Steve Coll's Blog, page 8

What Trump Means for the World���s Poorest People

It seems likely that aid to Third World countries such as Haiti will decline during the Trump Administration, Steve Coll writes.

What Trump Means for the World’s Poorest People

Last November, soon after the election of Donald Trump, President Barack Obama mentioned Haiti while commenting on the humanitarian aspects of American foreign policy. “Russia is a very significant military power, but they’re not worrying right now about how to rebuild after a hurricane in Haiti,” Obama noted. “We are. . . . That’s a burden we should carry proudly.”

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The Many Dangers of Donald Trump���s Executive Order

Steve Coll on Obama���s travel restrictions after the Paris terror attacks and Trump���s executive order on immigration from Muslim-majority countries.

The Many Dangers of Donald Trump’s Executive Order

In November, 2015, the Islamic State mounted devastating attacks in Paris, gunning down more than a hundred people at a rock concert, in restaurants, and outside a soccer stadium. In response, Donald Trump, then preparing for the Iowa caucuses, fulminated about the radical measures he would impose on Muslims seeking to enter the United States, if he were elected President. Trump was hardly alone in announcing rash proposals; on the subject of counterterrorism, it was a time of competitive opportunism among Republican Presidential candidates. Yet, in his nativism and bellicosity, Trump was already separating from his opponents. He began by making a series of loose comments during television interviews, including a suggestion that he might force American Muslims to register in a database. The following month, after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, he issued a formal statement promising “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

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Trump’s Information Wars

Last Monday, according to the Times, President Donald Trump, meeting in the White House with congressional leaders, told a story about voting fraud that he had supposedly heard from Bernhard Langer, the German professional golfer. (Langer soon issued a statement repudiating Trump’s account.) Throughout the week, the President repeated his calumny that he lost the popular vote only because millions of “illegals” voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump’s obsession with this subject may arise from his pathological need to tally every score in his own favor, but he surely knows that his propaganda also advances the Republican Party’s efforts to extend barriers to legitimate voting by Latinos and African-Americans, through voter-I.D. requirements and other state laws. Diverse studies have turned up no evidence of significant fraud in recent elections. On Wednesday, Trump nonetheless vowed to sign an executive order commissioning a federal investigation.

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The Strongman Problem, from Modi to Trump

At eight o’clock in the evening on November 8th, India Standard Time, just hours before American voters shocked the world by electing Donald Trump as their next President, Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, went on television to address his country’s more than a billion citizens. At midnight, Modi proclaimed, all of India’s five-hundred-rupee and thousand-rupee notes, worth about seven dollars and fifteen dollars, respectively, and constituting about eighty-six per cent of all cash in circulation, would be banned from use, in an effort to battle corruption. He said that cash was easier for terrorists to use, and that other lawbreakers used it to evade taxes and store ill-gotten wealth.

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Travelling with James Mattis, Donald Trump’s Pick for Secretary of Defense

In September, 2011, I met General James Mattis, then in charge of U.S. Central Command, at its headquarters, in Tampa, Florida. Central Command directs American military forces in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The General’s staff had agreed to allow me to travel with him on an extensive tour of “the sandbox,” as American military officers sometimes call the region.

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A Season of Terror and Donald Trump

In mid-September, Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani-American lawyer and writer, flew to Denver, to attend the annual conference of the Online News Association, where she was to present a paper on hate directed at American Muslims. She carried “Black Flags,” Joby Warrick’s account of the rise of ISIS, to read on the plane. Worried that passengers might be alarmed if they saw a South Asian woman engrossed in that book, she’d wrapped it in the floral cover of “Georgia,” Dawn Tripp’s novel about Georgia O’Keeffe. That is the sort of “passing,” Zakaria says, that many American Muslims engage in “to appear to be unthreatening” in this season of terror and Donald Trump.

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Assad’s War on Aleppo

On August 18th, Omran Daqneesh, who is five years old, survived an air strike on the apartment building where his family lived, in Aleppo, Syria. Rescue workers pulled him out of the rubble and took him to an ambulance. Mahmoud Raslan, of the Aleppo Media Center, who works in areas controlled by the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, photographed the child on video. His face was coated with blood and dirt; he sat staring silently. Within days, millions of viewers had seen Omran’s image on social media; the Times put it on the front page. The picture recalled Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photograph of a nine-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, taken as she fled naked and screaming from a napalm attack, or the images widely shared last year of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned off the Turkish coast, and whose body washed up on a beach. For adults to pause and reflect upon the costs of war, they sometimes require confrontation with a child’s suffering.

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