What's Puzzling You is the Nature of the Government's Game

Why the American citizenry is always confounded by its government.

There’s a funny (perhaps apocryphal) story about a famous showdown that happened in Aspen, Colorado during the ski season of 1991/1992. Donald Trump and his first wife, Ivana, where in town to enjoy the pleasures of the fashionable mountain town, but paradise was soon lost when Ivana heard a rumor that another woman named Marla Maples had caught the Donald’s eye.

Marla was known to post up at the Little Nell’s Après-ski, so Ivana decided to confront her. With hair and makeup done perfectly and wearing the latest, most fashionable ski outfit, Ivana entered the bar like a gunslinger walking into an Aspen saloon back when it was a rough silver town.

There sat Marla at a table with fancy friends, sipping her Après-ski drink, looking dashing. Ivana approached her and the two women locked eyes. . . at which point they realized that they were both wearing the exact same fashionable and sexy ski outfit. Donald, it seems, had performed the art of the deal, getting a favorable price by buying two at once.

I tell this story in the spirit of genuine humor and a fair measure of indulgent affection for the Donald. It’s hard not to be amused by it.

I was reminded of the story when some of my readers asked me if I had any theory of why Trump hosted the former al-Qaeda Terrorist Ahmed Al-Sharaa at White House.

President Trump now finds himself in the difficult position of being obliged by special interests to pursue their objectives, even though the majority of his voters are under the impression that he intended to represent their interests. In other words, Trump must pretend to act like the president of a Republic, doing what is best for the citizenry, while at the same time administering a sprawling, international empire in the service of assorted gangsters.

As an imperial power, the United States has always been constrained by the fact that most American people don’t want their sons dying in wars abroad. The government is adept at occasionally inciting popular passion for war against a foreigner who has allegedly committed a dastardly deed. However, the government struggles to sustain this passion for more than a year or two. Like a drunk young man who gets aroused by the sight of a girl at a bar, such excitement usually proves to be short-lived.

In the case of Iraq and Syria, the U.S. government and its ally, the Israeli government, aspired to get rid of the secular Ba’ath leaders in Iraq and Syria—Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad—because they insisted on being their own men.

The trouble for the U.S. government is that Iraq and Syria are large, unruly countries with multiple tribes and religious sects, inhabited by large numbers of young men who are keen to fight. Like Saddam and Assad, the U.S. military quickly discovered that a great deal of force and fear is necessary to govern these countries. This explains why the U.S. Army and CIA quickly started doing the same horrible stuff in Abu Ghraib prison that Saddam did before he was overthrown. Remember that the next time you read U.S. propaganda about the despotism of Saddam and Assad.

After a few years, the U.S. military and CIA found it necessary to make alliances with insurgency leaders like Ahmed Al-Sharaa who could—with the promise of money and power—be persuaded to serve U.S. and Israeli interests. This is what Trump was referring to when he said of of Al-Sharaa, “He’s a very strong leader. He comes from a very tough place.” In other words, Al-Sharaa demonstrated his mettle fighting the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq, and now he’s willing to be the CIA’s boy in Damascus.

And as often happens to Western heads of state when they meet demonized Arab men for the first time, they are surprised to discover that some of these bloody adventurers have considerable charm, charisma, and good manners. As Trump put it to reporters, “I liked him. I get along with him.”

Churchill purportedly toyed with something along these lines when he commissioned a study (in May 1945) known as Operation Unthinkable to join forces with what was left of the German army to turn on Stalin and kick the Red Army out of the eastern Germany and Poland. The idea was that, by 1945, Stalin had outlived his usefulness, while Nazi Germany had been defeated, thereby theoretically freeing Germany’s remaining soldiers for combat against the Russians.

A major problem with this concept was that all of Germany’s ordinary soldiers were exhausted, while many of its best generals (including Erwin Rommel) had been implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and were either executed or forced to commit suicide. I’ve long been of the opinion that American and British intelligence should have done FAR more to support the plotters instead of making the silly and counterproductive demand for unconditional surrender.

The U.S. government now more or less acts like the British government in Churchill’s day, when Great Britain was trying to hang onto its disintegrating empire. Because the American people don’t understand this, they are suffering from profound cognitive dissonance.