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 writing a book for Penguin/Random House about the Trump administration’s national security team and its policies. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
(CNN)President Donald Trump is at war with the generals.
The latest salvo in that war came on New Year’s morning — not traditionally a time for recrimination — in a presidential tweet that denigrated retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Trump tweeted, “‘General’ McChrystal got fired like a dog by Obama. Last assignment a total bust. Known for big, dumb mouth. Hillary lover!”
This tweet followed an interview that McChrystal gave to ABC’s Martha Raddatz on Sunday in which he described Trump as both immoral and dishonest.
McChrystal had led Joint Special Operations Command during the Iraq War and had turned it into one of the most efficient killing machines in history. McChrystal later resigned as the commander of the Afghan War in 2010 following disparaging remarks that some officers on his staff had made to a Rolling Stone reporter about top officials working for President Barack Obama.
Trump is known for being a counterpuncher, so on one level it’s not surprising he reacted this way to McChrystal’s withering criticism.
But when you step back, the degree to which Trump is battling America’s generals is startling, considering how he began his presidency. Trump came into office besotted by military brass, appointing retired four star Gen. James Mattis as his secretary of defense, retired four star Gen. John Kelly as his secretary of homeland security and later chief of staff, and retired three star Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as his national security adviser. After Flynn was forced out of the White House, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster assumed the role of national security adviser.
Now, two years later, Trump is eager to tear down the generals. After Mattis announced his resignation with a letter distancing himself from Trump’s key foreign policy positions on December 20 and said that he would stay in the job until the end of February to allow for an orderly transition, Trump instead pushed him out at the end of December.
The differences between Trump and US military leaders are more than simply stylistic, although Trump’s lack of decorum and rudeness are certainly at odds with the military’s honor-based values.
The military tends to want to sustain overseas military commitments, which they see as vital to securing world order, whether that is to defeat ISIS, or to contain a nuclear-armed North Korea, or to prevent Afghanistan from reverting into control by the Taliban.
Trump believes he was elected to end foreign entanglements and that alliances like NATO are “ripping off” the United States, while US military leaders are keenly aware that NATO allies have been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with them since the 9/11 attacks.
The policy differences between Trump and the military were underlined by Mattis’s resignation, which came as a result of Trump announcing a total withdrawal of the 2,000 US troops in Syria. Mattis appears to have resigned because this decision was made in an arbitrary way and without consulting allies. The Kurds who have been fighting ISIS in Syria on behalf of the United States risk being left defenseless on the battlefield by this move, which potentially subjects them to attack by superior Turkish forces that regard them as terrorists.
When Mattis announced his resignation, Trump tweeted, “When President Obama ingloriously fired Jim Mattis, I gave him a second chance. Some thought I shouldn’t, I thought I should.”
It is true that Mattis’ term as head of Central Command was wound up early by the Obama administration, but far from merely giving Mattis a “second chance,” Trump was quite eager to install Mattis as secretary of defense. He told reporters in mid-November 2016 after he had interviewed Mattis for the job, “He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man. What a career! We’re going to see what happens, but he is the real deal.”
A similar trajectory to how Trump treated Mattis also happened with John Kelly. In late July 2017, Trump tweeted “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American….” Over time the bromance fizzled — as it so often does with Trump — and Kelly, no longer on speaking terms with the President, left as chief of staff at the end of December.
McMaster was also eased out by Trump following comments he made at the Munich Security Conference in late February, in which he described the recent American indictments of Russian officials for interference in the 2016 US presidential election as “incontrovertible” evidence that they had interfered in the election, something the President has always been reluctant to admit.
Trump then tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”
McMaster retired six weeks later.
In November, Chris Wallace of Fox News asked Trump about retired Adm. Bill McRaven’s comments that Trump’s attacks on the news media were “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
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Trump told Wallace that McRaven was a “Hillary fan,” and when Wallace pointed out that McRaven was the architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Trump asked, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that, wouldn’t it have been nice?” This was a bizarre comment to make about what is arguably one of the greatest intelligence and special operations victories in American history.
Trump has now made a sharp break with Kelly, Mattis, McChrystal, McRaven, and McMaster, some of the leading American generals and admirals of our era.
Why Trump, even given his policy disagreements, would pick a war with the military leaders he once so publicly admired is a puzzle that future historians will surely try to unpack.
Trump’s bizarre decision on Syria, CNN.com
Trump’s bizarre decision on Syria
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 6:48 PM ET, Wed December 19, 2018
Trump orders US withdrawal from Syria 02:34
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.”
(CNN)The ever-unpredictable President Donald Trump has ordered the withdrawal of the 2,000 US ground troops in Syria who are training local forces to fight ISIS, according to a US defense official who spoke to CNN.
This comes after the Trump administration had finally brought some coherence to its Syria strategy under veteran diplomat Ambassador James Jeffrey and retired Army Col. Joel Rayburn, both of whom have deep experience in the region.
Until Wednesday, US policy in Syria was easy to describe: Defeat ISIS, maintain US forces in Syria until Iranian military forces withdraw from the country, and push for a transition away from the government of Bashar al Assad.
But news of the withdrawal broke on Wednesday after Trump tweeted, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
Just four days ago, Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS, warned against a withdrawal when I interviewed him at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Saturday.
While McGurk called ISIS a “significantly degraded organization,” he added, “But no one who does this day to day is naive enough to know you can just declare victory and walk away. We have to maintain pressure on these networks really, for a period of years.”
Pulling US troops out now would be premature and doing so would hand over an unexpected Christmas gift to five American adversaries: Assad, Assad’s close allies including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, as well as ISIS and al Qaeda, whose virulent Syrian affiliate goes by a variety of names, including Al Nusra.
Head scratching hardly begins to cover it.
While Trump has expressed his desire to pull out of Syria before, there were two main arguments that might have held him back.
The first: Why replicate the total withdrawal of US troops in Iraq — first set in motion by President George W. Bush before the Obama administration made the official announcement at the end of 2011 — which helped set the stage for the return of ISIS?
The second: Why hand over Syria to the Russians and the Iranians?
It seems these arguments are no longer persuasive to Trump.
Unfortunately, according to UN Undersecretary-General for Counter-Terrorism Vladimir Voronkov, who spoke on the panel I moderated at the Doha Forum, there are an estimated 20,000 ISIS fighters left in the world, many of whom are in Iraq and Syria.
Then add to that the fact al Qaeda’s affiliate and offshoots in Syria are estimated as of August to have 10,000 fighters, according to UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.
If there is one key lesson we have learned from fighting jihadist terrorist groups in the 17 years since 9/11 it is that they thrive in weak or failing Muslim states such as Syria, and other countries where the United States has little to no presence.\
The Syrian pullout would run the risk of negating so many of the gains that have been made against ISIS. It also leaves the United States’ Syrian Kurdish partners, who have done the bulk of the fighting against ISIS, to fend for themselves against the powerful Turkish military, which regards them as terrorists.
And we’ve run a version of this play before. After the United States pulled out of Iraq, the group that later became ISIS first organized in Syria in 2011 before it invaded Iraq three years later and took over territory the size of Great Britain, controlling a population of nearly 12 million.
It’s mystifying why Trump is risking even a limited repetition of this mistake.
The man who said Emperor Trump has no clothes, CNN.com
The man who said Emperor Trump has no clothes
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. He is writing a book for Penguin/Random House about the Trump administration’s national security team and its policies. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”
(CNN)Few who work at senior levels in the administration of President Donald Trump leave with their reputations unsullied. Even fewer leave on their own terms.
