The Empire is Being Run by an Erratic Nut Job

It is now obvious that President Trump is one notch below Chauncy Gardner when it comes to deep strategic thinking.

Think about it. The man ordered a drone strike on the Iranian equivalent of Colin Powell when Powell's popularity was at its peak. Masses, too large to count, turned out in Ahvaz, Iran for the funeral procession of the Trump assassinated Qassem Suleimani.

If Trump's goal was to unite a good chunk of the Muslim world against America, he has succeeded.

The Iranian government is sure to respond. Now, Iraq wants the Empire out. And who knows how many lone nut Muslims have been triggered around the world.

The odds of anyone of us getting hurt or killed in a reprisal attack is very low but there will be Americans that will be on the other end of Iranian reprisal.

As for the street hustler Trump, he is about to get exposed as just another version of Big Jim Walker.

Trump is babbling on Twitter as he begins to realize the depth of his miscalculation

He two-fingered:

Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently....

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

...targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran &  the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

What? Trump is threatening to blow up important Iranian culture targets? That is certainly quite a way to calm things down.

Tom Woods called it right:

 But all the above Trump tweeting took place only after he realized that Iran was indeed going to respond with intensity.

The next blow to Trump was a direct blow to the Empire. Iraq's parliament voted to expel U.S. forces from the country. The resolution now goes before the U.S nervous-puppet Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi.

Trump now had to respond to this Iraqi blowback that he didn't expect. His response was pure madhouse justification for why the Empire was not about to leave.

“We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build,”  Trump said on Air Force One as he returned to Washington from Florida. “We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”

What?

Trump is now implying that U.S. forces are in Iraq to collect a debt?

And, of course, there was the bully threat.

Unless the U.S. exits Iraq on a “very friendly basis,” Trump said, the U.S. “will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever.”

As Caitlin Johnstone put it:

[T]he instant Iraqi democratic institutions become even slightly inconvenient for the US empire, Iraqi Democracy gets flushed down the toilet. Iraq's elected parliament voted very clearly for the removal of America's military presence in the interests of its own sovereignty, and Trump has stated, in his typical accidentally-honest way, that America will not honor that vote.

This is, of course, because the invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. The invasion of Iraq was about controlling a crucial geostrategic region which refused to bow to the dictates of the US-centralized empire. This is important to remember, because that is also exactly what the regime change agendas against Iran and Syria are about.

It is not a mysterious coincidence that all these horrible dictatorships that urgently need a forceful injection of freedom and democracy just so happen to reside right next to each other. The fight for control over the Middle East has always been about controlling important fossil fuel resources and trade routes, and thereby controlling the world. If the empire can't gain control of the nations in the region via absorption into the imperial blob (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, etc) or just constructing a satellite from scratch on top of a previously existing nation (Israel), then the empire will work to gain control by attempting to replace any noncompliant governments with compliant ones (Iraq, Syria, Iran).

And, as we now know, the second a compliant government begins to act noncompliant, it will immediately begin receiving the same treatment that noncompliant governments receive.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry with Trump in control of the execution of the Middle East dominance plan.

Trump may bumble us into a great crash of the Empire or into some hot shooting wars.

No one knows for sure, certainly not Trump.

The Empire is being run by an erratic nut job.

The good thing about this is that governments around the world know this. Maybe they are going to be much less willing to dance to the tunes the Empire demands they dance to.  France has already condemned Soleimani’s assassination.

The bad thing is that Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the world. How he will use this and how the military will respond is a complete unknown. What we do know is that when Trump is cornered he will try to either weasel out with lies or bully his way out.

-RW