America Has a Long Tradition of Phony Peace Deals, Trump’s With the Taliban Is Just the Latest

Just the latest practitioner of the art of the phony peace deal

US President Donald Trump serves Thanksgiving dinner to US troops at Bagram Air Field during a surprise visit on November 28, 2019 in Afghanistan. (Photo by Olivier Douliery / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

Well, it only took a million years but peace has finally come to Afghanistan, sort of. Or at least so it appears. I’m not one of those hyperventilating liberal opportunists, bursting at the seems to piss on any peace parade led by a dayglo elephant. I have genuinely made an effort to put my best foot forward when Trump has made his occasional isolationist noises. Hell, I’m probably the only one to the left of Sebastian Gorka who cheered as he told the deep state to sit and spin from Helsinki with Putin at his side. But even in the wake of all the reactionary chaos of a flip-flopping Pat Buchanan wannabe, I’ve begun to notice another trend of vain opportunism which makes me feel less than easy about Orange-Man-Bad’s latest peace deal with the Taliban.

There are huge sections of this deal that remain off-limits to the eyes of American citizens, with word of annexes big enough to stow an army of corpses in. Even the stuff we know isn’t ironclad. A vague troop reduction over the next nine and a half months that can be reversed on the president’s whim, making it completely possible for Trump to run as a peace candidate and renege completely on his non-commitment just in time for the inauguration.

This, coupled together with Trump’s photo-op friendly game of negotiation hokey-pokey with a still starving North Korea, makes me more than a little hesitant to pop the cork and sing “Power to the People.”

Once again, the temptation here is to chock this all up to the unprecedented chaos of Trumpism, but this assumes that anything about Trump is unprecedented, a foolish schoolgirl lie that the Resistance repeats to itself in the mirror like a mantra every night before bedtime.

The only thing unprecedented about Trump’s foreign policy is his gal, everything else is standard imperial boilerplate. America has a long and storied history of phony peace deals, though your textbooks and PBS docudramas probably frame them a little differently. When Nixon opened up the West to Chairman Mao’s China in 1972, he was really making a deal with the daughtering old sociopath to fuck over Vietnam for the next couple decades, cutting arms to Charlie while undermining his efforts by financing the racist Khmer Rouge and joining us in flogging the newly liberated Vietnam when they tried to intervene and pull the plug on the Cambodian bloodbath. This ended with the long-forgotten bizarro spectacle of both Reagan and Deng propping up Pol Pot in exile while they starved what remained of Kampuchea with sanctions.

Liberal Darling and real-life Methuselah, Jimmy Carter has long been sainted for starting the endless peace talks over Israel-Palestine with his Camp David Accords. The sick sad reality, however, is that all Jimmy really did was offer Anwar Sadat and his pissant flunkee Hosni Mubarak a shit ton of American military hardware, along with the Sinai Peninsula, if they agreed to fuck over Gaza, setting a long hideous precedent of openly anti-Semitic Arab leaders willing to sit on their hands as the Nakba continues, just as long as they got the cruise missiles necessary to protect their thrones from their own people, many of whom turned from secular Arab Nationalism to violent Wahhabism in response to such savage hypocrisy.

This trend continued with the blessed Oslo Accords, where Yasser Arafat himself agreed to segregate his nation into the twin islands of eternal desperation now known as Gaza and the West Bank, just as long as he got to play president for a few years before his old buddy Ariel Sharon poisoned his scheming ass. The result wasn’t just the diplomatic destruction of the still inevitable One State Solution, but the reduction of any hope for democracy in Palestine to a corrupt glorified apartheid state, duty bound by “peace” treaties to oppress their own people on Israel’s behalf. Latter-day post-Zionists like Bernie like to piss and moan about the open racism of Kushner and Bibi, but Democrats like Bernie set the stage for Trump’s frankly genocidal Israel peace farce with decades of sleazy photo-ops at Camp David.

