In 2016, Democratic Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard met with Donald Trump to discuss Syria policy at a private meeting at Trump Tower in November, just ahead of then president-elect Trump being sworn into office. At the time the two appeared to be in complete agreement over Syria policy. Gabbard said this after the meeting:
“I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.”
The following summer President Trump allegedly shut down the CIA’s clandestine efforts for overthrowing the Damascus government, a covert program called ‘Timber Sycamore’, after reports said he was increasingly disturbed by the brutal and jihadist nature of the armed opposition. All the way up until April 2018, he had appeared to be pushing toward withdrawing the over 2,000 US troops from Syria, against which advisers and neocon warmongers vehemently pushed back. Trump had proposed,
“Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon, very soon, we’re coming out. We’re going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be.”
But that was then. Today, Trump’s stance has changed. Or has it?
Responding To Chemical Weapons False Flag
We all know what happened next. Just days after Trump’s statement touting the withdrawal of American troops, video emerged from Idlib purporting to show an Assad sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, to which Trump responded with a brief Tomahawk missile strike on a largely abandoned Syrian military airport in the center of the country. Trump launched an even bigger attack on Damascus the following April following more unverified opposition claims of another gas attack.
Now, I would bet my bottom dollar that Trump knows very well that those two alleged chemical attacks were orchestrated false flags in order to promote a military response against Syria. If this is the case, then why would he have authorized the attacks, and why did he recently issue a warning against Syrian, Russian and Iranian forces against attacking al-Qaeda forces in Idlib?
Tulsi Gabbard Calls Out Trump
The way Tulsi Gabbard sees it, there are two reasons, which she elaborated upon in this video:
“One is because, if you look back over the last couple of years, the two times that President Trump has received vast positive reinforcement from the mainstream media, from Democratic leaders. from Republican leaders, have been the two times he has launched military attacks against Syria. His poll numbers are dropping. So he’s looking with a political calculation of what’s the thing that I know will make it so that people are saying nice things about me again?
The second reason is because there’s been this long, slow regime change war happening in Syria, we’ve been waging this long war since 2011, and the main ground force in that war has been al-Qaeda, and these other Jihadist terrorist groups. And so there have been both direct and indirect support of these groups fighting on the ground, to overthrow this regime, and, so their concerned that if these terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are taken out in Idlib, what happens to the ground force fighting to overthrow the Syrian government? And this leads us to the United States alliance with Saudi Arabia, who would like to see a Wahabi extremist government replace the government that’s in Syria.”
A couple of days after commemorative speeches about 9/11 were presented by the Trump administration, Ms. Gabbard took the opportunity to contrast the rhetoric in those speeches with the current position of the administration on Syria, using the full minute afforded general speeches in the House of Representatives:
[youtube id=”B7A8VuRFGmQ”]
Are They Just Role-Playing?
A speech like that seems to me to be addressed not to Congress, not to Donald Trump, but rather to the public in general, to wake up and realize that all that’s going on is pure theatre, and that without the public waking up none of us can move forward. Bringing up the specter of “Al-Qaeda”, which seems to be the tried and true boogeyman of terrorism that everyone recognizes, is one clue. The suggestion the 9/11 was the fault of al-Qaeda is another. It seems like there is a need to wake people up with a narrative that has some familiarity, in order not to shock them.
Do we really think Donald Trump is a supporter of Jihadi groups trying to unseat Syrian president Bashar al-Assad? Of course not. His reasonable stance on withdrawing from Syria up until April of this year seems to be how he sincerely feels, but for some reason those feelings have to be shelved for the moment. Indeed, he has limitations in terms of what his ‘character’ in this drama is allowed to say. Notice these two almost contradictory remarks about the Syria situation that came out within a few days of each other:
Optics
You will note that while the first tweet condemning radical Jihadis garnered a little over 4K likes, his condemnation of Syria, Iran and Russia got almost 72K likes. In a way, this might actually explain why he has turned against Russia and Syria of late. Does he need to reconnect to his base and those who still believe the full weight of the Russia-is-bad narrative? Tulsi Gabbard alluded to his poll numbers; one has to wonder if there are deeper reasons why a president’s popularity is an important aspect of his ability to get things done. The other theory one might hold is that he is under blackmail pressure from the Rothschilds and the Deep State. He goes ahead and unleashes fiery rhetoric against Assad, but then his retaliatory missile attack barely does any harm.
One way or another, the inconsistency and contradictions in Trump’s words and actions must be more than the vicissitudes of a bombastic blowhard. I think there is a method to the madness, though a method whose logic is currently difficult to pin down.