Jim Mattis is one of the few.
In the wake of Mattis’ resignation as defense secretary Thursday, it’s worth recalling that the relationship between Trump and Mattis started well. Mattis met Trump for the first time at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey in mid-November 2016 to talk with the President-elect about the Secretary of Defense job.
After the meeting, Trump came out to talk to the press. Framed by the imposing, white columns of his Bedminster estate, Trump posed for pictures with Mattis.
Reporters shouted questions at Trump about whether Mattis was being considered for a cabinet job. Trump replied, “He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man. What a career! We’re going to see what happens, but he is the real deal.”
During Mattis’ first interview as Secretary of Defense on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host John Dickerson asked Mattis, “What keeps you awake at night?”
Without missing a beat, Mattis replied, “Nothing. I keep other people awake at night.”
Bromance over burgers
Trump loves this kind of smack and, before their bromance faded, he would invite Mattis to the White House to eat a casual dinner of burgers and to shoot the breeze about the state of the world.
In picking Mattis to be his Secretary of Defense, Trump said he had found his “Gen. George Patton.” Because of his ferocity on the battlefield, Mattis is nicknamed “Mad Dog,” a moniker Trump rejoiced in but Mattis himself doesn’t love.
Mattis is also a “warrior monk.” An American four-star general is likely to move a dozen times during a long career, bringing family and household effects from one post to the next. Gen. Mattis, who has never married, instead moved his books — all 7,000 of them.
In 2003 during the Iraq War, Mattis explained in an email to a fellow officer why deep reading about the history of warfare can save American lives on the battlefield. “By reading, you learn through others’ experience — generally a better way to do business — especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men,” he wrote.
By contrast, Trump reads little except, perhaps, hagiographic works by his most hardcore supporters.
As a candidate, Trump said he received information about military affairs from “the shows” on TV. Fox News continues to be a key briefing source.
But the differences between Trump and Mattis go far beyond their preferred means of absorbing information. The break between Mattis and Trump represents the most consequential split between those in the Trump administration who value US international alliances and commitments and those, like Trump, who do not.
Of course, others went before Mattis. Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, understood American alliances and commitments, having served alongside allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also led the fight within the administration not to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan, which was Trump’s first instinct.
But Mattis is the longest-serving senior cabinet official to leave the administration, and he is resigning on principle, in particular, over how Trump treats America’s international alliances.
Trump believes that longtime American allies are somehow “ripping off” the US rather than contributing to world order and helping the US continue as the world’s only superpower. At the same time, Trump declares his “love” for the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and fawns over Russian President Vladimir Putin, longtime American adversaries.
None of this makes any sense, of course. And Mattis’ resignation underlines the fact that Emperor Donald Trump I is wearing absolutely no clothes.
Storied military career
Mattis enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve when he was only 18 in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. He was commissioned a second lieutenant when he graduated from college in 1971.
Yet it was many years later that he first came to prominence. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, he led his Marines in the deepest aerial assault in US combat history near the de facto capital of the Taliban, Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The Marines then seized the key Kandahar Airport.
Mattis, Gen. James Kelly, Trump’s now-departing chief of staff, and Gen. Joseph Dunford, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have worked closely in various roles since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Mattis, Kelly and Dunford led the Marine force that invaded Iraq. They helped overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in a matter of weeks.
Mattis co-authored with Gen. David Petraeus the 2006 counterinsurgency manual that prompted a new US approach to the Iraq War, which had become a quagmire after the successful initial invasion. The manual was highly influential in military and national security circles and even became an unlikely New York Times bestseller.
Clash with Obama team
Mattis ran Central Command (CENTCOM) for President Barack Obama, overseeing American military operations in the Middle East. He pressed for military action against targets in Iran after Iranian proxy forces killed American soldiers in Iraq in 2011. This sparked a furious debate at the White House. Obama wanted to complete the negotiations for an Iranian nuclear deal, and an attack on Iranian territory would surely undercut that.
Mattis was forced by the Obama team to retire from the military five months early as a result of his hostility to Iran. Mattis learned about his defenestration when an aide passed him a note saying the Pentagon was announcing his replacement at CENTCOM. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had bothered to give Mattis notice of his termination.
Surely this experience helped inform Mattis’ choice to leave the Trump team on his own terms and make clear he was quitting on principle rather than being fired. After all, Mattis’ close ally, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, learned of his likely firing on a trip to Africa. Tillerson hurried back only to be informed by a Trump tweet that he was out of job.
Disagreements from the start
The Trump team and Mattis had substantive disagreements almost from the start about both personnel and policy.
Mattis wanted to appoint experienced, competent officials in the top spots at the Pentagon. For the key job of undersecretary for policy, Mattis wanted to bring on Mary Beth Long, a former CIA operations officer who had held senior jobs at the Pentagon under President George W. Bush. But during the campaign, Long had signed a “Never Trump” letter, and the Trump team nixed her.
For the same key position, Mattis then tried to install Ann Patterson, a recently retired top US diplomat. The White House rejected her. As US ambassador in Egypt, Patterson had performed typical functions with the democratically elected Islamist government of Mohammed Morsi, which made her suspect to Trump officials and supporters.
In June 2017, Trump endorsed the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, its neighbor and a US ally.
As the former CENTCOM commander, Mattis knew that in many ways the most important US base overseas is the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. It is not only the “forward” headquarters of CENTCOM but is also where the war against ISIS is coordinated. The massive base sprawls for miles in the Qatari desert and is home to around 11,000 American military servicemen and women.
Trump didn’t seem to know about these facts or care about them when he applauded the Saudi blockade of Qatar. Mattis pushed back heavily on the blockade to no avail, while the Saudis have persisted with it, confident that Trump has their back.
A month after the beginning of the Qatar blockade, the US military brass was blindsided by a Trump tweet ordering the banning of transgender individuals serving in the US military. This tweet came less than a month after Mattis had announced a six-month review of the matter.
Tensions between Mattis and Trump amplify
Trump’s idiosyncratic “America First” foreign policy has gathered steam during the past year and it created further tensions between the president and his secretary of defense.
In June, Trump attended a G7 summit in Canada. As he left the summit on Air Force One, Trump dumped on his host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, accusing him on Twitter of being “very dishonest and weak” and making “false statements.”
Trump feuded publicly with major Western allies at a NATO summit in Brussels a month later. Departing for his trip to the NATO summit and then on to the UK before a planned meeting with Putin, Trump said, “I have NATO. I have the UK, which is in, somewhat, turmoil. And I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all. Who would think?”
This all contrasted with Mattis’ longstanding support of NATO. On his first day in office, Mattis made a point to call the NATO secretary-general, the British defense secretary and the Canadian defense minister to emphasize the continuing US commitment to the alliance. It is one of the most successful in modern history and contributed to the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union.
NATO also proved its worth two days after the 9/11 attacks, when it invoked for the first time Article 5, which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all members.
Seventeen years later, NATO continues to assist and train the Afghan army.
After treating longtime US allies with contempt, Trump has gone out of his way to give passes to and shower praise on longtime American adversaries.
Trump kowtowed to Putin at the Helsinki summit in July, saying that he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible for interfering in the US election, going against the consensus of his own intelligence community.
By contrast, earlier this month Mattis said publicly at the Reagan Defense Forum in California that “we simply cannot trust” Putin.
In June, Trump attended a much-ballyhooed summit in Singapore with Kim and later declared, “We fell in love.”
This love affair has had scant impact on the dictator’s nuclear ambitions. According to the New York Times last month, the North Koreans have accelerated their ballistic missile program at more than a dozen secret bases.
