lands of enemies is a good thing.

    As Bret Stephens complained Aug. 11 in the Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s loudest supporters make a motley virtue of their ignorance.

    a stupid comment made by one who is hardly correct 50% of the time. repeating that silly comment without giving any examples of importance is childish but does reflect the snobby bias of self appointed experts…. who like the 50 stooges know whats going on but dont tell us the real story.

    There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness,” Stephens wrote. I knew the late Irving Kristol, who trained and promoted most of the cadre who ran the first Reagan Administration, and Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal–brilliant men from whom I learned a great deal, …..

    LOL, like I said, the halcyon days before we noticed that they all told fibs, witheld information, concealed criminal behavior, promoted paid for narratives…. the days when journalists were taken as decent folk rather than the “sleazy dishonest media” exposed to us all by Trump.

    men from whom I learned a great deal, some of which I had to unlearn afterwards.

    its time for spengler to do a little more “unlearning” and abandon the snobby perspective of “academia” and notice what we are noticing…. the “sleazy and dishonest press”. In that there is a much better story to write about as it has damaged the world for a number of decades.
    generally, I read and like spengler for his insight but on this issue he needs to go deeper into the trump phenomenon from a different perspective which will not color his conclusions.

  4. Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

    again, NAH again…. only one candidate really made it anywhere and that was due entirely to his position on those factors which directly influenced the ordinary person… not bush or foreign policies, except where an impact on the people: muslim immigration, illegal immigrants, law and order,loss of jobs to asia, firing US workers and replacing them, the economy.

  5. …and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due.

    I see no “disturbing inclination”. Perhaps, like most parroting “journalists” spengler is reading his own interpretation into Trumps words. All Trump is saying, and I agree, is that we should not have re created the cold war by provocatively wooing russias neighbors into NATO. He wants to find common ground and use their expertise in Syria. I disagree with Trump that IS is the problem but feel that when he finds out who created IS and why he will adjust accordingly. Obama fell under putins heel when he backed out of syria… Trump would negotiate from strength. Trump is not interested in “marrying” putin like I am not interested in “marrying” trump. He sees potential for common ground which may advance US interests. Frankly I am much more concerned with China, whose military we built and who is now aggresively provoking a potential war in the South China Sea. The credit Trump gave putin was that putin attacked IS and did it damage whereas the west ranted about IS and did nothing. What Trump doesn’t know is that IS is a false flag which better explains the behavior of the west in syria.

    But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination.

    Although I agree that he has common sense, more importantly he has accurate and good judgement. What propelled him to win is that he enunciated accurately and clearly, UNLIKE ALL HIS OPPONENTS… the needs and desires of the GOP rank and file voters as opposed to the BS of the GOP establishment and media..

    The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well.

    NAH…. its that academic overthinking again. The american people noticed that their leaders have led them into a cesspool and want out… experiments and egyptians are irrelevant.

  6. Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials ….

    Here we have the bias of the academic showing his freudian slip… a view held by many who consider themselves cultured, moral, intelligent, well educated…and designating themselves as having “good judgment”. But as Trump says… these are all the same people who led us down this horrible path of failure and making the world such a dangerous place.

    what is vulgar and obscene to me is not the apparent crude and uneducated delivery of a person… what is vulgar is the lying, thieving, murdering hypocrisy of all those politicians, journalists and academicians who knowingly colluded in this ongoing fraud in keeping the criminal behaviors of the clintons, the bushes, the cia liars.. from the public. They are obscene they are the disgusting and despicable folk… not because they say bullshite or fuck but because of their disgusting behavior.

    Is Trump ill informed? What is the basis for this conclusion? I agree in principle with many of Trumps positions and do not consider myself ill informed. What I do not know is that information has been withheld from me by the media, journalists and politicians who gave us fake “beliefs” as an explanation for their actions rather than the true motivations. Trump is well informed because unlike spengler, who opines upon the 50 corrupt stooger as if they merely were in error and ignorance,….. Trump knows that they are corrupt and play a part in the corrupt system which put them there and activates them to perform that which they are instructed to do by those who put them where they are. In that respect I would say that Trump is the best informed because he will approach all the players in the game with the assumption that they are liars, cheats, thieves and murderers…. a well informed person errs on the side of caution. Perhaps spengler can let us know where trump is ill informed in his basic policies?

    Poorly spoken? I have heard trump in interviews speak well but perhaps he dumbs down for the voting public who were smart enough to elect … as their president…. a guy named hussein….. after 911.

    has no foreign policy credentials? those who have been certified as having those credentials have proven incompetent or liars. The most important credential for foreign policy is the ability to achieve ones goals in negotiation. Those who pay covert ransoms to deceive the public into thinking they were good negotiators are the ones with the “foreign policy credentials”.

    It appears that “journalism” today consists merely of giving opinions and waiting for the echo.

  7. The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions for the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the American empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

    Had spengler looked at this paragraph using Trumps simplistic statement as a perspective starting point he might have noticed something which also have implications about journalism, journalists and their relation to the political establishment.

    First, it is interesting and accurate that he equates the gop establishment with journalists as examples rather than politicians. This freudian slip is actually reinforcing the notion that Trumps simple statement should be extended to the collaboration of the media and journalists in these failed “policies” OR perhaps they are not failed policies.

