By Ed Felien
He canât resist being loud and splashy. He wants to make a big show,
because then everyone will know what a big man he is.
And thatâs why he comes off as a buffoon, a clown out of control.
The most ancient con gam 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.
Thatâs the game Trump is playing with us.
Heâs got four shells: Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. He wants us to
guess where the action is.
Is it Syria? âWe can get rid of those ISIS guys with the help of my buddy
here,â and a small quiet man next to him nods and smiles.
What about Iraq? âWe shouldâve taken the oil.â [But Cheney and Bush did
take the oil, and they sold it to the Chinese.]
âIran, Iran. Theyâre the big problem. Always causing trouble for other
countries.â
What about Afghanistan, âNo. No problems in Afghanistan. Just got to keep
a small army there to maintain stability. Help the young democracy get off
the ground. Canât abandon them.â
But arenât 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 itâs only fitting
that the worldâs superpower stand guard over the treasure. The United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the harvest is worth $3 billion
a year. Of course the U S part in this drug deal is only to protect the
crop and get it to the smugglers in the north--the Northern Opium
Warlordsâwho 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.
Itâs 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 wrote âConfessions of an Opium Eater.â 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 thatâs 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 communist regimes
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.
Trumpâs 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 canât move
through Afghanistan to Turkmenistan without the knowledge and approval of
the U S and Russian governments.
Or, maybe they talked about Russiaâs great new project, The Trans Afghan
Pipeline.
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. Itâs 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=0ahUKEwizloKso7HQAhUOx2MKHW-PDz4Q7AkIOA#imgrc=r1ry5PKBhkkodM%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 ânothing but griefâ
from the Iran nuclear treaty.
Trumpâs second appointment was Mike Pompeo to head the CIA. On the day he
was appointed he said about the Iran Treaty, âI look forward to rolling
back this disastrous deal with the worldâs largest state sponsor of
terrorism.â
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 âa public official or
person selected to be a public officialâ who receives anything of value âin
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 fifteen years, or both, and may
be disqualified from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under
the United States.â
Lock him up!