Posts tagged as “Middle East”

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

America First—In Ukraine, Asia, and Elsewhere

By John R Guardiano on February 6, 2022

Some on the Right have learned the wrong military lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly believe the United States should support Ukraine and check Russian imperialism. However, there are a few noisy pols, egged on by a small contingent of conservative journalists, who beg to differ. Why?

Because they are isolationists or non-interventionists who recall the Iraq War and vow “never again.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for instance, told the New York Times that his skepticism about U.S. efforts to support Ukraine stem largely from “regrets about his own role in promoting the Iraq War.”

The American Conservative’s Helen Andrews, likewise, laments “seeing a lot of the good-old neocons, like, the same folks from the Iraq War, coming back and getting back in the saddle again, and saying exactly the same things that they did last time.”

Their rhetoric now, she warns, “is not that different from what it was in the Iraq War.”

This skepticism of U.S. military intervention is understandable given the unsatisfactory conclusion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What, then, ought to be the lessons learned from these two most recent conflicts and how do they apply to the situation now unfolding in Ukraine?

Nation-Building. First, nation-building is difficult and laborious and ought not be undertaken unless we are prepared for many years, and perhaps decades, of military and diplomatic engagement.

But here’s the thing: Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It is far more advanced and developed.

A functioning nation-state and a legitimate government already exist. These do not need to be built from scratch. We are not trying to create something new and unique; we are trying to assist something old and established.

Military Occupation. Second, military occupation of a country can precipitate adverse political repercussions, which can be self-defeating—especially if the ultimate goal is simply to eliminate a threat and leave.

But here’s the thing: no one is proposing that the United States invade or occupy Ukraine.

U.S. Military Advisers. Third, small numbers of U.S. military advisers embedded with indigenous forces are a decisive force multiplier. They can dramatically improve indigenous military capabilities and strengthen their will to fight and win.

Afghanistan. The most vivid and memorable example of this, of course, was the initial war in Afghanistan (2001), where small numbers of CIA officers worked closely with the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban from power.

The Afghanis did most of the fighting and dying; but their military capabilities and will to fight were immeasurably strengthened by the presence of U.S. military advisers.

This same dynamic played out at the end of the war in Afghanistan.

By President Trump’s final year in office, the United States had withdrawn just about all of its troops from Afghanistan, but crucially, retained a small contingent of advisers who helped to buck up the Afghan national military.

Again, the Afghans did almost all of the fighting and dying.

True, this did not result in a classic military victory; however, it did achieve a modus vivendi that kept the Taliban at bay. And many informed military observers, such as Bing West, believe this modus vivendi could have been sustained indefinitely at minimal cost.

The defeat of ISIS, likewise, was achieved with U.S. military airpower and U.S. military advisers playing a crucial support role for Kurdish and Iraqi forces, who did almost all of the fighting and dying.

Since at least 2015, the United States and its NATO allies have advised and trained with Ukraine’s military, albeit on a very limited and circumscribed basis, and far removed from the front lines of combat.

A more robust and strategic military advisory role could be a decisive force multiplier, just as it was in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This does not mean, obviously, that the United States should invade or occupy Ukraine. Nor does it mean that the United States should wage war on Russia.

What it does mean is that the United States should forward deploy to Ukraine and Eastern Europe critical military personnel and weapons systems to buck up our allies and strengthen their military capabilities.

This is the essence of deterrence. It is what Ronald Reagan meant by “peace through strength.”

Lessons Learned. So yes, there are important lessons to be learned from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they are not the lessons of isolationism and non-interventionism that some on the Right seem to have internalized.

Instead, the lesson is this: while the United States can be too heavy-handed militarily, it also can be too averse to military engagement, and neither extreme is wise or good.

For without American military engagement, nothing good in the world ever happens. Our enemies take advantage of our absence to promote a world order that harms our interests and benefits them.

Middle Course. For this reason, we must steer a middle course between isolationism or non-interventionism and military invasion and occupation.

We must remain militarily engaged on the frontiers of freedom—in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea—to keep our enemies, the enemies of freedom, on their heels, at bay, and on the defensive.

America: first, last, and always.

Feature photo credit: Tucker Carlson, courtesy of The Independent, and Helen Andrews, courtesy of HerAndrews.com.

Democrats Veer Left on Israel, Gaza, and Hamas

Democrats Veer Left on Israel, Gaza, and Hamas

By John R Guardiano on May 23, 2021

Democratic criticism of Israel show their party is increasingly illiberal and left-wing.

If there was ever any doubt that the Democratic Party is no longer a center-left party, but increasingly, a far-left “progressive” party, that doubt was erased in recent weeks by the reaction of Democratic pols to Israeli self-defense efforts in Gaza.

New York City Democratic Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, for instance, was forced to walk-back his support of Israel after his remarks caused an uproar on the campaign trail.

What did Yang say that ignited the furor?

I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists. The people of N.Y.C. will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.

Such a comment, 35 years ago, when Ed Koch was mayor, would have been standard fare and utterly unexceptional. Koch, after all, was a Democrat, a proud Jew, and an unabashed supporter of Israel.

Not so the new breed of “progressive,” left-wing pols who, increasingly, dominate the Democratic Party in New York and beyond.

Leftists Attack Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for instance, have been outspoken in their criticism of Israeli self-defense efforts in Gaza.

Ocasio-Cortez condemned what she calls Israel’s “occupation of Palestine,” while denouncing Yang for his “utterly shameful” statement of support for the Jewish state.

Sanders, meanwhile, blasted the government of Israel for allegedly cultivating and legitimizing “an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism” to oppress the Palestinians.

