The Lloyd Austin incident sheds harsh light on Biden’s team, CNN.com

Updated 5:51 PM EST, Mon January 8, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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In the midst of an international crisis involving the US military, the top civilian leader of the Pentagon was hospitalized for days without the commander in chief knowing his whereabouts.

The absence of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is a surprising development that puts a harsh light on President Joe Biden’s national security team. And the odd thing is that there may be very little Biden can do about it, practically speaking.

For the past week, Austin has been at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside of Washington DC, where he was admitted on Monday, January 1, after he experienced “severe pain” following an elective surgery on December 22. For at least part of his time in the hospital, Austin was in the intensive care unit. The White House wasn’t informed until Thursday of Austin’s condition, nor were senior Pentagon officials like Austin’s number two at the Pentagon, Kathleen Hicks.

Typically, the US Secretary of Defense is a savvy politician like former Sen. William Cohen, who served under former President Bill Clinton or former Rep. Leon Panetta, who served under former President Barack Obama, or a longtime Washington player like Robert Gates, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush but also served under Obama.

Despite his decades of military experience, Austin is neither a politician nor a longtime DC insider, and instead is known to be an introvert who only gives public speeches and interviews relatively infrequently.

Austin’s introversion and seeming lack of Washington savvy may help explain why he and his team didn’t give senior US national security officials a heads-up about his condition. The Pentagon has also offered up the rationale that Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, was out with flu when the Secretary of Defense was first hospitalized, but the Pentagon is the world’s largest employer with 2.86 million employees, so the notion that relaying Austin’s condition hinged on only one of them is confounding.

Everyone is entitled to keep their own medical information to themselves or to select people, but that doesn’t preclude telling others that you are out of commission for a few days, especially when you are the US secretary of defense. That role, among other things, puts you in the room for decisions involving nuclear weapons, although the president has the sole authority to order the launch of those weapons.

Biden tapped Austin to be secretary of defense in part because of their previous experience together. When Biden was vice president and was running the Iraq portfolio for the Obama administration, Austin was the top general who presided over the US withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2011. Austin also served as Central Command (CENTCOM) commander, where he helped lead the fight against ISIS in Iraq from 2014 during the Obama administration.

Yet, Austin does not seem to be part of Biden’s true national security inner circle, which includes US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, both of whom have worked with Biden very closely for many years. This may help explain why no one at the White House noticed that Austin was gone, or why, perhaps, they simply may have assumed he was on vacation.

Austin was hospitalized on January 1 — a federal holiday. But that is not much of a defense, since the Situation Room at the White House operates 24/7, and a simple call or email to the Situation Room staff from anyone on Austin’s team should have been enough to inform the rest of the cabinet and their key deputies what was going on with Austin.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin makes a joint statement in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Monday, December 18.
Defense secretary faces intense scrutiny over hospital stay that was not disclosed to key officials
There has rarely been a more fraught time during the Biden administration for the US secretary of defense to be out of commission than now. Consider that on Thursday, a US drone strike killed the leader of an Iranian-based militia in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. The Baghdad strike was authorized before Austin was admitted to hospital.

Iranian-backed militias have launched more than 100 attacks against US troops in Syria and Iraq since Hamas attacked Israel three months ago. The strike in Baghdad was a calculated risk by the Biden administration, especially since there are growing calls in Iraq, including from the Iraqi prime minister on Friday, to expel the 2,500 US troops that remain in the country on a mission to counter ISIS.

On Wednesday, the US and a dozen other allied nations warned the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, that they must stop their attacks on commercial shipping in the strategic shipping lanes of the Red Sea or face unspecified consequences, which presumably would involve US military action against Houthi targets.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah and Israel seem to be inching ever closer to an all-out war.

The Middle East is on fire, and one of America’s chief firefighters was AWOL.

Over the weekend, Austin released a statement saying he “could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed.” That hardly seems the point since Austin and his team did a terrible job keeping the president and other senior national security officials informed of his condition, which went unmentioned in Austin’s apologia.

So, what, if anything, can Biden do? Probably not much. A public reprimand of Austin by Biden would also only serve to reinforce the view held by Republican critics that the Biden team isn’t especially competent.

If Biden fired Austin, he would only bring more attention to the issue, and in this political environment, finding another candidate for the position and getting them confirmed by the US Senate would be a very heavy lift.

