Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, New America DC

Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War
EVENT

In his new book, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Fred Kaplan takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories—based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents—of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

Kaplan’s historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

Join the International Security Program for a conversation with Fred Kaplan about his new book, The Bomb. Follow the conversation by following @NewAmericaISP.

Participant:

Fred Kaplan, @fmkaplan
Author, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War
National-security columnist, Slate
Class of 2012 National Fellow

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America

When
Feb. 21, 2020
10:00 am – 11:30 am
Where
New America
740 15th St NW #900 Washington, D.C. 20005
RSVP

Trump faces revolt of the generals, CNN.com

Trump faces revolt of the generals
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.

(CNN)Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly said at an event at Drew University on Wednesday that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman did the right thing when he raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president in late July, according to a report in The Atlantic.

Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen
Kelly said that when Vindman heard Trump telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wanted investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, he was guided by what the US military teaches — that you report to your superiors actions which you believe to be wrong.
The Atlantic reported that Kelly explained, “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.'”
We have come to an extraordinary moment in the United States when some of the most senior retired military leaders in the country are publicly taking President Trump to task. Traditionally, such officers have not taken political positions, even in retirement. And now Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff in the White House — historically the cabinet official who spends the most time with the president — is one of those public critics.
While Kelly’s comments are the most wide-ranging public critique of the President and his policies by any of the generals who served in cabinet posts in the Trump administration, others have also spoken out.
A leading retired four-star officer, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told ABC News in December 2018 that he found Trump to be both immoral and dishonest.
Five months earlier, Adm. William McRaven, the architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, was even more blunt in the Washington Post, saying, “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”

In his comments this week, Kelly also poured cold water on one of Trump’s pet foreign policy projects, some kind of nuclear deal with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, saying that he “never did think (Kim) would do anything other than play us for a while.” And Kelly pushed back on Trump’s repeated claims that the media is “the enemy of the people,” saying, “We need a free media.”
Kelly is one of several generals who have served in high-profile posts in the Trump administration; among the others were former Secretary of Defense, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, and former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
Mattis and Kelly have a deep and longstanding relationship. During the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Mattis and Kelly led the 1st Marine Division into Baghdad. When they were working for President Trump they also worked together closely.
Now that Kelly has laid down a marker with his criticisms of Trump, might Mattis? I doubt it. Mattis ducked every opportunity to do so on his book tour in September to promote his memoir, “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead.” Mattis noted in his book, “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting presidents.”
As I reported in “Trump and His Generals,” at a party for Mattis in Washington, DC, to celebrate the publication of his memoir, Mary Louise Kelly, the co-anchor of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” asked Mattis what it would take for him to criticize President Trump publicly.

Could there ever come a time when he felt he had to speak out if he felt that the country was truly imperiled? Mattis became animated saying he would never do that, observing that, “Mike Flynn and John Allen—I could not disagree more strongly with what they did.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn had campaigned for Trump and had led chants of “Lock her up!” at the 2016 Republican convention, while Allen, a retired four-star Marine general like Mattis, had spoken at the Democratic convention the same year and had made his own spirited speech in favor of Hillary Clinton.
McMaster is working on his own book “Battlegrounds,” which is slated for publication this year, according to HarperCollins Publishers. On his book tour, McMaster will surely face some of the same questions that Mattis chose not to answer about Trump.

Exclusive: More drawings allege CIA’s horrific treatment of Abu Zubaydah, CNN.com

Exclusive: More drawings allege CIA’s horrific treatment of Abu Zubaydah
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

(CNN)They shock the conscience.

