Jonathan P. Baird

On January 5, the Iraqi Parliament voted to end the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil. This vote was in response to the Trump Administration’s assassination of the Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani. About 5000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

The Iraqi Parliament’s request for U.S. troops to leave seems to me a marker and an opportunity to critically evaluate that war. It has been 17 years since Americans invited themselves into Iraq. I wanted to look at reasons given for why the war was fought as well as outcomes.

Iraq was the bait-and-switch war. Al Qaeda in 2001 operated out of Afghanistan but we somehow had to fight in Iraq. Everyone now knows the reasons originally given by the U.S. government to justify the Iraq war were false. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no Iraqi connection to Al Qaeda.

Still, the U.S. war in Iraq has persisted. The costs have not been insignificant. At an approximately three trillion dollar price tag, 4550 U.S. soldiers have died and 3,793 U.S. contractors. The estimate for Iraqi deaths is in the 200,000 range.

I do not see this war as an example of good intentions gone awry. It was more a crime against humanity. President George W. Bush and his colleagues used the panic created by the events of 9/11 to indulge in wishful thinking. We would be welcomed as liberators. Iraq would be a cake walk.

This was the fantasy spun by the neo-conservatives surrounding Bush. With zero understanding of Iraqi society, they believed with Saddam Hussein gone, Iraq would become a model democracy and a compliant U.S. ally.

The group of neo-conservatives surrounding Bush played a pivotal role in pushing the U.S. intervention. However, the neo-con focus was on getting to Baghdad – not on what to do once Baghdad was captured. Cluelessness competed with greed after the invasion. Who can forget the arrogance and hubris of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and the whole collection of neo-cons who engineered the invasion. They believed their own fantasies.

Magical thinking dominated. It is easy to focus on the incompetence but Bush and his lieutenants seriously believed the war would be easy.

I find some other explanations for why the Iraqi war was fought less persuasive. Oil and its pursuit are always mentioned but I do not see it as a primary reason. I know Trump has said, “Why don’t we simply take their oil?” but since the invasion in 2003, more oil concessions have gone to Norway, France, China, and Russia. Of 11 contracts Iraq has signed, only one went to a U.S. company, Exxon Mobil.

Another explanation is that the war was fought to expand U.S. global dominance. This explanation ignores the conflict inside the U.S. foreign policy establishment at the time of the invasion. The old foreign policy establishment reflected in figures like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker opposed the war. They clung to a more realpolitick view, dubious of easy victories.

One notable outcome of the war was the emergence of ISIS which formed in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and occupation. Without the U.S. invasion, there was no ISIS.

Another outcome was the public re-emergence of torture, especially at Abu Ghraib prison. Army regulations and the Geneva Conventions were routinely violated. In 2004, photos emerged showing prisoners on leashes and bodies piled atop each other in a pyramid. Ignoring law, Trump has called for bringing back widely denounced torture techniques like waterboarding.

It is not clear that anything positive has come out of the war. The internal Sunni/Shia division remains as prominent as ever. Saddam is gone but 2.7 million Iraqis have been displaced. Over 1.5 million U.S. servicemen and women have cycled through Iraq with many multiple deployments.

The Iraq war has produced a generation of traumatized veterans. The amount of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and major depression is incalculable. The wounds generated by IED’s are gruesome. Loss of legs, fingers, hands and arms have been common. There are also smashed genitals.

Part of the post-war picture is soldier suicide. Last September, the Department of Veteran Affairs reported that at least 60,000 veterans died by suicide between 2008 and 2017. That is an average of 6,000 veterans dying annually (about 20 suicides per day) and the data shows that the suicide rate is increasing. Firearms were the method of suicide in 70.7% of male veteran suicide deaths and 42.2% of female veteran suicide deaths in 2017.

Surprisingly, in spite of this disastrous history, many of the same voices that pushed for war with Iraq are now pushing for war with Iran.

Former New York Times writer Judith Miller, George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and political operative Karl Rove have all been out there, beating the war drum. They are joined by Fox News Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity who has suggested the U.S. should bomb Iranian oil refineries and Trump insiders like Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo. I also should mention former Trump national security advisor, John Bolton, a well-known Iran war hawk, who cheered the Soleimani assassination.

Talk about a pointless war. These warmongers must concoct pretexts for aggression. There is no justification for any war with Iran. As I recall, it is the Trump Administration which recklessly withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal that many observers believed was working. Depicting Iran as the greatest threat toward peace is nonsense.

Those with even a rudimentary knowledge of Middle East history should recall that the United States overthrew the Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 and placed the Shah in power. Iran’s 1979 revolution was a response to our imperialism. The Shah was a widely reviled dictator who was a U.S. puppet.

Here in the United States we are in desperate need of an antiwar movement. There are multiple reasons a war against Iran makes little sense. Besides the lack of rationale for such a war, Iran is a far more formidable foe than Iraq ever was. Iran has three times the number of people Iraq did in 2003 and it is about three and a half times as big.

Iran is far more fortified than Iraq ever was and its geography has been difficult for invaders. A conflict could lead to thousands or hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. Millions of refugees would likely be seeking an escape from the war zone. The possibilities are hellish. The potential for destabilization of the whole region exists.

It is worth thinking about how ISIS emerged from the ashes of the U.S. invasion in Iraq. The aftermath of an Iran war could birth ISIS equivalents or worse. Desperation in the context of a power vacuum typically ends badly.

