What Will Happen If Trump Wins Again?

In January 1979 I attended a meeting at CIA in Washington, D.C. There were 70 or 80 people in the room, representing every security agency of the government, and the purpose of the two-day confab was to figure out what to do with the Shah of Iran, whose regime was about to be undone by some cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini who was sitting in a rented house on the outskirts of Paris.

The Shah had been our most trusted ally in the Middle East and his purchases of military equipment had created untold billions in profits to various American military manufacturers. Notwithstanding the fact that Iran under the Shah had enjoyed a firm and deep economic and political relationship with the United States for 25 years, there was not a single person at the January meeting who read or spoke Farsi, the traditional Persian language of the country from which the Shah was about to depart.

As the meeting ended in a state of quiet confusion, I happened to speak with a friend who had been a senior adviser at CIA during Viet Nam and had also been part of the planning group which put together the strategy for the Bay of Pigs.

When I asked this man what he thought would happen, given the fact that nobody in our entire security services seemed to know what was going on, he chuckled, shook his head and replied, ”I guess we’ll just fuck up another one.”