How the ‘Smart Republicans’ Blew It

Establishment forces within the GOP have made yet another desperate attempt to subvert Donald Trump’s campaign in favor of Hillary Clinton.

The latest stunt comes in the form of a letter signed by 50 GOP national security experts, asserting that a President Trump would make the United States and the world less secure and less safe. But 45 of 50 of these experts worked under President George W. Bush, and had a direct hand in making the world less secure and less safe.

“The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess.”

These are the same experts who advocated endless, destabilizing regime change in the Middle East — the same experts whose policies created a Middle East in flames and unleashed ISIS on the West. This fact was not lost on the Trump campaign.

“The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess,” Trump said in an official statement.

“These insiders — along with Hillary Clinton — are the owners of the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq, allow Americans to die in Benghazi, and they are the ones who allowed the rise of ISIS,” he said. “We thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.”

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Indeed, it’s more than just a fear of seeing the nefarious neoconservative worldview they worked so hard to impose on the GOP relegated to the ash heap of history where it belongs that is driving this opposition to Trump.

The world under a President Trump — a world in which the U.S. is less involved in the Middle East and Muslims are less likely to murder Americans on American soil — is a world in which many of these highbrow hooligans, like Michael Chertoff, would make less money.

“Between his private consulting firm, The Chertoff Group, and seats on the boards of giant defense and security firms, [Chertoff] sits at the heart of the giant security nexus created in the wake of 9/11, in effect creating a shadow homeland security agency,” The Huffington Post reported in 2011.

“Chertoff launched his firm just days after President Barack Obama took office, eventually recruiting at least 11 top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, as well as former CIA director General Michael Hayden and other top military brass and security officials,” the report continued. These charlatans’ very livelihoods rest on the continued existence of the security state and the continued pursuit of foreign entanglements.

But even if these so-called experts didn’t clearly have their own self-interests and ideological allegiances at heart when criticizing Trump, there would still be little reason to heed their advice, considering how wrong they’ve been in the past.

After the invasion of Iraq, one of the signatories — then-Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Andrew Natsios — claimed on Newsnight that the U.S. contribution to the post-war rebuilding of Iraq would be no more than $1.7 billion.

However, according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report, the actual taxpayer cost to USAID alone, not including the Pentagon or other agencies, of reconstructing Iraq between 2001-2014 was a cool $47.3 billion. By 2014 the cost was already 28 times higher than what Natsios promised the American people and the limitless spending on the war-torn nation wasn’t slowing down. USAID requested another $9.4 billion for fiscal year 2015 to use on reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The truth is that the authors’ hyperbolic and hypocritical anti-Trump scaremongering betrays a Neoconservative mandarin class paralyzed with fear at the prospect of losing power. “Mr. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding of America’s vital national interests,” they write.

What they truly mean is that Trump has no desire to further the interests of the neoconservative globalists, nor engage in costly exercises in nation building, which leave death and devastation in their wake just so the global financial elite can make a few extra bucks.

While these people attack Trump with ease, they make no efforts to defend their own twisted thesis. They tell us Trump’s skepticism of military adventures in the Middle East is against America’s “vital” national interests, yet they don’t tell us how trying to grow democracy in Arab soil fundamentally hostile toward it is actually in America’s “vital” national interests.

They insist Trump’s desire for peace with Russia is against America’s “vital” national interests, yet fail to explain adequately how a new Cold War with one of the few countries on the planet to speak openly in defense of Christianity and Western civilization — and against multiculturalism and allowing Muslims to flood the West — is good for the American people.

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Perhaps most hypocritical is the authors’ claim that Trump does not understand the “democratic values on which U.S. foreign policy must be based.” Of course what they actually mean is that Trump rejects a U.S. foreign policy which seeks to export “democratic” values.

Indeed, the idea that the foreign policy advocated by globalist neoconservatives is in any way based on “democratic” values is ludicrous.

A foreign policy which advocates an alliance with an oppressive theocratic Wahhabist state — Saudi Arabia — cannot be based on “democratic” values, nor can a foreign policy which seeks to subvert democratically elected leaders with whom the U.S. does not agree, such as Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

The 50 “experts” who put their names on the anti-Trump statement “are nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power,” Trump said. “It’s time they are held accountable for their actions.”