These drawings show the coercive interrogation techniques that Abu Zubaydah says were used on him by CIA interrogators when he was held in CIA secret prisons outside the US for four years after he was captured in Pakistan in 2002. It’s one thing to read about these coercive techniques, but it’s quite another to see Abu Zubaydah’s sketches of these alleged techniques, which were obtained by CNN.
Abu Zubaydah’s drawings show him:
Lying naked in a locked coffin-like box filled to the brim with water.
Strung up naked while being hosed with water in an air-conditioned, freezing room.
Being beaten with a bat.
Being water boarded by men in masks; a form of simulated drowning.
Being slammed up against a wall.
Having insects introduced into his cell.
The CIA declined to comment on these allegations of mistreatment by Abu Zubaydah.
According to Abu Zubaydah, the CIA used these techniques on him after he was captured in 2002. At the time he was believed to be a senior leader of al Qaeda. A number of these techniques were noted in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unclassified 2014 report on the CIA’s interrogation program, including “walling,” cramped confinement, stress positions, the use of insects and waterboarding.
In fact, it turned out Abu Zubaydah was a travel facilitator for the terrorist group, not one of its senior leaders. Indeed, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime and has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison since 2006 without charge. As I documented in my 2011 book, “The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda,” Abu Zubaydah was captured in a shoot-out in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002 and was later interrogated by the CIA.
03_AZ-12.16.19-Pics[1]
As I wrote in “The Longest War,” paraphrased here:
Abu Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al- Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was the first prisoner to be placed in a secret overseas CIA prison in Thailand. There Ali Soufan, an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, interrogated him. Soufan softened up Abu Zubaydah by calling him “Hani,” the childhood nickname his mother had used for him, a fact that he had gathered from intelligence files.
The approach started yielding quick results. When Abu Zubaydah was shown a series of photos of al Qaeda members by Soufan, he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as “Mukhtar,” meaning “the chosen” in Arabic.
This was a key to unraveling one of the great mysteries of the attacks on New York and Washington, because on a videotape recovered by American forces in Afghanistan a few months after 9/11, Osama bin Laden had referred to a “Mukhtar” as someone who had some sort of a plan for a “tall building in America.”
Abu Zubaydah had now identified Mukhtar to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Abu Zubaydah’s confirmation of Mohammed’s role in 9/11 was the single most important piece of information uncovered about al Qaeda after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and it was discovered during a standard interrogation, without recourse to any form of coercion.
Around 10 days after Soufan had first started interrogating Abu Zubaydah, and over the FBI agent’s vociferous objections, a CIA contractor stepped in to take over the interrogation. The FBI’s standard, noncoercive techniques were jettisoned and Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, subjected to “wallings,” deprived of sleep, slapped, locked in boxes, and repeatedly waterboarded, according to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report about the CIA prison program. After one waterboarding session Abu Zubaydah “became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth,” according to the report.
05-AZ-12.16.19-Pics[1]
In the top-secret memoranda prepared by the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel that authorized the coercive interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, he was variously described as “one of the highest ranking members of al Qaeda;” either the number three or four in the terror group, and as one of the planners of 9/11.
In fact, within weeks of Zubaydah’s capture, it became clear to at least some US officials that he was not “al Qaeda’s chief of operations,” as he had been publicly described by President Bush on June 6, 2002, but rather someone who was a logistician for militants in Pakistan on their way to training camps in Afghanistan.
Then-FBI Special Agent Daniel Coleman, a top al Qaeda expert at the bureau, explained to me that Abu Zubaydah was simply a “travel agent; he wasn’t a member of the inner circle” who would know about future operations, although he did know many members of al Qaeda by virtue of his role as a “safe house keeper.”
But believing that Abu Zubaydah was, in fact, a very big al Qaeda fish, White House lawyers authorized continuous sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours (one week), face slapping, extended nudity, dietary manipulation, confinement in cramped boxes, being slammed into a flexible wall, and waterboarding, according to the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Those techniques were supposed to induce “a state of learned helplessness” in the detainee, who would then supposedly be putty in his interrogator’s hands, according to the Senate report.
When I was reporting “The Longest War,” Soufan told me that he objected that Zubaydah was being subjected to “borderline torture.” Soufan was pulled out on the orders of his FBI superiors, who did not want the bureau’s agents to be involved in coercive interrogations. Abu Zubaydah was later “waterboarded” at least 83 times by the CIA, The New York Times reported in 2009, citing a Justice Department legal memorandum from 2005.
In the end, the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah provided no specific leads on any plots, although clearly his role as an al Qaeda logistician did give him insights into the organization and its personnel. The CIA destroyed the videotapes of the coercive interrogations of Abu Zubaydah in 2005, according to the Senate report. It’s not too far-fetched to assume that, had the tapes ever been made public, they would have been quite damaging to the agency.