In June, Trump canceled joint US-South Korea military exercises, a staple of the alliance for decades. The move blindsided Mattis and was a gift to the North Koreans.
Final straws
A sign of the fraying relationship between Trump and Mattis came in October when Trump told Lesley Stahl on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that Mattis was “sort of a Democrat.”
Then came the twofer last week. First, Trump announced the pullout of 2,000 soldiers from Syria. This was an early Christmas present to American enemies such as Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad and his close allies Putin and Iran, as well as to ISIS and al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. It also leaves the Kurdish forces that did almost all the fighting against ISIS on behalf of the US vulnerable to attack by the powerful Turkish military, which regards them as terrorists. In effect, Trump’s decision risks abandoning an American ally on the battlefield. This was the decision that precipitated Mattis quitting.
And then came the reports of Trump’s plan for a pullout of some 7,000 US troops from Afghanistan, about half the US troops in the country.
That is hardly a politically useful message to send to the struggling Afghan government, which will embark on a critical presidential election next year. Or to Afghanistan’s many problematic neighbors. Or, indeed, to the Taliban, which recently started negotiating directly with the US.
A principal Taliban demand is the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. Trump styles himself as a great dealmaker, but he is giving the enemy half of what they want without exacting any concessions at all.
Mattis was in favor of the Afghan policy that Trump announced last August, which included a troop increase and a “conditions-based” timeline for their withdrawal. This is all unraveling now.
What is particularly bizarre about these policy shifts is they do exactly what Trump repeatedly warned against during his campaign. They give America’s enemies an early heads up about military plans and withdrawal dates.
During the campaign, Trump also critiqued the total US troop withdrawal from Iraq under Obama as paving the way for ISIS.
Now comes Mattis’ resignation letter, which called out Trump on the need for “showing respect” to longtime allies.
Mattis reminded Trump that 29 NATO countries have fought “alongside” the US since 9/11.
Mattis also gently took Trump to task for his mollycoddling of Russia and its “authoritarian model.”
In a final dig, Mattis reminded the president that he based his critique of Trump’s policies on “over four decades of immersion in these issues.” That was a not-so-subtle reminder that Trump is the first US president with no political or military service and a national security neophyte.
Trump won’t listen, of course. But good for Mattis that he resigned on principle, a public servant in the court of Donald Trump who left with his reputation intact.
Qualified candidates to succeed Mattis must look at Trump’s abrupt and unilateral decisions on Syria and Afghanistan and ask if they want to be part of the continuing chaos.
“Chaos,” incidentally, was Mattis “call sign” on the battlefield.
Mattis may have brought chaos to enemies, but he tried to keep a lid on it during his two years in the Trump administration.
What comes next? Already, Trump has stuffed his national security team with advisers who are likely to go along for the ride, including his National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, chief Middle East adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his nominee as US ambassador to the UN, Heather Nauert.
In the court of Donald Trump, there seems to be no room for independent thinkers.
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Trump was mad at coverage of Mattis’ resignation and therefore forced him to leave early, a source said
Source: Trump ‘hates’ Mattis resignation letter
The mystery of Mike Flynn, CNN.com
The mystery of Mike Flynn
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 11:11 AM ET, Tue December 18, 2018
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.”
(CNN)Retired Lieutenant General Michael (“Mike”) Flynn’s fall from grace has been precipitous. Flynn was once an admired Army Special Operations officer who went on to hold one of the most powerful jobs in the world as President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser.
Now he is awaiting sentencing on December 18 for lying to the FBI. According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sentencing memo filed earlier this month, because of his extensive cooperation with investigators as well as his more than three decades of public service, prosecutors are requesting a minimal sentence, including the possibility of no jail time for Flynn.
Flynn has spoken to prosecutors 19 times as part of his plea agreement, which underlines his value to Mueller as a witness because of his early involvement in the Trump campaign and the key role he played in the transition, all of which gives him important insights into the campaign’s precise involvement with the Russians.
How did Flynn’s long fall from grace happen? This story is based on interviews with multiple former colleagues of Flynn’s in the military, as well as with his colleagues in the Trump White House. (I have also interviewed Flynn in the past, although he has not spoken to the media while awaiting sentencing.)
An intensely hard-working officer and effective leader
During his military career few could have predicted the path that Flynn would eventually take. As a colonel in charge of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), Flynn was a well-loved, effective team leader and an intensely hard-working officer who was constantly deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn used to joke that he lived at the JSOC base in Balad, Iraq, and took his vacations at the JSOC base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
The hours working for JSOC were brutal, 17-hour days every day of the week, but the mission was clear. Flynn and his boss, General Stanley McChrystal, understood by 2005 that the United States was losing the war in Iraq and that JSOC wasn’t configured well enough to destroy the industrial strength insurgency it was facing, which was led by al Qaeda in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq wasn’t a traditional military opponent operating with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy, but rather a loose network of like-minded jihadists. McChrystal’s mantra became “it takes a network to defeat a network.”
To become a network, JSOC would have to get flatter and more agile. McChrystal and Flynn reconfigured JSOC so it communicated more seamlessly with all the components of the intelligence community and more quickly processed the intelligence gathered on raids so other raids could be immediately launched based on what was gleaned from the initial operation.
The results were startling; JSOC went from doing only four or five raids a month to doing hundreds every month, and al Qaeda in Iraq took a huge beating.
In 2012 Flynn, now promoted to lieutenant general, was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn wanted to turn DIA into something more like JSOC with more analysts deployed “forward” in the war zones.
This was an excellent idea. After all, if you are supposed to be providing intelligence on a war, it helps if you are not working in an office 6,000 miles from where the conflict is actually happening. But DIA is a bureaucratic behemoth of some 17,000 employees, most of whom are quite happy living in the Washington, DC, area as opposed to, say, working for a year at Bagram Air Base in the windswept, mountainous deserts of Afghanistan.
The DIA desk jockeys pushed back against Flynn and his plans to deploy many of them to the war zones. Flynn had never commanded a giant organization like DIA. The first rule of bureaucratic politics is if you want to make big changes you need to enlist folks to help, Flynn didn’t make much of an effort to do this at DIA, which ruffled bureaucratic feathers and irritated his bosses at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.
‘Flynn facts’ and conflicts with Obama team
At DIA, Flynn also began developing some eccentric notions. Flynn became convinced that the jihadist attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 was orchestrated by Iran, which on the face of it made little sense since the Shia regime in Iran rarely cooperates with Sunni militants. There was also no evidence for this fanciful notion, but Flynn pushed his analysts at DIA to find a link that didn’t exist.
It was Flynn’s failures to distinguish between conjecture and truth that led analysts at DIA to coin the term “Flynn facts.”
When Flynn was running DIA, the Obama administration’s view of the terrorism threat was best encapsulated by President Obama’s statement to New Yorker editor David Remnick in January 2014 that the group that would evolve into ISIS was merely a “jay-vee” team.
Flynn had a far less sanguine view, warning that the global jihadist movement was not waning in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, as was then the conventional analysis. Flynn made this case publicly in congressional testimony on February 11, 2014, when Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, asked him if al Qaeda was indeed on the run, as the Obama administration was claiming.
“They are not,” testified Flynn.
A few months later, Flynn made a similar public statement at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference held in July in Aspen, Colorado, that attracts top US national security officials and the journalists who cover them.
CNN’s Evan Perez asked Flynn, “Are we safer today than we were two years, five years, ten years ago?”
