Following the September 11th terror attacks, US counterterrorism efforts have largely focused on international Islamist terrorist organizations based overseas. Yet since 2001, domestic terrorism has killed more Americans than international terrorism. Law enforcement officials have noted in Congressional testimony this year that there has been a recent rise in domestic terror cases, a large proportion of which involve extremist ideologies such as white supremacism. Policymakers are facing critical questions: What is driving the apparent rise in domestic terrorism? What transnational linkages have formed between violent extremists? And how should the global campaign against Islamist terrorism inform our responses to other forms of extremism?
Please join us for an on-the-record discussion with Peter Bergen, national security analyst for CNN, Vice President of Global Studies and Fellows at New America, and author of The United States of Jihad, and Arie Perliger, Professor and Director of Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has written about political extremism and terrorism in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Dr. William Rosenau, a terrorist innovation expert at CNA and author of Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, will moderate. The conversation will explore whether and how the United States should re-think the balance between external and internal threats in its counterterrorism efforts and allocation of resources. It will also seek to uncover comparative insights that could inform law enforcement responses to extremism and domestic terrorism in the United States.
This event is open to the public but registration is required. Please register no later than COB on September 5th if you would like to attend. If you have any questions, please contact CNA_NSS@cna.org. Media attending the event should register and contact Elizabeth Cutler at cutlere@cna.org.
Limited parking is available in the pay-for-parking garage located behind the CNA building on 11th Street North. The CNA building is one block from the Clarendon Metro station. Please bring government-issued photo ID for check-in at the front desk. Refreshments will be available.
The CNA National Security Seminar series is an initiative to bring together thought-leaders from across the U.S. government, academic and research institutions, the private sector, and U.S. partner nations to share their expertise, facilitate discussions, and contribute to an on-going dialogue about critical national security issues. CNA is uniquely positioned to examine the range of these issues through the Center for Naval Analyses, which supports the Department of Defense, and the Institute for Public Research, which supports homeland security, public safety, and emergency operations at all levels of govern
Al Qaeda Today, 9/ 11 Memorial Museum, NYC
Al-Qaeda Today Tuesday, November 19, 7:00 p.m. Over eight years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, the State Department recently declared al-Qaeda to be as much of a threat to the U.S. as it ever has been. As a complement to the 9/11 Memorial Museum’s upcoming exhibition, al-Qaeda experts Peter Bergen, Bruce Hoffman, Mary Galligan and Mark Stout discuss the future of the terrorist group.
The threat to America that Trump ignores, CNN.com
The huge threat to America that Trump ignores
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and David Sterman
Updated 5:55 PM ET, Sun August 4,
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” David Sterman is a senior policy analyst at New America. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)The Trump administration’s National Counterterrorism Strategy correctly states that the country has “long faced a persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not motivated by a radical Islamist ideology but are instead motivated by other forms of violent extremism.”
Saturday’s attack in El Paso, Texas, which is being treated as a case of domestic terrorism by federal authorities, according to the US attorney for the Western District of Texas, is a reminder of that long history and its particular threat today.
To prevent future attacks, the United States will need to expand on the work being done by law enforcement to combat right-wing terrorism, and President Donald Trump will need to recognize that the threat posed by far-right terrorists is of a similar scope to that posed by jihadist terrorists.
Trump should also use the bully pulpit of his presidency to attack the ideological underpinnings of right-wing violence rather than stoking its flames.
On Saturday, authorities say, a 21-year-old white man shot and killed 20 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Minutes before the attack, police say, they believe the shooter posted a “manifesto” on 8chan, an online message board often featuring racist postings, about his support for the terrorist who killed 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
Just as school shooters learn from other school shooters, terrorists learn from other terrorists. Notably, the terrorist who carried out the Christchurch attack had posted a manifesto to 8chan just before he carried out the attacks at the mosques.
The latest online manifesto — a four-page document — referred to a “Hispanic invasion” of Texas as the rationale for an imminent terrorist attack in El Paso.
Trump has also described immigrants coming across the southern border as an “invasion.” However, the writer of the document says his views about immigrants predated Trump becoming president.
