RUTHFULLY YOURS

Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

But as Trump’s young presidency has shown, many of the candidate’s foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It’s not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week’s chemical weapons attack on rebels. It’s not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president’s biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump’s national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster’s critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump’s new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. special operations forces and some conventional forces have been in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama reversed course and ordered a new air campaign against the Islamic State. But so far, the U.S. presence on the ground has been much smaller and quieter than more traditional military campaigns, particularly for Syria. It’s the difference between boots on the ground and slippers on the ground.

Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: “We’re not going into Syria,” he said.

The United States dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal yesterday on an Islamic State complex in the mountains of Afghanistan, a powerful indication that the Trump administration takes its responsibilities in the war against Muslim terrorism seriously.

This successful mission is part of President Trump making good on a campaign promise made in late 2015 to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). Yesterday the president referred to the military operation as “another successful job,” after acknowledging he trusted his generals in the field enough to delegate strike authority to them.

It is a welcome change after the Obama administration did little for years to combat Muslim terrorism and engaged in many activities that strengthened and emboldened terrorist groups. It also puts hostile regimes, like those in North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Russia, and Syria on notice that America’s new president is dramatically different from his predecessor.

“This president understands that diplomacy without force behind it is nothing,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Trump White House counterterrorism guru, said on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night.

“It’s words. It’s pieces of paper. Statecraft and leadership are when you use these things together to reinforce each other.”

Trump, unlike Obama, refuses to lead from behind and play friendlies off against each other, he said.

What we have seen is eight years of divisiveness, of the Obama White House dividing our nation against itself, and dividing us against our allies and friends. And in just 84 days, President Trump has replaced divisiveness with decisiveness, whether it’s to do with the border, whether it’s to do with manufacturing, whether it’s to do with NATO, or whether it’s to do with our enemies in ISIS, or in this case, the chemical weapons attack [in Syria] last week, we have changed the geopolitical reality in the world in just a matter of weeks.

President Trump is serious about confronting the terrorist threat, Gorka said.

People now understand just how much the president means what he says. When he says – unequivocally – in front of a joint session of Congress, at CPAC, when he says I am going to obliterate ISIS, literally, when he says, I am going to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth, it’s not empty rhetoric.

“It’s stunning” if you read the memoirs of Obama’s defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Gorka said.

The former Pentagon chiefs tell of National Security Council meetings that last “three to four hours with nobody taking a decision,” he said. “That was the last eight years. That was the reality of the red lines. Along comes President Trump, that’s gone. We have a threat. We’ve promised to deal with and we’re dealing with it right now.”

The U.S. military dropped one of the largest nonnuclear bombs in its arsenal Thursday on an Islamic State tunnel-and-cave complex in eastern Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.

A U.S. plane dropped the nearly 22,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb—nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs—just a few days after an American Special Forces soldier was killed during a joint U.S.-Afghan offensive against dug-in Islamic State positions in the same area.

“We have been waiting months to use it,” said an allied official in Afghanistan. “I think the loss of our soldier helped motivate leaders to approve it.”
The bomb is a precision-guided “smart bomb” designed to cause maximum damage to bunkers, tunnels and other areas that can typically withstand even large standard bombs or artillery strikes.President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that he had not personally been involved in the decision to use the giant bomb, which is deployed by parachute from the rear ramp of a transport plane. “I authorize my military,” Mr. Trump said. “We have given them total authorization.” CONTINUE AT SITE

As demonstration effects go, it would be hard to top the bomb the U.S. dropped Thursday on Islamic State in Afghanistan. The 21,000 pound GBU-43, or “mother of all bombs,” landed on Islamic State installations in eastern Afghanistan.

What happened at the receiving end of the bomb isn’t known, nor would White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer say whether President Trump personally gave authorization, which isn’t needed to deploy the GBU-43. But like the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles that struck a Syrian airfield last week, the right people no doubt noticed this display of American purpose.

