Trump may lack experience but his detractors lack common sense, by David Goldman (Spengler). This is an interesting story of how stupid our elites have become on foreign policy, especially concerning Islam, even the US Republicans.
General Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration [was asked] why the US Republicans 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.
Hayden, like … 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.
So the Republican establishment have been disastrously wrong on foreign policy recently. Where does Trump fit in?
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’s response to the letter:
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.
Back to Spengler:
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. … 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 …
The original neo-conservatives knew how wrong they had been in their youth, and re-learned their politics after forty. Unlike their forbears, today’s neo-cons never have had a self-critical moment. Today’s guardians of the sacred flame of the sacred conservative flame are to the manure born. …
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.