What remains are Zubaydah’s own drawings of the coercive interrogation techniques that he says were used on him. Some were first published by ProPublica, and others more recently by The New York Times.
CNN obtained another tranche of Abu Zubaydah’s drawings, which are published here for the first time. They are the most comprehensive visualizations of the coercive techniques that he says that were used against him.
Pretrial hearings at Guantanamo are underway in the separate case against five defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks. The CIA’s coercive interrogations at its secret prisons have been the subject of days of testimony at those hearings in Guantanamo, and defense attorneys have argued that any evidence gathered from detainees gained by coercive techniques is inadmissible.
The CIA declined to comment on the newly obtained drawings showing the alleged coercive interrogation techniques.
Abu Zubaydah’s drawings are a vivid reminder that in the frenzied immediate post-9/11 years, the administration of President George W. Bush authorized coercive interrogations that the current CIA director, Gina Haspel, has testified that the agency would never revive.

Al Qaeda in the 2020s: Threat or Anachronism? CFR, DC

Reminder: CFR 2/11 DC Roundtable: Al Qaeda in the 2020s: Threat or Anachronism?
Wed, Jan 29, 2020 10:32 am
Bruce Hoffman (jware@cfr.org)To:you Details

Council on Foreign Relations

New Strategies for Countering Terrorism Roundtable Series

Al Qaeda in the 2020s: Threat or Anachronism?

Speakers

Peter Bergen, Vice President and Director, International Security, Future of War, and Fellows Programs, New America

Katherine Zimmerman, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Presider

Bruce Hoffman, Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, Council on Foreign Relations

Dear Mr. Bergen:

As we enter a new year, al-Qaeda continues to buck the trend for terrorist group lifespans. Now in its fourth decade, the group’s core remains intact, while managing increasing numbers of affiliates in Africa and Asia. But do al-Qaeda and its branches still pose active and imminent threats to the United States and its allies? Join al-Qaeda and terrorism experts Peter Bergen and Katherine Zimmerman as we discuss the group and the threat it presents in the 2020s.

To attend, please click on the Register or Decline button. For more information, please contact Jacob Ware at jware@cfr.org or 202.509.8707.

Sincerely,

Bruce Hoffman
Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security
Council on Foreign Relations

Invitee
Peter Bergen, New America

Date and Time
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
12:00 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. Lunch
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Discussion

Location
Council on Foreign Relations
1777 F Street, NW
Washington, DC 20006

This meeting is not for attribution.
Register or Decline

This invitation is not transferable.
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America’s Other Muslims, New America DC

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America’s Other Muslims
Imam W.D. Mohammed and the Making of American Islam
Event

American Muslim Revivalist and son of the original Nation of Islam leader, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) made a substantial contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical thought of American Muslims. Yet his role in America’s oldest Muslim community has received little attention in the contemporary context. In his new book America’s Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam, Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores the story of Imam W.D. Muhammad and details the intersection of the Africana experience and its encounter with race, religion, and Islamic reform that it encapsulates. Fraser-Rahim argues that his interpretations of Islam were not only American – they were also modern and responded to global trends in Islamic thought.

Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is the executive director of Quilliam International and an assistant professor at the Citadel, in addition to being the author of America’s Other Muslims. Prior to his current role, he served as a Senior Program Officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he led their Horn of Africa program and served as an expert on violent extremism issues globally. He earned his Ph.D. in 2017 from Howard University in African Studies, with a focus on Islamic thought and on violent extremism issues.

Follow the conversation online using #OtherMuslims and following @NewAmericaISP.

Participant:

Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, @mfraserrahim
Author, America’s Other Muslims
Executive Director, Qulliam International

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America
When
Feb. 4, 2020
1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Where
New America
740 15th St NW #900 Washington, D.C. 20005
RSVP

“Making the Case for Sustained U.S. Engagement in a Transitioning Afghanistan.” CSIS, DC

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – Discussion

DC Daybook – Policy & News Events

February 5, 2020 Wednesday 09:30 AM GMT

Section: WAGEN; Foreign Affairs

Length: 122 words

Body

TIME: 9:30

EVENT: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) holds a discussion on “Making the Case for Sustained U.S. Engagement in a Transitioning Afghanistan.”

PARTICIPANTS: Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla.; Peter Bergen, vice president of global studies at New America; Rina Amiri, senior fellow at the New York University Center for Global Affairs; former U.S. Agency for International Development Executive Vice President for Programs Earl Gast, executive vice president for programs at Creative Associates International

DATE: February 5, 2020

LOCATION: CSIS, 1616 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.