At the top of the list would be Islamic State, which Mr. Trump has promised to eliminate. The terrorist group has seized territory in Afghanistan’s Nangahar Province, near the border with Pakistan. The Afghan army, supported by the U.S., has taken significant losses in its attempt to dislodge ISIS. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, called the GBU-43 smart bomb the “right munition” to “maintain momentum” against ISIS.

Momentum is an important concept in this fight. The armed forces of Iraq, for example, are on the brink of recovering Mosul from Islamic State and have taken huge casualties to do so. But it will be difficult to consolidate an achievement like that unless other nations are willing to make similar commitments to support the fight, whether in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen.

Momentum routinely wilts beneath the politics and factions across the Middle East. The strike against Syria and now the use in Afghanistan of the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the active U.S. arsenal makes clear America’s resolve to our allies. Islamic State won’t be defeated without buy-in from those allies.

We may also assume that the missile-launching crowd in Pyongyang noticed the deployment of the GBU-43. Far be it from us to suggest that the U.S. drop one on a North Korean nuclear factory. But in the space of a week, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad, Xi Jinping and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wherever he is hiding, have learned that the U.S. considers it to be in its interest to push back hard against its adversaries’ aggression.

During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last July he declared that “Crimea is none of our business.” He had also promised to end regime-change operations, advised Obama to stay out of Syria, and indicated that President Bashar al-Assad staying in power was not to be discounted.

In his first ten weeks in the White House President Trump has made U-turns on all key fronts. In the course of a single day—Wednesday, April 12—he made no fewer than four public statements which repudiate his previous positions. Standing next to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at an East Room news conference, Trump declared that NATO was “no longer obsolete.” Only days after unleashing cruise missiles against Syrian government forces he described Bashar al-Assad as a “butcher” over alleged chemical weapons attacks on civilians, sounding like an avid advocate of regime change. In an interview that aired also on Wednesday, Trump said that Putin was partly to blame for the conflict in Syria and denounced the Russian president for backing Bashar. At a White House press conference later in the day he said that “right now we are not getting along with Russia at all; we may be at an all-time low in terms of relationship with Russia.” Asked whether Syrian forces could have launched the chemical attack without Russia’s knowledge, Trump replied that it was possible but unlikely.

When asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta about apparent reversals, White House press secretary Sean Spicer replied, “Circumstances change.” Trump’s embrace of establishmentarian positions was confirmed in an interview with the New York Post last Tuesday in which he openly criticized his political chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose political future now seems uncertain. Bannon was excluded from the National Security Council last week, in a move that was widely interpreted as a victory for supporters of the bipartisan imperial consensus.

Should the United States have prolonged the Syrian civil war by arming the rebels? Based on recent experience, one wonders if deposing ruling monarchies is in the best interest of either the peoples of the Middle East or of the world at large. Consider the following:

The failure of the Carter administration to support its ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, led to establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the region’s greatest threat. The reward to the United States for its implicit support of the Iranian revolution was an attack on its embassy, the ensuing hostage crisis, throngs in the streets screaming “Death to America,” and support of terrorism aimed at the U.S. and its’ allies. The result to Israel is likely to be increasingly dire in months and years to come.

The failure of the Obama administration to support U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt, and a key supporter of the peace with Israel negotiated by Anwar Sadat, led to a near takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood, described as a terrorist organization by a number of allies in the region. Only intervention by the military saved Egypt from Islamic totalitarianism.

While hardly virtuous, Muammar Gaddafi, following a wakeup confrontation with President Reagan’s military followed by the implicit threat of George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism campaign after 9/11, had given up his nuclear ambitions and was actually providing significant assistance in world efforts to defeat Islamic terrorism. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s first-term Secretary of State, decided that Colonel Gaddafi should not be allowed to put down a rebel insurrection within Libya and led an international effort to free Libya from his predilection to violence. Again, our interference resulted in tragedy for America and disaster for the people of Libya.