The experience of the Iraq war dictates heavily against any more Middle Eastern wars and especially against American involvement. The American people are again being sold lies minimizing the risks and danger of a war. It is late to be going along with more neo-con magical thinking.

I am reminded of the Vietnam Syndrome. Ever since the Vietnam war, American presidents have worried about public aversion to our overseas military adventures. We could use a rebirth of that syndrome right now.

During this primary season, foreign policy has been superficially discussed. With so many pressing domestic concerns, it is understandable. Still, foreign policy matters and the newly exposed Afghanistan Papers show why.

The American people have been systematically lied to for 18 years by our civilian and military leaders. We have been sold a false narrative of progress in Afghanistan. Even worse, our leaders have known that narrative was false but they have persisted with the lies.

The Washington Post recently reported on over 2000 pages of confidential government documents now in its possession about the war in Afghanistan. The documents include previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The Post won release of these documents, now known as the Afghanistan Papers, through a three year legal battle they fought under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents the Post exposed come from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, also known as SIGAR, a federal agency created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone. In 2014, SIGAR launched a Lessons Learned project meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan. The Lessons Learned staff interviewed over 600 people with firsthand experience in the war.

The Post began seeking the Lessons Learned interviews in 2016. SIGAR refused disclosure, saying the documents were privileged. The Post then sued SIGAR in federal court to compel the release of documents.

SIGAR has now released the transcripts from 428 of the interviews as part of the 2000 pages released. This was before a court decision which is still pending in the federal court in Washington, DC.

The Afghanistan Papers show that the United States government officials have never had a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. Douglas Lute, a three-star Army General who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015:

“What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

There are good reasons Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of empires” and the Learned Lesson interviews are illustrative. Our war fighting strategies were fatally flawed. Enormous sums of money were wasted trying to rebuild Afghanistan. The attempt to curtail runaway Afghan corruption failed as has the effort to build a competent Afghan army and police.

The Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani governments have been kleptocracies. The U.S. government threw vast sums of money their way and then acted surprised that corruption delegitimized their regimes. The Obama Administration essentially ignored Karzai ballot-stuffing his way to re-election in 2009.

I am not sure which regime was more corrupt, the old South Vietnamese government or our current Afghan partners, but both lacked legitimacy in the eyes of their respective masses. There was never a chance of winning hearts and minds.

All along, U.S. military commanders have struggled to articulate any clear rationale for why our troops were in Afghanistan. Craig Whitlock, a reporter from the Post put it this way:

“Was Al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadis, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.”

It has been impossible for U.S. troops to know who was a friend and who was a foe.

The cost has been astronomical. Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of these, 2300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action. In the 18 years of the war, Neta Crawford, a professor at Brown University, calculated, with an inflation adjustment, that the Defense Department, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion.

During the 18 years of the Afghanistan War, U.S. government officials, both civilian and military, have argued the war is going well, no matter the real battlefield situation. This has been equally true under George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. Instead of any honest accounting, we have gotten rosy pronouncements they knew were false while they hid evidence the war was unwinnable.

John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, acknowledged to the Post that the documents show “the American people have consistently been lied to”.

Since the Afghanistan Papers were published, they have been compared to the Pentagon Papers and the comparison is valid. Both expose official lying. Both wars were and are quagmires with Afghanistan an even longer quagmire than Vietnam.

The problem though, as I see it, is that critical analysis stops there. Why the repetition compulsion with war? I agree with those who see the decision to invade Afghanistan as an essentially irrational, emotional response aimed at satisfying the collective psychological need for revenge for the 9/11 attacks.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats have critically evaluated this failure. The Trump Administration had promised to extricate the U.S. from Middle Eastern wars but they remain as sucked in as Bush and Obama were. Since early 2019, the U.S. has deployed roughly 14,000 more troops to the region.  This is a reversal of Trump’s promise to extricate.  Trump is now considering sending thousands more troops to the region to. counter the alleged threat from Iran.

For a long time, there has been a mistaken tendency to see Afghanistan as the good war and Iraq as the dumb war.

At a deeper level, we should be examining the endless billions of dollars spent on military adventures built on lies. The American people have meekly submitted to this military overreach for years. The Pentagon asks, both political parties oblige. We have given a blank check to the military with no critical evaluation of results achieved.

It is hard to imagine any president or Congress standing up to the powerful vested interests of the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex. These interests have a permanent investment in perpetual war, somewhere or anywhere.

When Senator Bernie Sanders argued in 2016 that climate change was our greatest national security threat, he did not get much traction. He was laughed at. The merit of that argument is now evident. But we still shovel money at the Pentagon.

I have to laugh when I hear that Medicare for All or a Green New Deal are unaffordable. Is anyone looking at what we are spending money on?

Considering the history of lies from Vietnam to Afghanistan, a complete reorientation of foreign policy should be on the agenda. Next time, we might want to have a rationale before we intervene someplace.

No 16 year old has ever been named Time Magazine Person of the Year. It is always some older person winning that award. That is, until Greta Thunberg this year.

I watched a short video from Time explaining how they made the choice. They described Greta as “the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet this year”. She has been a galvanizing force, leading a worldwide movement.

Time described her as taking climate change from behind the curtain to center stage. They also wrote that she reflects a broader generational shift in culture along with a recognition that our current crop of world leaders are failing to serve the younger generation as well as humanity as a whole.

