The ISIS Campaign: More of the Same?
The ISIS campaign needs a new strategy. Is Trump pursuing one?
Max Boot 2017-03-06
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was bitterly critical of the Iraqi and U.S. governments for announcing an offensive against Mosul in advance. In a presidential debate, he said, “Whatever happened to the element of surprise, OK? … Douglas MacArthur, George Patton [are] spinning in their graves when they see the stupidity of our country.”
So now that Trump is president, it stands to reason that the Iraqi government has ceased announcing offensives in advance, right? Actually, on February 19, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told the entire world that Iraqi forces, having liberated east Mosul, were about to attack west Mosul. There was not a peep of protest from the White House.
This is a small sign of the fact that, rhetoric and bluster aside, there is a lot more continuity than change in the anti-ISIS campaign. In fact, almost nothing has changed on the battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq since Trump became president. U.S. advisers are now allowed closer to the front lines but this was a decision made by President Obama before he left office.
And what of Trump’s promise to come up with a new plan to “crush and destroy” ISIS as a step on the road toward his pledge to “eradicate… Radical Islamic Terrorism… completely from face of the Earth”? Secretary of Defense James Mattis has now submitted a plan with a range of options to accelerate the campaign against ISIS. But judging from this Washington Post report, it will be largely more of the same:
A Pentagon plan for the coming assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State capital in Syria, calls for significant U.S. military participation, including increased Special Operations forces, attack helicopters and artillery, and arms supplies to the main Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighting force on the ground, according to U.S. officials…
Officials involved in the planning have proposed lifting a cap on the size of the U.S. military contingent in Syria, currently numbering about 500 Special Operations trainers and advisers to the combined Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. While the Americans would not be directly involved in ground combat, the proposal would allow them to work closer to the front line and would delegate more decision-making authority down the military line from Washington.
The proposal to lift the cap on the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” is a welcome move. Such hard-and-fast troop caps were, along with the arbitrary deadlines on troop deployments that accompanied them, one of the most noxious tics of the Obama administration when it came to the use of force. Also welcome is the move to delegate more authority downward, reducing the number of decisions that must be made by the president personally. But this is hardly a radical shift. The U.S. role in the coming Raqqa offensive (also announced in advance!) appears to be similar to the one in Mosul, with U.S. troops serving as advisers and providing artillery and air strikes but not leading the offensive themselves.
The most important role for U.S. forces in northern Syria may be to act as a buffer between America’s Kurdish allies–the YPG–and our Turkish allies, who are more determined to fight the Kurds than ISIS. So far there is no sign of any alliance with Russia in Syria of the kind that Trump talked up endlessly during the campaign, no doubt because his military advisers realize that Russia’s goals do not align with America’s. Putin is not fighting ISIS; he is fighting to keep the Iranian-backed Bashar Assad regime in power.
There’s a good reason why Trump is unlikely to radically change the Obama blueprint for battling ISIS. Although Obama took far too long to mobilize against this threat, his team did belatedly implement a strategy that is showing significant signs of success in Mosul and beyond. That relieves Trump of having to make any hard decisions that would thrust U.S. ground troops into another major war. In this case, the hard decisions will come not in defeating ISIS but in dealing with the aftermath.
General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already begun to talk about the need for the U.S. to make a “long-term” commitment to Iraqi security. Indeed, the only way to prevent ISIS or another Sunni terrorist group from rising again in Iraq is for the U.S. to learn the lesson of 2011. When Obama foolishly pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, he created a security vacuum that was filled by both Shiite and Sunni extremists. A continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is not a guarantee of stability. By giving assurances to the Sunni minority that they will not once again have their rights trampled by Iranian-backed Shiite sectarians in Baghdad, though, it does increase the odds.
But such a mission would involve the U.S. in precisely the kind of long-term intervention overseas that Trump denounced during the campaign. “If I become president, the era of nation building will be brought to a very swift and decisive end,” he vowed in August. Before long we will find out which imperative is more important to Trump—to defeat ISIS or to avoid nation-building? If the U.S. shies away from the latter, it won’t be able to achieve the former.
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The ISIS Campaign: More of the Same?
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John Kelly Changed the Game
When Trump fights on values, he wins.
Noah Rothman 2017-10-20
For approximately 18 minutes, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly accomplished the impossible: He got America’s journalists and political opinion writers to shut up and listen.