ISIS attacks spotlight the simmering mess growing in the Middle East CNN.com

Opinion:

Updated 6:11 PM EST, Fri January 5, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to prevent a larger regional war in the Middle East. Yet, already, there is a de facto regional conflict raging with all the possibilities for screw-ups and escalatory responses that are inherent in such a conflict. Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, the region may wake up one day soon and realize it’s in the midst of an all-out war.

The danger of growing conflict is rising and threatens to entangle the United States. That’s partly why US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting the Middle East this week: to try to stop the widening hostilities.

Consider just the past few days: On Thursday, a US drone strike killed the leader of an Iranian-based militia in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have launched at least 118 attacks against US troops in Syria and Iraq since the October 7 attack by Hamas inside Israel.

The strike in Baghdad was a calculated risk by the Biden administration, especially since there are growing calls in Iraq to expel some 2,500 US troops that remain in the country on a mission to counter ISIS. The Baghdad strike has amplified those calls to expel US troops, according to the leading Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

In purported support of Hamas, the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, have launched 23 attacks at commercial vessels in the Red Sea since November 19 using a variety of missiles, drones and sea-based drones.

The Red Sea approach to the Suez Canal is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, and some key shipping companies have suspended their operations in the area.

On Wednesday, the US and a dozen other allied nations warned the Houthis that they must stop their attacks on commercial shipping or face unspecified consequences. That followed the sinking by the US three days earlier of three Houthi speedboats in the Red Sea to prevent them from hijacking a commercial vessel.

On Tuesday, a leader of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed by a drone strike in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, adding to the growing tensions between Hezbollah and Israel. There have been near-daily tit-for-tat exchanges of fire between them along the Israel-Lebanon border since October 7. Al-Arouri was killed in an area of Beirut dominated by Hezbollah, which has vowed to avenge his death.

On Monday, Israel launched air strikes in the Syrian capital, Damascus, hitting what it said were Syrian military targets. The Syrian regime was aided by Hezbollah fighters during the Syrian civil war, and it has publicly supported Hamas.

Adding to all of this on Thursday, ISIS claimed responsibility for two suicide attacks at a memorial service for the key Iranian military leader General Qassim Suleimani that killed at least 84 people. ISIS is a Sunni jihadist group that regards the Shia clerics who run Iran as heretics. Attacks by Sunni jihadist groups inside Iran have been relatively rare, and this attack marks a significant escalation by ISIS against Iran. Iran’s leaders have promised to seek revenge against the terrorist group.

The growing conflicts in the region are partly the result of advances in military technology over the past two decades and the growth of proxy warfare in the Middle East during the same time period. It’s easy to forget that before the 9/11 attacks, there were no armed drones capable of carrying out targeted strikes far from the base of the attacker. The use of armed drones by the US became a hallmark of the “war on terror,” and today, countries like Israel and groups like the Houthis have also adopted the tactic.

Meanwhile, during the same time period, the Middle East saw a surge of proxy forces allied in some fashion with Iran. This phenomenon was precipitated partly by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The war in Iraq produced only one real winner, Iran, according to the official US Army history of the conflict. Iran today continues to support militias in Iraq, according to a 2023 report prepared for the British House of Commons.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran, and thousands of its fighters have trained in Iranian camps, according to the US State Department. In Syria, Iran also has considerable influence, and its own forces are based there. The Houthis in Yemen are armed and trained by Iran, while Hamas has also received arms from Iran.

This all makes for a simmering mess because while armed drones and proxy forces allow powers like the US, Israel, and Iran to avoid all-out conventional wars, reliance on drones and proxies is also playing with fire as they move all these powers closer to all-out conflict. The history of warfare, after all, suggests that it is the most uncertain of human enterprises, and seemingly relatively unimportant events like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which became a key trigger of World War I, can instigate broader conflicts.

In Israel, there is now a growing lobby for a war with Hezbollah, a far better armed and more militarily proficient force than Hamas. The last time that Israel and Hezbollah fought a full-scale war was in 2006, and the conflict was something of a draw.

In Lebanon, there is little appetite for another war as the 2006 conflict destroyed a good chunk of the country, which is reeling from its current economic and financial crises.

But war may come anyway, given attitudes in Israel about the threat posed by Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s own increasingly strident responses to Israeli attacks.

