Some of the highlights of former CIA agent Michael Scheur's letter to Trump are floating around the internet. If you have not read them already, I highly suggest you do. They reveal a great deal about our situation, and a lot focuses on a looming, potential war:
On Non-Intervention: What is it that benefits the United States from an automatic war if a non-NATO country attacks Montenegro? Mr. President, this is the fine madness of Senators McCain and Graham, both of whom are reprehensible political ghouls who love any war they can find so long as their children or loved ones are not at risk. Only the quickly growing-in-stature Senator Rand Paul had the courage to stand for America First when he blocked McCain’s late-night attempt to sneak Montenegro into NATO. Senator Paul needed and merited the support of you and your administration, as did the parents, wives, and children of our Marines and soldiers who would be killed or maimed in some half-assed, McCain-wanted war to defend Montenegro. Damn both you and your lieutenants for not joining Senator Paul to defend America First.
On Iran: Mr. President, with respect, you need to begin to think for yourself and go with your commonsense, and not with the advice of U.S. generals, a species that has proven itself unable to win a war since 1945, and who seem to live mostly to retire and become wealthy in the employ of arms makers, other industrialists, and foreign governments. This week we heard the Commander of the U.S. Central Command, Army General Joseph Votel, tell a congressional committee that Iran is “the greatest long-term threat to stability” in the Middle East, and that, “We need to look at opportunities where we can disrupt through military means or other means their activities.” (1) Later in the week, FOX’s top-and-always-wrong retired general, Jack Keane, backed-up General Votel and said that, under the Trump administration, ‘We are finally going to hold Iran accountable.” (2) Mr. President, have you ever asked your genius generals — serving or retired — why, if Iran is such a terrible threat to the United States, they support the growing presence of U.S. military forces in Syria and Iraq that are nothing more than facilitators for the Iranian leaders’ campaign to establish Iran’s control from the Iran-Afghanistan border westward to the Mediterranean? Or, why they believe that the only entities capable of destroying the Iranian regime — the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, their allies, and the Gulf Arabs who fund them — should be defeated using the blood and limbs of U.S. soldiers and Marines in a campaign that will do nothing but ensure Iran’s hegemony? Get with the program, Mr. President, your generals are anything but America First; note their universal support for committing America to automatic war via NATO. You need to educate them to the fact that America First means as little war as possible, and no war ever to serve the interests of so-called friends –Saudi Arabia, other Arab Tyrants, NATO, and Israel — and known enemies, like Iran, Iraq, and Syria. There is, of course, no reason not to shoot to hell any Iranian naval ship or aircraft that is harassing or even nearing a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. Otherwise, the course of wisdom is to just sit back and leave the slitting of Iran’s throat — and those of Syria and Hezbollah — to those who are most eager and capable of doing so, the fiercely anti-Shia, Sunni mujaheddin and their Arab-tyrant supporters.
On Israel First: It is beyond me, Mr. President, to know whether you understand that there is a direct correlation between the manner in which you manage the U.S.-Israel relationship and the number of U.S. Marines, soldiers, and civilians killed and maimed by the mujahedin. The more you side with, arm, and fund Israel, the more Americans you will get killed. This was true when bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and it is true today. It also is true that you, as president, are the only U.S. official who can limit the damage done to the republic and its people by this relationship. Save for Senator Paul, it would not be surprising to find that the other 534 members of the U.S. Congress are in the pay of one or another of the major Jewish-American political organizations, all of which you should immediately force to register as agents of a foreign power. (NB: Russia’s purported tampering in the 2016 election is nothing compared to the decades of manipulation of U.S. presidential and congressional elections by disloyal, Israel-First, Jewish-American citizens.) You will know, of course, that both Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi raced to the recent AIPAC conference to pledge their eternal allegiance to Israel’s interests, and this after they and their caucuses gave $38 billion of the money taken from U.S. taxpayers’ incomes to Israel. One might have thought, Mr. Trump, that that $38 billion would have helped pay for some of the infrastructure building, veterans’ care, and border-wall projects you promised. Would this amount not be helpful if spent in the interests of America First? So far, however, you have been nearly bellicose in your support for Israel, and you have sent there an ambassador whose loyalties lie entirely on the side of Israeli expansionism — and so war-causing — and therefore is a foe of U.S. interests and security. Whether or not Israel survives is of no relevance to the United States. It, like all other nations, has no right to exist and will continue to do so only on the basis of its own decisions and actions. The U.S. national government ought never to speak or act in a way that damages Israel’s absolute right to defend itself, but, more important, the national government ought to seek nothing but the kind of standard commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel that it seeks with all the other nation-states that are irrelevant to the republic’s survival, prosperity, and social cohesion.