Kelly took to the podium in the White House briefing room on Thursday to put an end to a controversy that had been bleeding the White House of credibility for days. On Monday, the president was asked why he had not yet spoken out about the deaths of four U.S. soldiers in Niger and if he had spoken with the families of those killed in action. Trump confessed that he had not yet called the families of the dead because they were difficult calls for him to make. But he sought to insulate himself from criticism by insisting that Barack Obama, too, had refrained from contacting the families of deceased servicemen and women.
To the press, this sounded like a challenge, and they responded as they should. Methodical accounts of calls made by Obama to Gold Star families were uncovered. The Washington Post discovered that Trump had personally promised $25,000 to a bereaved family; the check was not written until the day that story was published. Finally, when Trump did contact the family of a serviceman who died in Niger, it was overheard by a family friend—Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson—who told the press that Trump had behaved insensitively on that call. Trump denied it, but the grieving mother of the fallen confirmed Wilson’s account.
It was a bad story for the White House, and Kelly was tasked with damage control. And he succeeded. Kelly held the rapt attention of reporters in the briefing room as he described what happens to a soldier when he is slain in action. Voice cracking, he opened up about his own experience when his friend, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, told him that his son lost his life in Afghanistan. Kelly said that Dunford used a variation of the words that Trump used, which the president’s critics had called artless. They might have been, but Kelly noted that there simply are no words that can ease the pain of that moment for a grieving parent who has lost their son or daughter. And he expressed bitter disappointment that the president’s words would be used as a political football by Rep. Wilson.
It was a moment that changed the game for Trump. When the president is fighting a war against established and confirmed facts, he loses. This week’s $25,000 check is not unlike the money Trump raised for veterans early in 2016 to counterprogram against a Fox News Channel debate he wanted to skip; the press can humiliate Trump and compel him to act in ways he’d prefer to avoid. But the facts have to be demonstrable. When Trump is engaged in a battle over amorphous sentiments and values–even if they are values Trump does not personally appear to share–he is on firmer terrain. That was precisely the terrain Trump’s chief of staff chose for the president.
Toward the end of his address, Kelly gave the press a rare window into his own thinking on cultural and political matters. He expressed disgust at the values and mores that have been cast aside. Respect for women, the sanctity of life, service to one’s country, honoring the sacrifice of a Gold Star family above petty political concerns–all gone. Many observed that these criticisms apply as much to Trump as they do his detractors, but that is beside the point. The nebulous and yet nevertheless intuitive values Kelly articulated—chivalry, piety, valor, and patriotism—are precisely the grounds on which Trump prefers to make his stands.
It turns out that Kelly was mistaken about Wilson. He attacked her for praising her own role in securing funding for a new FBI building in her district. In fact, she had only taken credit for helping to name it, and she did so in a humble and bipartisan way. Kelly was posturing as incensed for the benefit of the audience, and it was effective. Nevertheless, he missed the mark, and he should address the error. That will not be good enough for Kelly’s critics who are today behaving as though Trump’s chief of staff has slandered Wilson’s good name and must have satisfaction. What’s more, in scene-chewing fashion, Kelly’s critics are going so far as to deem him racist.
Planned Parenthood attacked Kelly for joining in a “pattern” of Trump administration officials “undermining black women.” MSNBC host Joy Reid and Lawrence O’Donnell implied Kelly’s comments were inspired by his upbringing in “segregated Boston.” Even Rep. Wilson suggested that Kelly deployed a “racist term” by attacking her for living up to the “long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise.” The phrase “empty barrels” had not been racist until about 4 hours ago, as of this writing, but it’s not hard to find liberal Kelly critics echoing the charge with vim. In fact, the line Kelly used is only one word off from a famous refrain in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart: but the saying is true ‘The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.’” It is hard to think of a more Shakespearean twist than a national effort to dissect this line for hints of coded racism.
Kelly erred in his attack on Wilson, but so, too, did Wilson err in her attack on Kelly. Trump’s critics will make no allowance for simple mistakes here; Kelly was far too effective behind that podium to let it stand unchallenged. In the process of litigating their grievance, Trump’s critics are charging headlong off of defensible terrain and into a debate about American values—debates that Trump tends to win. One day, Trump’s critics will stop making the same mistakes, but that is not today.
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Bush’s Finest Hour
More than just Trump.