“My quick answer is we’re not,” Flynn replied.
Flynn went on to say that focusing only on the declining fortunes of “core” al Qaeda, the group that had attacked the United States on 9/11, was to gloss over the fact that jihadist ideology was in fact “exponentially growing.”
As ISIS conquered much of Iraq during the summer of 2014 and imposed its brutal, totalitarian rule, it was clear that Obama and his national security team had underestimated the strength of ISIS, while Flynn had understood the threat far better than many of his peers. But Flynn had angered his two bosses, Michael Vickers, the overall head of intelligence at the Pentagon, as well as James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.
Vickers and Clapper thought that Flynn trying to shake things up at DIA was actually sabotaging morale at the agency, according to Clapper’s autobiography, “Facts and Fears.” They decided to force Flynn out of office a year early.
Flynn in the civilian world
Flynn seems to have been both bitter and embarrassed about the way he had been fired. In his own mind he was forced out because he wasn’t playing along with the Obama administration line that the war on terror was largely over, according to his autobiography, “The Field of Fight.” For Vickers and Clapper, it was much simpler: They fired him because he was a bad manager.
Either way Flynn, a highly decorated officer with 33 years service in the army, much of it in Special Operations, at the age of 55 had his career abruptly ended — and in an inglorious manner to boot.
Perhaps by way of compensation, once he was out in the civilian world, Flynn wanted to show that he was a rainmaker. Flynn set up Flynn Intel Group, which took on all manner of clients, a number of them with links to foreign governments.
Out of some combination of naiveté and arrogance Flynn, the maverick who came out of the “special” insular world of Joint Special Operation Command, did not play by the rules when it came to the lobbying work he did for some of his foreign clients, for which he was supposed to register officially as an agent of a foreign government. In Flynn’s sentencing memo, the Special Counsel says that Flynn misrepresented his work on behalf of the Turkish government for which he and his company were paid more than half a million dollars.
Flynn also began dipping his toe into politics. After meeting with Donald Trump in August 2015 Flynn came away deeply impressed. Trump was a good listener; he asked smart questions and he seemed truly worried about the direction that the country was heading, according to an interview Flynn gave to The Washington Post.
Flynn became a prominent presence on the Trump campaign and a vocal critic of Obama’s supposedly “weak” policies on ISIS. This, of course, dovetailed very neatly with what Trump was saying.
Flynn’s support of Trump was all the more important because he was the only person on Trump’s campaign team with any experience of America’s post-9/11 wars that continued to grind on at various levels of intensity in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Like Trump, Flynn thought that the United States could work with Putin and even sat next to the Russian president at a gala dinner in Moscow in December 2015 that celebrated the 10th anniversary of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-sponsored TV network, an appearance for which Flynn was handsomely paid. The Russians, through his speaking agency, gave Flynn $33,750.
Flynn later told a Washington Post reporter that this wasn’t a big deal, as RT was similar to CNN, a bizarre claim given that RT is effectively an arm of the Kremlin.
In the spring of 2016, Trump started to seriously consider Flynn as a possible candidate to be his running mate. The three-star general would certainly help on the commander in chief issue. At the time, the leading candidates to be Trump’s running mate were former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Flynn. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was seen as only a distant possibility for the number two-slot on the ticket, according to a senior Trump campaign official.
Flynn made his first, big appearance on the public stage when he made a fiery speech of support for Trump at the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 19, 2016. Flynn angrily charged Obama and Clinton with endangering the United States and even lying about the nature of the terrorist threat: “Tonight, Americans stand as one with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence…Because Obama chose to conceal the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam, Americans are at a loss to fully understand the enormous threat they pose against us.”
As he spoke, Flynn led the crowd in chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and incited them, “Get fired up! This is about this country!”
Flynn declared, “I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.”
The crowd started chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
Hesitating only slightly, Flynn added his voice to the chants declaring, “Lock her up, that’s right! Damn right, exactly right. And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth of what [Clinton] did, I would be in jail today.”
Officers who had served with Flynn were dismayed and puzzled by this performance, which went against their code not to take such clearly partisan positions, even in retirement. The angry man on stage didn’t seem like the Mike Flynn they knew.
Growing enamored of neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues
Some of his peers felt Flynn had succumbed to a case of “Obama Derangement Syndrome” after he was fired from running the Defense Intelligence Agency. That might be a partial explanation for Flynn’s impassioned rhetoric against Obama and Clinton, but in the years after he was pushed out of the military Flynn had also became enamored of leading neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues.
Flynn coauthored a book, “Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.” with Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative academic who was a longtime, bitter critic of the Iranian regime. In “Field of Fight,” which was published just before the Republican convention, Flynn claimed the United States was in a world war with “radical Islam,” which it was losing. Flynn also claimed that American Islamists were trying to create “an Islamic state right here at home.” This is a common conspiracy theory of the far right.
Flynn also wrote for the New York Post about a supposed “enemy alliance” that included Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela as well as al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban. This was George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” on steroids and scarcely more convincing since ISIS and Iran were at war, as were al Qaeda and ISIS, and none of these terrorist groups had any relationship with the North Koreans or with leftist regimes in Latin America.
At the same time Flynn became increasingly gripped by rightist conspiracy theories. In August 2016 Flynn claimed in a speech that Democratic members of the Florida legislature were trying to install Sharia law in their state. This was, of course, nonsense.
Flynn also tweeted that fear of Muslims was “rational” and publicly said that Islam was really a “political ideology” rather than a religion. When he was in uniform, Flynn had never made these kinds of assertions about Muslims and Islam.
Flynn’s inability to distinguish easily between facts and obvious falsehoods seemed to worsen as the presidential campaign continued. Flynn claimed in an interview with Breitbart News that there were Arabic signs along the United States-Mexico border to guide potential terrorists into the States and that he had seen evidence of these signs. Flynn said, “I have personally seen the photos of the signage along those paths that are in Arabic. They’re like waypoints along that path as you come in. Primarily, in this case the one that I saw was in Texas and it’s literally, it’s like signs, that say, in Arabic, ‘This way, move to this point.’ It’s unbelievable.” It was unbelievable because it was completely false.
Unexpected victory
That Flynn seemed to have never really expected Trump to win the election was underlined by an article written by Flynn that appeared in The Hill newspaper on Election Day 2016 that compared Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in in exile in Pennsylvania, to Ayatollah Khomeini.
For the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen was an obsession. It had fingered Gulen for purportedly masterminding a botched military coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016.
Flynn’s article suggested that Gulen, who had very good reasons to fear for his safety if he ever returned to Turkey, should not be allowed to remain in the United States.
No one who really thought he would be the next US national security adviser would have published such a provocative piece in a relatively obscure publication the very same day that his candidate was elected to the most powerful job in the world.
The article also risked drawing attention to the fact that Flynn’s consulting firm had been paid more than half a million dollars by a company close to the Erdogan government, despite the fact that Flynn hadn’t registered as an agent of a foreign government as is required by law.
Flynn’s positions and actions during the campaign and the transition were not those of the typical national security adviser, but then nor were the president-elect’s.
Two days after Trump was elected president, Obama sat down with Trump in the Oval Office and, among other matters, warned Trump against hiring Flynn in any senior role.
A week after meeting with Obama, though, Trump offered Flynn the key job of national security adviser. Flynn’s loyalty to Trump and early support for him trumped questions about his temperament as well as his lack of experience managing the complex national security bureaucracy — and the fact that he had never worked at the White House.