I guess I worry about the take-away that people will have about Greta’s selection. It is not about one extraordinary young woman, even though she is extraordinary.

We are facing a climate emergency. As Greta has made clear, she is not supporting any political party, politician, or ideology. She is about communicating the science of climate change and the enormous risk of failing to act on it.

There is a remarkably large gap between Greta’s perspective and the mainstream political world. In that world, there is no emergency or any sense of urgency. The world remains ruled by climate change deniers or utterly compromised, half-hearted exponents of climate change who counsel moderation.

Even if they pay lip service to science, our world leaders seem far removed from appreciating what the science means.

Science tells us we are in a race against the clock. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, something of a gold standard among climate scientists, reported in October 2018 that we have to reduce carbon emissions by 40% in the next 12 years to have even a 50% chance of avoiding catastrophe. And yet in 2018 emissions went up from an increase of 1.6% in 2017 to an increase of 2.7%.

The catastrophe alluded to is the suffering and deaths of many millions of people. Things are far worse than is generally recognized because climate change is happening faster than was anticipated. Witness the proliferation of superstorms, extreme wildfires. polar ice and glacier melting, and coral reefs dying.

We are talking about the destruction of many nations, species, and cultures. A 2019 study warned that one million plant and animal species face extinction due to climate change. And still, the world has remained largely indifferent and non-responsive.

While Greta can be seen as some type of prophet like a modern-day Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah, I think that is the wrong way to look at her. She is driven by science. In no way is she a religious figure.

Her own personal evolution is interesting. She has said she first became aware of environmental issues at age 8 when her parents told her about recycling and turning off lights to save electricity. She read books and watched documentaries about species collapse and melting glaciers.

She did not understand why the adult world refused to take climate change seriously. She worried about whether she would have a future. She said:

“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad. I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the films, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”

She described herself: “I was the invisible girl in the back of the class “. Greta was quite intellectual. She studied scientific predictions about how radically the earth was likely to change by 2040, 2060 and 2080 if climate remained unaddressed.

At age 11, Greta became very depressed. She stopped talking and eating. Doctors diagnosed her with a form of autism that used to be called Asperger’s syndrome. She also received the diagnosis of selective mutism. She has been quite open about her autism. She does not view it as an illness. She calls it “her superpower”. She did acknowledge that being on the spectrum, things are very black and white for her.

Greta became famous at age 15 when she spent her school days outside the Swedish parliament holding up a sign saying “School strike for the climate”. Although alone at first, her example led to an explosion of protests, especially in Europe.

Greta got the idea of a climate strike after the school shootings at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida led young people to refuse to go to school.

In the summer of 2018 Greta experienced the record heat wave in Europe and forest fires which ravaged northern Sweden. These were confirming events.

I think her speech in September at the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit tremendously raised her profile. In her speech, she said,

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”.

Greta has said that the real danger now is politics that makes it look like action is happening when the reality is just creative P.R..

With the 2020 election fast approaching, many voices are counseling moderation, that the only important thing is defeating Trump. One major problem with that view is its failure to reckon with the planetary climate emergency. We need to stop the world warming. That means policies which work to eliminate human-created greenhouse gas emissions of all types as quickly as is humanly possible. Time is of the essence.

Maybe there are times when radical action becomes absolutely necessary. To quote Naomi Klein:

“The truth is that the scientific deadline for deep transformation is so short that if radical action doesn’t roll out every year for the next thirty years, we will have lost the tiny window we have to avert truly catastrophic warming.”

More than anyone, Greta Thunberg deserves credit for challenging the massive climate change denial we are up against.

We all get exposed to so many injustices in life. There are so many that maybe only a small number can truly stick with us.

I suppose how we feel injustice is a very personal thing. Still, some injustices hit harder.

For me, the murder of Fred Hampton was one of those events that hit me harder. Hampton died at age 21. According to all his friends, the guy was fearless. He knew his life was in danger but he always remained committed to the goal of liberation for all poor and oppressed people.

This last December 4 was the 50th anniversary of that horrifying day Hampton died. It took a long time for the true story to emerge but the outlines are now much clearer about what happened.

For those who do not know about or remember, Fred Hampton was a young, charismatic activist in the Black community in Chicago. As a young man, he was an organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He organized for better recreational facilities and improved educational resources in his impoverished community. He made a mark as a community organizer.

Hampton was an honors student and a fine athlete. Baseball was a passion and he dreamed of playing center field for the New York Yankees. He also dreamed of becoming a lawyer. He had much exposure to police brutality in the Black community because it was a part of the everyday fabric of life.

Chicago, not unlike many other American cities, has had a long history of racism in its police department. In 2015, the U.S. Justice Department conducted a civil rights investigation into the Chicago Police Department. A Justice Department report concluded that the Chicago police engaged in “both discriminatory conduct and the disproportionality of illegal and unconstitutional patterns of force on minority communities”.

Most famously, a police commander, Jon Burge, and his crew of officers used an electric shock box to torture African American suspects into giving confessions. Other stories of violence committed under Burge include beatings, electric shock to the genitals and games of Russian roulette. Most of this misconduct occurred in the 1970’s and 1980’s. For decades, this torture was covered up by machine politicians and judges. It is estimated Burge tortured more than 200 criminal suspects in order to force confessions.