The attack in El Paso, if the investigation proves it to be the work of a white nationalist, would be far from the only lethal far-right attack in recent years. Since 9/11, terrorists motivated by far-right ideology, including white supremacy, anti-government and anti-abortion views, have killed 107 people in the United States, according to New America’s research. Meanwhile, jihadist militants have killed 104 people in the United States since those attacks.
In other words, far-right terrorists have killed similar numbers as jihadist terrorists have in the United States in the past 18 years.
Additionally, according to New America’s data, most far-right terrorist attacks since 9/11 have killed relatively small numbers of people. In the past two years, however, terrorists inspired by far-right ideology have been carrying out mass-casualty attacks. And, if it’s confirmed that far-right ideology was behind the attack in El Paso, it is the most lethal far-right terrorist attack in the post-9/11 period.
Less than a year ago, a shooter who was inspired by anti-immigrant conspiracies killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack against Jews in American history.
Across a wide spectrum of ideologies and beliefs, terrorist violence is rising in the United States. Terrorists inspired by ideological misogyny have, for instance, killed eight people in the United States in recent years. One shooter killed six in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 in attacks he framed in terms of his hatred for women. And last year, a gunman killed two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, using the same rationale. Similarly, individuals inspired by black nationalist ideology have killed eight people in the United States in the past three years.
Meanwhile, since 9/11, no foreign terrorist organization has carried out a deadly attack in the United States. Every one of the perpetrators of the 13 deadly jihadist attacks that have killed 104 people in the United States since 9/11 was a US citizen or legal permanent resident.
Yet the Trump administration continues to fail to recognize the true nature of the terrorist threat in the United States. Its answer to terrorism was suspending travel from largely Muslim countries that would not have stopped a single deadly terrorist attack since 9/11.
To its credit, law enforcement is investigating far-right terrorist threats. According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, there have been about 100 domestic-terrorism-related arrests this year.
That said, more needs to be done, as underlined by the statement on Sunday from six of the nation’s top former counterterrorism officials who served under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump. It reads, “it has become abundantly clear over many months now that more must be done to address acts of violence driven by extremist views of all types, including acts of domestic terrorism. We call on our government to make addressing this form of terrorism as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11. … We simply cannot wait any longer.” Indeed.
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of four books about al-Qaeda including “Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)A US official confirmed to CNN that Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son, is believed dead and that the United States had a role in his death.
Cathy Scott-Clark, a British journalist who has written extensively about the bin Ladens and is in touch with the family, confirmed Hamza’s death to me.
Hamza, believed to be 30, was being groomed to be a next-generation leader of al Qaeda.
Hamza had appeared in al Qaeda propaganda videos since he was a child. In recent years, he also had started releasing statements that positioned himself as one of al Qaeda’s ideologues — for instance, Hamza released an audio statement in 2016 calling for unity among the jihadist militants fighting in Syria.
Earlier this year the US State Department announced a $1 million reward for information about Hamza
Despite Hamza’s increasing public profile there is no evidence to suggest that he played a successful operational role in al Qaeda organizing terrorist attacks around the world. Indeed, there hasn’t been a lethal attack by al Qaeda in the West since a terrorist operation in London that killed 52 commuters on the London transportation system in 2005. Hamza bin Laden, fortunately, did nothing to reverse this.
The night that Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad Pakistan, the US Navy SEAL operators who carried out the mission were carrying cards with the names and descriptions of who was likely to be in the compound that night. Among them was Hamza bin Laden.
Hamza, however, was not there that night so he survived, unlike another of bin Laden’s sons, Khalid, who was killed during the operation.
For much of the decade after 9/11, Hamza lived under a form of house arrest in Iran until he was released by the Iranian regime in 2010.
From Iran, Hamza made his way to the tribal areas of Waziristan in Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, an al Qaeda stronghold. The tribal areas have long been in the crosshairs of the CIA, which has launched more than four hundred strikes in the region, according to a count by New America, a research institution.
At bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad the SEALs recovered thousands of documents, including letters from bin Laden that showed that al Qaeda’s leader had been communicating with Hamza.
Nelly Lahoud, a fellow at New America, has examined all of the documents recovered from the Abbottabad compound for a book she is writing. Lahoud says that Hamza wrote to his father that he was eager to receive military training after which he planned to go and fight in Afghanistan against “God’s enemies.”
