The Bone Spur in Chief

Photo by Kristoffer Trolle | CC BY 2.0

To see the Bone Spur in Chief salivating over the billions of dollars ($12.5 billion: “Trump touts weapons deals with Saudi Arabia as peace groups accuse US of fueling kingdom’s war on Yemen,” Independent, March 20, 2018) of lethal military hardware sales to Saudi Arabia is almost more than a reasonable man or woman can bear. And if the salivating wasn’t enough, the Incoherent in Chief couldn’t even get full sentences out of his mouth to express his admiration of the reprehensible government (in the person of Crown Prince Bin Salman) of Saudi Arabia. As readers are well aware, Saudi Arabia was a faux creation of the British for reasons of oil and power.

Reading Amnesty International’s 2017/2018 human rights report on Saudi Arabia is like a trip through Wonderland, with the cry of “off with their heads” being something more than the stuff of fiction. The Saudis have been beating up the people of Yemen in ways that defy description. Saudi Arabia makes a joke of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter, but so do the U.S. and Israel. That we’re living in a world that allows for a mass outbreak of cholera to go unchecked in Yemen tells much about the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government kills innocent children and other civilians for sport. But back to human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Women may be allowed to drive cars this coming June (Imagine this great expression of rights for women going into effect?), but a woman still can’t move around that nation freely without a male escort: Amazing! And those who buck the government are likely to end up in jail with lengthy sentences, or be executed after show trials. Going on the Internet and criticizing the Saudi bastion of democracy will get a blogger a lengthy prison term. Our allies always do us proud!

Saudi Arabia is a key player in any planned war with Iran that would assist the U.S. and make the racists in the Israeli government jump for joy. And the unending chaos in Syria that takes Israel’s attention off of the Golan Heights for a time can only be a boon for the latter.  This is all great stuff for the tyrants of the Middle East.

There was a time when those who felt that resistance in any way to the Vietnam War ought not to be criticized. We had all been through this with the chicken hawks who planned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. But enough is enough! Now the bellicose Trump is so out of control that the likelihood of him doing something truly awful with U.S. military power (of course, that has been going on for sometime anyway) is not a pipe dream for the right any longer. The idiotic map (“Trump Boasts of Killer Arms Sales in Meeting with Saudi Dictator, Using Cartoonish Charts,” Real News Network, March 20, 2018) of planned arms sales to Saudi Arabia that he displayed at the White House meeting with Bin Salman was almost laughable had it not been for its lethal intent. Elementary school social science projects are usually of higher quality. The horror that we got because of ignorance and hate and neoliberalism in November/January 2016/2017, may get all of us in the end. It certainly will get lots of innocent people in other places in the world.

Meanwhile, a neighbor described Texas bomber, Mark Anthony Conditt, as a “very normal kid”  (“Conditt used ‘exotic’ batteries in explosives, sources say,” NBC News, March 21, 2018).

 

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).