Numerous civil suits related to police brutality have cost the City of Chicago hundreds of millions of dollars. I think any fair assessment of Fred Hampton requires an appreciation of the context in which he lived. Racism was probably worse during Hampton’s lifetime than in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

As a young man, Fred Hampton became attracted to the Black Panther Party which was in its early days. The Panthers were standing up against the police brutality he saw daily. Hampton joined the Panthers in November 1968. Because of his personal charisma and his organizing skill, he quickly became leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers.

Hampton was a political visionary. He wanted to organize a rainbow coalition that included people of all races who shared his political goals. This was years before Jesse Jackson’s rainbow coalition. Jackson did later take the concept from Hampton whom he knew. Hampton brokered a peace agreement among Chicago’s warring gangs.

He helped set up the Panthers Free Breakfast program that particularly served children. The Party also set up the People’s Medical Care Center in North Lawndale, Illinois that provided free health care to the community. The Panthers screened thousands for sickle cell anemia, a genetic disease prevalent among Black people.

Hampton was not a racist. He believed in organizing poor people of whatever background across the racial divide. He became a highly visible and popular public figure in Chicago, often speaking to large meetings about police brutality.

Hampton did not escape notice of either the Chicago police or the FBI which was then run by J. Edgar Hoover. According to FBI memos, Hoover worried about the rise of a “messiah” who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.

Hoover wrote that the purpose of COINTELPRO was to neutralize and cripple groups like the Panthers. The FBI started bugging Hampton and his mother and tapping their phones. They also recruited an informant to make his way into the Panthers.

The informant, William O’Neal, had a criminal record. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and a monthly cash payment, O’Neal agreed to infiltrate the Panthers and report back. Behind the scenes, O’Neal worked to sow distrust and to instigate splits among the Panthers and Chicago gangs.

O’Neal drew a detailed map of the layout of Hampton’s apartment which he handed over to the FBI. The FBI shared the sketch of the apartment with the Chicago police. At the behest of the FBI, the Chicago police set up a raid on Hampton’s apartment.

On December 4, 1969, Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan organized the raid with a team of 14 operatives. Hanrahan ordered execution of the search warrant at 4:45am. The search was supposedly for illegal weapons.

O’Neal had slipped the barbiturate sleep agent, secobarbital, into Hampton’s drink late that night. When the police came to the apartment, Hampton never got up.

Although the Chicago police called the events that transpired a “shootout”, they were a shoot-in. It was later determined that the police had fired almost 100 shots into the apartment. The Panthers fired one shot out (and the circumstances of that shot are contested).

The Chicago police murdered a drugged and unconscious Hampton in his bed. It was found that shots were fired point blank at Hampton’s head. Another Panther, Mark Clark, was also shot and killed in the raid.

Strangely, after the shooting, the Chicago police did not secure and seal off Hampton’s apartment. The Panthers opened the apartment for viewing and thousands of people from the community viewed the aftermath where they could see the large number of bullet holes and the bloodstained mattress.

Years of litigation followed these events. No one was ever convicted for the murders of Hampton and Clark. A special prosecutor did indict Hanrahan – not for murder but for obstruction of justice. A judge appointed by the Chicago political machine acquitted Hanrahan of these charges. Eventually in 1982, the City of Chicago agreed to settle a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families for $1.85 million.

The various legal proceedings showed that the raid that killed Hampton was part of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program also known as COINTELPRO. Hoover saw almost all strong Black leaders as advocates of hate. His disgusting campaign against Martin Luther King is probably the best example but it certainly was not the only one. Hoover was a vicious racist.

This is an instance where very high government officials abused their power and were implicated in what can only be described as an assassination. Hampton’s case never received the type of publicity of Dr. King, Malcolm X, or the Kennedy brothers.

However, Hampton did leave a legacy. While the Panthers in Chicago never recovered from his loss, Hampton’s death galvanized the broader Black community. I think there is a straight line from the Hampton/Clark murders to the election of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, and now Lori Lightfoot.

The Hampton/Clark murders provoked a split of African Americans away from the old Richard J. Daley machine and toward independent political organizing. The old Daley machine ruled Chicago politics from 1955 until Daley’s death in 1976. Hanrahan had actually been groomed by Daley to be his prospective successor but his role in the Hampton/Clark murders nixed any chance of that.

Hampton’s story helped to expose the history of racist policing and white supremacy endemic in large American cities like Chicago. When Laquan McDonald was shot by the Chicago police in 2014, the background example of Hampton placed the event in perspective.

A feature length movie on the murder of Fred Hampton is currently in the works with Daniel Kaluuya, the star of Get Out playing Hampton, and Lakeith Stanfield playing William O’Neal. The film, tentatively titled Jesus Was My Homeboy, with screenplay by Shaka King and Will Berson, is slated to come out in August.

Although he paid with his life, Fred Hampton changed the narrative about racist policing and racist police brutality forever.

“…Presidents are not kings.” Those powerful words from Judge Ketanji Jackson of the Federal Court in Washington D.C. resonated for millions of Americans. Judge Jackson is the judge who presided over the case about whether Donald McGahn, the president’s former attorney, must comply with a Congressional subpoena to testify before Congress.

At issue is whether McGahn can be compelled to testify where the President claims executive privilege prohibits it.

Actually the President is not just claiming executive privilege. He is claiming absolute immunity from prosecution and even investigation. The President and his lawyers are saying such absolute immunity applies to himself, his staff, and his senior aides, even those who no longer work for him.