In Washington, DC, the national security establishment has for many years focused on the rising threat posed by China, and every administration since President Barack Obama’s has tried to lessen US involvement in the greater Middle East. Obama withdrew all US troops from Iraq in 2011, only to deploy American soldiers back to Iraq in 2014 to counter ISIS. President Donald Trump’s team signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in 2020, and President Joe Biden withdrew all US troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

Yet the United States keeps getting pulled back into the Middle East because of several factors, including its alliance with Israel, the central role that oil and gas play in the global economy and its longtime competition with Iran, none of which are going to change any time soon. The risk now is that a series of increasingly lethal attacks between Iranian proxy forces, and the US and its allies, including Israel, will embroil the region in a larger war.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq ONLINE EVENT

[ONLINE] – The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq
EVENT

In The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Steve Coll, tracks the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein in a deeply researched and news-breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time. The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America’s disastrous war with Iraq. Drawing on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam’s own transcripts and audio files, Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Steve Coll, to discuss his new book The Achilles Trap. Coll is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars, a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of New America. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990.

Join the conversation online using #AchillesTrap and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Steve Coll

Author, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq

Dean Emeritus, Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University

Former President, New America

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen

Vice President, New America

Co-Director, Future Security

Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

The Americans Who Would Be on the Frontline of a War in the Pacific

In the summer of 2022, the United States military ran a major training exercise to prepare to respond if its ally Taiwan gets invaded by China. Central to the strategy: the tiny American island of Guam, the westernmost part of the United States, where the U.S. has more than doubled defense spending in recent years. But not everyone on Guam is convinced that all this additional military buildup, meant to deter China, will ultimately make them safer. As one legislator put it, it’s like the island has “a bullseye” on it. So how did this tropical island become central to U.S. strategy in the Pacific?

Who Controls America’s Past?

Revisiting history is never simple. Especially the history of the United States, which is often painful, and, invariably political. At dinner tables, school board meetings, and political protests, Americans disagree not only about how our past should be interpreted, but what actually happened in the first place.

From the myth about George Washington’s teeth to the true cause of the Civil War, three historians bring us into the impassioned debates about America’s origins and ask, does the fight over America’s past threaten our security today?

God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, New America ONLINE EVENT

[ONLINE] – God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America
EVENT

Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither new nor unprecedented. In God, Guns, and Sedition leading experts Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware trace the historical trajectory and assess the present-day dangers of this violent extremist movement. They highlight developments including the use of cutting-edge communications technology; the embrace of leaderless resistance or lone actor strategies; the emergence of characteristic tactics and targets; infiltration and recruitment in the military and law enforcement; and the far right’s intricate relationship with mainstream politics.

Join New America’s Future Security Program for a discussion with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware regarding their book God, Guns, and Sedition. Bruce Hoffman is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service; professor emeritus of terrorism studies at St Andrews University; and the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. His Columbia University Press books include Inside Terrorism (third edition, 2017). Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Join the conversation online using #GodGunsSedition and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speakers:

Bruce Hoffman

Author, God, Guns, and Sedition

Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Professor, Georgetown University

Jacob Ware

Author, God, Guns, and Sedition

Research Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

Moderators:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn

Vice President, New America

Co-Director, Future Security Initiative, ASU

Professor of Practice, ASU

How to Beat the Russian Army

Hollywood may have portrayed him as a nerd, but Mike Vickers was the superstar architect of America’s covert war in the 1980s that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. And this alum of the Green Berets and the CIA has some ideas about how to do the same thing in Ukraine today.

Global Special Operations Foundation, SOF Imperatives Forum, Capitol Hill, DC

SOF Imperatives Forum

Could Prosecuting the Former President be Bad for American Democracy?

Some countries have fallen into a toxic cycle of tit-for-tat prosecutions, where every ex-president has to expect they’ll eventually end up behind bars. Could the U.S. be next? Two constitutional experts warn that some of the criminal cases against Donald Trump could cause cycles of retribution that poison our politics. And why our saving grace just might be — get this — government bureaucracy.

Christopher Hitchens was right about Henry Kissinger, CNN.com

Published 3:58 PM EST, Fri December 1, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. He is the author of “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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America is the “shining city on a hill,” a moral force for good whose ideals should be spread worldwide, according to the idealistic interpretation of US foreign policy.

Backers of that view cite President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s push for the creation of the United Nations, President Harry Truman’s signing of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe in the wake of World War II and President Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on a human rights-first foreign policy.

Then there is the ‘realist’ school of US foreign policy, which puts America’s interests first, whose most recent exemplar is former President Donald Trump’s ‘America’s First’ foreign policy. No matter how poorly it was executed by Trump himself, this school argues that the US isn’t the world’s conscience or policeman and should take care of its own interests above all others.