In one of the recovered letters bin Laden fretted to an aide about the possibility of a CIA drone strike killing his son, writing, “Make sure to tell Hamza that I am of the opinion he should get out of Waziristan.” Hamza should decamp for the Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar, bin Laden advised.
It seems quite likely that Hamza never followed this advice and remained in Pakistan’s tribal regions where he was likely picked off by a CIA drone strike. There have been a total of 13 drone strikes in Pakistan during the Trump administration, according to New America’s count.
Trump clashes with a truth teller and replaces him with a partisan sycophant, CNN.com
Trump clashes with a truth teller and replaces him with a partisan sycophant
(CNN)Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, is resigning, according to a tweet on Sunday from President Donald Trump.
Coats’ departure was utterly predictable because he performed his job, which was to tell the truth. Unfortunately, his boss didn’t like those truths.
On many of the key foreign policy and national security issues of the Trump administration — Iran, ISIS, North Korea and Russia — the director of national intelligence and the President fundamentally disagreed about the facts. So naturally Trump is nominating Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex) as his candidate to replace Coats — with the principal qualification for the job appearing to be his unquestioning fealty to Trump.
The assessment is an annual report of the 17 American intelligence agencies are overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. The report generally attracts scant political controversy since it is widely understood to be an objective recounting of the threats that the United States faces.
2019’s Worldwide Threat Assessment would be different. Coats testified that North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capability because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.”
Trump was said to be “enraged” by the coverage of Coats’ testimony, which he believed undercut his efforts with the North Koreans to have them agree to complete “denuclearization.”
Experts on North Korea almost universally believe that it is quite doubtful that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will give up all his nukes.
Iran and ISIS
Coats also testified that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was working: “We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device.” If that was the case, why was Trump constantly claiming that Iran was a big threat and the Iran nuclear agreement was a terrible deal?
The morning after Coat’s testimony, Trump let loose a tweetstorm writing, “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”
The President also tweeted, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
Once Trump starts publicly contradicting his top aides they are generally toast. It would only be a matter of the time and the method for the inevitable parting of ways.
In the threat assessment, Coats also explained that, “ISIS still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria, and it maintains eight branches, more than a dozen networks, and thousands of dispersed supporters around the world, despite significant leadership and territorial losses.” This contradicted Trump’s frequent claims that ISIS was dead.
The Russia clash
All this came around six months after Trump and Coats had publicly disagreed about Russia. On July 16, 2018 Trump met in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a two-hour meeting that included no other officials.
At a news conference in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, standing next to Putin, instead of endorsing the unanimous finding of US intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Trump observed that Putin was “extremely strong and powerful in his denial … He just said ‘it’s not Russia.’ I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump then dumped on his own country saying, “I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish… I think we’re all to blame.” In fact, as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had discovered, the ones to blame were a group of officers in Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU.
Within hours of Trump’s news conference Coats released a statement pushing back on Trump saying, “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy …” It was an unusually direct public rebuke from Coats, a longtime conservative Republican.
Three days later, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed Coats at the Aspen Security Forum. In the middle of the interview, a producer handed a note to Mitchell that flagged some breaking news. Mitchell told Coats that Trump had just invited Putin to the White House in the fall.
Coats looked so surprised that it looked like he might be just pulling Mitchell’s leg. Of course, the director of national intelligence knew that Putin was going to be visiting the White House!
The Aspen audience began to realize that Coats wasn’t joking when he said, “Say that again?”
Coats then added with a soupçon of sarcasm, “Okay …That’s going to be special.”
Trump is nominating Ratcliffe, a three-term House member and former federal prosecutor who previously was the mayor of Heath, Texas, population just under 9,000, to be the next director of national intelligence.
Coats, by contrast, had served in the Senate and House for two and half decades and was also US ambassador to Germany for four years.
A key qualification for the job seems to be the excoriating attack Ratcliffe made on special counsel Robert Mueller when he testified last week about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Radcliffe’s attack seemed largely designed to appeal to the audience of one that he knew would be watching.
When Coats was in the Senate, he served with a senator who famously observed that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Trump seems to want to reverse Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known dictum so it now is, “I’m entitled to my own facts, which will match my opinions.”
