Daily Times

Donald Trump is at it again Talking big and walking small. This time, in the wake of the recent terror attacks in Spain, the apprentice-president has called for the world to take on Islamist extremism “by whatever means necessary”. And why not? After all, this is a man who knows a thing or two about it. He was the one to show the hurly burly men of ISIS that no one makes a fool out of him, remember? It was that time when he, full of swagger, casually dropped the Mother of All Bombs on a militant hideout. After the 11-tonne explosive device, the largest non-nuclear weapon in the US arsenal, took out a total of 92 Islamist extremists — could there be any doubt that President Trump knows what it means to not hold back?

We would like nothing more than for the US President to say what he means and mean what he says. As a first step, he could begin a sincere and concerted effort to negotiate a settled Israel-Palestine peace, based on a two-state solution. Not because we would like him to kowtow to terrorists in the same malleable manner that he does when it comes to white supremacists. Potayto, potahto. But because it is grave injustice that the Palestinians are still a people without statehood. Yet instead all we are seeing is the unquiet American rallying the big boys of the Middle East to bully Qatar over the latter’s recognition of Hamas as a legitimate political representative of the Palestinian people.

We would also like to see Trump come up with an Afghan policy, preferably an exit strategy, and the sooner the better. Thus far the latest ‘breaking news’ coming out of the White House goes something along the lines of this: the US president has made a decision on Afghanistan — it’s just that he’d rather not say what. Which is entirely understandable. After all, we all know what a shy and retiring wallflower Trump is. Not wallflowers are the Afghan Taliban. We would like to know whether “by whatever means necessary” also extends to the latter’s offer of a dignified US withdrawal from the Afghan quagmire.

Whatever Trump decides to do, he had better act soon. For there are those who have already cast him as a lame duck president, predicting that he will be out of the White House hot seat by this autumn at the latest. To that we say, by whatever means necessary. Say what, Mr Putin?  *

Published in Daily Times, August 20^th , 2017.