It is truly amazing how many individuals who stood opposed to George W. Bush’s wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan now blindly follow the patently neocon foreign policy of Donald Trump. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump constantly castigated candidates like Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and others for their support for neocon regime change in other countries.
Not only has Trump allowed John Bolton, his national security adviser, to festoon the National Security Council with neocon retreads from the Bush era, but the Central Intelligence Agency-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—the chief architect of regime change—is chaired by George W. Bush’ chief of staff, Andy Card.
Seventeen years ago on September 11th, Card was the person who interrupted Bush, as he was struggling with the reading of “My Pet Goat” to a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, with the rather hackneyed and canned words: “America is under attack.” According to former NATO commander General Wesley Clark, after 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office, spurred on by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, drew up a plan for regime changes in seven countries in five years. The first target was Iraq, followed by Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Card, who assisted in destroying America’s democracy, is now in charge of a regime change agency that has the Trump administration’s wholehearted endorsement to topple governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, Syria, Iran, Serbia, Belarus, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Sudan, Bangladesh, and other nations.
Trump, who cannot pronounce the names of most of these nations, is, nevertheless, content to allow his neocon cadres to stir up trouble in the targeted countries.
Bolton is also taking every opportunity to destroy the Palestinian Authority as a viable governmental and diplomatic entity. He has engineered the cancelling of U.S. direct assistance to the Palestinians and terminated U.S. support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Bolton is also attempting to further isolate the Gaza Strip, Israel’s open-air concentration camp of a densely-populated 1.8 million Palestinians, and transform it into a political non-entity under Israeli military and intelligence jackboots. Bolton’s latest move was to order the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington closed.
As chairman of the NED Board of Directors, Card joins other notorious neocons, including Victoria Nuland, the distributor of rolls and cookies to coup-enabling neo-Nazis on Maidan Square in Kiev, Ukraine; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and senior counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; and Daniel Fried, who preceded Nuland as the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Fried favored providing the Republic of Georgia with lethal U.S. weapons in its confrontation with Russia.
On the board of directors of NED’s Republican Party branch, the International Republican Institute, are found such regime change proponents as Senators Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Joni Ernst, as well as Mitt Romney and former Illinois Senator Mark Kirk.
The NED is currently meddling in Serbia, the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serb enclaves in northern Kosovo.
Make no mistake about it. Trump is every bit as much of a neocon as Bush and Dick Cheney, especially with Bolton as his national security adviser. Card at NED represents another neocon cog in Trump’s very own “deep state” machinery.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
Trump is an evil, perverse man