War In The Age of Trump. Patrick Cockburn
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political leadership. Hillary Clinton frequently made distasteful boasts about her self-inflated role in the killing of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi. Trump likewise uses and misuses macho slogans more than most politicians and then disowns them when they have served their purpose. But he does not disown all his election pledges and he has not disowned the one on waterboarding, banned by President Obama by means of an executive order, which is much more important than the prosecution of Clinton or building the Mexican wall. Ever since 9/11, and more particularly since the rise of Isis, there has been debate about the radicalisation of Muslims and how this might be prevented. Saudi-sponsored madrassas and imams have been blamed, with some reason, but a much simpler cause of radicalisation has nothing to do with the slow imbibing of extreme Islamist ideology. This is anger and a desire to retaliate provoked by specific injustices such as waterboarding, rendition of suspects to be tortured, and the abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which acted as powerful and persuasive recruiting sergeants for Isis and Islamic extremism.
Keeping this in mind, it is important to realise that the US now has a president-elect who has just restated that he believes in the value of water-boarding. His views will not pass unnoticed among the quarter of the world’s population who are Muslims and know that they were the main victims of these abuses. Some members of the Trump administration, like General Mattis or General Flynn, the national security advisor, do not believe in torture, but others say that it works and that any criticism of it is unpatriotic.
Such senior figures include the newly appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and a supporter of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party. He has backed interrogation techniques amounting to torture and greater domestic surveillance by the NSA. He sees Christianity and Islam as engaged in a titanic struggle. Speaking in 2015 before a Christian flag at a church in his district that focuses on “Satanism and paranormal activity,” he spoke of the “struggle against radical Islam, the kind of struggle this country has not faced since its great wars,” and warned that “evil is all around us.” He advised the congregation not to be put off by people who might call them “Islamophobes or bigots.” On another occasion, he denounced a mosque in Kansas for holding a speaking event which coincided with Good Friday. As for Guantanamo, Pompeo described it as “a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have travelled to GTMO and have seen the honourable and professional behaviour of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility.” He denounced the release of the revelatory 2014 Senate report on torture, saying that “these men and women [the interrogators] are not torturers, they are patriots. The programmes being used were within the law, within the constitution.” It is worth recalling what waterboarding and other types of torture of which Trump and Pompeo approve really consist of.
The 2014 US Senate Report on torture by the CIA described waterboarding as a “series of near drownings,” in addition to which detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week and medically unnecessary “rectal feeding.” One CIA officer described prisoners being held in a “dungeon” and interrogation leading to “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.” The report concludes that the CIA had lied about the number of detainees, their treatment, and had fed sympathetic journalists with false information about valuable intelligence acquired by means of torture. The “waterboarding” approved by Trump and Pompeo was only one in a range of torture techniques used by the CIA before they were banned, according to testimony in the case of Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad al-Nashiri in a US appeals court hearing earlier this year. In addition to artificially induced suffocation, detainees “were kept naked, shackled to the wall, and given buckets for their waste. On one occasion, al-Nashiri was forced to keep his hands on the wall and not given food for three days. To induce sleep deprivation, detainees were shackled to a bar on the ceiling, forcing them to stand with their arms above their heads.”
By such means, Trump intends to make America great again.
13 January 2017
As Trump prepares for his inauguration, he is struggling with opposition from the US media, intelligence agencies, government apparatus, parts of the Republican Party, and a significant portion of the American population. Impressive obstacles appear to prevent him from exercising arbitrary power.
He should take heart: much the same was said in Turkey about Erdogan in 2002 when he led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the first of four election victories. He faced an army that, through coups and the threat of coups, was the ultimate source of power in the country, and a secular establishment suspicious of his Islamist beliefs. But over the years he has outmanoeuvred or eliminated his enemies and—using a failed military coup on 15 July last year as an excuse—is suppressing and punishing all signs of dissent as “terrorism.” As Trump enters the White House, the AKP and far-right nationalist supermajority in the Turkish parliament is this month stripping the assembly of its powers and transferring them wholesale to the presidency. President Erdogan will become an elected dictator able to dissolve parliament, veto legislation, decide the budget, and appoint ministers who do not have to be MPs.
All power will be concentrated in Erdogan’s hands as the office of prime minister is abolished and the president, who can serve three five-year terms, takes direct control of the intelligence services. He will appoint senior judges and the head of state institutions, including the education system. These far-reaching constitutional changes are reinforcing an ever-expanding purge begun after the failed military coup last year, in which more than 100,000 civil servants have been detained or dismissed. This purge is now reaching into every walk of life, from liberal journalists to businessmen who have seen $10 billion in assets confiscated by the state.
The similarities between Erdogan and Trump are greater than they might seem, despite the very different political traditions in the US and Turkey. The parallel lies primarily in the methods by which both men have gained power and seek to enhance it. They are populists and nationalists who demonise their enemies and see themselves as surrounded by conspiracies. Success does not sate their pursuit of more authority. Hopes in the US that, after Trump’s election in November, he would shift from aggressive campaign mode to a more conciliatory approach have dissipated over the last two months. Towards the media, his open hostility has escalated, as was shown by his abuse of reporters at his press conference this week.
Manic sensitivity to criticism is a hallmark of both men. In Trump’s case, this is exemplified by his tweeted denunciation of critics such as Meryl Streep, while in Turkey, 2,000 people have been charged with insulting the president. One man was tried for posting on Facebook three pictures of Gollum, the character in The Lord of the Rings, with similar facial features to pictures of Erdogan posted alongside. Of the 259 journalists in jail around the world, no less than eighty-one are in Turkey. American reporters may not yet face similar penalties, but they can expect intense pressure on the institutions for which they work to mute their criticisms.
Turkey and the US may have very different political landscapes, but there is a surprising degree of uniformity in the behaviour of Trump and Erdogan. This type of political leadership is not new: the most compelling account of it was written seventy years ago in 1947 by the great British historian Sir Lewis Namier, in an essay reflecting on what he termed “Caesarian democracy,” which over the previous century had produced Napoleon III in France, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. His list of the most important aspects of this toxic brand of politics is as relevant today as it was when first written since all the items apply to Trump, Erdogan, and their like. Namier described Caesarian democracy as typified by “its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality despite a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises to all and sundry; militarism; gigantic blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses [bread and circuses] once more—and at the end of the road, disaster.”
Disaster comes in different forms. One disability of elected dictators or strongmen is that, impelled by an exaggerated idea of their own capacity, they undertake foreign military adventures beyond their country’s strength. The disaster that Namier predicted was the natural end of elected dictators has already begun to happen in Turkey. The Turkish