This is a staggeringly broad assertion of presidential authority. It is also one that has no basis in legal authority. As Judge Jackson made clear in her opinion, absolute immunity is “a fiction that has been fastidiously maintained over time through the force of sheer repetition”.

In other words, there is nothing behind the claim of absolute immunity. Trump and his team made it up. Whether it is for purposes of delay (running out the clock) or some other agenda, Article II of the Constitution provides no such extreme privilege. Executive privilege is a very different beast than absolute immunity; it is narrower and more nuanced.

Trump is trying to place himself above the law. He has said that Article II of the Constitution gives himself the right to do whatever he wants as President. He argues that he cannot be indicted while in office. Whether it is New York state prosecutors seeking information about hush money payments he made to two women or House committees seeking his tax returns, he stonewalls.

Trump’s lawyers did actually argue in a federal appeals court that Trump could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and face no criminal consequence because he is immune from prosecution while in office. Apparently, the role of the Department of Justice is to help him get away with it.

If we step outside the bubble that is Washington DC partisan politics, the absurdity of this position is immediately observable. The President has a good faith constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. There is almost no constitutional support for the assertion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy not to indict a sitting president. A policy is not law. It is, at most, persuasive authority.

Congress needs to clarify that a sitting president can be indicted for criminal activity, including obstruction of justice.

I am amazed at the buy-in of conservatives and many Republicans with Trump’s dictatorial view of executive power. I thought conservatives believed in limited government.

Trump is failing to abide by the Constitution in not recognizing the three co-equal branches of government. In the Trump view, there are no checks and balances – only an all-powerful Executive. In his actions, Trump treats Congress as an inconvenience and a nuisance to be strong-armed. Not only does he refuse to share power, he impedes all Congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses. What Congress does is “a hoax” or “a witch hunt”.

After criticism for his decision to host a G-7 Summit of world leaders at his Doral, Florida resort, Trump called the emoluments clause in the Constitution “phony”. I do not recall any president ever disparaging provisions in the Constitution, whatever they privately felt.

James Madison had predicted that elected leaders could become intoxicated with power and might seek greater power for themselves. That is exactly what is happening now.

It is worth recalling that our nation was founded in a rebellion against the British monarchy. The Founders were quite conscious of Europe’s miserable history of despotic regimes subject to the church and monarchs. The design of the three co-equal branches was an effort to avoid an American tyrant-in-charge. The Founders famously worried about power corrupting.

Trump is like an embodiment of those fears. Even worse, is the fantasy world he has constructed through his tweets and public utterances. He won by a landslide. He was the victim of illegal voting and he really won the popular vote. The Ukrainians, not the Russians, interfered in the 2016 election. In the matter of who interfered in 2016, Putin, not the American intelligence services, is a more reliable source. This administration has gotten more done than any other administration.

Destroying facts through the constant repetition of lies and the degradation of words has been part of how totalitarian regimes rule. By October, the Washington Post Fact Checker database found that Trump had made 13,435 false or misleading claims during his presidency. Trump is following a well-established playbook where words become meaningless.

Trump jokes about not leaving office. Although the Constitution limits presidents to two terms, Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility that the people will demand he stay longer. He has praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for being president for life and has said maybe we should give that a shot someday.

One does have to wonder whether Trump sees himself as a temporary custodian of the presidency. Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen warned that if Trump were to lose the 2020 election, he would not permit a peaceful transition of power. For Trump, the presidency is the ultimate business opportunity to sell his brand.

For those who think Trump is joking about staying on after two terms, I think of the writer Masha Gessen who has written, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says…humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted with the unacceptable”.

It is not at all clear that checks and balances will save us. Removal by impeachment takes two-thirds of the senate, a daunting number. So far, Senate Republicans have remained cowardly sycophants.

Trump is not a normal bad president – he is an existential threat. He has eroded the rule of law. He delegitimizes judges who rule against his policies. He has tried to undermine free and fair elections both in 2016 and 2020. He claims an absolute right to pardon himself.

As a pathological liar, a sexual predator, a serial tax-avoider, a race-baiter, and an election-corrupter, Trump has more than earned impeachment and removal from office. The problem would seem to be that Republicans are placing party loyalty over constitutional responsibility. Fear of the political cost of defying Trump controls behavior.

If Trump does not face consequences for his corruption, it is predictable he will be empowered toward his goal of being an autocratic strongman, without regard for any ethical or legal limits. Whether we survive as a constitutional democracy is an open question.

There is no certainty how events will unfold. Without vigorous resistance, we could end up with a king for president.

It is easy to be subjective and think we are living in the worst of times. After all, we have thousands of immigrant children being held in cages, an epidemic of white-supremacist-inspired mass shootings, and rampant climate change denial in the face of a climate emergency.

However, contrary to what you might think, these are definitely not the worst of times. One hundred years ago, the United States experienced a three year period from 1917 to 1920 when anti-immigrant hysteria, mass imprisonment of labor activists and radicals and unprecedented censorship ruled the country.

The extent of that political repression far surpasses anything we have seen, to date. That repression zeroed in on people who had been living in the country – not people trying to enter.

The peak of that hysteria was the Palmer Raids, named after then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Anyone who saw the movie J.Edgar in which Leonardo DiCaprio played J. Edgar Hoover might remember that the movie started with Hoover’s role in the Palmer Raids.

