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iraq war
Trump 2.0: A First-Class Shock-and-Awe Experience
It is remarkable that a single figure could become responsible for potentially the greatest bankruptcy of all—the ending of the American Century (as we once knew it) and even, after a fashion, humanity’s centuries on Planet Earth.
Mar 20, 2025
Yes, “shock and awe” is back in the second age of Donald Trump. His border czar, Tom Homan, used that very phrase to describe border policy from day one of the new administration and, whether the president has actually said it or not, it’s now regularly in headlines, op-eds, and so much else. If you remember, it was the phrase used, in all its glory, to describe America’s massive bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003. (You remember! The country that supposedly threatened us with nuclear weapons but, in fact, didn’t have any!)
We Americans were, of course, going to shock and awe them. But from that moment on (if not from the moment, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when, rather than simply going after Osama bin Laden and crew, President George W. Bush launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan), you could say that it was we who were truly shocked and awed. After all, in their own disastrous fashion, our post-9/11 wars prepared the way for… yes!… Donald Trump to take the White House the first time around (shock and awe!)—and then blame the final disastrous retreat of the American military from Afghanistan in 2021 on the Biden administration. (“Kamala Harris, Joe Biden—the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.”) And of course, four years later, his reelection on a functional platform of Trump First, Americans Last, was distinctly a double shock and awe!
Tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him.
And if you’ll excuse my being thoroughly repetitious, that was—or at least should have been seen as—the true definition of shock and awe. Donald Trump! Twice! Even now, can you truly take it in? In fact, more or less every moment since his reelection victory in November 2024 has been—pardon me for the turn of phrase—a first-class S&A experience.
And—shock, if not awe—I haven’t even mentioned Elon Musk yet, have I? I mean, who can take him in either? The richest man on Planet Earth (S&A!) and, at least until President Trump levied those massive tariffs on our three major trading partners (only to partially back off soon after), still making money hand over fist (wrist, pissed?)—about $224 billion extra dollars (S&A!) just between the November 2024 election victory of Donald Trump and the moment he actually took power again in January 2025—at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, he’s been more or less running this country (into the ground) hand in glove with Donald Trump, who, by the way, is already talking about a possible third term in office! (“They say I can’t run again; that’s the expression… Then somebody said, I don’t think you can. Oh.”) Now, wouldn’t that be an all-American S&A first (or do I mean last?)!
An MMMW World
Phew, I’m already out of breath and exclamation points! No surprise there, of course, given the awesomely shocking and shockingly Trumpified (or do I mean Muskratted?) world we’re now living in and dealing with.
After all, we once again have a president who himself is (or may be—since you never know with him) a multi-billionaire and has at his side the DOGE-y man with a totally made-up position and an organization that nonetheless seems to have the power to dismantle whole parts of our government. (Science? Medicine? Who needs them? Veterans, who cares?) He could evidently even purchase Mars (and donate his sperm to help colonize that planet). And imagine this: Despite all the dough they and their billionaire pals possess—there are at least 13 of them in his administration, worth something like $460 billion—Elon and he seem intent on shoving through Congress a plan that would make his tax cuts for billionaires a permanent feature of American life (whatever it may cost the rest of us).
Don’t try to tell me that we’re not in a mad, mad, mad world (MMMW, if you prefer). And hey, the man who only recently set a record by spending more than an hour and 40 minutes giving the longest State of the (Dis)Union speech or speech of any sort ever to a joint session of Congress has done a remarkable job of foisting his version of an America First (Foist? Last?) policy on the rest of us and this world—a world that distinctly isn’t ours, but his. Think of us as now living in a Trump First World, or TFW. Of course, his version of America First includes those recent tariffs (some but not all of which have been delayed again) that, though officially levied against Canada, China, and Mexico, were actually being foisted on the rest of us. Count on one thing: In the end, we will undoubtedly pay through the nose for them. So, no question about it, we have certainly entered a distinctly S&A era.
The Double D of Donald
In truth, the 45th and 47th ( and 48th and 49th?) president of the United States is a genuinely remarkable figure. Truly historic—or do I mean hysteric? After all, who can’t bring some image of him to mind at any moment? That face, that stare, that glare, that red tie, that wave in his hair. Need I say more?
In his own remarkable fashion, he should be given full credit and a double capital D—for both Donald and Decline. Or just think of him as PD (for President Decline). And it is remarkable that a single figure, one man who once oversaw the bankruptcy of six different companies he had launched, could become responsible for potentially the greatest bankruptcy of all—the ending of the American Century (as we once knew it) and even, after a fashion, humanity’s centuries on Planet Earth.