Mike Flynn was only 24 days in his job when he was forced to resign. The reason given: that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him that during the transition he hadn’t discussed lifting Obama-era sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States, when in fact he had. This lie appears to have been an effort to cover up the fact that Flynn was conducting substantive American foreign policy before he was ever in office. The United States operates on the principle that there is only one president at a time.
Flynn repeated the lies about the Russian ambassador to the FBI and compounded his legal jeopardy by lying about his links to the Turkish government in documents filed with the U.S. government, according to Tuesday’s sentencing memo.
Those actions completed Flynn’s fall from grace. No American National Security Adviser has served as briefly as Mike Flynn.
Trump’s terrorism argument for border wall is bogus, CNN.com
Trump’s terrorism argument for border wall is bogus
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 8:12 PM ET, Tue December 11, 2018
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.”
(CNN)In a memorable televised spat in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Donald Trump met with Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to discuss funding for the border wall and the possibility of a government shutdown.
During the meeting, President Trump claimed that “10 terrorists” were caught at the southern border in a “short period of time.”
A query that I sent to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about the cases of the 10 arrested terrorists that President Trump referred to went unanswered.
The number cited by Trump seems to be a garbled version of an assertion by Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who stated, “on average, my department now blocks 10 known or suspected terrorists a day from traveling to or attempting to enter the United States.”
The main terror watch list, known as Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), consists of some 1.6 million people with suspected ties to terrorism.
But, of course, there is a big difference between being merely suspected of having some kind of putative connection to terrorism and actually being a terrorist.
In the 450 cases of jihadist terrorism in the United States since 9/11, tracked by the research institution New America, not one involved a terrorist crossing the southern border into the United States. Indeed, if a real jihadist terrorist were ever arrested at the southern border, wouldn’t he be put in prison rather than being released to fight another day? And there is no evidence that any such terrorists crossing the southern border have ever been indicted or convicted of a crime.
The terrorists who have infiltrated the United States overwhelmingly did so by taking flights into the country. This is, for example, how Faisal Shahzad entered the country, after being trained by the Pakistan Taliban. Shahzad tried unsuccessfully to detonate a bomb in an SUV in Times Square on May 1, 2010.
In any event, the vast majority of jihadist terrorism cases in the United States — 84% of them — were carried out by American citizens or permanent residents who didn’t need to infiltrate the southern border, or any border.
For more opinion…
Indeed, every lethal act of jihadist terrorism in the United States since 9/11 has been carried out by an American citizen or legal resident.
If the border wall is supped to ameliorate the issue of terrorism, it’s pretty simple: It won’t.
Trump’s art of the giveaway, CNN.com
Trump’s art of the giveaway
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. ”
(CNN)Donald Trump came to national prominence with his best-selling 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” As President, he is perfecting the art of the giveaway.
Take how he is approaching Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, which the CIA concluded was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS.
The CIA assessed that a resident of Virginia working for the Washington Post was dismembered by Saudi officials acting on orders of MBS.
In an ordinary administration, that would have been carefully considered and likely leveraged to try to achieve multiple US goals in the greater Middle East.
But this is an administration run by an impulsive President who doesn’t overly trouble himself with facts.
And so, on Tuesday, Trump released a statement saying he was all-in with MBS because of what he contended were the hundreds of thousands of jobs that the Saudis were creating in the States and the huge arms deals that the US has negotiated with them.
This is a classic case of believing your own propaganda. The jobs likely to be created in the US and the arms deals are both small potatoes.
Trump’s all-in support for MBS is not distinguished by its transactional nature. After all, many previous American presidents also gave the Saudis a pass because US interests in the Middle East almost always trumped human rights concerns. In an emblematic interview about the Saudis with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in 2015, President Barack Obama observed, “Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”
What distinguishes Trump’s embrace of MBS is that other presidents would have taken advantage of this international outrage to get some American wins on the board.
Those wins would include:
Ending the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen
Lifting the Saudi-led blockade of its neighbor and US ally Qatar
The release of jailed Saudi civil society activists who face execution
And significant Saudi funding for the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.
To be sure, some of Trump’s cabinet members, such as Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have sought to pressure the Saudis to end the Yemen war.
But Trump himself has squandered this moment of maximum leverage with MBS. Trump has signaled that the young crown prince has a free hand at home to imprison and execute and can continue his overseas adventurism with no more than a slap on the wrist.
The art of the giveaway was also demonstrated by the Trump administration’s decision in May to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This has long been a central goal of the Israeli government. But every other US administration has punted on this to avoid losing American influence with the Palestinians. Trump ordered the embassy move while extracting no concessions from the Israeli government, such as ceasing or even slowing its settlement-building in Palestinian territory.
After the embassy move, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared that Americans negotiating a peace deal led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could no longer be considered honest brokers. Meanwhile, Kushner has yet to release his Middle East peace plan after two years of effort.
The art of the giveaway is also unfolding in Trump’s much-vaunted negotiations with North Korea. Trump has declared “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” and that he and the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, have even fallen “in love.” Meanwhile, the North Korean ballistic missile program seems to be accelerating, according to the New York Times. And the Washington Post reports that US intelligence has concluded that North Korea plans to hide elements of its nuclear weapons program.
Of course, the art of the giveaway reached its apotheosis with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump embraces Putin at every turn despite conclusions of his own intelligence community that Putin ordered interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the British assessment that the attempted assassination of a Russian defector was ordered at a senior level of Russia.
The grim apogee of the art of giveaway took place in September at the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin. Trump stood next to Putin and declared of the interference in the 2016 presidential election, “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump could have used the Helsinki meeting as the moment to tell Putin to knock off interfering with American elections. Instead, he gave him a free pass to do so.
Trump is particularly susceptible to authoritarian regimes. Kim, MBS and Putin are dictators to whom Trump always gives the benefit of doubt. They all play Trump like a Stradivarius, writing him “beautiful letters” (Kim) and assuring him that his own intelligence community’s conclusions about Khashoggi and about the election are false (MBS and Putin.)
By contrast, Trump harangues and insults leaders of Western democracies that are longtime US allies, such as Canada, France, Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom. To what strategic purpose it’s never been clear.
Perhaps when he is tending his future Trump Presidential Library, Trump will find a ghostwriter to help him with a memoir entitled: “The Art of the Giveaway.”
With the Khashoggi story worsening, the US may finally have an adult in the room, CNN.com
With the Khashoggi story worsening, the US may finally have an adult in the room
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 2:09 PM ET, Mon November 19, 2018
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He has been a frequent visitor to Saudi Arabia since 2005.”
(CNN)Now that CIA officials have concluded that the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — an allegation the regime denies — the crisis in US-Saudi relations has ratcheted up another level.
According to sources cited by CNN and other news organizations, there is sufficient evidence to attribute the orders for the death to bin Salman, also known as MBS.
MBS has also variously presided over a disastrous war in Yemen; the blockade of Saudi Arabia’s neighbor, Qatar; the de facto temporary kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister; and the incarceration in a luxury hotel in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, of some two hundred businessmen and princes, who had to hand over tens of billions to secure their freedom in what the government described as settlements in an anti-corruption drive.
Astonishingly, given the importance of Saudi Arabia there hasn’t ever been a Trump-appointed ambassador in the country. The US-Saudi relationship has therefore been largely an informal one managed by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, 37, and MBS, 33.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration nominated retired four-star general John Abizaid to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The post requires confirmation by the US Senate.
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What has been sorely lacking is someone of the stature of Abizaid in the Saudi capital to be in regular contact with MBS and to try and provide him some adult supervision.