Even Barack Obama’s nearly universally celebrated nuclear peace deal with Iran was little more than a farce designed to be destroyed overnight on the whim of the executive office Barry helped fortify. Iran gave us access to everything but the Ayatollah’s colon and nothing but empty promises of sanctions reduction for their trouble. All for dismantling a nuclear weapons program that even our own CIA testified they didn’t have. And I see this same cruel prank of gangster diplomacy all over the Taliban deal. Best case scenario; we reduce our military footprint in the Hindu Kush to CIA torture chambers and black-ops death squads, and swap out the Northern Alliance for the Taliban as our new dope pushing militia of choice. Worst case scenario; nothing really changes and what few troops we actually rotated out of that carnivorous death trap are back getting their shins blown off before their kids can blow out the candles on their next birthday cake.

Look, dearest motherfuckers, I don’t like to be the killjoy here, I really don’t. But when you cut deals with an empire that runs on perpetual violence, you’re really doing little more than shaking hands with the devil, and that fucker can give you way worse woes than the coronavirus. The only deal you can make with a bully state as colossal as the one I exist in, that can possibly lead to anything remotely resembling peace, is the kind that says get the fuck off my lawn or your Yankee ass is grass. This kind of peace only happens when American anti-imperialists assist their comrades overseas by putting our knee on Uncle Sam’s throat like we did to get out of Nam. Anything else is just an inevitable imperial shakedown.

Source: Exile in Happy Valley

6 Comments
  1. ALTERNATE HISTORY says

    Pale-face Shmuel speaks with forked tongue, once, always, forever.

  2. IM DeRose says

    “Hell, I’m probably the only one to the left of Sebastian Gorka….” Exactly in which political direction does one have to travel to get left of a communist? This entire article is hung on the flimsy framework of a political false facade erected on the eroding foundation upon which the left-right paradigm is situated. It’s like, “Oh look at the cute puppet” as the audience is pick-pocketed by costumed thieves and shills sprinkled among the crowd.
    Can any “journalist” with even a shred of credibility be so oblivious as to the global shell game? The only two conclusions are (1) just dumb or (2) one of the shills. As these showman pantomime “a-murika,” “Obama,” “Trump” and other such phantasmagoria, the entire western front engages in the deception smiling all the way to the ATM hung on the gates of hell. While these naively nefarious journalistic shills write scripts for the juvenile geopolitical Kabuki theater of “Trump bad, Putin good,” real life puppet masters laughingly share a toast to NWO West meets NWO East.
    Anyone who is silly enough to believe that Obama, Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Xi, and/or lord god emperor Putin are anything but window dressing in the NWO East-West show would be better served writing children’s fairy tales (perhaps in drag) instead of wasting their “talents” promoting the current globalist political charade.

  3. CHUCKMAN says

    “America Has a Long Tradition of Phony…”

    Headline could have ended right there. It is the land of P T Barnum, after all.

    A rather jumbled, confused piece of writing.

    1. Canosin says

      is this your last burp?

  4. IM DeRose says

    “Once again, the temptation here is to chock this all up to the unprecedented chaos of Trumpism, but this assumes that anything about Trump is unprecedented, a foolish schoolgirl lie that the Resistance repeats to itself in the mirror like a mantra every night before bedtime.” Testament to how completely this “author” is out of touch with and understanding of “the Resistance.” Particularly since the True Resistance understands that Trump is irrelevant to The Cause, and nothing more than a morbidly entertaining puppet bridging the gap between wokeness and The Crash. The man has stepped from behind the curtain, the game is afoot and the True Resistance has one hand on The Holy Bible and the other hand on a fully loaded AK-15.

  5. Brion Adair says

    Yeah we well know the USG’s ability to keep treaties and other agreements:

    https://all-med.net/pdf/a-century-of-dishonor/

    The only thing that is “exceptional” about the US Government is its exceptional ability to lie its ass off. Call it the great American con. If I was the Taliban I wouldn’t trust these bastards as far as I could throw them. They should be the ones setting the conditions not the other way around.

Reply To Canosin
Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Anti-Empire