RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility.
It would be great if diplomats could protect America, its allies and its interests with words alone. But in matters involving aggressive tyrannies, words don’t mean much unless they are backed up by military muscle and the credible willingness to use force. When that threat goes missing, predators take notice.

It’s also clear that when America backs down, the threats tend to compound. Predatory regimes tend to do business together, observe each other and learn from each other. When Russia snatches turf from a neighbor and gets away with it, that sends a message to China.

Beijing, with its interest in building artificial islands topped with military bases in the South China Sea, can see that it’s open season in Asia for accelerating such territorial grabs. When North Korea conducts an illicit nuclear test and gets away with it, we can reasonably assume that Iran takes note.

For the world’s most dangerously ambitious and threatening tyrannies — from Russia to China, from North Korea to Iran — Obama’s neutering of American power over the past eight years created a host of opportunities that they eagerly seized. The sorry truth, given the character of these regimes, is that they would have been fools not to.

By the time Obama left office this January, America’s official words meant almost nothing. Take, for instance, Obama’s declaration in 2013 of a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria. That gave way to former Secretary of State John Kerry’s Lilliputian assurance that an American strike on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities would be “unbelievably small.” That turned into no strike at all, as Obama entrusted Russia with the supervision of its client despot in Damascus, President Bashar Assad — whose resignation Obama had called for, to no effect, two years earlier.

Donald Trump has delivered bombs to the West enemies. Obama shipped pallets of cold, hard cash to Iran in a ransom deal that will do nothing to crimp the mullahs’ mischief while further heightening Israel’s jeopardy. Guess which president the media paints as the wise and heroic leader?
So President Trump bombed Syria’s Shayrat air force base on April 7 with 59 cruise missiles. Compare and contrast with President Obama’s “bombing”[1] of Tehran in January, 2016, with pallet-loads of European banknotes totalling $US1.7b. There was $400 million in Swiss franc notes and $1.3b in Euro notes.

Obama had organized the swap of US government dollars for the banknotes. He had a technical difficulty with the $1.3 billion because a long-standing US government rule limited payout to $1 billion. So he used his initiative and split his $1.3b request into 13 separate requests of $99,999,999.99 and a top-up of $10,390,236.28.[2]

The pallets of banknotes materialized at Geneva airport on January 3 ($400 million in francs), and January 22 and February 5 ($1.3b in Euros – some accounts say that other hard-currency notes were included). Each time, the treasure was ushered into a waiting, unmarked Iranian cargo plane. The plane took the money to Tehran and only the Iranians know where it went thereafter. Let us hope not on weapons and salaries for terrorists.

It’s a racy story but what’s it all about? It’s about a weekend’s work by Obama on January 16-17, 2016, where he consummated the anti-nuclear pact with Iran, did a prisoner swap of four Americans in Iran for seven Iranian-American sanctions-violators in the US, and settled a debt to Iran dating back to 1979 when the populace overthrew Shah Pahlavi. All three aspects involve murky stuff which has gradually trickled into the public domain, and which I’ll try to explain.

Obama’s main goal (jointly with five other world powers) was to thwart Iran’s rapid progress to the nuclear-bomb club.

In brief, Iran signed up that weekend to switching its deeply-buried Fordo nuclear plant to “a centre for science research”; to making its Arak plutonium-capable plant inoperable; and to halving its U235 bomb-capable uranium centrifuges at Natanz from 10,000 to 5,000. Enrichment is to stop at 3.7%, compared with the current 20% (bomb-capable is 90%). It has also promised to cap its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 300kg (insufficient for an A-bomb upgrade) for 15 years.

Great stuff, but even the Obama-loving New York Times expressed concern that Iran would make monkeys out of the International Atomic Energy Agency scrutineers, given “Iran’s history of evasions, stonewalling and illicit procurements.” But assuming Iran behaves itself, the US will lift sanctions against arms sales in five years, and sales of ballistic missiles in eight years.

The Iran legislators and their street mobs have responded to the nuclear deal by retaining their No 1 slogan of “Death to America!” and re-iterating their ambition to nuke Israel as soon as feasible.

The Israeli government rated the Iran deal as a repeat of Munich in 1938, a licence for a second Holocaust, and a sop to a global terrorism. It repeated these views last August, when Obama claimed, improbably,

“Israeli military and security community acknowledges this [deal] has been a game changer…The country that was most opposed to the deal. By all accounts, it has worked exactly the way we said it was going to work.”

In reality, Iran the previous year had violated a 2010 Security Council resolution banning it from nuclear-capable missile tests. It did a further missile test in January, 2017, which exploited a loophole in a successor Security Council resolution.[3] The update inexplicably changed the wording from “shall not” test nuclear-capable missiles (emphatic) to Iran being “called upon” not to test such missiles (translation: utter, non-binding waffle).