It’s hard to think of someone more qualified than Abizaid for the role. Abizaid, aged 67, speaks fluent Arabic and once ran Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for US military actions in the Middle East. This gives him great expertise and experience in the region as well as the gravitas to speak for President Trump.
Having largely acquiesced in MBS’s foolhardy ventures, the Trump administration is beginning to push back a bit. For instance, earlier this month the US ended the American refueling of Saudi warplanes that are bombing Yemen back into the Middle Ages. The administration has also sanctioned 17 Saudis allegedly involved in Khashoggi’s murder.
Every day seems to bring some new story of chaos at the White House, not least the defenestration on Wednesday of Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel because she had angered Melania Trump. That said, the Trump foreign policy team is becoming more professionalized than it was under the hapless Rex Tillerson, who is widely regarded as one of the least successful secretaries of state in American history.
Tillerson had a dismal record of getting qualified diplomats confirmed. By contrast, his successor, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has tapped some real stars for significant foreign policy roles.
For Afghanistan, an experienced representative
In addition to Abizaid, another shrewd appointment by the Trump administration was tapping veteran diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad two months ago to be Special Representative to Afghanistan.
Khalilzad is an Afghan American who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. Khalilzad and the then-Afghan president Hamid Karzai worked closely together at a time when the country was relatively stable. President George W. Bush later appointed him to be ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations.
He is already leading American discussions with the Taliban to try to produce some kind of peace settlement. That process will surely take time, but it is necessary to bring an end to the conflict in Afghanistan.
Khalilzad may also have the knowledge and experience to bring together the fractious Afghan political establishment to try to ensure a somewhat free and fair presidential election next year.
The previous two presidential elections were both fiascos, marred by widespread fraud. Afghanistan simply cannot afford to have another deeply flawed presidential election, and Khalilzad should use Trump’s well-known unpredictability and distaste for the Afghanistan War as leverage to tell Afghan leaders that a presidential election characterized by rampant fraud could result in Trump pulling the plug on American support.
Other capable appointees
Another key appointment by the Trump administration is James F. Jeffrey as Special Representative for Syria Engagement. Jeffrey is an enormously experienced foreign policy official, a Turkish-speaking diplomat who has served as US Ambassador to both of Syria’s key neighbors, Iraq and Turkey, and was also Deputy National Security Advisor in George W. Bush’s second term.
Jeffrey was one the dozens of signatories of the ‘Never Trump’ letters by leading Republican national security officials during the 2016 presidential election campaign. In the past, signing such a letter would have torpedoed your chance of serving in a significant role in the administration, but in Jeffrey’s case his subject matter expertise has apparently trumped the letter.
Brian Hook, who ran policy planning at the State Department for Tillerson and was widely regarded as one of the few competent officials appointed by Tillerson, was named special envoy for Iran in August.
For more opinion…
The same month, Stephen Biegun, who has had much experience in national security roles on Capitol Hill and at the White House, was appointed special representative for North Korea.
To be sure, Trump himself is so mercurial that even with the appointments of some real heavy hitters to deal with the most challenging foreign policy issues of our time, he can dramatically change his mind on matters relating to any range of countries from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s preposterous bin Laden comments, CNN.com
Trump’s preposterous bin Laden comments
Updated 4:51 PM ET, Mon November 19, 2018
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.”
”
(CNN)President Trump spoke to Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday and made a number of false claims about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Wallace mentioned the commander of that operation, retired Admiral Bill McRaven, who has publicly criticized Trump for his denigration of the media.
Trump responded that McRaven is a “Hilary Clinton backer and an Obama-backer.”
In fact, McRaven took no position on the 2016 presidential election in which Clinton ran against Trump.
McRaven did serve in the US military at a time when President Obama was the president, which makes him no more of an Obama backer than anyone in uniform today is a Trump “backer.”
After Trump’s Fox interview, McRaven told CNN, “I did not back Hillary Clinton or anyone else. I am a fan of President Obama and President George W. Bush, both of whom I worked for.”
McRaven’s crime, as far as Trump seems to be concerned, is that he publicly defended former CIA director, John Brennan, in August when the President revoked Brennan’s security clearance because of his criticism of Trump.
McRaven has also stood up for the press, which Trump routinely derides as “the enemy of the people.” In a speech in Texas last year McRaven said, “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
In Sunday’s interview, Trump went on to claim that bin Laden was “living in Pakistan right next to the military academy, everybody in Pakistan knew he was there.”
This is complete nonsense. When I was researching a book about the hunt for bin Laden, I spoke to dozens of key government, intelligence and military officials involved in the bin Laden operation and they all said that the Pakistanis had no clue that al Qaeda’s leader was living in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan where he was found.
On the night of the bin Laden operation, US officials eavesdropped on the communications of top Pakistani officials who were completely surprised by the news that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad.
In the interview Sunday, Trump went on to say, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that.” This is an appalling smear on the many dozens of men and women at the CIA who dedicated their entire careers to finding bin Laden both before and after 9/11.
The fact is that finding bin Laden took a decade after the 9/11 attacks because he wasn’t using any form of electronic communication and relied instead on handheld messages delivered by his trusted courier. As a result, even senior leaders of al Qaeda didn’t know where bin Laden was hiding.
The whole issue of the hunt for bin Laden may be a sore subject for Trump because the final countdown for the operation took place during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when Obama roasted Trump mercilessly for his penchant for spreading conspiracy theories, such as the so-called “birther” conspiracy, which claimed that Obama wasn’t an American citizen
During a break from rehearsing that speech for the correspondents’ dinner, Obama called McRaven for a final status check.
“What do you think about the intel?” Obama asked. The intelligence that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad was entirely circumstantial.
“Well, if he’s there, we’re going to get him. If he’s not, we won’t,” McRaven answered.
“Exactly! It’s 50-50,” Obama said, according to reporting from my book about the hunt for bin Laden.
The president wrapped up the call, saying, “I couldn’t have any more confidence in you than the confidence I have in you and your force. Godspeed to you and your forces. Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely.”
The bin Laden raid was, of course, a success. Not only was bin Laden killed, but also thousands of important documents about al Qaeda were recovered during the operation. As a result, it is arguably the most successful special operations mission in American history.
After stepping down from leading the Special Operations Command, McRaven became the chancellor of the University of Texas, where as an undergraduate he had majored in journalism. (He has since retired from that role.)
It’s an experience that seems to have shaped McRaven’s continuing pushback against Trump’s assaults on the press.
