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FOREIGN POLICY

Trump Flattens ISIS Terror Complex The Mother of All Bombs takes out a terrorist stronghold. April 14, 2017 Matthew Vadum

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.”

U.S. Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on ISIS Tunnels in Afghanistan Pentagon says plane dropped one of the largest nonnuclear bombs in its arsenal on tunnel-and-cave complex By Jessica Donati, Ben Kesling and Dion Nissenbaum

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

Trump’s Big Bomb Let’s hope the right people noticed this blast against Islamic State.

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.

Trump’s Comprehensive Volte-Face View all posts from this blog By: Srdja Trifkovic

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.

Trump’s Syria Strike Was Constitutional The Framers gave presidents broad powers to take the lead in matters of national security, and they gave Congress the power to cut off funding. By John Yoo

In ordering Friday’s strike on a Syrian airbase, President Donald J. Trump sent the U.S. military into combat without Congress’s blessing. He has punished the Assad regime for its use of sarin nerve gas on its own people and only begun to correct the mistakes the Obama administration made when it allowed the Syrian civil war to metastasize into a conflict that is destabilizing the Middle East.

For its troubles, however, the Trump administration has come under fire from his conservative flank. Libertarian senator Rand Paul demands that Trump seek congressional authorization, while distinguished conservative law professor Mike Paulsen and National Review editor Kevin Williamson argue in these pages that the strikes violate the Constitution. Their arguments add to the outrage of Trump supporters, such as Ann Coulter, who tweeted: “Those who wanted us meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates.”

This time, President Trump has the Constitution about right. His exercise of war powers rests firmly in the tradition of American foreign policy. Throughout our history, neither presidents nor Congresses have acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can conduct military hostilities abroad. We have used force abroad more than 100 times but declared war in only five cases: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, and World Wars I and II.

Without any congressional approval, presidents have sent forces to battle Indians, Barbary pirates, and Russian revolutionaries; to fight North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea; to engineer regime changes in South and Central America; and to prevent human-rights disasters in the Balkans. Other conflicts, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War, received legislative “authorization” but not declarations of war. The practice of presidential initiative, followed by congressional acquiescence, has spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations and reaches back from President Trump to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

Common sense does not support replacing the way our Constitution has worked in wartime with a radically different system that mimics the peacetime balance of powers between president and Congress. If the issue were the environment or Social Security, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second. But the Constitution does not duplicate this system in war. Instead, our Framers decided that the president would play the leading role in matters of national security.

If the issue were the environment or Social Security, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second.

Syria and the Fundamentalist Islamic Uprising By Robert Turner

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?

Taiwan Needs Submarines As China increases its threats, the U.S. can help the island’s self-defense.

Taiwan’s recent announcement that it will build its own diesel-electric submarines has provoked skepticism across the defense industry. The island’s shipyards lack experience constructing pressure hulls, and the local defense industry will struggle to provide the high-tech innards of a modern submarine, such as fire control and propulsion systems. So what is Taipei up to?

Taiwan certainly needs the subs to deter an invasion from mainland China, and the best option would be to buy them from a country with an existing production line. But Beijing has pressured the viable candidates not to sell to Taiwan.

In 2001 George W. Bush’s Administration promised to develop and build conventional submarines for Taiwan. But the U.S. Navy and its backers were opposed because it only deploys nuclear-powered subs and it fears that if a U.S. company began to build diesel subs, then it might lobby Congress to acquire them. The Bush proposal also foundered on political opposition within Taiwan to spending the large sums to buy and operate the boats. The U.S. dropped the idea in 2008.

Since then Taiwan’s defense situation has grown more dire. In 2009 a RAND study concluded that in the event of a mainland attack, the island would lose air superiority over its territory within a few days. China’s armed forces have continued to advance in quality and quantity, while many of Taiwan’s weapons are aging or obsolete.

China has also stepped up its bullying. After President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in January 2016, Beijing downgraded economic ties and again threatened to use military force if Taiwan refuses indefinitely to hold talks on reunification. The country’s first aircraft carrier conducted a cruise around Taiwan in December and January, sending a pointed message to the island’s population.

These moves seem to have shaken Taiwanese politicians out of their complacency. The government recently announced plans to increase military spending by up to 50% in 2018, bringing the island’s defense budget up to the goal of around 3% of GDP that the U.S. has been urging for years.

Trump’s Putin Pushback He invites Montenegro to join NATO and keeps up the Syria pressure.

