Woe to You, O Moab!

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By Jason Michael

When President Trump uses his most powerful non-nuclear weapon against local hoodlums in eastern Afghanistan, sending a clear message to Russia and North Korea, he betrays his eagerness to crack open the launch codes.

Good Friday began with the news that the United States had deployed its largest non-nuclear ordinance against tribal insurgents in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarha. According to US sources the decision to drop “MOAB” – the GBU-43/B, known affectionately in American military circles as the “mother of all bombs” – was made in Afghanistan, but there can be no doubt its use was a particular ambition of the hawks in the Trump administration. Early reports have suggested that no more than 36 militants were killed by the 11 tonne detonation – resulting in a blast zone one mile in radius, and that the intended target was a network of tunnels which the most sophisticated military hardware in the history of human warfare was incapable of destroying in almost 11 years of fighting.

Largest non-nuclear weapon used by US against 36 tribesmen in Afghanistan at a cost of $300 million. A message to R… twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

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Jason Michael (@Jeggit) April 14, 2017

We can cut the crap. The use of this super bomb – at a cost of over $300 million – has nothing to do with Afghanistan, the Islamic State, or any other half-baked notion that the US military-industrial complex is incapable of dealing with fighters who are now no more advanced in their military skills than the Mujahidin were in the early 1980s. MOAB – the use of which, according to the write-up in the Guardian, had villagers in the area terrified the world was ending – is nothing but more evidence that Trump is out of control. In the simplest of terms, this was the biggest toy in the box – without resorting to the nuclear option – and this man-child in the Oval Office couldn’t wait to use it.

What is all the more worrying is, of course, the fact that this is the ultimate weapon on the threshold of the use of non-conventional weapons – a sure sign that Trump is eager to cross the line. Afghanistan is the southern course of the curtain wall the US has been building around Russia over the past two decades – and in Moscow Putin will read this as a message indented for him. With tensions continuing to mount between the US and North Korea, there can be no mistaking that this also a warning to Kim Jong-un; who has already warned that he is prepared to strike back at American forces if Trump oversteps the mark.

The killing of 36 alleged members of an ISIS affiliated group – bearing in mind that the Americans are convinced everyone with a gun in the region is ISIS – will not damage resistance to the effective US occupation of much of the Middle East. So in terms of its strategic benefits in the fight against radical Islamism it is limited at best. MOAB is a watershed moment in the foreign policy of the Trump regime, every other player on the board has been shown the tools the US intends to use in any, more serious, conflict, but the problem with this is that it lets Russia and North Korea know that the only advantage they will have in the protection of their interests is nuclear.

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U.S. Drops MOAB, ‘Mother Of All Bombs,’ On ISIS Complex

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