Doha Forum, Doha, Qatar
15th DEC
SATURDAY
9:00-9:45
Plenary Session Shaping Policy in an Interconnected World
9:45-10:00
Break
10:00-11:00
Plenary Session The Global Order Revisited: Old Actors, New Alliances
11:00-11:30
Plenary Session Newsmaker Interview: Brett McGurk and Vladamir Voronkov
Brett McGurk, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS
Vladamir Voronkov, U.N. Undersecretary General for Counter Terrorism
Peter Bergen (moderator), Vice President for Global Studies & Fellows, New America Foundation
11:30-12:30
Plenary Session The Growth Potential of Emerging Markets
and the Impact on the Global Economy
H.E. Ali Shareef Al-Emadi, Minister of Finance, Qatar
H.E. Berat Albayrak, Minister of Treasury and Finance, Turkey
Christian Sewing, CEO, Deutsche Bank
Chris Giles (moderator), FT Economics Editor
12:30-14:00
Networking lunch
14:00-15:00
Parallel Session 1 Bit-by-Bit: Enforcing Norms in Cyberspace
Hessa Al-Jaber, Vice Chairperson of Es’hailSat Qatar Satellite Company
Latha Reddy, Co-Chair, Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace
Marietje Schaake, Member of European Parliament, Netherlands
Latha Reddy, Co-Chair, Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace
Karin Von Hippel (moderator), Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute
Parallel Session 2 Identifying a European Role: Navigating Polarization Across the MENA Region
Rt Hon Alistair Burt MP, Minister of State for the Middle East at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office & Minister of State at the Department for International Development
H.E. Sigmar Gabriel, Member of the Bundestag, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
Mutlaq Al-Qahtani, Special Envoy of the Foreign Minister of the State of Qatar for Counterterrorism and Mediation of Conflict Resolution
Ibrahim Kalin, Special adviser to President Erdogan and the presidential spokesperson
Julien Barnes-Dacey (moderator,) Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme, ECFR
Parallel Session 3 Fact or Falsehood? The Consequences of Misinformation
Michael Rich, President, RAND
Alain Gresh, Editor, OrientXXI
Ahmed Elmagarmid, Executive director, QCRI
Nicholas Enfield, University of Sydney
Steve Clemons (moderator,) Editor-at-Large, The Atlantic
Parallel Session 4 Facilitating Peace in the Sahel: What Are the Alternatives to Militarization?
H.E. Moussa Mara, Former Prime Minister of Mali
Yéro Boly, Former Defense Minister, Burkina Faso
Phillip Carter III, Consultant, The Mead Hill Group, Former US Ambassador to Ivory Coast
Rinaldo Depagne (moderator,) West Africa Project Director, ICG
15:00-15:15
Break
15:15-15:45
Plenary Session Newsmaker Interview: Mohammad Javad Zarif
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister, Iran
Robin Wright (moderator), Writer, The New Yorker
15:45-16:15
Plenary Session: Newsmaker Interview: Achim Steiner and Vaira Vīķe-Freiberg
Achim Steiner, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme
Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, President of the Club de Madrid and former President of Latvia
Ghida Fakhry (moderator), Current affairs presenter, TRT World
16:15-17:15
Plenary Session The Targeting and Demonization of Journalists and News Outlets: What Should Be Done?
Maria Ressa, Executive Editor, Rappler
David Schlesinger, Committee to Protect Journalists, Member, Board of Directors, Former Reuters Editor-in-Chief
Sean Spicer, Former White House Spokesman
Peter Dobbie (moderator), Al Jazeera English anchor
17:15-17:30
Closing Remarks
18:30-22:00
Dinner
16th DEC
SUNDAY
9:00-10:00
Plenary Session Prospects for International Trade and Investment
H.E. Ali Bin Ahmed Al-Kuwari, Qatar’s Minister of Commerce and Industry
Volker Treier, Member of the Bundestag
Stephane Garelli, Professor Emeritus of World Competitiveness at IMD & Professor at the University of Lausanne
John Defterios (moderator), CNN Emerging Markets Editor/Anchor
10:00-10:30
Plenary Session Newsmaker Interview: 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad
Nadia Murad, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Rawaa Augé (moderator), Al Jazeera Arabic presenter
10:30-10:45
Break
10:45-11:45
Parallel Session 1 Struggling for “Justice”: Palestine, Syria and Yemen
Baraa Shiban, Member of Transitional Justice Working Group at the Yemeni National Dialogue Conference
Staffan de Mistura, UN Special Envoy to Syria
Fadel Abdul Ghany, Chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights
Ata Hindi, PhD Candidate, Tilburg University
Noha Aboueldahab (moderator), Brookings Doha
Parallel Session 2 Water Sustainability and Food Security: Addressing the Crisis in Waiting
H.E Pablo Campana, Minister of Trade, Ecuador
Bader Al Dafa, Executive Director, Global Dryland Alliance
Djimé Adoum, Executive Secretary, Permanent Committee for Drought in the Sahel
Miguel Cuyaube, Future U.N. High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations
Dareen Abughaida (moderator,) Presenter, Al Jazeera English
Parallel Session 3 Asian Connectivity Conundrums: From Trade Routes to Trade Strategy
Mohamad Maliki, Senior Minister of State (Defense and Foreign Affairs), Singapore
Manish Tewari, Former Union Minister of State, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, India
Theresa Fallon, Director, Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies, Belgium
Lu Miao, Secretary General of Center for China and Globalization
Samir Saran (moderator,) President, ORF
Parallel Session 4 Russia’s Evolving Global Role
Andrey Kortunov, Director-General, Russian Affairs Council
Fahd Al-Attiyah, Qatar’s Ambassador to Russia
Vitaly Naumkin, Director, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Paul Saunders, Executive Director, Center for National Interest
Timofei Bordachev (moderator,) Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club
Plenary Session New Age Energy Policy: A Balancing Act
H.E. Mr. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Minister of State for Energy Affairs, President & CEO of Qatar Petroleum
Yury Sentyurin, Secretary-General, GECF
Claudio Descalzi, CEO, ENI
Dmitry Zhdannikov (moderator), Editor in Charge, Energy, EMEA, Thomson Reuters
14:45-15:15
Plenary Session Newsmaker Interview: Saeb Erakat
Saeb Erakat, Chief Palestinian Negotiator
Steve Clemons (moderator), Editor-at-Large, The Atlantic
15:15-15:30
Break
15:30-16:30
Parallel Session 1 Gender and Mediation: The Role of Women in Conflict Resolution
Delia Albert, Philippines Former Foreign Secretary
H.E. Ivonne A-Baki, Ambassador of Ecuador to Qatar
Ann Phillips, Senior Advisor, U.S. Institute of Peace
Meenakshi Gopinath, Director, Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace
Mely Anthony (moderator), Head of Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, RSIS
Parallel Session 2 Countering Violent Extremism: Recruitment, Rhetoric and Radicalization
Anne Speckhard, Director, ICSVE
Peter Bergen, Vice President for Global Studies & Fellows, New American Foundation
Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Oxford University
Omar Mulbocus, UK Prevent Counselor
Alberto Fernandez (moderator), President, Middle East Broadcasting
Parallel Session 3 Changing Societies: The Rise of Populist Movements and their Impact on National Values, Identities, and Policies
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Professor of Politics, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
John Esposito, Professor, Religion and International Affairs, Georgetown University
Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City
Terri Givens, Political Scientist
Dana El-Kurd (moderator), Researcher, The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies
Parallel Session 4 The Geopolitics of Natural Resources: New Energy Routes and the Future of Energy Security?
Kristian Ulrichsen, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy & Associate Fellow, Chatham House
Mahjoob Zweiri, Director of Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University
Mikhail Krutikhin, Partner and Energy Analyst at RusEnergy
Majed Al-Ansari (moderator), Manager of Policy at QU Social and Economic Survey Research Institute
16:30-16:45
Break
16:45-17:45
Plenary Session How Can the International Community Best Serve Those Most in Need?
Henrietta H. Fore, Executive Director, UNICEF
Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator
Robert Malley (moderator), President and CEO, International Crisis Group
17:45-18:15
Keynote Address H.E. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General, UN
18:15-18:30
Closing Remarks
20:00-21:30
Networking dinner
Doha Forum is a global platform for dialogue, bringing together leaders in policy to build innovative and action driven networks.
Mission
Established in 2000, the Doha Forum is a platform for global dialogue on critical challenges facing our world. The Doha Forum promotes the interchange of ideas, discourse, policy making, and action oriented recommendations. In a world where borders are porous, our challenges and solutions are also interlinked.