The government carried out raids in 35 cities, sweeping up thousands of immigrants and suspected radicals. There are no clear records of how many were arrested during the raids carried out in November1919 and January 1920. Estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 people arrested.

There were no search warrants. Suspects were grabbed off the street and from their residences; they were often badly beaten up by the police, thrown in jail, and left to rot there for months.There was no meaningful due process. America was in the grips of a Red Scare and powerful politicians and business leaders favored mass deportation of immigrants and radicals.

Fear got completely out of hand. In understanding why the Palmer Raids happened, the historical context is critical. The United States had entered World War I in 1917. In November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, with seismic shock impact. Many American business leaders feared social revolution would happen here.

There was an active radical labor movement led by the Socialist Party and by the International Workers of the World also known as the IWW or the Wobblies. Part of the resistance in that era was a small anti-war movement opposing America’s role in World War I. Radicals like Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman organized against the draft.

For the powers-that-be, deportation became a political weapon to be used. If they were not citizens, foreign-born radicals especially became government targets. For example, federal authorities put Emma Goldman (and 248 others) on a boat back to Russia even though she had lived in America for over 30 years.

The Palmer Raids had followed on the heels of attacks on the Wobblies. In September 1917, Federal agents raided 48 Wobbly offices around the country as well as the homes of activists. Over 100 Wobblies were put on trial in Chicago. This still remains the largest mass trial in American history.

The judge found all the accused guilty on all counts, handing out sentences totaling 807 years of prison time and fines of more than $2.4 million. The punishment delivered a crippling blow.

In Butte, Montana, in August 1917, a mob lynched a Wobbly organizer named Frank Little. Vigilantes played an important role in the Palmer Raids, supplementing the authorized persecution.

Little was not the only one lynched. Lynching has been an American tradition and 1919 saw more lynchings than in the previous ten years. President Wilson himself stoked the racism by predicting that American blacks “would be our greatest medium for conveying Bolshevism to America”. 83 African Americans were lynched in 1919.

That era had seen a huge increase in immigration to America, especially from people living in Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia. There were many Jewish immigrants too. Not unlike now, many Americans believed immigrants should go back where they came from. Nativism was a powerful current.

Anarchists had tried to blow up the home of Attorney General Palmer himself. Palmer believed that 90% of socialist and anarchist agitation was “traceable to aliens”. The American Establishment looked down their noses at aliens as undesirable and inferior. Shortly after the Palmer Raids, the government initiated strict immigration quotas.

Many of those arrested during the Palmer Raids had no relationship to anything radical but they were foreign born. In New Hampshire, federal agents and local police conducted a series of raids around the state, including in Berlin, Nashua and Manchester.

Russians were particularly suspect because of the fact of the Russian revolution. State-wide, 260 people were rounded up for such offenses as reading Russian newspapers or for being members of the Tolstoy Club.

Part of the repression was an assault on the media. President Wilson’s Postmaster General Albert Burleson went after a wide range of progressive newspapers and magazines especially those connected to the Socialist Party and the Wobblies. Over 75 different publications were either censored or completely banned.

Interestingly, most of those seized in the Palmer Raids were not ultimately deported although almost 600 were. 80% of those arrested ended up being released without charge.The reason more extensive deportations failed was because of the actions of an unknown hero, Louis F. Post, the acting Secretary of Labor. In that period, while Palmer’s Justice Department had the power to arrest people, deportation was under the jurisdiction of the Immigration Bureau which was then part of the Labor Department.

Post was a wily opponent of Palmer and Hoover. He invalidated over 3000 arrests when he discovered that many of the raids had been made without warrants or with warrants based on faulty information. Post also found that many of those swept up in the raids were questioned without being informed their answers could be used against them. They had never been given access to lawyers. Post managed to eliminate or dramatically reduce bail for many of those held.

Hoover unsuccessfully tried to get the American Legion to pressure for Post’s dismissal. There was then an effort to get Post impeached. That failed. Post prevented thousands from being deported.

I am struck by how little known the Palmer Raids are. They have been largely forgotten. In comparing that era and our own, I do think there is a greater awareness now of due process and constitutional rights.There is also greater media attention to violations of civil liberties. Still, both eras point to how hysteria about immigrants can quickly lead to the erosion of fundamental rights and values.

If Trump thought he could pull off something like the Palmer raids, does anyone doubt that he would try? The Palmer Raids stand as an example of how bad things can get when hysteria commands public policy.

Not too long ago, I wrote about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who warned early about the danger of fascism in the 1930’s. She tirelessly wrote about the German Nazis at a time when their threat was downplayed and underestimated.

I might have created the impression that Thompson was alone in her heroic efforts to expose the horrors of fascism. That was certainly not the case.

Along with Thompson, I would mention Martha Gellhorn, a reporter, novelist, and war correspondent who deserves far more recognition than she has ever received.

Gellhorn was a type of journalist we almost never see now. Fueled by a sense of outrage at injustice done to everyday working people, Gellhorn repeatedly travelled to war zones and covered conflicts for 60 years. She especially covered the victims of war. She was more likely to be interviewing bombing victims than generals or heads of state.

Gellhorn’s career had an unusual trajectory. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr College where she was bored as a student. She moved to Paris and started a journalism career working for the New Republic and a Hearst paper. In 1934, she returned to the United States where she got a job working for Harry Hopkins, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration under FDR.