    Second, he submits the notion that the journalists and the establishment were motivated by beliefs which failed in their outcome as opposed to the “beliefs” being fig leafs for outcomes which were intended but presented as mishaps or inintended consequences. But is that accurate or true… on what does the journalist base those conclusions… are they based on the declarations of those who did the deeds? Would we take seriously the declarations of criminals justifying their crimes as an accurate explanation of the real motivations for their crime? So why assume that here…. especially since Trumps statement appears to point in other directions if taken seriously as a complete factual statement? Why assume that they wanted a stable gov in Libya and Iraq just because they presented that argument as their intention? Why assume that destabilization fragmentation, disorder and chaos was NOT the intention? A good analytical and investigative journalist might have looked into the ramifications that the decades of “failure” were really intentional and that the 50 stooges and the enabling journalists were simply criminals distracting from the questions that might be asked regarding decades of “apparently serial failure”

    when Spengler refers to the “sunni rebellion” we might infer that it was truly a spontaneous democratic uprising of the people rather than an intentional planned twitter activation of moles and orgs to provide a cover for the subsequent entry of foreign jihadi mercenaries.. complete with uniforms,flags etc. I think I might have read differently from Spengler prior on that subject.

    In any case my point is that journalists, journalism and the media are just another category similar to the 50 stooges and Morell of the last 3 decades… part and parcel of an ongoing serial fraud deserving of application of RICOH. This might have been a more relevant path to investigate than whether Trump merely has common sense but is vulgar, ignorant and clueless about foreign policy. My own experience with Trump is that although he has “felt” unattractive, unaesthetic, crude and vulgar… I cannot remember one event, statement or propaganda incident of the dems and establishment gop fairy tales whereby after analysis he was not correct in his simple assessment: e.g. “lets ban muslim immigration until we figure it out”…. everyone has been trying to change this, even he appears to be succumbing… but I have yet to see a more accurate analysis of what and who is the problem, and what is the solution than that simple statement. That is the statement I vote for and I do not want it watered down into something PC and false. All those seeking to change it are seeking to fool the public.

  8. Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct.

    Had Spengler stopped here and used his academic and anlytical expertise to analyze the full implications of Trumps “simplistic” statement he might had had a much more relevant, revealing, accurate, much deeper and resonating thesis on which to propound. The “full implications of Trumps simplistic statement” lead us to much more important conclusions than Spengler elucidates here.
    The following add on of Spenglers was irresistible and indicative of the important part played in unfolding events of the media and its academics and journalists. Spengler like most journalists is an academic and like most academics have spent their life reading and pondering culture, history, events, philosophy… and using their mind to figure it all out. Such folk tend to believe that events must be complicated because if it weren’t then all their time spent acquiring “knowledge” would be meaningless…. therefore they tend to belittle simplicity and worship complicated explanations.
    For example:

    He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

    but why Spengler, why might he have added that statement… of what value would that be…. that is your perspective not his. You speak of “.. if given the opportunity” which means you dont get it, and you dont get Trump. The whole statement indicates that he has already decided they cannot be given the opportunity, and Trump is correct in that assessment, so why does Spengler want to bring up the notion OR this tangent. Its an irrelevant tangent which leads Spengler into discussing the halcyon days of “journalism” without understanding that all those journalists fall into the same category as the 50 stooges. The “sleazy and dishonest press” have mislead the public for decades and been willing paid facilitators and enablers of the 50 failed incompetents and their counterparts. Had Spengler instead have really thought about Trumps simple AND fully complete statement without going off on an irrelevant tangent, he might have asked why did these 50 stooges suddenly stand up, what really motivated them, should we believe that they were motivated to stand up by their declared love of country and Trumps “incompetence” and “bad character”, why did they stand up in unison now as if a button had been pushed to activate the puppets, what does that mean wrt to our “democracy” and pretend two party system, is it really real? He might have applied the same Trump simplistic statement to journalism of the last 3 decades and ponder whether it has also been part of the fraud.

    Trumps simple statement needs no adding to … but it does need deeper analysis of its implications by so called academics and journalists because if Trumps statement is true then we must wonder how and why our system harbored these failures for decades and designated these repetitive failures as experts? Either Trumps statement is true or it is false… if it is true as I believe then the whole system is a massive fraud which needs to have a major purging. But Spengler instead sees Trumps simplicity as vulgar and ignorant and as a result of his snobby academic bias and perspective has, as many others, missed the whole story.

  9. The Moslem Brotherhood of Egyptian is in fact that country’s national garbage. And in politics as well as urban sanitation, garbage has never been known to dispose of itself.

    Arnold Harris, Outspeaker

  10. The Middle East mess was Clinton’s baby named “Libya” along with the mess of Obama foreign policy.

    The phrase “unlearned interloper” is biased when compared to Regan, Carter, and other “politicians” including Obama ranks the worse to date.

    Which forces the point – he isn’t a professional “politician”. Trump has enough testicular fortitude and experience as a man to go mano-e-mano with any world leader(s).

    There is a vast difference between spending someone else’s money vs your own.

    That experience gives intestinal fortitude, testicular fortitude, and common sense of which hasn’t been seen in history of American and is sorely need right now.

    The direction and the corruption of the USA is incredible. I fear if he makes it office – will he survive assassination attempts?