Abe Greenwald 2017-10-20
On Thursday, George W. Bush delivered a speech at the “Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World” event in New York City. Headlines are touting the speech as an attack on Trumpism. That’s accurate, so far as it goes. But it’s clear from Bush’s words that he was aiming for (and achieved) something loftier than yet another complaint about the 45th president. Bush was making the case against the pervasive discontent that’s driven many citizens throughout the Democratic West to a politics of grievance and revenge. Trumpism is but one example.
Without mentioning Trump by name, Bush said: “Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.” Without uttering the words “America first,” he offered his critique of it: “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism—forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade—forgetting that conflict, instability, and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.” He went on to remark: “Bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed.” A beautiful statement justly applauded.
Those quotes have garnered the most attention because they relate directly to Trump and his followers. But, in truth, the entire speech was a masterpiece, offering up brilliant gems throughout.
There was this description of our political divide: “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions—forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.” There was a kind of philosophical proof of the rightness of democracy: “No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy.” And on a day that found the president and a congresswoman sparring over whether or not the president had insulted a war hero’s widow, there was this: “We know that when we lose sight of our ideals, it is not democracy that has failed. It is the failure of those charged with preserving and protecting democracy.”
If Bush had merely attacked Trump, his speech would have been subsumed into the sordid us-and-them squabbles he was denouncing. (If some pundits have their way, it still will be.) Bush, recall, has an aversion to criticizing other American presidents. “I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president undermine a current president,” he said while Barack Obama was in office, “I think it’s bad for the presidency for that matter.”
It’s also a way of avoiding the larger moral challenges we face. And Bush, the most misunderstood leader of our time, is all about large moral challenges. This is the man who said, three days after 9/11, “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” For Bush, ridding the world of evil still means, in part, advancing the cause of human liberty. And that’s really what his speech was about. As he said, “This is part of the reason we meet here today. How do we begin to encourage a new, 21st-century American consensus on behalf of democratic freedom and free markets?”
To find answers to that question he turned to Tom Melia and longtime COMMENTARY contributor Pete Wehner, both scholars at the George W. Bush Institute. In response, they drafted a paper titled “The Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World,” and, yesterday, Bush talked up some of its recommendations. These include adopting a stronger defense against foreign attacks on American democracy, leading the fight for freedom around the world, placing a priority on civics education, and restoring trust to American institutions. These are all excellent ideas, and the paper elaborates on them in creative and useful ways.
The trickiest challenge of all, however, is cultural: how to encourage the American people to abandon destructive political fads and reclaim the higher ideals of our country’s founding. There is little that policy can do to strengthen our faith in the “American creed.” But toward that end, Bush’s speech was itself an effective step. His words will stand as a marker of where we want to be after the current political enthusiasms fail to deliver. The decency of the man, contrasted with the indecency of the moment he was describing, was the most powerful rebuke to American self-doubt that we’ve seen since Trump was elected president.
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The Danger of the Me Too Campaign
Denunciations.
Daniella J. Greenbaum 2017-10-20
Silence, Wordsworth wrote, “is a privilege of the grave, a right of the departed. Let him, therefore, who infringes that right by speaking publicly of, for, or against, those who cannot speak for themselves, take heed that he opens not his mouth without a sufficient sanction.”
Others have said it less poetically: don’t speak ill of the dead.
The message has apparently been lost on one Jenny Listman, who posted a diatribe against the late Elie Wiesel on Medium this week. In the wake of the #metoo campaign, Listman accused Wiesel of having sexually assaulted her 28 years ago.
In her account, Wiesel squeezed her tush at a fundraising dinner that had more than 1,000 people in attendance. She further alleged that Wiesel “mistook me for an ultra-religious underage girl who was unlikely to tell anyone about it.” She went on: “he purposely chose to molest someone who he assumed was a minor and who would be compelled into silence.” She then recited a laundry list of her problems: suicidal tendencies, depression, panic attacks, etc., all of which she seems to blame on Wiesel’s alleged assault.
I know I will be vilified for this, but Listman’s tale is hard to believe. She not only describes behavior on Wiesel’s part that no one, in his half-century as a major world figure, has ever even whispered about; she seems to know he thought she was religious and was underage and would therefore never report his offense against her. How could she know what he had thought, what she had looked like to him? The fact she is free to advance these wild speculations as though they were truth impeaches her credibility.
