The Establishment Is Trying To Steal The Presidency From Trump — Paul Craig Roberts

January 13, 2017 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

The Establishment Is Trying To Steal The Presidency From Trump
And the Liberal-Left Is Helping
Paul Craig Roberts
Reuters reports that 2,700 US troops accompanied by tanks are moving across Poland toward the Russian border. Col. Christopher Norrie, commander of the 3rd Armoured Brigade Combat Team, declared: “The main goal of our mission is deterrence and prevention of threats.” Apparently, the colonel is not sufficiently bright to realize that far from preventing threats, the force he is leading presents as a threat. And to no less a military power than Russia.
What is the point of this miniscule force? It woud not constitute a threat to Russia if it were 100 times larger, perhaps even one thousand times larger. Remember, Hitler invaded Russia against an unprepared Stalin with the largest and best military force the world had ever seen in the largest military operation in human history. The German invasion force was comprised of 3,800,000 troops, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,350 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces, and 2,770 aircraft. The Red Army, despite its officer corps having been purged by Stalin, ate up this magnificient force and won the war against Germany.
Compared to Stalin’s Russia, Putin’s Russia is prepared. NATO is not capable of assemblying a large enough force to invade Russia. So what is the point of the 2,700 US troops moving across Poland toward Russia?
The answer is to keep alive the Western propaganda that Russia is a threat and to make it as
difficult as possible for Trump to normalize relations with Russia. It is extraordinary that the US military is conducting this provocative exercise that contradicts the policy of the incoming president. The US military, the CIA, and their whores in the US media are undemocratically pursuing their own agenda independently of the policy of the president-elect. According to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, US intelligence officials have even warned the Israeli government not to share intelligence information with the Trump administration, because Putin has “leverages of pressure” over Trump and Trump will leak the information to Russia and Iran. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.764711
We can see how the military/security complex’s sabotage of Trump’s policy works. Constant accusations have forced Trump to say that possibly the Russians were involved in a hacking that never occured, neither by Russia nor anyone else. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Tillerson, has to declare Russia to be a threat in his confirmation hearing in order to be confirmed. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Mattis, has had to say in his confirmation hearing that the US needs to be prepared to confront Russia militarily, adding that there are few areas in which the US can cooperate with Russia which he says is trying to break NATO.
We could dismiss Trump’s admission as throwing a bone to the CIA so they can feel vindicated and get off his back, and the statements by Tillerson and Mattis could be dismissed as what has to be said in order to be confirmed. Nevertheless, these statements from Trump’s top appointments are being used as confirmations that everyone except Trump, even Trump’s own government, realize that Russia is a threat. The propaganda picture of Russia that the Obama regime worked so hard to create now has the luster of acceptance by Trump’s nominees for State and Defense. Whether Tillerson and Mattis mean it or not, clearly the US Congress in thrall to the campaign donations from the military/security complex is determined that Russia be regarded as a threat.
The Russians watching all this must quickly be losing their hopes for normalized relations. The US ruling establishment is causing hope to fade and suspicion to rise in the Russian government, thus raising barriers within Russia herself to Trump’s policy of better relations.
Nothing speaks more clearly of the unbridled evil of the US Establishment than its willingness to
risk conflict with Russia for the sake of its hold on power and profit.
Where is the liberal-left’s moral conscience? Why is the liberal-left helping the military/security complex delegitimize Trump and box him in so that his agenda is dead on arrival and thermo-nuclear war remains an option?

 

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.