2020 IFDA Dairy Forum, Scottsdale AZ
The Dairy Forum, organized by the International Dairy Foods Association will take place from 26th January to the 29th January 2020 at the The Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, USA. The conference will cover areas like food safety & defense, dairy policy & economics, environment & sustainability and many more.
The ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US is crumbling, CNN.com
The ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US is crumbling
(CNN)There is an old joke that in Washington “the definition of a gaffe is telling the truth in public.”
Sir Kim Darroch, the UK ambassador to the US, has brilliantly — if inadvertently — demonstrated the truth of this dictum, with cables that he wrote to senior officials in London that have since leaked. In them, he described the Trump White House as “uniquely dysfunctional” and “inept.”
This is hardly news. Authors Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff have comprehensively covered the dysfunction at the Trump White House in their best-selling books.
The conservative military historian and CNN analyst Max Boot writes a column in the Washington Post that makes pretty much the same point on a regular basis.
Characteristically, Trump has reacted to the leak of the cables with an all-out attack on Darroch, whom he called “a very stupid guy.”
But the real issue is not the embarrassment caused by the cables, but the true state of the connection between the United States and the UK — which has been called the “special relationship” ever since former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the phrase in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946. By almost any measure, that special relationship is now defunct — politically, militarily and economically, even if it still lives on at a vestigial, cultural level.
Sure, Trump may extol the virtues of Queen Elizabeth II, which is all part of his long fascination with the royal family. In the 1980s, Trump reportedly circulated a rumor that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were considering buying an apartment in Trump Tower. Shortly after Diana died in a car accident in Paris in 1997, Trump told an interviewer he would have had a “shot” at dating her. Nice!
But beyond his affection for the royals, Trump has no hesitation in dumping on British leaders. He has repeatedly denigrated the outgoing UK Prime Minister Theresa May. On Monday, Trump tweeted, “I have been very critical about the way the UK and Prime Minister Theresa May handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created.”
On Tuesday, Trump described May’s handling of Brexit as “foolish.”
For the moment, Trump treats former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the front-runner to replace May as Prime Minister, with a measure of respect, but that can change on a dime.
Recall that Trump described incoming US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as a “world-class player.” After Trump fired Tillerson, he called him “dumb as a rock.”
Beyond all that, Britain itself is simply no longer one of the great powers upon which the “special relationship” was in part predicated.
Trump will leave office in either January 2021 or January 2025, and his impact will eventually recede — but however Brexit goes down, it will inflict lasting damage on the British economy.
Since the Brexit vote three years ago, the pound has lost around 20% of its value against the dollar.
A “hard” Brexit from the European Union in October, which Johnson has left open as a possibility, would likely be a catastrophe for the British economy. On Tuesday, the pound fell to a two-year low because of fears of such a “hard” Brexit.
Meanwhile the British military, which used to “rule the waves,” has decreased in size every year since 1952 and now numbers less than 150,000 personnel, which is smaller than the size of the US Marine Corps.
Trump may be “inept,” as Ambassador Darroch cabled to London, but he presides over the largest economy in the world and the most capable military, and whoever succeeds Trump will likely have the same good fortune.
Whoever succeeds Theresa May will preside over an economy in which overseas investment is at its lowest level since the 2008 crash, and a military that can barely deploy overseas.
The US-UK special relationship survives only on fumes because of various forms of nostalgia symbolized by the Queen — but it isn’t really so special anymore, as the British military continues to shrink, and its economy appears poised to take a bath with Brexit moving forward.
When Churchill, the son of an English lord and an American heiress, trumpeted the special relationship in 1946, Britain and the United States had together just defeated the Nazis.
That was all a long time ago. And that kind of partnership today seems as distant as the presidency of Donald Trump is from the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Reporting on Civilian Casualties in the War Against ISIS, New America DC
Reporting on Civilian Casualties in the War Against ISIS
EVENT
Photo credit: Kainoa Little, April 12, 2017 in Mosul’s Old City after visiting a Federal Police unit on the front line
Reporters at U.S. media outlets strongly believed that civilian harm should be a central component of war coverage. Yet, civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes have been patchily covered during the war against so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. This is one of the key findings in a new report by Airwars entitled,News in Brief: U.S. Media Coverage of Civilian Harm in the War Against ISIS. Authored by investigative journalist Alexa O’Brien, the report draws on new research and interviews with reporters at major U.S. media outlets, providing editors with recommendations for improved coverage.News in Briefis the result of a six month study funded by the Reva and David Logan Foundation in the U.S. and the J. Leon Philanthropy Council in the U.K.
