The prospect of a Trump administration beginning in January 2017 generates nervous grimaces among the punditry.  Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a man who doesn't shrink from bold statements pertaining to bombing and invading other countries, looks limp when he condemns the persistent Republican presidential frontrunner.  Kristol's permanent sneer, though apparently unaffected by the formerly unthinkable possibility of President Trump, looks more threatened now by the political success of a billionaire reality TV man who won't be polite, such as when he condemns George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies (including Kristol) for advocating and carrying out the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq.
     Donald Trump, using what should now be a familiar tactic to anyone who understands English, likes to claim he was against the Iraq War from its beginning in March 2003.  "About a week after" the war began on March 19, according to a Washington Post reporter who "approached him at an Oscar after-party, [Trump]" said the war was "a mess."
     In July 2004, soon after Iraq's virtual viceroy L. Paul Bremer ended his year long mishandling of a country in civil war, Trump told an Esquire reporter that the war was a "mess."  By this time, a growing number of Americans had lost enthusiasm for the war.  Trump likes to cite this Esquire interview, supported by a cover photograph of himself looking like he's got someone's cock in his mouth.  On August 10, 2015, Trump phoned Morning Joe and said, "I didn't want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there.  So now we totally knocked out the balance.  What we've done in the Middle East is incredible."
     He's repeatedly cited 2004 as the year he's so proud of in regard to his ability to perceive national mistakes.  No evidence of Trump opposing U.S. military involvement in Iraq prior to March 19, 2003, exists.  I offer my own opposition to that war; what I wrote in an unpublished manuscript, The War File, on March 6, 2003, thirteen days before the first missiles flew:

     "I cannot support this upcoming war with Iraq.  Cloaked with lies, it is exploitation, degradation, humiliation, and a savage mismatch between a twenty-first century army against a twentieth century army.  It will go badly.  America's reputation for insensitivity towards the complexity of the world will increase.  More hatred will flare up.  Acts of terror will multiply worldwide.  Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their corporate sector associates will profit.  America will be regarded as an ogre.  Babies will be bisected by chunks of shrapnel.  Wildlife will vanish.  The atmosphere will be poisoned.  The antichrist will come through and Bush may someday be surprised to discover that he, in a Jungian sense, is it...
     Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and the other Project for the New American Century ideologues want war.  Getting a grip on the Middle East has been a dream in the ambitions of these arrogant cocksuckers for a long time.  Their desires are about to happen."

     Insisting on one's prophetic ability, as Trump does, isn't impressive when the remarks on the subject come sixteen months after the war began.  After the Iraq War got ugly, from an American perspective, pundits, politicians, Trump, started viewing the catastrophe as a fuck-up, though many of these people didn't look at it from the humanitarian viewpoint of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded, missing, and displaced.  Iraqis jailed under false pretenses and mistreated in confinement translated in America to "some bad apples among Army guards in Abu Ghraib prison have disgraced their country and their uniforms."  Controlling the Iraqi populace amid civil chaos by making mass arrests and stamping down heavily on civil rights, enabled by the American virtual viceroy's orders, meant nothing to those in America, like Donald Trump, viewing human rights abuses carried out as policy as simply a failed war effort.
     Shame on Bush and Cheney for fucking up the Iraq War!
     Bill Kristol doesn't approve of Donald Trump.  The neocon co-editor of The Weekly Standard probably doesn't like Trump's loose cannon style.  Kristol likes well-aimed cannon, as long as he can agree on the targets.  On one of the Sunday morning talk shows he frequents, Kristol said of the so-called ISIS capital, Raqqa, that it would simply be a matter of sending in "fifty-thousand" troops to "clean it out."
     A 2012 census of that city puts the population at 220, 268 people.  ISIS members there probably don't account for more than a small minority, so "cleaning out" a city of around 200,000 people means homes and civilians getting in the way of Kristol's fantasized urban warfare.  Stalingrad, site of a five month battle between German and Russian troops in 1942-1943, showed in a 1939 census a population of approximately 445,000 people.  By the time the battle began the city's population had swelled by many thousands of evacuees fleeing German advancement.  Over the course of the battle, lost finally by the Germans, the city was virtually destroyed.  Since I assume Bill Kristol is smart enough to be a pundit and magazine editor, I must conclude that he just doesn't give a shit about what would happen to Raqqa's civilian population if it's ever the site of an urban campaign.  Nor, apparently, does he give a shit about U.S. troops involved in such a horrific battle.
     "Clean it out," he said, and Trump might add, based on what he actually proposed, "Kill the children and wives of ISIS fighters."  Since it would be hard to discern who's who in such a (overused phrase) "fog of war," many women and children in Raqqa unconnected to ISIS fighters would die.
     Kristol, appalled by the prospect of a Trump presidency, nevertheless has in common with the Republican frontrunner a heartfelt advocacy of mass murder.  Their voices (Trump's especially) are believed in by an alarming American minority I declare to be void of morality.  Trump and every other race-baiting, foreigner-hating, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, pro-war asshole in news media and politics do not speak for me, or millions of other Americans not enchanted by the desire to blame the unknown for their personal difficulties.

                                                                              Vic Neptune