The 100 Days War

Britain’s refusal to act in the former Yugoslavia left the Serbs free to butcher thousands of Bosnians. Brendan Simms dissects a catastrophe of British foreign policy in ‘Unfinest Hour’.

Simms mints the phrase ‘conservative pessimism’ to describe the mentality of Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and David Owen. They evaded Serb responsibility for the atrocities and vastly overestimated the difficulties of intervention. Exhausted by Ireland and haunted by Suez and Vietnam, Conservative politicians and the ‘experts’ in the press and think-tanks maintained that ethnic cleansing was an unpleasant fact of life.

Yep, mass murder, an unpleasant, but acceptable, fact of life…just as Rifkind seems to say today as he abuses Trump for ‘dangerous’ intervention in the world.

Then we had a parade of other worthies who hadn’t a good word to say about Trump and his first 100 days as President….never once acknowledging that he essentially had the whole Establishment lined up against him from the 95% of the Media, to the Democrats, even much of his own Party, to the intelligence and security services and of course the activist judges.

Justin Webb has been off the ranch to write his own summing up in the Mail [LOL…they just can’t keep out of the hated rag…no doubt hoping they can ‘poison’ the minds of the horribly white and Right Mail readers with their liberal worldview…it’s the Beeboids missionary work to civilise the savage natives].  Webb admits Trump hasn’t in fact done badly, a view you don’t hear on the BBC itself, but he can’t help the digs…

His madcap, jumpingjack-flash of a presidency is going from . . . well, not exactly strength to strength — that would be stretching reality — but it’s still going somewhere, and in some respects it is going rather well.

Of course, as with any president, the reality of trying to deliver on noisy campaign promises soon becomes apparent when you arrive in the Oval Office.

Webb also admits that America is in many respects ‘broken’….’carnage’…a phrase for which Trump was roundly abused and condemned…and yet he was right….

If you have been to America recently, you will have noticed that much of the place is — to use the word Trump himself used in his inaugural speech — ‘carnage’. It’s broken. rusted. Sad.

Webb admits Trump has a very good team around him…

The Trump team is now a steady and experienced group of former soldiers and businesspeople. Their eyes do not swivel.

Webb even admits bombing Assad might have been a ‘good thing’ for the world….

By blasting a Syrian army air base to rubble in response to a sarin gas attack allegedly carried out by President Assad’s regime, he has proved that — unlike Obama — he is prepared to act.

That will have served to make Assad, and his allies in Moscow, think twice. It should worry them, and that’s a good thing.

But then Webb slips into the BBC’s normal approach to Trump, a man whose personality, worldview and way of doing ‘business’ they just can’t compute and therefore dismiss as dangerous ‘madness’…

If there is a real Trump weak spot, 100 days into this rollercoaster ride, it is still the temperament of the man himself. There is something quite breathtakingly narcissistic about him. All Presidents are bit odd. To look in the mirror and see a President of the United States staring back is, well, not the sign of a normal mind.

James Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry, told a conference at Yale University: ‘I’ve worked with murderers and rapists. I can recognise dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert to know how dangerous this man is.’

Will Trump crash and burn — and if he does, will he take us all with him? Nothing about this presidency is stable. Nothing predictable. And there are 1,361 days to go, assuming he isn’t impeached and doesn’t resign in the meantime.