I mean, who can even remember anymore the time in a distant century—the year was 1991, to be exact, the very moment when Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy for the Trump Taj Mahal and the year before he did the same for the Trump Plaza Hotel—when the Soviet Union went into the garbage pail, China had not yet truly risen, and this country was left alone as not just a great power but The Great Power or TGP, the only one left on Planet Earth? That, in retrospect, was a truly shock-and-awe moment. And isn’t it no less shock-and-awing to think that a mere 34 years later, that same country is now led by a raging maniac on an America First platform that could, in effect, prove to be an America Last one? In a mere two terms in office, he will have taken what was once known as the planet’s “sole superpower” into a world of chaos and, ultimately, disaster of a sort we still can’t really grasp. He will have been the monarch—and yes, that’s the appropriate word, not president—from hell. (In fact, the White House digital strategy team all too appropriately produced a portrait of President Trump with a golden crown and the phrase “LONG LIVE THE KING”!)
And if that (and he) isn’t the definition of shock and awe, what is?
Burn, Baby, Burn
Worse yet, tariff by tariff, tax by tax, act by act, Donald Trump stands a reasonable chance of taking this planet down with him. Think of it as little short of remarkable that, in a world in which every month, every year (and every decade) is hotter than the previous one in a record fashion, in a world in which the weather and its devastating effects—from fires to storms to floods—is only growing more extreme and more horrific, Americans freely voted in (a second time around!) someone whose election phrase of choice was “drill, baby, drill,” but might as well have been “heat, baby, heat” or “storm, baby, storm,” or simply “burn, baby, burn.”
And if his platform was America First (but truly Donald First), it distinctly should have been Planet Earth Last. (Of course—don’t be shocked—he also appointed as secretary of health a man who thinks that the way to fight measles outbreaks is with anything but a vaccine.) Yes, above all else, Donald Trump, who has called climate change both a “scam” and a “Chinese hoax,” continues to be focused on making sure that ever more oil, natural gas, and coal comes out of the ground and is indeed burned, baby, burned forever and a day.
Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!
Of course, no one should be surprised, given the way the fossil fuel companies funded his campaign. He’s already gone out of his way to cancel anything the Biden administration did to fight climate change and announced the country’s departure from the Paris climate accords (again). As The New York Timesput it recently, “In a few short weeks [of his second term in office], President Trump has already severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.” What he’s doing is now considered a “deep freeze” on climate programs of all sorts (though it might better be thought of as a hot melt).
At one point, he was even talking about eliminating 65% of the employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (S&A!). Lasting implications indeed.
In any other era, President Trump would still undoubtedly have been considered a nightmare and a half, but not a potentially world-ending one (at least the world as humanity has known it all these endless centuries). The truth is that, once upon a time, if you had told anybody that this would be our S&A version of the future, you would have been laughed out of the room.
The Second Time Around with No End in Sight
And yet, there can be no question that, all these years later, despite bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and failure after failure, he remains the man of the second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Give him credit. It’s a remarkable record not just when it comes to the success of failure but of putting Himself (and yes, under the circumstances, I do think that should be capitalized!), not America First.
Oh, and while all of this has been going on, the Democratic Party has not completely but largely been missing in action. Imagine that! And as for Congress, remind me what it is (other than an audience for You Know Who).
Consider it a remarkable historical irony that America First has remained Donald Trump’s slogan all these years when, in reality (or what passes for it in his universe), it should certainly have been Trump First and, when it came to anything that truly mattered to him, America (not to speak of the rest of the world) Last!
Worse yet, if all of us hadn’t actually lived through the Trumpian epoch (epic? toothpick?), I don’t think anyone could have made this up or, in a previous version of America, even imagined it happening. And if they could, there can be little question that they would simply have been laughed out of the room, if not institutionalized, not once but twice.
And yet here we are, the second time around with no end in sight, and a third time a history-breaking possibility, leaving us fully and thoroughly in another America on another planet. Phew! Talk about shock and awe!
I must admit, with at least three years and 10 months to go in the era of You Know Who, I find it hard to imagine our future, even if (as is certainly possible) the American and global economies go down the tubes and the Democrats are swept back into Congress—I’m sorry, where?—in 2026.
Nonetheless, for the (un)foreseeable future, we’re all living with Donald Trump in a genuinely shock-and-awe world of almost unpredictable strangeness. In some fashion, all of us are now Afghans or Iraqis.
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I Resigned 22 Years Ago Over the Iraq War... And Wish I Had More Resignations to Give!
I resigned two decades ago due to criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.
Mar 20, 2025
Twenty-two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the U.S. Department of State. I was the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq on March 19, 2003.
22 Years Later, I Don’t Regret My Decision One Bit
Former President George W. Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
In 2003, Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Four Presidential administrations after I resigned—Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump—another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a president: Project 2025.
Instead, Bush was following the advisers who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century, which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.
The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.
Bush had already lied about the reason to send the U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran. But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.
I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaeda was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere… and it turned out to be in overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
If I had one more resignation…. no, two more resignations...
