Just days after President Trump came out firmly on the side of the Saudi Islamic extremists in their tiff with the Qatari Islamic extremists, his State Department, led by the rape-the-environment extremist Rexxon Tillerson, has denounced the Saudis for not coming up with a justification for their embargo of Qatar — a move that Trump himself took credit for. The story is here.
This is the FUBAR form of government. This is rule by SNAFU. It also shows in stark relief the reality of the US government today. Exxon man and the generals are in charge of foreign policy. The Congressional extremists led by Ryan and McConnell are in charge of domestic policy. Steve Bannon, as he openly declared last year, is using Trump as an “instrument” to push his vision of white nationalist authoritarianism. The ignorant, infantile president, Trump, is not in charge of anything at all beyond the promotion of his own brand and the aggrandizement of his sleazy, crime-ridden family and their cronies.
Sometimes these power centers converge, sometimes they contradict each other (Trump contradicts himself on a regular basis); all of them are using the immense power of the US government to advance their grubby agendas — but none of them, not one, give even the slightest damn about the well-being of the American people. The chaos at the heart of the American power system today makes the wildly careening Yeltsin government I saw in action years ago look like a model of reasoned statecraft.
The generals are pushing — and provoking — war with Iran and Russia; their sometime ally, Tillerson, wants war with Iran but rapprochment with Russia to secure lucrative oil contracts; Trump backs any country that bribes him with business deals, like Saudi Arabia and China; and the Congressional extremists, along with their allies in the cabinet, continue their crusade to kill the sick, kill the old, rob the poor and the middle-class, poison the environment and leave the country a smoking, hollowed-out ruin, all to fill the coffers of their oligarch masters.
I have written — for decades — about the crimes and depredations of the American power elite (including the mass murders and assassinations and corporate servitude of the great progressive god Obama); but there has never been anything quite like the monstrous chaos we now see at the heart of the American power structure. Where this out-of-control FUBAR/SNAFU form of government will lead us — world war? nuclear conflagration? societal colllapse? authoritarian rule? — is anyone’s guess. But we are certainly living in more “interesting times” the planet has seen since the 1930s; and I think we will all know how that turned out.