Lock him up!

BY ED FELIEN

He can’t resist being loud and splashy.  He wants to make a big show, because then everyone will know what a big man he is.
And that’s why he comes off as a buffoon, a clown out of control.
The most ancient con game is probably the shell game.  It goes back at least to Ancient Greece.  A hustler puts a pea under one of four shells, then moves the shells around and asks you to guess which one the pea is under.
That’s the game Trump is playing with us.
He’s got four shells: Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.  He wants us to guess where the action is.
Is it Syria?  “We can get rid of those ISIS guys with the help of my buddy here,” and a small quiet man next to him nods and smiles.
What about Iraq?  “We should’ve taken the oil.”  [But Cheney and Bush did take the oil, and they sold it to the Chinese.]
“Iran, Iran.  They’re the big problem.  Always causing trouble for other countries.”
What about Afghanistan? “No.  No problems in Afghanistan.  Just got to keep a small army there to maintain stability.  Help the young democracy get off the ground.  Can’t abandon them.”
But aren’t those troops mostly guarding the opium crop in Kandahar Province?
The stony fields in Kandahar Province with its terrible weather are probably the most lucrative farmland in the world, so it’s only fitting that the world’s superpower stands guard over the treasure.  The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the harvest is worth $3 billion a year. Of course the United States’ part in this drug deal is only to protect the crop and get it to the smugglers in the north—the Northern Opium Warlords—who were our main source of support for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The Afghan War was a drug deal all along.
Afghanistan always has been.
It’s The Great Game.  British adventurers 200 years ago dreamt of sultans and czars and large quantities of opium that would make them fabulously rich.  By 1821 de Quincey had written “Confessions of an Opium Eater.”  They had so much opium coming out of Afghanistan that they forced it on the Chinese after winning the two Opium Wars in 1842 and 1860.
The Great Game was always about balancing Russian interests and native interests and protecting the opium crop so it could be taken to market.  Great risks were taken and great fortunes were made.
And that’s the same way The Great Game is being played today, with the modern variation that in the 20th century the opium goes across the border to Pakistan to labs to be turned into heroin before it comes back through Afghanistan to go to Turkmenistan and Istanbul.
It used to go through mountain passes in Iran, but the Ayatollahs stopped smuggling on the Iranian side.  Religious theocracies and the Chinese are not fans of The Great Game.
The Taliban eliminated opium cultivation in 2001 and, as a reward and acknowledgement of their success, Colin Powell gave them $43 million to support impoverished opium farmers.  And a few months after being rewarded for not growing opium, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan with our strong native allies, the Northern Opium Warlords, and the poppies bloomed again in Kandahar.
Trump’s first appointment, and probably the one most important for him, was General Flynn to head             up the National Security Administration.  Flynn dismantled insurgent organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He knows the mission: Move the opium out of the country and pick up the check.
He went to a reception in Moscow last winter and sat close to Putin.  Did they talk about the opium trade, their Great Game?   The opium can’t move through Afghanistan to Turkmenistan without the knowledge and approval of the U.S. and Russian governments.
Or, maybe they talked about Russia’s great new project, The Trans Afghan Pipeline.
The Russian gas company Gazprom wants to run a pipeline from Turkmenistan through the center of Afghanistan and Kandahar Province to customers in Pakistan and India.  They know they will need the support of the U.S. military to protect the line from Taliban rebels.  Gazprom needs a U.S. president sympathetic to their interests.  It’s fortunate for them that Donald Trump owes the Russian oligarchs between $350 and $650 million for bailing him out of his casino bankruptcies.  Maybe they think Trump owes them something in return.  The Russian pipeline is scheduled to be completed in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmenistan%E2%80%93Afghanistan%E2%80%93Pakistan%E2%80%93India_Pipeline#/media/File:TAPI-EIA.png
But that puts Gazprom in direct conflict with the Iranian pipeline due to be completed in 2018:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Turkmenistan%E2%80%93Afghanistan%E2%80%93Pakistan%E2%80%93India+Pipeline+map&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=640&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizloKso7HQAhUOx2MKHWPDz4Q7AkIOA#imgrc=r-1ry5PKBhkkodM%3A
General Flynn loves the Russians.  He has appeared frequently on Russian television talking about how the two countries should cooperate on common objectives.  He hates the Iranians and thinks we got “nothing but grief” from the Iran nuclear treaty.
Trump’s second appointment was Mike Pompeo to head the CIA.  On the day Pompeo was appointed he said about the Iran Treaty, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
What do they want to roll back?  Do they want Iran to start building a bomb?  In exchange for Iran agreeing to not build a nuclear bomb and agreeing to regular inspections, the U.S. and the European Union agreed to free Iranian assets and allow Iran to export an additional 600,000 gallons of oil a day.  The assets have been unfrozen and sent back to Iran.  So the only thing that could be gained by tearing up the Treaty would be to stop Iran from exporting oil.
Is it worth a nuclear arms race in the Middle East to stop Iran from using their new pipeline to export oil to Pakistan and India?
And who would benefit from that?  Gazprom and the Russian oligarchs?
We know Trump is deeply in debt to the Russian oligarchs.  Recent federal court records show a $50 million oligarch investment in Trump SoHo.
At what point does this become corruption of a public official?
The federal bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201(b), says, “a public official or person selected to be a public official” who receives anything of value “in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act … shall be fined more than three times the monetary equivalent of the thing of value, or imprisoned for not more than 15 years, or both, and may be disqualified from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”
Lock him up!