One Resignation Over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza
In the next 22 years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.
Former President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation… and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.
And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine, including the 2014 right-wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.
Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025
And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.
Four Presidential administrations after I resigned—Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump—another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a president: Project 2025.
While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisers, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.
The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants. Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.
Trump is emboldened by the lack of congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump: “Elbows up!”
Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.
While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, did hammer out a much-needed cease-fire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the cease-fire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter, and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons. As the cease-fire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”... but without them.
And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities, and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—as his henchmen erase mentions of women, minorities, disability, and gender in his white male nationalist agenda, seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.
So many issues… and opportunities for resignation and resistance.
From Resignation to Resistance
I resigned two decades ago due to criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.
Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace, Shut Down Drone Warfare), and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.
You Must Resist
If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails, and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!
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Dear Canada: Beware of Peter Hoekstra!
As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as a hostile guest—not an ambassador worthy of distinction or trust.
Mar 08, 2025
On February 22nd, the Michigan Republican Party met in Huntington Place in Detroit to elect a new chair. After the ballots were counted, State Senator Jim Runestand prevailed over President Donald Trump’s choice, “fake elector” Meshawn Maddock. Even though he had delivered Michigan to the GOP column, incumbent Peter Hoekstra didn’t run again. He couldn’t, because as of November he is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s ambassador to Canada.
During his three-decade plus career in government, Hoekstra has amassed quite the right-wing record. In the 90s, he was a fierce foe of workplace safety and union reformers. Teamster warehouse director Tom Leedham called Hoekstra “a congressman who tried to eliminate the forty-hour workweek, and gut overtime and job safety laws.” As chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Hoekstra led a witch hunt into the Teamsters that ended up removing Ron Carey, the only reform president ever elected in Teamsters history, from office shortly after the union won a hard fought battle against UPS. Hoekstra proclaimed in 2000 that if he and his allies “had not acted, Ron Carey would still be president of the Teamsters.”
On foreign policy, Hoekstra’s tenure was similarly malicious. After voting for the Iraq War, Heokstra remained convinced well into 2006 that Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction. To that effect, he announced that U.S. troops had actually found WMDs that year. Too bad for Hoekstra they turned out to be defunct weapons that predated the Persian Gulf War. The WMD lie remained just that, a lie. He also palled around with David Yarushalmi, an anti-Muslim bigot who once called Blacks “the most murderous of peoples.”
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well.
In 2012, Hoekstra attempted to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenhow. His campaign’s Super Bowl ad featured an Asian woman, bicycling through a rice paddy, who castigated “Debbie Spend It Now” in broken English. A clear attempt to resuscitate the “Yellow Peril,” a journalist called it “the most racist political ad of the year.” Heokstra’s campaign floundered and he lost in a landslide.
Hoekstra’s post-Congress years saw him argue that the CIA’s torture program, euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” produced “actionable intelligence.” He took time in 2016 to defame Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin over her “egregious” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. After co-chairing Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign in 2016, Hoekstra was back in government. For his services, he was rewarded with an ambassadorship to the Netherlands, his birthplace.
As Trump’s ambassador, Hoekstra was dogged by reporters over his false 2015 claims that there were Muslim “no-go zones” in the Netherlands, in which cars and politicians were “being burned.” In 2020, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands posted a bizarre image of a graveyard containing German soldiers from World War II. The account said the graves were a “terrible reminder of the cost of going to war and why we must always work towards peace,” seemingly forgetting what side the U.S. was on during the war. The whole thing was reminiscent of when President Reagan went to a graveyard containing bodies of Hitler’s SS to declare the dead Nazis were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
Hoekstra’s tenure was marked by accusations that he openly interfered in Dutch politics. In 2019 he hosted a party for the far-right Forum for Democracy whose anti-Islam, anti-immigrant views nicely dovetailed with his own. Diplomats are prohibited from interfering in their host countries politics by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Although other political parties in the Netherlands complained, Trump lost the following year’s presidential election and Hoekstra was out. Or was he? Hoekstra’s reward for helping Trump win the Mitten State, is once again, an ambassadorship, but this time to Canada.
Hoekstra’s views and previous tenure as a diplomat should make his appointment a complete joke, but there’s danger in his appointment as well. Given that he has already violated diplomatic protocol via his involvement in the domestic politics of the host country, and that a stated goal of the Trump administration is the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, it stands to reason that Hoekstra will use any available means to further that project as ambassador. In short, he will attempt to undermine Canadian sovereignty under the guise of diplomacy.
Although Peter Hoekstra will almost certainly be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that’s no reason for him to be treated as just another ambassador in Canada. As long as U.S. policy is one of annexation and domination, Hoekstra deserves to be treated as someone who will undermine Canadian independence in the service of American empire.
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