Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Trump is sending US troops to be based in Saudi Arabia, and King Salman has signed off on the paperwork.

Several hundred US military personnel will be at Prince Sultan Air Base, accompanying fighter jets and Patriot missile defense systems.

US troops were first based in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War of 1990-91, when George H. W. Bush assembled a coalition to force Iraq back out of Kuwait, which it brutally occupied and tried to annex in August, 1990.

As Courtney Kube at NBC notes, in 1996, a terrorist bombing at Khobar Towers killed 19 US air force personnel and wounded 400 other persons, and as a result US servicemen were thereafter kept at Prince Sultan Airbase, which the US leased from the Saudis. The then no-fly zone over Iraq was policed from Prince Sultan.

Apparently everyone has forgotten that al-Qaeda made hay over the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. That country includes the twin holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and traditionalist Muslims believe that the second commander of the faithful, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, forbade non-Muslims to live in the holy land.

Usama Bin Laden characterized the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, the monarch of which is the "Guardian of the Two Holy Shrines," as a military occupation by foreign Christians and Jews ("crusaders and Zionists") of the Muslim holy land. Al-Qaeda used this allegation as a recruiting tool, and Bin Laden gave it as one of three major motivations for the September 11, 2001, attacks (the others were the sanctions on Iraq that killed thousands of children and the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem).

After the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US had lots of bases there, and felt no further need for the Prince Sultan Airbase, from which it withdrew. Qatar also offered its facilities, and the US put 10,000 troops into al-Udeid Air Base.

The impetus for the return of US troops to Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia is the renewed tensions with Iran, which Trump caused by breaching the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman may also have lobbied for this move because Riyadh put Qatar under blockade, and feels at a disadvantage in this struggle because the US base al-Udeid makes Washington tilt toward Doha. But the US should be telling King Salman to make nice with Qatar; it shouldn't be enabling his blockade by coddling Riyadh.

But it is a very, very bad idea.

First, al-Qaeda and kindred movements such as ISIL have not gone away. They will use this move very effectively for propaganda and for radicalization.

Second, Saudi Arabia in 2015 launched a massive and debilitating air war on little Yemen, in which Riyadh is still embroiled. The Houthis who control northern Yemen have managed to get hold of silkworm missiles and have occasionally struck substantially inside Saudi Arabia. The US is inserting itself further into this struggle, and Prince Sultan base could be targeted by the Houthis, though their technology and resources are limited.

Third, given the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it is very bad optics for the US to be opening a base in Saudi Arabia. It looks like an endorsement of the assassination of dissidents.

Fourth, the bigger the US footprint in the region, the more exposed US personnel are to attacks, and hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton will manipulate any such attacks into a reason for the US to go to war with Iran.

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

In 1956, then Senator John F. Kennedy authored a best-selling book titled Profiles in Courage, in which he told the stories of Senators in American history who, on principle, bucked the tides of power. Today, some Republican writer or conservative syndicated columnist - George Will or Max Boot - should write a book called Profiles in Cowardliness. It should cover Republican leadership's near total cowardliness in the face of Donald Trump, whom they despise on many fronts. Many in Republican leadership believe he has hijacked their Grand Old Party (GOP).

Clearly the Republicans - except for Rep. Justin Amash, who recently quit the Party after accusing Trump of impeachable crimes - are intimidated by this foul-mouthed president. Republican politicians are cowed by Trump's bellicose personal rhetoric. We have seen this cycle repeat itself countless times, with the media boosting their ratings by recklessly repeating Trump's insults.

Republicans remember what Trump did to Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio during the 2016 Republican primary. They observe how loud-mouthed Donald spews toxic falsehoods at Democrats and gets away with it. Why, Republicans ask themselves, should they take any chances provoking this unstable Twitter Emperor and his ditto-heads on social media whom he deliberately incites? The answer: because patriotism demands action.

Donald Trump acts as if he is above the law - coming off his career as a corporate criminal, he has become a government outlaw. He has always cheated justice. Trump flouts the Constitution, refuses to faithfully execute the laws preventing corporate crimes, and obstructs justice. Just as bad are Trump's ethical and personal failings; he has brought disgraceful personal behavior, serious daily lies, expensive nepotism, denials of grave realities facing the country, bigotry, violent incitement, and disrepute to the White House. All of these failings are why the Founding Fathers gave impeachment authority to the House of Representatives and the authority of open trial to the Senate.

There are many more indictable and impeachable offenses, but the focus here is on why the entire GOP has completely fallen in line. Only former Republican Governor of Massachusetts William Weld has dared to officially challenge Trump in the upcoming Republican primary. This week, former Republican Congressman and Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford announced he is testing the waters for a run against President Trump, emphasizing Trump's huge expanding deficits. It is shocking that so few opponents have emerged considering Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and remains more consistently unfavorable in the polls than any president in modern times.

Republicans must think "crooked Donald" is invincible. So why try? Plenty of Republican politicians consider Trump to be a clear and present danger to Party and country. They include Former Senators Flake and Corker; current Senator Mitt Romney; former Governor of Ohio John Kasich; former New Jersey Governor and EPA head, under Reagan, Christine Todd Whitman; and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. All have spoken out about Trump's dangerous ignorance and loutishness. All believe him to be unqualified and fear his reckless actions. On trade, immigration, climate crisis, and his open admiration of brutal dictators, they find him appalling.

Yet there are few signs of a serious challenge. In the 1990s, John Kasich was the Chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee. At the time he was critical of the wasteful, unauditable Pentagon budget then (imagine now). Asked about 2020, Kasich told The Washington Post that he's "never gotten involved in a race that [he] didn't think [he] could win," adding, "things are very volatile in this business and you just cannot predict what might change." Such words hardly signal anything beyond extreme caution.

One would think, these persons and others who could take on Trump (for example, the very popular former Governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean) would want to stand up for traditional Republican principles and positions (think about Senator Robert Taft, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course, Abraham Lincoln). In sharp contrast, current Republican leaders almost never criticize Trump publically apart from a mild op-ed (Romney) or the occasional public comments (Whitman).

It gets worse. Apart from William Kristol, Trump's arch-critic, there doesn't seem to be any activity among Republican kingmakers to find a challenger or even consider mounting a third party accountability challenge from the political right.

There is someone, were he younger, who would take on Trump. He is former Republican Senator from Connecticut, Lowell Weicker. He was known in the Senate as a ferocious defender of the Constitution and was prominent during the Watergate hearings that exposed Richard Nixon.

Apart from elected officials, what about those cabinet secretaries and White House chief of staff, whom Trump praised to the skies, before he drove them out with a frenzy of ruthless epithets ("dumb as a rock," etc.)? They know the insides of mad Trump's White House, which would receive media attention.

At the least, Republicans who challenged Trump in the primaries would put Trump on the defensive and hold him more accountable.

Time is passing on the road to November 2020. There are countless Republicans who deeply believe that Trump is a disgrace to his office and a threat to the Republic, as well as to the future of the Republican Party. Who amongst them will stand up and be counted?

Is their moral courage totally AWOL?

If Black people were choosing sides in the primary based on ideology and issues, Biden would have little appeal and Sanders would win, hands down.

Joe Biden's corpse-like performance at the Miami debate should have caused the immediate interment of his campaign to the graveyard of presidential history. Biden's longstanding lead in the polls, dating from before he'd even announced his candidacy, was largely due to outsized support among Blacks, who make up between a quarter and fifth of Democratic voters - and 60 percent of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina, the critical "Black" primary state. Kamala Harris masterfully gutted Biden for his opposition to school desegregation, but the stake missed his shriveled white supremacist heart, leaving Biden gasping but un-dead. A Reuters poll conducted in the days after the Miami debacle showed Biden dropping 8 percent among Democrats in general, but that his nationwide Black support was cut in hal, "with about two out of 10 saying they backed President Barack Obama's former vice president, compared with four out of 10 in the June poll."

In heavily Black South Carolina, however, the CBSNews/YouGov poll still gives Biden 39 percent, versus Bernie Sanders (17 percent), Elizabeth Warren (12 percent), Harris (12 percent) and Pete Buttigieg (5 percent), while the latest Politico/Morning Consult poll show's Obama's former vice president pulling 33 percent of the Democratic primary vote, with Sanders at 18 percent, Warren at 14, Harris at 13 and Buttigieg stuck at 5 percent.

Although the corporate media polls are effectively rigged against Bernie Sanders, Biden's appeal among Black voters is real and has survived well-publicized reminders that the Delaware politician has spoken affectionately of arch-racists like the late Mississippi senator James Eastland, whose views on Black people was clearly stated at a rally of the White Citizens Council in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956, as quoted in Robert Caro's Master of the Senate:

"In every stage of the [Montgomery] bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers...African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives...All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers."

Black voting behavior in Democratic primary elections is maddeningly contradictory - but only because it reflects the bizarre contradictions of the Black experience in the world's most successful white settler state. (It is also maddening to re-explain this phenomenon every election season - yet Black primary voter "conservatism" seems always to catch the Left by surprise.)

Masses of Black votes can be swayed with symbolic gestures (Kennedy's phone call to the imprisoned Dr. Martin Luther King's wife in 1960) and symbolic candidacies (Obama, the more conservative of the top three Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2008). Symbolism holds outsized importance in a nation founded on the incompatible principles of white supremacy and equality among men - a contradiction that is routinely resolved by placing Blacks and despised Others outside of humanity, so that they may be lynched, imprisoned, expelled or simply demonized for fun and profit, at will. ("Send them back! Send them back!")

In such an endemically dishonest society - ALL of whose foundational assumptions and stories are lies - the language of Power is weighted with symbolism. Historically, much of Black politics has consisted of analysis of white folks' coded public discourse, to decipher the actual intentions of Power - the misreading of which could be fatal to whole communities. (See 1921 Tulsa Massacre, Red Summer of 1919.) In an eternally hostile society, "positioning" becomes a principal "strategy" of the Black political class and a staple of the general Black political conversation. For a people that have always been at the bottom of the social and economic barrel, despite periods of incremental gains, symbolic victories are often the only ones that produce pure joy and delight among the masses (Election Day 2008). A politics of "positioning" favors the interests of the Black upwardly mobile classes, who package their own narrow agenda as the political program of Black people as a whole. It is these "leaders" that take the "seats at the table" of Power when such a positions are made available to Blacks. Their associations with Power, no matter how tenuous, are presented as evidence of Black progress.

In the United States, the bar that distinguishes friends from enemies of Black people is set low. The Arkansas cracker Bill Clinton only had to play the saxophone on a Black man's syndicated TV show to get a tentative thumbs up. Simply by not having white supremacy as its organizing principle, the Democrats have in the last half century become the "Black" party, in both the imaginations of Black people and the propaganda of the GOP (as was the fate of the Republicans during Reconstruction - until they discarded the Black freedmen). Juxtaposed with today's Republicans, the Democrats win Black loyalties by default, as the only electoral option available that is connected to Power.

Ultimately, a strategy of positioning does not confront Power, but hopes to infiltrate and influence the powerful. The Black practitioners of the strategy point to their positions "at the table" as proof of its effectiveness, and that they are dutifully "representing" the Black masses - a circular reasoning that lots of Black folks see through, but despair of an alternative.

"Positioning" relative to Power is a formula for perpetual weakness, since those with real power can change the rules of engagement as necessary, forcing the weak to scramble for a new "position." In 2005, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi prevented her party from holding hearings on Katrina and forbade Black Caucus members from attending Republican hearings on the disaster, fearing that too close an identification with Blacks would ruin the party's chances for recapturing the House in 2006. With the exception of Atlanta's Cynthia McKinney, Black Democrats did as ordered, sacrificing African American interests for the sake of the party's perceived need to downplay its huge Black presence. For the Black Caucus, strategic positioning means Democratsuber alles.

Barack Obama had to prove that he could win in lily white Iowa before a majority of Black voters and the bulk of Black elected officials would support his presidential bid. In the binary corporate electoral arrangement that governs the United States, Black people approach each primary season pondering which Democratic candidate is best equipped to defeat the White Man's Party. Polls and studies have long showed that Blacks are the most left-leaning constituency in the nation on issues of socio-economic justice and peace, but that's not how Black Democrats vote in national primaries, where they tend to support whoever they believe can beat the Republican. "Electability" trumps and displaces ideology. Given the role that money plays in the U.S. electoral game, Black primary voters intent on choosing an "electable" Democrat will support the corporate candidate - not because these voters are "centrist" or corporate-minded, but because their overarching priority is beating the GOP. Thus, during Democratic primary season, many Black voters will seem to have no worldview or mission except as soldiers of the Democratic Party.

Inventing "Unelectability"

Unlike during the 2016 primary contest, Black people are now broadly aware that Bernie Sanders is the Democrat whose politics most closely resembles their own. Polls conducted in 2017 ranked Sanders the most popular politician in the nation, including among Blacks - the only politician, according to Newsweek, "who a majority of voters like." Democrats were aware that polls showed Sanders would have beaten Trump, and by a significantly larger margin than had been predicted for Hillary Clinton. As the new primary season approached, the corporate media conspired (yes, that's the appropriate term) to destroy Sanders' image of electability and to label his signature issues -- supported by supermajorities of Democrats, and by even larger proportions of Blacks - as radical baggage that will tilt the election to Trump. The narrative has succeeded in frightening Black voters, who see defeat of Trump as an existential issue, superseding all others.

Sanders is correct in sticking to his broad attack on concentrated wealth, rather than mimicking Harris , Buttigieg , and now Biden's "Black targeted" campaign promises. Black people already support Sanders signature proposals, and see him as the consummate reformer. They don't need pandering; they have understood the evils of the rule of the rich all their lives. Black people need to believe Sanders can beat Trump.

Sanders is the most "liked" among all the Democrats, according to a Gallup poll conducted after the Miami debate. As Common Dreams reported:

"Sanders led the pack, with 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters viewing him favorably. Former Vice President Joe Biden followed at 69 percent. Rounding off the top half of the pack were Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 59 percent, Sen. Kamala Harris at 54 percent, and Sen. Cory Booker at 44 percent."

Electability is actually Sanders' greatest asset. Trump's hold on power is dependent on a slim slice of votes in Pennsylvania and the midwestern states he won in 2016 - less than 100,00 votes. (He must also duplicate the GOP's even larger Black voter suppression schemes.) But polls show Trump is likely to do even better in Michigan and Wisconsin, this time around. Trump's supporters are pleased with his racist style of rule. Only Bernie Sanders offers programs big enough, with immediate impact on struggling families, to convince a small portion of these whites to choose saving their sick mother over stoking their sense of racial superiority. If only a few percent of Trump's blue collar whites in two or three states can be peeled away, the Orange presidency is doomed. Sanders is the only candidate that can do it, and therefore the only electable Democrat.

Black people can readily understand that logic, which also frees them to vote their own, leftish hopes rather than their fears.

That's why the corporate Democrats would rather lose with Biden (or Harris and the rest) than win with Sanders. Because the Lords of Capital will not permit one of their governing parties to be captured by opponents of endless austerity and war - the only program the ruling class has to offer in the 21st century.

Every presidential election year, Frontline, the superb investigative TV series on PBS, produces an in-depth look at the Democratic and Republican candidates. It's called "The Choice," and invariably offers some insights that likely you won't see anywhere else.

When I first watched the 2016 edition, three things struck me as revelatory-aside from that now infamous Omarosa Manigault soundbite from the program that began, "Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump." Yikes.

Today, after two and a half years of a Trump White House, these three remembered moments seem more pertinent than ever. First up was journalist Marie Brenner, who recalled Trump's brother Robert telling her, "Donald was always the kid in the family who would start throwing birthday cake at all the parties, that you would build up a tower of blocks, he would come knock your blocks down."

Second were the memories of classmates at New York Military Academy, where young Donald was sent to deal with his behavior issues. One said that as a teenager, Trump "had a very Hugh Hefner Playboy magazine view of success." Another agreed: "Our lives came from Playboy magazine. That's how we learned about women. That was all of my adolescence. And that's why getting out of military school was difficult. You had to realize that you couldn't just follow the Playboy philosophy."

He added, "The things that we talked about at that time in 1964 really are very close to the kind of way [Trump] talks now."

But the third thing, the one that especially stuck in my head, is something Frontline reported Trump had learned from nature's own Nazi, his martinet of a father Fred. It was a theory, according to the narration, Donald "especially liked."

Interviewed for the documentary, Michael D'Antonio author of The Truth about Trump, says, "This is a very deep part of the Trump story. The family subscribes to a race horse theory of human development, that they believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring."

In other words, he embraced eugenics-the science of human selection that's just a hop, skip and a 23 and Me saliva test away from advocating the primacy of a master race.

Which is why what we're seeing now, less than a year and a half before the 2020 election is no surprise. You know the litany: Trump and his father's housing business censured by the Justice Department for racial discrimination; publicly attacking the young Latino and black men of the so-called Central Park Five, even after they were found innocent; ludicrous birther slurs flung at Barack Obama; the Muslim travel ban; offhand bigoted references to "shithole countries," Nigerians in huts and Haitians with AIDS; Charlottesville.

On and on. And now, these attacks on four women of color, four members of the United States Congress told by the president to go back where they came from, even though only one was born in another country and all four are US citizens. While a few of his Republican colleagues voiced disgust at Trump's tweets, most chose to remain silent, equivocate or to double down like the toadying Lindsey Graham, who screamed that Alexandria Octavio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are "a bunch of communists"-sounding not like his late mentor John McCain but a raving, spittle-hurling Joe McCarthy.

(Lindsey and his man crush Trump would do well to heed-but won't-the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in a 1929 dissent wrote, "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.")

So yes, Donald Trump is a racist, a white supremacist, a misogynist, a right-wing extremist, and as he goes full tilt into maniacal campaign mode, with nary a GOP voice raised in protest, it's only going to get worse. This is how he thinks he can win reelection and so these current ravings were inevitable. Recent and intentionally misconstrued comments by the women may have sped the onslaught up a bit. As per The Washington Post, he thinks the four are "good foils." But this always was going to happen. Always.

Don't let your outrage at his words dim, but neither let this presidential pickpocket use these cruel verbal assaults-or his jeering rally crowds-to distract you from the truth as he falsely accuses these legitimately elected women of disloyalty and worse. Don't let him deflect your attention from Robert Mueller's congressional testimony this week (which apparently Fox News refuses to carry) or the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia scandal and the role played by Trump's now former labor secretary Alex Acosta.

Ignore not the ICE raids and the new rules restricting asylum requests and the continuing deplorable conditions in the detention centers, the separation of undocumented families, the failed attempt to cook the census. And keep your eye on which candidates are offering viable plans and solutions for climate change, immigration, health care, the opioid crisis, education and student debt, infrastructure, income and racial inequality.

As for those of you among Trump's vaunted base, the ones to whom he's pitching this poisonous snake oil, do you honest to God think that being given license to attack or mock a person's skin color or religion is more important than having a job, a roof over your head and food and clothing for you and your family? Do you truly believe that Trump's trade wars, tax cuts aimed at his rich cronies and slashing regulations to satisfy corporate fat cats are giving you a better life?

Is having a president who jabs his thumb in the eye of all who don't fawn over him here and abroad and who lacks a moral or honest bone in his body preferable to a leader who is respected here and overseas, who's not a white nationalist but a patriot with an informed worldview embracing diversity and expertise?

Trump needs to return where he came from, and I say that with some hesitation only because that would be New York City and I live here. Even if he's defeated in 2020 we won't have heard the last of him, of course, but at least the power and bully pulpit of the presidency will be denied the bully who currently lives in the White House. We'll put him in a special room where he can throw all the birthday cake and knock over all the toy blocks he wants. Just send him back.