In her new capacity, she travelled through Southern states and interviewed all kinds of people. It was the Great Depression. She was horrified by the poverty, sickness and malnutrition she found and she wrote about it. Hopkins forwarded her reports to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Mrs. Roosevelt was so impressed she invited Gellhorn to the White House for a visit. That was the start of what proved to be an important relationship in the lives of both women. Martha and Eleanor became fast friends. The Roosevelts invited Gellhorn to live in the White House which she did for a while. Mrs. Roosevelt became a close confidante and advisor.

As a journalist, Gellhorn had a desire to be where the action was. She had returned to St. Louis, her hometown, to write novels but she was drawn to Spain and the Spanish Civil War. She wrote:

“We knew, we just knew, that Spain was the place to stop fascism. This was it. It was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt.”

Gellhorn’s Spanish reporting was a high point in her journalism career. She wrote for Collier’s Weekly. The contending forces of democracy and fascism were lining up in an epic confrontation that proved to be a prelude of World War II. The Republican government fought against the fascist forces of General Fransisco Franco. The Australian writer, John Pilger said this about Gellhorn:

“I first understood the importance of the struggle in Spain from Martha Gellhorn. Martha, who was one of my oldest friends, is remembered as one of the greatest war correspondents and especially for her dispatches from Spain during the civil war. In November 1938 she wrote:

In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded.There was nothing much to drink: a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out, enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come for at least two hours. The flower stalls look bright and pretty along the promenade. “The flowers are all sold, Senores. For the funerals of those killed in the eleven o’clock bombing, poor souls.” It had been a clear and cold day all yesterday… “What beautiful weather,” a woman said and she stood, holding her shawl around her, staring at the sky. “A catastrophe,” she said. Everyone listened for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers, they were like tiny silver bullets, moving forever up, across the sky.”

Time and again, Gellhorn saw the human cost of those bombers and the misery inflicted on unarmed civilians. She used to invoke a Tolstoy quote that ‘governments are a collection of men who do violence to the rest of us’.

She was a premature anti-fascist. Recognizing the danger early, she saw that World War II would be a necessary war. In the late 1930’s her position was not widely held. In that era, there was plenty of confusion, lies and deceit obscuring the fascist threat. She wrote:

“Journalism is education for me. The readers, if any, may get some education too but the big profit is mine. Writing is payment for the chance to look and learn.”

During World War II, Gellhorn ignored American military restrictions on female war correspondents, stowing away on a hospital ship to gain a first-hand account of the Allied invasion of France in 1944. She reported from the beaches of Normandy in a nurse’s uniform. She spent the rest of the war filing from various front lines. She said she never knew if she was going to be alive the next day and that was immensely interesting.

At the end of the war, Gellhorn went to Dachau with the liberation troops and described it as a “circle of hell”. She wrote:

“Behind the wire and the electric fence, the skeletons sat in the sun and scratched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.”

Gellhorn’s biographer, Caroline Moorehead, wrote that exposure to Dachau changed Gellhorn in a profound, despairing way. She lost her belief that truth, justice, and kindness always prevail in the end. It was her dark side education. She said. “I’ll never forgive the Germans. Never. Never.”

Although her later career history is less well known, Gellhorn continued traveling to war zones and reporting, working for the Atlantic. She covered the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Vietnam war, the civil wars in Central America and the U.S. invasion of Panama.

To the extent that Gellhorn is now remembered, it seems to be mostly because of her short-lived marriage to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway dedicated his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to Gellhorn. There was a 2012 movie, Hemingway and Gellhorn, where she was played by Nicole Kidman. Gellhorn resented being known as Hemingway’s ex-wife.

Gellhorn lived to see Mandela address a multiracial parliament in Cape Town. Suffering from ovarian cancer, she took her own life in London on February 15, 1998.

The writer Victoria Glendenning, a friend, said Gellhorn was “a woman who was afraid of nothing and nobody. Though she held her convictions with passion, she had no self-conceit.” Since 1999, there has been a Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for exposing what Gellhorn called “official drivel”. That seems fitting. We might want to ask why a writer of her stature remains so little known now.

These are uneasy times for American Jews. After Charlottesville and after the Pittsburgh and Poway, California synagogue shootings, it does seem like there has been some kind of resurgence of antisemitism. The degree of the resurgence remains unclear.

I had never thought I would see armed guards screening worshipers as they enter American synagogues.

On November 1, federal authorities arrested Richard Holzer, a self-described skinhead and former Ku Klux Klan member, who was accused of plotting to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado. On Facebook, Holzer had written that Jews “need to die” and that they were a “cancer”. He had previously posted a video of himself urinating on a temple.

Holzer’s plot was quickly followed by another story about the alt right leader, Richard Spencer. Milo Yiannopolis, his alt right colleague and apparently ex-comrade, leaked an audio recording of Spencer from the day after the Charlottesville march. The recording has Spencer ranting about “little f—— kikes. They get ruled by people like me”.

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 1,879 antisemitic incidents nationally in 2018, with incidents ranging from vandalism to harassment. Of these antisemitic incidents, 1,794 were classified as “right wing (anti-government, white supremacist or other)”.

In 2019, the main danger to Jewish people comes from the far Right. It is not now nor has it ever come from the Left. Certainly there have been episodes of insensitivity or wrong-headed comments on the Left but there is no comparability. The numbers alone are very clear.