For writing these words, I’ll be called a sexist and a misogynist; a victim-blamer and a survivor-shamer. So be it. Like most women, I too have experienced un-asked for attention, unwanted catcalls, and yes, on the subway, once, a touch I did not request and to which I did not consent. According to the wording of the #metoo campaign, and the endless stories I saw on my social media newsfeeds, I could have posted, I could have claimed the mantle. “Me too,” I could have said to the world. But I haven’t. Because, sadly, I know women who have experienced real sexual assault, the kind that cannot ever be confused for harassment or impropriety. To equate harassment and assault, as the campaign does, is to do a grave disservice to women who most deserve our support.
Elie Wiesel is gone from this world. He can no longer defend himself, proclaim his innocence, declare that Listman’s tale is a false one. Or, if she is to be believed, if he is guilty, he can no longer apologize. This is a moment when accusers are believed without question before they have even had to offer an iota of proof for their allegations. The pen is mightier than the sword. You or someone you love might be next. Does that worry you? #metoo.
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Fake News Will Never Die
A problem with no solution.
Noah Rothman 2017-10-19
Though it’s certainly the worst Photoshop job I have ever seen, a provocative image making the rounds on social media also helps demonstrate why the fight against “fake news” is unwinnable.
Let’s set the scene: Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett is surrounded by his jubilant colleagues in the team locker room, all of whom appear to be madly celebrating their teammate’s decision to torch a giant American flag. The image apparently originated on Facebook weeks ago and had been shared thousands of times before it found its way to me. Yet even a cursory review of it would suggest to the critical observer that something is amiss.
For example, all of Bennett’s teammates are looking directly at him and not the blazing flag he’s holding. Even Bennett is looking away from the object of his hatred. Despite being almost entirely engulfed, the flag shows no signs of charring. There is no smoke, nor is there apparently any heat; Bennett is leaning into the flames. Despite being well outside the usual flag-burning demographic, head coach Pete Carroll is ebulliently observing the spectacle. You would think someone might be concerned that setting a blaze inside the tiny, windowless locker room might set off the sprinkler system. This demonic ritual seems to have so possessed our subjects that they are prepared to suffer smoke inhalation and minor burns; such is their commitment to hating America the protector of the faith, Donald Trump.
You don’t need to dig up a debunking of this image (there are several) to know it is propaganda, and weak sauce at that. The fact is, thousands wanted this to be true. They wanted to imagine that their cultural adversaries are one-dimensional robots with a monomaniacal hatred of the country. Those who earnestly shared this image had to suspend disbelief, and then to cloister themselves in circles that would not expose them to evidence contradicting their preconceptions. This is why Washington’s fixation with “fake news” and containing its most damaging effects on the national political ecosystem are doomed. That is a battle against human nature itself.
For lawmakers, that sounds like a challenge, and many have accepted. On Thursday, Axios revealed that Senator John McCain will join two Democrats, Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar, in supporting a move to regulate social-media outlets like Facebook. A proposed amendment to the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which regulates campaign- and issues-related advertising on broadcast, cable, and satellite radio and television, would compel tech and social media firms to disclose advertisements that cost more than $500. Though this act has suffered previous rebukes in the courts, its provisions preventing foreign nationals from engaging in political spending have survived judicial scrutiny. Moreover, Axios indicates Silicon Valley is resigned to the prospect of interference from Washington. The writing is on the wall for social media, but that does not change the fact that expanding Washington’s regulatory power to the Internet is a solution in search of a problem.
According to Facebook, between June 2015 and May 2017, Russian propaganda outlets and Russia-linked agitators purchased about 3,000 divisive ads to the tune of $100,000. That amount of money could yield at least one impression for anywhere from 23 to 70 million people. That seems like a lot, but, in 2015 and 2016, Facebook took in more than $11 million directly from campaigns, to say nothing of legitimate outside groups and 501(c)s.
While “fake news” had more potential to be shared and consumed by those who get some news and information from social media, it’s not clear that it had any impact on shaping public opinion. A study conducted by New York University’s Hunt Allcott and Stanford’s Matthew Gentzkow published in January found that average news consumers were highly unlikely to recall a fake news headline and even less likely to believe them. Moreover, media consumers are much more likely to get their news from news outlets online, radio, and broadcast and cable television than social media.
