According to media reports, it appears increasingly likely that as soon as they put their Iran intervention to rest, President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment will initiate a military attack on Cuba. Trump himself has alluded to this possibility by saying that he could “take Cuba” or “Cuba’s next.” That’s assuming, of course, that the Cuban people haven’t already succumbed to mass starvation and illness as a result of Trump’s and the Pentagon’s brutal and ruthless oil blockade on the island.
The possibility that Trump, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA will attack another sovereign and independent country that has never attacked the United States can’t help but bring to mind President John F. Kennedy as well as the war that he was waging at the end of his life, not against Cuba but rather against the U.S. national-security establishment itself.
Of course, Trump could point to the fact that Kennedy himself authorized or ordered a U.S. attack on Cuba. That was at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, a CIA-organized invasion conducted by Cuban exiles who had been trained and supervised by the CIA.
The attack turned out to be a catastrophe. The invaders were all captured or killed by Cuba’s communist armed forces, an event that the CIA has clearly never gotten over.
But there was right after JFK took office in 1961. There was no doubt that at that point he was a standard Cold Warrior. Like most other Americans, JFK had been inculcated with the notion that the Reds were coming to get us and, therefore, that the mere presence of a communist regime in Cuba posed a grave threat to the “national security” of the United States.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy realized that the CIA had set him up. The CIA had assured him that no U.S. air support would be necessary to win the war. It was an intentional, deliberate, and knowing lie. The CIA figured that once the battle began, Kennedy would have no practical choice. He would have to provide the air support to avoid losing the war to the Reds.
Kennedy stuck by his guns and the CIA’s attack on Cuba went down to defeat. Furious, Kennedy vowed to destroy the CIA. Unfortunately, he was not successful in that effort.
But the war between Kennedy and the CIA continued, especially since the CIA, for its part, was convinced that Kennedy was a soft-on-communism, weak, cowardly, and incompetent president.
Even though Kennedy went to war against the CIA in 1961, he continued to be a standard Cold Warrior. However, with each passing day, he was getting closer to achieving a monumental “breakthrough” that would enable him to see the national-security establishment’s Cold War as the deadly and destructive racket it was.
Playing a role in his approaching breakthrough was Operation Northwoods, the top-secret infamous plan of the Pentagon to have JFK undertake a false-flag operation, one in which innocent people would be killed, to serve as a false and fraudulent justification for attacking Cuba. To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation Northwoods.
Also playing a role in JFK’s approaching breakthrough was the Pentagon’s proposal for initiating a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, arguing that we would “win” the war because “we” would have more people standing at the end of the war than “they” would. Kennedy left that meeting indignantly exclaiming to an aide, “And we call ourselves the human race.”
It was during the Cuban Missile Crisis that Kennedy fully achieved his breakthrough, which enabled him to clearly see the national-security establishment’s Cold War against the Reds for what it was — one great big deadly and destructive racket.
Thus, dissing the Pentagon and the CIA, which were insisting that Kennedy order an attack on Cuba to take out the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, Kennedy instead negotiated a deal with the Soviets in which he vowed not to permit the Pentagon and the CIA to invade Cuba again. In exchange, the Soviets agreed to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba.
With his negotiated settlement, Kennedy had essentially undertaken Step One in a declaration of war against the U.S. deep state, whose officials were enraged that Kennedy had struck a deal in which Cuba, the supposed grave threat to “national security,” would be immune from any further regime-change operations on the part of the Pentagon and the CIA. They even called Kennedy a “Neville Chamberlain” and stated that his negotiated settlement with the Reds was the greatest defeat in U.S. history.
Step Two of Kennedy’s declaration of war against the U.S. national-security establishment came on June 10, 1963, in the form of Kennedy’s famous “Peace Speech” at American University, where he declared his intention to move America in a totally different direction than that demanded by the U.S. national-security establishment — a direction that effectively would have brought an end to the Cold War racket by establishing a relationship of peaceful and friendly coexistence with the communist world. In fact, on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy had an emissary in Havana having lunch with Cuban leader Fidel Castro with the aim of restoring normal relations with Cuba, which would necessarily have included a lifting of the brutal and ruthless U.S. economic embargo that continues to strangle the Cuban people today.
In the end, as we all know, JFK lost the war against the U.S. national-security establishment when it violently took him out on the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963. With the full support of new President Lyndon Johnson, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA restored and reinforced their deadly and destructive Cold War racket, which included the false and fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to the full-scale U.S. intervention into the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 American soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted to fight and die for “freedom,” lost their lives for nothing.
Once the Cold War racket ultimately and surprisingly came to an end, it morphed into the war-on-terrorism racket, which included more state-sponsored assassinations, coups, invasions, sanctions, embargoes, wars of aggression, forever wars, mass secret surveillance of the American people, attacks, alliances with and foreign aid to brutal regimes, torture, indefinite detention, Gitmo, and, of course, ever-increasing budgets for the Pentagon, the vast standing army, the military-industrial complex, the “defense” industry, the empire of foreign and domestic military bases, the CIA, and the NSA.
For his part, President Trump once talked about taking on the Deep State, just as Kennedy did. But as we all can see, Trump instead effectively surrendered to the Deep State, has been absorbed by it, and is helping to take our nation in the horrific direction of state-sponsored violence, militarism, empire, interventionism, death, and destruction that Kennedy was determined to change.
One thing is indisputable in all this deadly and destructive mayhem and chaos: Donald Trump is no John Kennedy.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