CONTACT: Andrew Schwartz, 202-775-3242; http://www.csis.org [Note: Media must RSVP to aschwartz@csis.org] (+WAGE002+)

Classification

Tracy Walder – The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists with Peter Bergen, Politics and Prose, DC

Tracy Walder – The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists — in conversation with Peter Bergen
Saturday, February 29, 2020 – 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Walder’s first job after college was with the CIA, where she worked as a staff operations officer at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. In this engaging account, she describes monitoring al-Qaeda cells with drones, tracking chemical terrorists, debriefing prisoners who had vowed never to talk to a woman, and following terrorist trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East to stop chemical attacks. She also saw a terror chart she’d compiled manipulated by White House staff to convey misleading information, and in her second position, as special agent at the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, she both helped capture one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught in the U.S. and experienced rampant sexism. Walder will be in conversation with Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America.

This event is free to attend with no reservation required. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.
Click here for more information.

5015 Connecticut Ave NW Washington DC 20008

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The Unexpected Spy: From the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking Down Some of the World’s Most Notorious Terrorists (Hardcover)
By Tracy Walder, Jessica Anya Blau
$27.99
9781250230980
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St. Martin’s Press – February 25th, 2020
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Discussion w Asst. Atty General John Demers, Woodrow Wilson Center, DC

Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani is beginning to look like a reckless gamble, CNN.com

Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani is beginning to look like a reckless gamble
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 5:27 PM ET, Mon January 6, 2020
Iranian mourners vow ‘harsh revenge’ at Soleimani funeral

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)The targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani is arguably the most consequential American intervention in the Middle East since George W. Bush authorized the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Was this a bold move or a reckless gamble?

We are beginning to get an answer to this question. Already the killing of Soleimani precipitated Iran to announce on Sunday that it was suspending commitments it made in its 2015 nuclear agreement that capped its centrifuge allowance.
Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency had repeatedly found that Iran was adhering to that agreement.

Now there is the prospect that the mullahs who run Iran could try to seek a nuclear weapon.
An Iran armed with nuclear weapons is clearly not preferable to an Iran without nuclear weapons, the latter of which we’ve seen since 2015 when the nuclear agreement was signed.
Also on Sunday the Iraqi Parliament set in motion the process to expel American troops from Iraq, which has been a long-term goal of the Iranians.
The last time that American troops pulled out of Iraq was at the end of 2011 under the Obama administration. Three years later ISIS took over much of Iraq.

Trump had a bizarre reaction to the vote by the Iraqi Parliament telling reporters on Sunday; “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before, ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.” Iraq is a US ally that was instrumental in the defeat of ISIS.
The Iraqi protests against Iranian influence in Iraq that took place in November have now been replaced by protests against the United States.
Similarly, recent protests in Iran against the regime have been replaced by protests against the United States.
And now we are teetering on the edge of a war between the US and Iran. Iran’s top military adviser told CNN that revenge would be taken for Soleimani’s death by attacks on American “military sites.”
And there are many of those to choose from in the region, for instance, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to name just three countries where Iran wields considerable influence.
Meanwhile Trump has taken to Twitter to threaten war crimes against the Iranians in the form of strikes aimed at Iran’s cultural patrimony; a form of warfare that we associate with ISIS, not the US military.
Trump has created his biggest foreign policy crisis yet
Trump has created his biggest foreign policy crisis yet
We are now exactly where Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, worried that we would be.
During the course of reporting my new book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos” I discovered that Mattis repeatedly stonewalled or slow-rolled military options on Iran requested by the White House fearing that Trump might embroil the United States in a war with the Iranians.
Mattis told senior officials in the Trump administration, “We have to make sure reason trumps impulse.”

White House officials realized that Mattis believed Trump was a loose cannon and that Mattis didn’t want to enable any bad decisions by providing military options that Trump could then seize upon.
According to the New York Times, this is exactly what happened with the decision to kill Soleimani. Soleimani’s killing was on a menu of options presented to Trump following the killing of a US contractor last month in Iraq that the US government blamed on an Iran-backed Shia militia.
The President seized on this most extreme option leaving top Pentagon officials “stunned’ and “flabbergasted,” according to the Times.
Also, Trump can no longer draw on the considerable expertise about the Middle East possessed by Mattis, as well as his former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, and his former national security adviser, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, all of whom served in Iraq. These generals all resigned or were pushed out of office because they were willing to disagree with Trump about policy matters.
G

Mattis’s replacement as Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, has no known expertise in the Middle East, nor does Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, nor does his national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Nonetheless, Trump now seems increasingly confident in his own military judgments.

