Spengler replies

Submitted by Dan Schwartz (United States), Nov 11, 2016 at 13:58

Our mutual friend David "Spengler" Goldman weighs in on the Wilsonian Progressive "experts" who got us into this ever-worsening mess since late 2002:

Spengler: Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. "We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown" in July 2013, Hayden explained. "We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage."

"General," I remonstrated, "when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!"

"I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian," Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in "Men in Black," Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he's aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt's adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey's dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed "moderate Islamists" in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden's specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump "lacks the character, values and experience" required of a president and, if elected, "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being."

Trump responded, "The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place." That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity. (more)

[If you want to know how the world *really* works, read David Goldman's "Spengler" column, which has been a staple of Asia Times since 2003. Just click his name to see a list of all of his columns]

http://www.atimes.com/trump-lacks-experience-but-his-detractors-lack-common-sense/

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In a comment to me on a related post, David also wrote: "Dan Schwartz, during the question period after the very same lunch lunch I asked Gen. Hayden what he thought of the decline in US military R&D spending. He said that the US had made a choice to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and spend money on manpower rather than technology, and crowded out the R&D defense budget. Those are the choices we made and they have damned near ruined us."

https://www.facebook.com/david.goldman.967/posts/1112935535480525/

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