The increasing antisemitism goes along with an international trend reflected in right wing authoritarian governments and movements. Trump, Orban, Bolsanaro, Duterte and others of that ilk thrive on fear of the stranger, anti-intellectualism, and hateful rhetoric. Anti-semitism is one element in that toxic stew.

I think the shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway also persuasively show the role of online communities in radicalizing antisemitic bigots to engage in acts of violence. Neo-nazi and white supremacist websites have generated and continue to generate a surprising amount of traffic.

With the most disturbed racists and antisemites, there is a pattern of the true believer authoring an online manifesto explaining and attempting to justify his actions before he goes on a deadly shooting rampage. Their ideology is a key factor in understanding why they murder. Over the last ten years, white supremacists have been responsible for more homicides than any other extremist group in America.

The role of President Trump in all this must be mentioned and considered. It is no accident that he is a favorite of neo-nazis and the alt-right. They re-tweet him all the time and Trump returns the favor. Trump has served as an inspiration to far right extremists. He has continuously messaged the far Right that he is their guy.

Cesar Sayoc, the now-convicted Florida pipe bomber, illustrates the point. He was the guy who prepared pipe bombs for multiple Democratic leaders and people he considered political enemies. His bombs never went off and he was captured by police. Sayoc is a kind of fruit off a poisonous tree. You have to wonder how many other Sayocs are out there.

Consider Trump’s comments in August when he described Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats as showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”. This was the second time this year that Trump invoked the antisemitic trope about dual loyalty. In April, before an audience of Jewish Republicans, he referred to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister”.

The dual loyalty trope has a long history. Trump is playing with the false association that the loyalty of American Jews is primarily to Israel. The antisemitic trope is that Jews are not loyal to their home countries; rather, they are infiltrators and outsiders.

I immediately thought of the Dreyfus Affair when Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of betraying France. The common thread in the trope is that Jews harbor secret loyalty to some other, not us at home. The accusations against George Soros are very much in this same vein. Antisemites call Soros a “globalist” which effectively places him in the outsider category.

I think Trump’s attacks on Congressman Adam Schiff as “Shifty Schiff” are antisemitic. Schiff is Jewish. He is also chair of the House Intelligence Committee. In light of the impeachment probe, Trump has his reasons for fearing Schiff. Nevertheless, the way he has chosen to criticize Schiff is revealing. Trump has said:

“We don’t call him Shifty Schiff for nothing. He’s a shifty, dishonest guy.”

Trump had previously called Schiff “little pencil-neck”. Here he is playing on stereotypes of Jews as shady and unscrupulous. Think Shylock.

On October 2, Trump’s son, Don Jr. tweeted:

“And for those who don’t know who Adam Schiff is, he is not just a radical liberal, he is someone who has been hand-picked and supported by George Soros”.

Don Jr. went on to call Schiff a “Soros puppet”. While the Trump modus operandi is sliming opposition, Don Jr. has zero grounds to make the Soros accusation. Here Don Jr. is playing the antisemitic boogeyman card, throwing a bone to the irrational haters and conspiracy mongers in the Trump base.

Since 2016, the Trump campaign has played a cagey game with the use of antisemitism. Pepe the frog was a regular campaign meme. In July 2016, Trump tweeted out an image of the star of David, Hillary Clinton and piles of money. Shortly before the election, Trump used George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein in his closing campaign ad.

Clearly, if Trump thinks that antisemitism can advance his interests, he is using it. It takes major league chutzpah to use antisemitism while accusing your opponents of being antisemites. Trump has certainly done this with the Squad, particularly Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all women of color.

Trump’s accusations, especially against Omar, have been hateful smears. The pattern is well-established: find a quote about Israel, cherry pick a phrase or a quote, and make blatantly false accusations of antisemitism. Then get pro-Trump media outlets to pile on.

The real reason for these accusations of antisemitism is that Trump and the Republicans have lost the Jewish vote so badly. In the 2018 mid-term elections, 79% of American Jews voted for Democratic candidates with just 17% voting for Trump’s Republican Party. Next to African-Americans, American Jews have been the most loyal Democratic voting bloc.

Trump is weaponizing false accusations of antisemitism in an effort to peal away Jewish voters from the Democrats. Such political machinations minimize and trivialize real antisemitism.

Also, Trump absolutely refuses to call out the racism and antisemitism in his base. Witness the neo-nazis in Charlottesville who were “very fine people”. If Trump wanted to be taken seriously as someone who genuinely opposes antisemitism and racism, he would denounce it among his own supporters. I think we will be waiting a long time for that to happen because it won’t happen.

It needs to be said that no nation state is beyond criticism. Like all nation states, Israel needs to be criticized. I personally think the Netanyahu government has been a disaster for Israel and for the Jewish people. Part of the problem has been Israel’s failure to recognize the human rights of the Palestinian people. Jewish racism against Palestinians has been a disgrace and a shame. Given the history of the Jewish people, we should know better about all kinds of racism.

As an American Jew, I find accusations of disloyalty offensive. In the United States and in Israel, there are Jewish people with a wide range of political views on every issue. People need to vote their conscience. The last thing we need is President Trump or any other authority, acting as arbiter, dictating how we vote and passing judgment.

American antisemitism is coming from the same deep well that has long brought us racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. It is the same deep well that perpetrated the genocide against Native Americans, enslaved generations of African Americans and has cursed our history.