Trump should appoint advisers at the White House who can give him informed, expert advice about the likely fallout from his actions, which don’t seem to have been well-considered when it came to ordering the death of Soleimani.
Would Trump listen to them? Who knows, but at least he would get a sense of all the different scenarios that might play out after such a consequential decision.

Trump’s head-spinning gyrations on Iran are confusing everyone, CNN.com

Trump’s head-spinning gyrations on Iran are confusing everyone
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

(CNN)For the moment the United States seems to have pulled back from a shooting war with Iran. The Iranians conducted limited strikes on American targets in Iraq Tuesday causing no casualties.

President Donald Trump then gave a somewhat conciliatory speech on Wednesday observing that, “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.”
But given Trump’s consistent inconsistency this is surely not the end of the story. The President’s gyrations on the Middle East have been head-spinning and this week’s developments are only the latest example.
Trump has gone back and forth on Iran, for instance: authorizing the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani last week in Iraq, while also at the last minute calling off a military operation in June against targets in Iran, and then offering to sit down with the Iranians without preconditions.
Trump's decision to kill Soleimani is beginning to look like a reckless gamble
Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani is beginning to look like a reckless gamble
Discussing Iran on Wednesday, Trump even bizarrely asked “NATO to become much more involved in the Middle East process. ” Good luck with that! Trump unilaterally pulled out of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal that was painstakingly negotiated along with three other key NATO member states — the United Kingdom, France and Germany — and he has berated many NATO countries for not spending enough of their GDP on defense. It’s hard to imagine NATO countries queuing up to get involved in the Iran morass, which is largely of Trump’s own making.
Trump’s gyrations on Iran are similar to his reversals on Syria: Trump said that he would pull all American soldiers out of Syria on two occasions in the past year, only to reverse himself twice.
What Trump doesn't get about Iran's tactics
What Trump doesn’t get about Iran’s tactics
Similarly, Trump authorized peace talks with the Taliban, which he then abruptly terminated in September and he then reversed himself again in recent weeks, so those talks are now back on the table.
As a result of these myriad reversals, it’s hard for both America’s allies and enemies to discern any stable strategy in the greater Middle East.
At the same time, three years into his presidency President Donald Trump trusts himself to make the crucial military decisions while Trump’s war cabinet is largely made up of men with scant experience about warfare or expertise in the Middle East, people who lack the standing and influence with Trump to keep him on a consistent course.
Trump needs the 'deep state' more than ever
Trump needs the ‘deep state’ more than ever
After he was elected, Trump — the first president in history who had neither served in the US military nor held public office — relied heavily on the military to supply his key national security officials.
Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General Jim Mattis, had run Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees all of America’s wars in the greater Middle East.
Trump’s National Security Adviser. H.R. McMaster had fought with distinction in the first Gulf War and in the Iraq War as well as serving a long tour in Afghanistan.
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General John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, was Mattis’ deputy when they led their Marines into Baghdad in 2003. Kelly later ran Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees all US military operations south of the US-Mexico border.
By the end of 2018 Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster were all gone because they were willing to disagree with Trump about matters of policy ranging from how to treat NATO allies, to how to best handle Vladimir Putin or how to best contain Iran.
Mattis wanted to stay in the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration not only because Iran was sticking to the terms of the agreement but, as I found when I was reporting my new book “Trump and His Generals,” because the deal had been negotiated together with close American allies—the British, French, and Germans. In Mattis’s view, if the United States had made an agreement, you should stick to it.
Trump’s replacements for Kelly, Mattis, and McMaster are in a different league than the generals who helped guide the first two years of the Trump administration. Mark Esper is Secretary of Defense, Mick Mulvaney is “acting” chief of staff and former hostage negotiator Robert O’Brien is national security adviser. Esper is a West Point graduate and served in the first Gulf War; he was on active duty for 10 years. Still, compared to their predecessors, they collectively have scant expertise in the Middle East or in running wars, and none of them have the experience or clout to challenge the commander in chief as their predecessors regularly did.
This has left Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as the dominant voice in Trump’s war cabinet. Pompeo has long been an Iran hawk, which seems to be in part because of his Christian fundamentalist views. Pompeo publicly said last year that it’s possible that God sent Trump to protect Israel from the Iranian menace. God certainly works in mysterious ways.
Trump ran on a platform that he would get America out of its endless wars in the Middle East. Now he has plunged headlong into a conflict with Iran with consequences that no one can predict, including Trump himself.