To discuss the report and its findings, Alexa O’Brien is joined by Chris Woods, executive director of Airwars, a not-for-profit organization which tracks civilian harm claims in Iraq, Syria, and Libya (where it partners with New America), as well as by Azmat Khan, an ASU/New America Future of War Fellow and author of “The Uncounted,” a New York Times Magazine investigation into civilian casualties in Iraq, and by Greg Jaffe, national security correspondent for the Washington Post.
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)In 2007, Jared Kushner’s family company purchased 666 Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan office building, for a then-record $1.8 billion at the height of the real estate boom. It was widely regarded as one of the worst deals in Manhattan real estate history, since Kushner could never secure enough tenants to cover his mortgage payments.
Now Kushner has moved onto much bigger deals — a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Except it’s all a lot more complex than the world of Manhattan real estate. The deal that Kushner is now offering the Palestinians makes his disastrous Fifth Avenue purchase look like the Dutch purchase of Manhattan from the Indians in 1626 — for the equivalent of not much more than $100.
That’s because Kushner is offering the Palestinians bupkis as his opening bid. You read that right. Kushner’s opening bid for one of the most important real estate deals in the 21st century is: Palestinians, you get nothing.
Yes, Kushner’s economic plan for the Palestinians, announced on Saturday, is $50 billion of investment. But no country, including the United States, has actually put a dime of that money on the table.
Talk about a leveraged real estate investment! This is like Kushner’s father-in-law’s real estate play where investors paid him to put the Trump name on a building, while he put up no money up himself.
And as far as we can discern from reports about what else might be in the tightly held Kushner plan, there is no plan for an actual Palestinian state nor for the return of any Palestinian lands annexed by the Israelis. In fact, quite the reverse — the plan will likely try to codify Israel’s annexations of Palestinian territory.
Just imagine if the British in 1947 had told Jewish leaders in Palestine (now modern-day Israel), “We have a really great deal for you: We will offer you a lot of nonexistent investment, and we will also prevent you from gaining your own state.” How would the Jewish leadership have then reacted?
Kushner and his negotiating team seem to have internalized the Israeli positions that there are no credible partners on the Palestinian side to deal with, whether it’s the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. Meanwhile, Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel, challenging the very notion that peace negotiations are feasible at this time.
Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians are boycotting the much-ballyhooed Palestinian investment conference that Kushner is hosting this week in Bahrain.
Palestinian Munib al Masri, a billionaire industrialist, told the Washington Post that he promptly rejected an invitation to the conference because, “Our problem is a political one, not an economic one. We have dignity, we have leadership, and they don’t want to go because they believe America is not an honest broker.”
In other words, Kushner’s peace plan is predictably dead on arrival — though the collapse of any real peace deal has been a work in progress since the beginning of the Trump administration.
But Palestinians also regard Jerusalem as their capital, while Muslims at large look upon it as a sacred city — since the Prophet Mohammed was supposed to have ascended into heaven from the al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem. And this was, in large part, the reason that the United States embassy had remained in Tel Aviv.
Friedman’s rhetoric doesn’t help matters. An ultra-Zionist, he has called supporters of the progressive Jewish group J Street “worse than kapos” for supporting a two-state solution. For reference, kapos were the Jews in Nazi concentration camps who guarded other prisoners.
Friedman also said this month that the Trump administration could support Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.
On May 15, 2018, Friedman — together with Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump — opened the new US embassy in Jerusalem alongside the buoyant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was so close to the Kushner family that he had once slept in Jared Kushner’s childhood bedroom in New Jersey.
Kushner declared, “Peace is within reach.” While the Kushners were celebrating peace, only 50 miles away, Israeli forces in Gaza were simultaneously killing scores of Palestinians who were protesting the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. (Israel said it was responding to what it called terror attacks.)
After the embassy move, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared that Kushner and his negotiating team, which includes Friedman, could no longer be considered honest brokers.