The scourge is, for the most part, homegrown. Of course, there are notorious foreign enterprises, like the Macedonian “fake-news” factory that methodically pumped propaganda into websites to ham-fistedly target conservative readers. For example, the fake website ConservativeState.com ran a headline in 2016 that purported to expose Hillary Clinton saying she hoped people like Trump ran for office because “they’re honest and can’t be bought.”
That is an atypically sophisticated example of the genre. Much of the “fake news” that concerns lawmakers is made in the U.S.A, and the examples are less than inspiring. Among them are the revelations that Barack Obama planned to issue a “blanket pardon” to protect Clinton from prosecution for crimes of which she was already exonerated, the fact that the former first lady filed for divorce after the election, that Trump thinks being an atheist is a good business strategy, and that the FBI had issued a warrant for Obama’s arrest.
The problem for the crusaders attempting to impose temperance on those who imbibe “fake news” is that their efforts are misdirected. “Fake news” isn’t the menace; gullibility is.
These and thousands of other fake-news stories should inspire in responsible news consumers a hunger for confirmation. It takes an active commitment to ignorance to take salacious headlines from suspicious sites for gospel, and that’s not something Washington can regulate away. They would be more effective educating the public on what constitutes “fake news” and fostering a sense of curiosity in whoever is still looking to politicians for guidance. Ultimately, though, the problem is not for politicians to solve. If you want to believe the former president personally makes millions off of Obamacare’s “royalties,” nothing will stop you. And, frankly, it’s a waste of effort to try.
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The Great Stock Market Crash of 1987
Still the blackest Monday.
JOHN STEELE GORDON 2017-10-19
Thirty years ago today—October 19th, 1987—the bottom dropped out of the stock market.
After the Federal Reserve had stopped the rampant inflation of the 1970’s by inducing a sharp recession that pushed unemployment up to 10.8 percent, the great boom of the 1980’s began. As usual, the stock market anticipated it. There was a full-blown buyer’s panic in August of 1982 as traders piled into stocks. The Dow crossed 1,000 for the third (and last) time that year and hit 1,500 on December 11, 1985. A year later it hit 2,000 and only six months later still hit 2,500, a Dow-Jones number almost inconceivable a few years earlier.
But such a rise is bound to cause a correction sooner or later, and the market peaked at 2,722.42 on August 25, 1987. Japanese traders began selling U.S. securities, especially Treasuries, pushing up bond yields sharply. The Treasury Secretary, James Baker, threatened to let the dollar fall against other currencies. War clouds were building in the Persian Gulf. And the market began to retreat. By Friday, October 16th, the Dow had fallen 17.5 percent to 2246.74, off 109 points that day alone—the biggest single-day point drop in the Dow ever.
Asian markets opened sharply lower on Monday, October 19th, and London followed suit. When the New York Stock Exchange opened that morning, there was such an imbalance between buy and sell orders that only 25 of the S&P 500 could open at all. NASDAQ market-makers began to stop answering their phones, shutting down trading in small-cap stocks. Rumors that the SEC was about to close the market caused still more panic.
By the time the market closed at four o’clock, the Dow was down 22.6 percent on volume of 608 million shares, twice the previous volume record. In the crash of 1929, the volume was 16 million shares; a record that stood until 1968. Two old, large brokerage firms had failed, as had sixty small ones.
The next morning, prices sagged further, but then the Federal Reserve acted as central banks are supposed to act in such a situation. It injected massive liquidity into the system by buying large amounts of Treasuries, greatly increasing bank reserves and thus the banks’ ability to lend. And it leaned, hard, on the banks to reopen credit lines to brokerage firms that the banks had been closing in the previous two months. It was the first time since 1792 that the federal government had acted decisively to stop a market panic. And it worked.
The market steadied around noon and then rose sharply for the rest of the day. Because the underlying economy was sound and growing quickly, stocks soon began to rise again. The market recovered its 1987 high in only two years (it took 25 years to recover reach 1929’s high), and it reached 3,000 in the spring of 1991.
Because the Fed did its duty in 1987 and “flooded the Street with money,” the crash today is almost completely forgotten (except by the pros who were on the Street that day, which was for many the most exciting and terrifying of their careers). But the crash of 1929, when the Fed did nothing, is still seared in the American folk-memory.
We can only hope that the Fed learned its lesson that day and when the next crash comes along—and it will come someday, as sure as the sun will rise in the east that morning, it will once again flood the Street with money.
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