The theory, popular with the media, that President Trump is a political prisoner of Vladimir Putin is looking less credible by the day. The latest evidence arrived Tuesday as White House officials accused Russia of trying to cover up Bashar Assad’s chemical-weapons assault in Syria, and Mr. Trump formally invited Montenegro to join NATO.

As Mr. Putin was refusing to meet Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow, White House officials said Russia is conducting a “disinformation campaign” to shield Mr. Assad from accountability for last week’s sarin attack that killed at least 85 people. The officials also said they suspect Russia knew about the attack in advance given how closely the two militaries work together in Syria—though there isn’t definitive evidence. This public truth-telling is welcome and helps to keep diplomatic pressure on Mr. Assad and Russia as his accomplice.

Meanwhile, the White House announced that Mr. Trump signed the U.S. “instrument of ratification” for Montenegro to become the 29th member of NATO. The decision paves the way for the tiny Eastern Europe nation to join at the NATO summit in May if other nations agree.

Montenegro won’t count for much militarily, but its entry is important as a rebuke to Mr. Putin, who opposes any expansion of the Western alliance close to Russia’s borders. Last year Russian agents tried but failed to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Montenegro’s pro-Western government. “President Trump congratulates the Montenegrin people for their resilience and their demonstrated commitment to NATO’s democratic values,” said the White House statement, in a clear reference to the coup attempt.

The investigations into ties between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign have a long way to go, but Mr. Trump isn’t acting like someone who is making foreign-policy judgments out of fear of Russia’s response. This is reassuring and will strengthen his leverage with the Russian strongman.

Hall of Mirrors in Syria By Victor Davis Hanson

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?

Trump Bombs Syria. Now What? A look at what the strategic objectives should be. April 11, 2017 Bruce Thornton

President Trump’s swift bombing of a Syrian airfield responsible for a chemical attack has been praised by our allies and even by Democrats. The mere fact that Trump followed up his condemnation of a sarin gas attack with military action sends a signal that the U.S. is no longer the “weak, pitiful giant,” to use Richard Nixon’s phrase, that eight years of Barack Obama’s appeasement and retreat had left it. Such praise is deserved, but the bombing is just the start. The real question is, what happens next? What’s the strategic goal?

The effect of the attack on restoring American prestige is undoubtedly important. Obama’s foreign policy reflected the idealistic internationalism that dismisses such old-fashioned ideas as prestige. Modern progressive thinking holds that the use of force represents a foreign policy failure, and usually makes things worse by entangling the U.S. in escalation and quagmires. Non-lethal negotiated settlements are a better way to defuse conflict, and a national humility based on recognition of past neo-imperialist sins (see Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech) can make our rivals and enemies more amenable to “win-win” agreements.

Obama’s now infamous “red line” warning about Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, a warning the Syrian butcher promptly violated, reflected this thinking. Rather than back up his bold words with force when Assad went ahead and used chemical weapons in the Ghouta region, Obama quickly accepted Russia’s offer to help him negotiate a deal: The U.S. wouldn’t bomb Syria if Assad surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles to Russia. Despite domestic and international criticism of such an obviously feckless capitulation, Obama told a reporter last year that he is still “very proud of this moment.”

Of course the deal was negotiated in bad faith by Syria and Russia, and did nothing to stop the slaughter or the use of chemical weapons. Like the current deal with Iran, no one knew if the terms of the deal were being adhered to by Assad. Now we know that they weren’t, and that he retained significant stockpiles. Such duplicitous behavior is consistent with the long history of failed negotiated agreements that usually serve as a tactic for furthering an aggressor’s ends. And the failure of such “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes called them, damages a state’s credibility and prestige, emboldening other aggressors. That in a nutshell is the history of Obama’s foreign policy, which has been a huge success for Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the myriad jihadist outfits swarming out of the Libya that our thoughtless intervention turned into a jihadist jungle.

So bombing the airfield is a necessary first step to restoring our credibility and concentrating the minds of our enemies and rivals. But it is only one step, and such a one-off by itself can often be an act of international public relations rather than a game-changer. Cruise-missile and drone attacks are dramatic and photogenic. They get media attention and make noise, but without a larger strategic plan, they serve mainly to create the illusion of action in the absence of a lack of will to use decisive force. Destroying some planes on one airfield, or killing an endless series of al Qaeda “number two” leaders has little strategic value. New war planes can be bought, and al Qaeda has an endless supply of potential “number twos.”