But the Trump administration kept driving stakes into the heart of the Kushner peace plan with punitive measures against the Palestinians — such as defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency that educates and feeds millions of displaced Palestinians. It also closed an office that represented Palestinian interests in Washington, DC.
Palestinian officials stopped meeting with Kushner. What was the point?
King Salman, the Saudi monarch, repeatedly condemned the US embassy move to Jerusalem. The Saudi monarchy has awarded itself the title, “Custodian of the Holy Places.” It is a title that the Saudis take seriously, and there is no way they are going to play along with Kushner’s peace plan if the Trump administration seems intent on ceding the holy city of Jerusalem to the Israelis.
The fantasy that the Saudis could bribe or strong-arm the Palestinians to accept a Kushner-constructed peace agreement is now officially dead.
A further confirmation that Kushner’s peace plan has no chance of success came after an election in Israel on April 9, 2019, after which Netanyahu was unable to form a coalition government and had to call for new elections to be held in September.
It was inconceivable that Kushner or Trump would put forward any peace plan that required even the most minimal of concessions from the Israelis during an election season when their key foreign policy goal was the maintenance in power of the right-wing government of Netanyahu, which has not the slightest interest in moving forward on any plan that gives the Palestinians anything even approximating their own state.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, said this month that the Trump administration will likely push back the announcement of the overall peace plan until November.
If you believe that Kushner is going to facilitate a peace agreement at the Bahrain conference or at any time in the foreseeable future, I have a truly great deal on an office building at 666 Fifth Avenue that I can broker for you.
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New Americaand professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies atArizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articlesat CNN. This article has been updated to reflect the latest news.
(CNN)At the last possible minute President Trump did something smart on Iran Thursday night: He pulled back strikes on three Iranian targets that could have killed as many as 150 people because, he tweeted, it wasn’t a “proportionate” response to Iran bringing down an unarmed US drone.
Indeed, that is a good reason.
There are also other good reasons. First, it is Congress that is supposed to authorize American wars. Such a potentially lethal strike surely would need, at an absolute minimum, congressional buy-in, and more properly it would need an actual congressional resolution for the use of force. US presidents have sometimes disputed Congress’s authority over military strikes, but congressional approval first is how things should work, according to the congressionally asserted but never presidentially signed War Powers Resolution of 1973.
Second, an escalatory strike of this scale could pose serious risks to Americans in the Middle East. Unlike the Syrian regime against which Trump launched air strikes in 2017 and 2018, Iran has the capacity to launch significant retaliatory operations across the Middle East. Iran and its proxies have major presences in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.Iran also has thousands of missiles with ranges of up to 1,500 miles that can hit targets around the region, including Israel, and can reach as far as southeastern Europe.
The more hardline elements in Iran could easily unleash their forces or proxies against American troops in both Iraq and Syria or against American commercial targets around the Middle East.
There was a sneak preview of this potential approach on Wednesday when a rocket landed at the headquarters of American oil giant ExxonMobil in southern Iraq. Although it’s not clear who launched the rocket, it is reasonable to assume it was the work of a Shia militia aligned with Iran.
Third, Iran also isn’t Syria, where Trump launched strikes in 2017 and 2018 after the Syrian regime allegedly used chemical weapons against its own people. Those strikes enforced a significant international norm against the use of chemical weapons and had considerable support around the world. Indeed, the British and the French both participated in the 2018 strikes.
There would have been scant support for strikes against Iran by America’s European allies, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, because the Iranians have been sticking to the terms of the agreement.
Trump largely created the crisis with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal last year and imposing tough new sanctions on the Iranians with no real Plan B for what would come next, once the Iranians started pushing back against the sanctions that are crippling their economy.
That said, even though Trump’s war cabinet is now led by two hardliners on Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, to his great credit Trump has now walked back potential strikes that would have significantly escalated the Iran crisis. Trump insisted to CNN on Friday that “nothing was greenlighted,” though he tweeted on Friday morning that “10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.”
It’s not quite John F. Kennedy adeptly managing the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it’s one of the better moments of Trump’s presidency.
This article has been updated to clarify the day on which Trump tweeted about stopping the strike and insisted to CNN “nothing was greenlighted”.
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