Doha Forum 2018
Advancements in every sector have reshaped the world and made it more interconnected and globalized than ever before. The butterfly effect, resulting from such unique interconnectedness, requires that we think outside the box of modern and applicable policies to deal with the growing challenges that threaten us all. We now live in a world where nation states and their domestic policies affect other nations, where seemingly unrelated foreign policy of nations affect citizens of the world. Today, states and non-state actors play an equally important role in politics and policies.
The world is living through a period of rapid changes, with potentially enormous implications globally. Great power rivalries are resurgent. Regional powers are increasingly struggling for influence in their neighborhoods and beyond. International institutions and norms are under siege. The world more interconnected than it has ever been, but is also fragmented?
This year, in its eighteenth edition, the Doha Forum will serve as a platform to discuss the “Shaping Policy in an Interconnected World” and focus on four essential themes:
Security
Peace and Mediation
Economic Development
Trends and Transitions
Shaping Policy in an Interconnected World
Different countries have had varied reactions to ongoing conflicts. Some countries have receded their international presence and started looking towards domestic concerns and some nations have created global roles for themselves. As major powers compete or look inwards, increasingly forceful regional powers jockey for geostrategic advantage. International law and customary norms have lost traction; many conflicts today see grave violations of the laws of war.
All this brings new complexity to crisis management. Indeed, warzones across the world have become a principal arena for geopolitical struggles. Most wars today are intra-state but involve outside powers – not just neighbours or major powers, as was the case in the past, but an array of others too. What does ending a war look like when those involved view it mostly through the lens of interests elsewhere?
The Doha Forum would examine what these trends mean for conflict prevention and resolution. Security; is a complex but necessary matter. We will explore traditional and non-traditional ways of security. Cybersecurity is being used by countries and non-state actors; expensive wars resource consuming cyber wars are being waged. Wars that are not tangible, have no rules and rarely have any winners. At the Doha Forum we will be discussing the cybersecurity, its future and how we work together as nations.
In terms of food security, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), more than 800 million people in today’s world are undernourished. This alarming number requires that we act fast to solve this epidemic. Food security is a growing challenge to most countries located on dryland areas. Drylands are home to nearly 2 billion people and cover 40 percent of the world’s land surface. These global challenges can only be resolved by coalitions of countries working together to provide for each other.
In the most traditional manner; defense and defense spending is always a priority for nation states; this challenge is convoluted; nations buy weapons to prevent war but also to be prepared for war; this delicate balance is tested every day. Are security coalitions still relevant? How can we work together to ensure nations are held accountable for their actions but are also able to protect themselves? This paradigm makes it so that there are nations and peoples struggling for justice while at the same time
economies of war are being stimulated. Economic sanctions are a tool for states to pressure their adversaries, but are they effective or obsolete?
The world’s shifting power dynamics indicate that we will inevitably need new policies to achieve peace and security in the international order. As evident in wars that we have witnessed the last few years, peace and mediation have become complex schemes of interests and long-term global implications. How can countries come together and build an incentive structure for long-lasting peace amongst nations? How can international law and international communities support peace and mediation?
Economic development has seen unprecedented growth. GDP of countries has increased and standards of living have improved. Countries are investing into new markets and alternative energy sources. When we talk about economic development we now need to include foreign investment funds and international coalitions as the European Union, OPEC, and new competitive
markets such as Africa.
We must not lose sight of the progress interconnectedness has brought to our world. The global crime rate, world hunger and disease related deaths are at their lowest. This is not a coincidence, world leaders have worked together to ensure a sustainable world. Leaders have enacted smart, forward-looking policies. While the improvements are great, so are the challenges. We now live in a world with changing societies and dynamics, countries are facing challenges with a seemingly eruption of ideologies from liberalism to conservatism. Interests group and ideology across nations are also more potent in a world where information or misinformation is now widespread. Does that make us interconnected or fragmented?
We must learn from the best practices of our world and scale to the next level. Education, innovation and collaboration should be at the heart of our work as we face our common challenges together. Most importantly, fair and relevant policies that guide and govern our work must be adapted and respected by all. The narrative of the modern world has proved that acting collectively is the only way we can address and solve our challenges.
The 2018 Doha Forum brings together political figures, thought leaders, governmental agencies, and civic society organizations with the aim of facilitating dialogue about how conscious policymaking can guide us to our global tomorrow. The forum addresses today’s urgent issues and ways the international community can come together to solve them. The forum also highlights the modern success models and discusses how we can expand on them and replicate them. Through active and
responsible global leadership, our possibilities are limitless.
Previous Editions
Gallery
Videos
Doha Forum 2005
“ Our aspirations and goals are for this forum to be more than a platform for dialogue and consultation, but also a tribune for enlightened thinkers to present proposals and solutions that could be converted into concrete plans, policies and programs for the benefit of Humanity.” – Deputy Prime Minister &
Minister of Foreign Affairs, HE Sheikh / Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al Thani.
Doha Forum 2006
“ I commend the State of Qatar and His Highness the Emir of the State of Qatar for organizing this important gathering, whose continuation has made it a beacon of hope for the entire region of the Middle East.” – Vice-Minister for foreign affairs of Japan, Professor Akiko Yamanaka.
Doha Forum 2007
“ I would like to pay tribute to His Highness, Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani. His leadership has opened new avenues for political participation in his country. Qatar is a fitting host for this important international forum.” – Secretary-General United Nations, Ban Ki-moon.
Doha Forum 2008
“ I welcome you all to the Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade in its 8th Session. Undoubtedly, this high level participation in this Forum is a sign of progress and an added value to the importance of the effective role it plays in the service of political, economic and social development programs.” – Amir of the State of Qatar, His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
Doha Forum 2009
“ My conviction is also that it is pointless to talk of democracy without understanding how different cultures, different languages, can also be respected and transmitted. ”-Former French president, JACQUES CHIRAC.
Doha Forum 2010
“ So, our common challenges are becoming more and more multi-dimensional and global. This means that our cooperation must also be global. Therefore, from the different G’s the most important “G” is the G-192 – the United Nations.” – President of Finland, TARJA HALONEN.
Doha Forum 2011
“ Let me start by expressing my appreciation of the role Qatar is playing in bringing ideas, interests and personalities together for important discussions – also during these crucial days ” – Foreign Minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt.
Doha Forum 2012
“ This forum (Doha Forum) is of special importance in the context of the current global financial crisis, the emphasis on education, training, and development. It also looks at the importance of foreign investment and international aid in achieving national development ” – President of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa
Doha Forum 2013
“ Platforms like the Doha Forum are extremely important to find solutions to regional and international issues ” – Director of the Center for Middle East Development at UCLA Steven L. Spiege
Doha Forum 2014
“ We clearly share, from our diverse stances, the passion to construct a new world. A safer world, fairer, more inclusive, more in peace, more secure, with greater understanding amongst people ” – Vice President of Argentina, Amado Boudou.
Doha Forum 2015
“ You have to be clear why you want change and what reforms mean ” – HE Prime Minister and Interior Minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
Doha Forum 2016
“ This forum is very important, not only because of the topics but due to the opportunity it provides to learn ” – Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, Ján Kubiš
Doha Forum 2017
PARTICIPANTS: Aamar Kahf, executive director of the Omran Center for Strategic Studies; Yaser Tabbara, co-founder of the Omran Center for Strategic Studies; Mona Yacoubian, senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace; and Peter Bergen, vice president of New America
LOCATION: New America, 740 15th Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, D.C.
FEATURED BOOK
The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and The World:
