By: S. Nawabzadeh

The medieval British playwright, William Shakespeare, in his drama "Julius Caesar”, put the following famous sentences in the mouth of the ancient Roman dictator when soothsayers warned him against venturing out on the Ides of March – 15th March 44 BC, the day he was assassinated:
"Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
Here, the metaphor of death has been used to convey how a coward feels when he runs away from a challenge, losing strength of character each time he chickens out. In other words, a gutless person, scared to death because of his breach of promises, accords, and commitments, is never fair, frank, and forthright in his plans, for fear his characterless life might be snuffed out anytime by some fearless figure unafraid of the consequences that befall him.
In contrast to the coward, a valiant person never thinks of himself and is not swayed by greed or self-interests while discharging duties and responsibilities with honesty, even if death is imminent, since there is no time for machinations, jealousies, regrets, or cover-ups.
US President Donald Trump is definitely no Julius Caesar, whose name and fame is alive despite the passing of two millenniums – whatever his faults and shortcomings as an imperialist striving to make Rome a superpower in those days when the other superpower, that is, Iran’s Parthian Empire, had checked Roman expansion in the east nine years earlier through General Sourena by a resounding victory in 53 BC at Carrhae (Harran in present day Turkey).
It means neither Trump is anywhere in the list of the valiant, nor will he be remembered by anyone in the US – let alone the world – after, say, a half century.
The man who likes to boast that he will make America Great Again, is actually a Lilliput, despite his hulk and the bombastic language he uses from the safety of the iron-cage security surrounding him.
As a matter of fact, like all cowards, who die many times before their death, Trump is terrified of the fast approaching day when he would be a lifeless corpse, no matter how he shrouds his movements around the US and abroad in secrecy.
The person, who last Christmas sneaked like a thief into Ain al-Asad airbase (a hundred km north of Baghdad), without the knowledge of Iraqi authorities, late last November committed the same cowardly crime, and this time in Afghanistan.
According to a CNN report: "On Thanksgiving eve, President Donald Trump slipped unnoticed out of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on his way to a bare-bones military plane with just a handful of top aides. His departure was concealed even from White House staff and military personnel who were at Mar-a-Lago… Sixteen hours later, he touched down for the first time in Afghanistan… after a similar Christmas Eve trip last year to Iraq.
"The 16-hour trip – plus the three more Trump spent on the ground at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul – were shrouded in secrecy. At 2 p.m. reporters traveling with the President were authorized to report on his visit, minutes before Air Force One took off to return Trump to Florida.”
It is clear that Trump, who despite the utmost secrecy of his trip may have gone through scary thoughts of death if some malfunction were to occur with the aircraft or if a stray Taleban shell were to end his life, breathed a heavy sigh of relief on returning intact to Florida.
We are not concerned here with the results or lack of results of his Afghan trip as well as his empty words of restarting peace talks with the Taleban which he himself had broken off some months before.
To sum up, it was a carbon copy of his last year’s Iraq trip, with the only difference being President Ashraf Ghani answered the call of the uninvited guest and came to Bagram to meet him, while in December 2018 a similar call by Trump to Prime Minister Adel-Abdul-Mahdi to come and meet him at Ain al-Asad was firmly rejected as an insulting demand by a violator of Iraq’s sovereignty.
Mr. Trump, for your information, Shakespeare has further said: "Strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”