Where is the Republican-controlled Congress on Syria? By all accounts, it is busy cheerleading the president’s firing of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a foreign sovereign — an offensive attack that was unprovoked and unauthorized by Congress, rendering it unconstitutional. With a Republican in the White House, though, Republicans on Capitol Hill are all for executive overreach, despite having spent the last eight years chiding a Democratic president’s excesses and Middle Eastern misadventures.

Of course, the bottom line is the same: Congress does nothing. But at least during the Obama years, legislative spinelessness was swaddled in righteous constitutional rhetoric. Now, lawmakers outright encourage presidential imperiousness and their own consequent irrelevance.

The Constitution vests in Congress the power to declare war — meaning the power to authorize military operations. The president may order the use of force unilaterally only when the United States is under attack, or at least the threat of attack. There was no such threat from the Syrian regime.

That makes Trump’s aggression unprovoked. Yet, Trump apologists claim that the use of chemical weapons by the despicable Assad — perhaps in collusion with his despicable Russian and Iranian enablers — is provocation enough. It is not. To be a provocation warranting unauthorized forcible retaliation, an attack must target the United States. Or, as someone once said: America First!

The Syrian atrocity — or should we say, the latest Syrian atrocity — had nothing to do with America. It was more internecine Islamic savagery. It was a case of a ruthless dictator in a barbaric civil war conducting yet another attack on his opposition, including the non-combatant civilians among whom that opposition hides. And as the Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn reminds us in an essential report published by the Weekly Standard, Assad’s opposition includes al-Qaeda cells, Islamic State elements, and assorted Islamist militants. These factions are notorious for their own atrocities and desire to cleanse Syria of its Christian and other non-Islamic populations.

American troops are on the ground in Syria, coordinating coalition attacks on the anti-Assad jihadists. Assad, Russia, and their equally loathsome Iranian/Hezbollah allies are not targeting those Americans in Syria. Why would they?

While Assad & Co. avoid confrontation with American forces, Trump’s attack on Assad buoys the jihadists. It gives them hope that if they can hang in long enough, stave off the reluctant American intervention long enough, the new administration will engineer Assad’s removal from power — an intention Trump’s State Department is now signaling. That would pave the way for the jihadists to turn most of Syria into another of the Sunni sharia-supremacist basket-cases we’ve come to know so well — like Egypt while under Muslim Brotherhood-control, Afghanistan under Taliban domination, post-Qaddafi Libya, and other failed states whose ungovernable frontiers become safe havens for anti-American terrorism.

No one expects the Trump administration to reverse the disastrous effects of the Obama supported Muslim Brotherhood’s highjacking of the “Arab-Spring” in the Middle East that increased the regional contest for supremacy in the Islamic world. The rivalry has intensified between the Sunni camp led by Saudi Arabia and the Shiite camp led by Iran – each with their pet terrorist organizations.

It’s hard to overstate how much damage was done by the Obama Administration’s misjudgment that Sunni jihadists and Shia Iran were somehow friendly to us and could be useful tools of American policy. But using jihadi groups claiming to be less violent than al-Qaida and ISIS resulted in the Benghazi massacre of four Americans including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the destabilization of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, and elsewhere.

The “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” (SATA) (HR 608), which was sponsored Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) would help curtail U.S. assistance to Sunni and Shia jihadists, who would gladly use it against Americans, not not only against each other.

Rep. Gabbard points out in her introductory statement for the bill,

“Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaida, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaida or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaida, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham, and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets last Thursday night — and this Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office?

Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and politicians who have been paying close attention both to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people — most recently with chemical weapons — and to every syllable of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Their argument now goes that Trump’s latest military moves — and shift in attitude toward NATO — are examples of policy “flip-flopping” from the “isolationism” expressed in his inaugural address to a newfound global interventionism. They contend that a president who so drastically and swiftly shifts gears is perfectly capable of performing yet another about-face when the mood arises.

The trouble is that this assertion is both overly simplistic and inaccurate.

In the first place, Trump himself openly acknowledged that though he had said he was not going to intervene in Syria, he “changed his mind” when it was established that Assad was killing babies with sarin gas — after lying about having rid his country of chemical weapons. He has also openly declared war on the Islamic State group. This hardly constitutes a flip-flop. Instead, it indicates flexibility of thought and action on the part of a leader faced with a set of circumstances that warrants both.

The same goes for his statements on NATO, which he originally called “obsolete” and has since deemed necessary. His initial attack on the organization was that its members were not pulling their weight. This spurred them to make at least symbolic gestures, such as slightly increasing their budgets, to persuade him to reconsider. This is no small thing.

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.