Saddam Hussein, the counterweight to Iran in the Middle East, was a cruel dictator with the propensity to involve himself in world politics and commit despicable acts. After 9/11, in addition to its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration opted to invade Iraq due to concerns over Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The ensuing government of Iraq was transformed from Sunni Muslim control that kept a firm hand on its Shiite Muslim majority population to Shiite Muslim control that abused its minority Sunni Muslim population. The result has been a continued reign of terror as car bombs and suicide bombers continue attacks on both branches of the Islamic tree.

Our involvement in Iraq was then followed by the disastrous and premature Obama decision to withdraw U.S. forces, thereby creating the opening for creation of a caliphate by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that has been on a murderous rampage throughout not only the Middle East but now extends into Europe, Africa, and even the United States.

That brings me back to the question of Syria: if the United States had not encouraged Syrians in their rebellion against the Assad government, if we had not surreptitiously armed Islamist rebels with weapons from Gaddafi’s stockpiles in Libya, if we had not trained and equipped something we called the “Free Syrian Army,” might not the civil war in Syria have ended by now with far fewer casualties than our prolonging of the war effort has allowed? I don’t know the answer to this question, but it seems worthy of serious consideration.

Is it a curious coincidence that this revolutionary wave engulfing one Islamic nation after another from Tunisia in 2010, to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Iraq occurred within mere months of one another? Is it a coincidence that demonstrations, protest and riots over this same period of time occurred in Morocco, Bahrain, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan with lesser protests in half a dozen other nations?

Syria is weird for reasons that transcend even the bizarre situation of bombing an abhorrent Bashar al-Assad who was bombing an abhorrent ISIS — as we de facto ally with Iran, the greater strategic threat, to defeat the more odious, but less long-term strategic threat, ISIS.

Trump apparently hit a Syrian airfield to express Western outrage over the likely Syrian use of chemical weapons. Just as likely, he also sought to remind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that he is unpredictable and not restrained by self-imposed cultural, political, and ethical bridles that seemed to ensure that Obama would never do much over Chinese and Russian cyber-warfare, or Iranian interception of a U.S. warship or the ISIS terror campaign in the West or North Korea’s increasingly creepy and dangerous behavior.

But the strike also raised as many questions as it may have answered.

Is Trump saying that he can send off a few missiles anywhere and anytime rogues go too far? If so, does that willingness to use force enhance deterrence? (probably); does it also risk further escalation to be effective? (perhaps); and does it solve the problem of an Assad or someone similar committing more atrocities? (no).

Was the reason we hit Assad, then, because he is an especially odious dictator and kills his own, or that the manner in which he did so was cruel and barbaric (after all, ISIS burns, drowns, and cuts apart its victims without much Western reprisals until recently)? Or is the reason instead that he used WMD, and since 1918 with a few exceptions (largely in the Middle East), “poison” gas has been a taboo weapon among the international community? (Had Assad publicly beheaded the same number who were gassed, would we have intervened?)

Do we continue to sort of allow ISIS to fight it out with Syria/Iran/Hezbollah in the manner of our shrug during the Iran-Iraq War and in the fashion until Pearl Harbor that we were okay with the Wehrmacht and the Red Army killing each other en masse for over five months in Russia? Or do we say to do so cynically dooms innocents in a fashion that they are not quite as doomed elsewhere, or at least not doomed without chance of help as is true in North Korea?

Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Syria, deriding the Iraq War, and questioning the Afghan effort. Does his sudden strike signal a Jacksonian effort to hit back enemies if the mood comes upon us — and therefore acceptable to his base as a sort of one-off, don’t-tread-on-me hiss and rattle?

Or does the strike that was so welcomed by the foreign-policy establishment worry his supporters that Trump is now putting his suddenly neocon nose in someone’s else’s business? And doing so without congressional authorizations or much exegesis?