Biden bombs Syria to send message to Iran that a threatening Iraq is a no-no.

quote:

---

I think Iran would get the message quicker if you just bombed it directly.

---

quote:

---

DC are the real terrorists

---

quote:

---

....Come January, the 43-year old Sullivan will become the youngest national security adviser in almost 60 years. Yet for those who know him, Jake’s remarkable rise seemed almost fated. One of his oldest friends, Sarah Rathke said of his early days that, “Looking back at everything he did during those years, it’s clear he’s always had a plan.”

Born in Vermont, Sullivan moved to Minnesota for the fourth grade. Talent and drive brought success at an early age and by high school he was student council leader, editor of the school newspaper, and voted “most likely to succeed.” His friend Sarah remembers that a teenage Jake had an unusual fascination with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Fitting, then, that Sullivan the government servant would so strikingly resemble the “best and brightest” John F. Kennedy-appointed holdovers in LBJ’s administration.

Like the young “whiz kid” think-tank analysts brought to the Pentagon by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Jake soon played out the dark, flip-side of Democratic interventionism. Also, like those cocky and book-smart-brightest of the Vietnam War, Sullivan would plan, cheer, and manage wars he’d never considered lacing-up his own boots for. It doesn’t appear to have crossed his mind.

Theory, arguments, analysis – that much Jake knew, and knew well. He was a champion debater both in high school and at Yale – later, on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford he finished second in the world debate championship. Then he headed back to Yale for law school, graduating in 2003, just as over a hundred thousand Americans his age and younger were flooding into an Iraq quagmire that’s not quite ended.

Jake Sullivan is the archetypal Biden bro – he sprang from the Ivy League (Yale); apprenticed with a congressperson (Amy Klobuchar); was appointed to mid-tier roles on Barack Obama’s foreign policy team (deputy chief of staff for Secretary Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden’s top security aide); then joined a consultancy firm (the former British spy chief-led Macro Advisory Partners); was a senior fellow at a war industry-funded think tank (the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – funded by 10 separate military agencies and defense contractors); and married someone who’s also in the game (Margaret Goodlander, onetime advisor to hawkish Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain, who’s previously worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for a New American Security – the second-largest think-tank recipient of government and defense industry largesse). Yet, Sullivan’s story starts way earlier – in southwest Minneapolis.

....Within a couple of years he was prepping his future State Department boss for her 2008 presidential primary debates. Jake’s meteoric rise did, in fact, largely stem from hitching his star to Secretary Clinton. The two became inseparable and traveled together to over 100 countries. Indeed, she asked Sullivan to review chapters of her book, Hard Choices. In it, Clinton called him “discreet, earnest and brilliant.” A senior Obama aide said, “Jake did everything for Secretary Clinton.” She once joked that, “When Jake Sullivan first came to work for me, I told my husband about this incredibly bright rising star – Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School – and my husband said, ‘Well, if he ever learns to play the saxophone, watch out.’”

....Jake was back in the Clinton camp after the Obama triumph – first as her deputy chief of staff, then, at 34, as the youngest director of policy planning in State Department history. During that first Obama-term, Jake was bullish on Libyan and Syrian military interventionism, and like Hillary opposed Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s pleas to at least talk to the Taliban without the preconditions. In fact, Sullivan was in the room when Holbrooke’s heart literally burst as the ambassador delivered impassioned arguments on this very issue. Holbrooke, who died a few days later, had been right (so had Biden, it must be said) – and Obama, Clinton, and Sullivan wrong, as it turned out.

See, Sullivan is a mind-melder, the sort that military men would call a “career aide-de-camp” – not unlike David Petraeus – punching necessary command “tickets,” but always hitching his star to senior generals’ stars. Such sycophants are ubiquitous enough in army life that a popular novel’s fictional character – Courtney Massengale – has entered the military lexicon. Jake strikes me as a “Massengale man.” Perhaps that’s why Anne-Marie Slaughter, who ran the State Department’s policy planning office in Obama’s first term, called him “the consummate insider.”

Sullivan especially excels at one thing – anticipating his boss’s wants and needs, thus making himself indispensable. Consider the advice that legendary diplomat Holbrooke gave the new deputy secretary of state in 2010: “Let me tell you, the only person and the one person you need to get to know, who is loved by everyone in the institution and gets things done, is Jake Sullivan.”

America’s next national security adviser is nothing if not a company man – a technocrat’s technocrat, sure, but with the ambition of a man on a mission straight to the top. When he was traveling the world with Secretary Clinton, she said she’d talk to global leaders who wanted to “meet a potential future president of the United States – and of course they mean Jake.”

If his ambition strikes you as somewhat shameless, one look at Sullivan’s personal philosophy and un-fresh take on American exceptionalism and patriotism is even more revealing.

---

quote:

---

Trump went after the same group in 2017

---