Henry Kissinger, who died at age 100 on Wednesday, was the apotheosis of the realist school of American foreign policy that puts perceived American interests first. And just as there are two schools of American foreign policy, there are also two schools of thought about Kissinger himself.

One might be termed the Christopher Hitchens school. Hitchens was a prolific writer and author who argued that Kissinger was a “war criminal” who should be tried for war crimes. In 2001, Hitchens published a book arguing this case, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”

The other school is how “The Blob” sees Kissinger. The Blob is the term coined by Ben Rhodes, former President Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor, to describe the American foreign policy establishment whose badge of honor is membership of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Blob generally regards Kissinger as a foreign policy guru who got the big ideas right, such as his establishing relations between the US and communist China after decades of mutual hostility.

So, which view is truer to history?

To answer that question, we need to look at his actual record in office during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, which has been partly obscured by Kissinger’s long post-government life as a foreign policy oracle whose advice was sought out by many American presidents.

Any sober assessment of Kissinger’s actual record must surely conclude that Hitchens was more right than not.

In 1971, Kissinger acquiesced as the Pakistani military killed hundreds of thousands, though the estimate is disputed, in what is now the country of Bangladesh, despite warnings from his own State Department officials that something akin to a genocide was unfolding.

Two years later, Kissinger pushed Nixon to overthrow the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. According to documents declassified by the National Security Archive Kissinger later told General Augusto Pinochet, who mounted the military coup that overthrew Allende, “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.”

In Argentina in 1976, Kissinger secretly gave the green light to the military junta then in power to carry out what’s known as the “Dirty War” to kill between 10,000 to 30,000 of its political opponents, according to an account later posted on the CIA’s website.

Kissinger was the key US player in ending American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. As a result of his peace deal with the North Vietnamese, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize, but his legacy in Vietnam is decidedly mixed.

Kissinger stepped up the secret American bombings of Vietnam’s neighbors Cambodia and Laos, causing untold misery in those countries that also helped to enable the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Cambodia is still ruled by the party of Hun Sen, an autocrat who was once part of the Khmer Rouge. (Sen stepped down in August, handing power over to his son.)

Kissinger excluded the South Vietnamese from his peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Within two years of the Paris Peace Accords being concluded in 1973, the communist North Vietnamese had seized all of South Vietnam, and Vietnam today remains, at least nominally, a communist country, though now on friendly terms with the US.

This has some echoes in how Trump excluded the Afghan government from the US 2020 deal with the Taliban that eventually removed thousands of US troops from Afghanistan, who were helping to keep the elected Afghan government in power.

President Joe Biden then completed the Trump withdrawal plan in 2021, enabling the Taliban to seize the country where they have established their misogynistic theocracy.

In the Economist, Kissinger wrote that this withdrawal from Afghanistan was a “self-inflicted setback” though he had done something similar during his peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese, which was to exclude a major party to the war, the government of South Vietnam, which was soon defeated once the US withdrew its forces from Vietnam.

Kissinger deserves credit for his “shuttle diplomacy” to ease the hostilities between Egypt, Syria and Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but it was the one-time peanut farmer from Georgia, President Jimmy Carter, not Kissinger with his Harvard PhD in diplomatic history, who through his sheer force of will created the lasting peace between Egypt and Israel five years later at Camp David.

Kissinger and President Richard Nixon did open the door to China — in order to undercut relations between the communist Chinese and the leaders of the Soviet Union — re-establishing American relations with the Chinese in 1972. In many ways, this was Kissinger’s greatest achievement as it helped China to rise and become the US’ largest trading partner. The US and China are now the world’s two largest economies.

Yet China hasn’t liberalized as it has prospered. It has become increasingly authoritarian in recent years, putting into internment camps some more than a million Uyghurs, according to a UN report last year, extinguishing democracy in Hong Kong and creating a repressive mass surveillance state. The Biden administration concluded in its 2022 National Security Strategy that China is now “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.”

Kissinger traveled to China in June to perform a valedictory victory lap, where he was greeted as a returning hero by the Chinese regime, which he has often visited as the chairman of his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.

In some quarters, Kissinger is celebrated as a great diplomat, but his real legacy was creating a world that often sees, with good reason, that the United States will sometimes act in an amoral and duplicitous manner, and it is far from the “shining city on a hill” that it aspires to be and often imagines itself as.

Of course, being clear-eyed about national interests is the responsibility of any leader, but for Kissinger, the ends almost always justified the means. Other American policy makers, from FDR to George Marshall to Carter, showed that the national interest and a higher moral purpose are not incompatible.