Ocasio-Cortez is rumored to be mulling a 2022 primary challenge to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). So it is telling that she apparently sees no political downside to loudly beating the drums against Israel.

It is also telling that, last week, Schumer signed onto a Congressional call for a ceasefire—apparently because he takes seriously the threat of being primaried by Ocasio-Cortez.

Rise of the Left. Schumer has reason to worry. Ocasio-Cortez, after all, was a little-known 28-year-old bartender and organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America when she knocked off 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in the 2018 Democratic Party primary.

Two years later, another leftist, Jamaal Bowman, upset 16-term incumbent New York City Rep. Eliot Engel in the 2020 Democratic Party primary.

“Jamaal Bowman proves Ocasio-Cortez was no fluke,” reported the Times. His election

looks more like an indicator than an anomaly: He is one of three younger, insurgent Democrats in New York who seem poised to tilt the state’s, and the party’s, congressional delegation further to the left.

So-called progressives “want the Democratic Party to rethink its relationship fundamentally with Israel,” reports National Public Radio.

“At least half [of the Democrats in Congress] are hostile to Israel,” while the other half of the party’s Congressional caucus is “afraid of those who are hostile to Israel,” explained Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).

The Future. The far left hasn’t yet forced the United States to renounce its steadfast ally, Israel. President Biden has been careful to say that Israel has a right to defend itself while also urging the Jewish state to recommit to the so-called two-state solution.

However, given the political currents and the current political trajectory, we may only be a few election cycles away from the break with Israel that the progressive left demands.

“We are seeing the rise of a new generation of activists who want to build societies based on human needs and political equality,” Sanders exults.

“We saw these activists in American streets last summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We see them in Israel. We see them in the Palestinian territories.”

“With a new president, the United States now has the opportunity to develop a new approach to the world—one based on justice and democracy.”

Feature photo credit: Three of the most anti-Israel members of Congress: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), courtesy of Robert J. Hutchinson.

What if Trump Used His Twitter Feed to Wage War Against ISIS?

What if Trump Used His Twitter Feed to Wage War Against ISIS?

By John R Guardiano on February 18, 2020

Many critics, myself included, lament the fact that President Trump tweets so much. In truth, though, the problem is not that Trump tweets so much; it’s that so much of what he tweets is embarrassing, juvenile, and blatantly detrimental to his own political interests.

But just imagine, if you will, a president who had greater self-awareness, self-discipline, maturity, wisdom, savvy, and political smarts. Why, such a president could tweet regularly and often, but to much greater political effect. I thought about this when reading an excellent piece by Thomas Joscelyn in The Dispatch.

Joscelyn is a senior editor at the Long War Journal published by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He notes that, according to fresh reporting by Martin Chulov and Mohammed Rasool in The Guadian, the Islamic State’s new leader is Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, also known as Haji Abdullah; and he is not an Arab, but an ethnic Turkmen.

Salbi (or Haji Abdullah) became the leader of ISIS after their previous leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, blew himself up in a U.S. military raid in late October 2019. And the fact that Salbi is not an Arab, but an ethnic Turkmen is a real problem for the Islamic State: because it calls into question Salbi’s legitimacy as a ruler in the eyes of the jihadists whom he’s supposed to lead and command.

Why is that? Because ISIS’s claim to legitimacy its based on the fact that its rulers supposedly descend from the Prophet Muhammad; but such a claim is dubious, Joscelyn points out, if in fact, Salbi is not an Arab.

An earlier leader of the Islamic State, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, had much the same problem, he notes.

Jihadist critics argued that no one really knew Abu Omar’s true identity or background, so it was absurd for anyone to declare their fealty to him. Bin Laden had to answer this charge in both his private correspondence and public statements.

There’s more to the story, but the point is that this could be a real problem for the current Islamic State, which split off from al-Qaeda. But thus far the U.S. and its allies have done little to exploit it.

“If the U.S. and its allies were adept at messaging—and, trust me,” Joscelyn writes, “they are not—this is the sort of apparent discrepancy that would be trumpeted far and wide as part of a counterterrorist media campaign.”

Internecine Jihadi War. This is a great and under-appreciated point. Internecine ideological disputes within the Jihadist ranks are intense and very real—and taken quite seriously by the Jihadists themselves. The United States should be doing everything that it possibly can to exploit these divisions and keep the Jihadists divided and at war with themselves.

This is especially important because, as Joscelyn observes, ISIS is not yet dead. Indeed, despite the loss of its territory, the terrorist group retains an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 combatants in Syria and Iraq combined, including “key veteran personnel” such as Haji Abdullah.

Haji Abdullah, in fact, “is a founding member of the Islamic State’s first incarnation, with his jihadist biography stretching back to the days of al-Qaeda in Iraq (circa 2003-04),” Joscelyn writes.

An American President who understood this (not President Trump, obviously) could use his Twitter feed smartly and wisely to wage war agains the Jihadists.

And there is no need for heavy propaganda or editorializing either. Simply tweeting out a link to this Guardian article, for instance, and mildly asking some fair and legitimate questions about the ISIS leader would do the trick.

Unfortunately, Trump would rather tweet in juvenile and idiotic fashion about what he last saw on Fox News or how he was wronged by the “Deep State.” But the problem is not Twitter, which, in the right hands, can be used well and to good effect. The problem is the man—or the adolescent in a man’s body—behind the tweet.

Feature photo credit: The Guardian

The Suleimani Strike Comports with Both International and Constitutional Law

The Suleimani Strike Comports with Both International and Constitutional Law

By John R Guardiano on January 16, 2020

There have been a flurry of published articles declaring, ex cathedra, that the U.S. military strike against Iranian General Qassem Suleimani violates both international and Constitutional law. As we briefly explained in a previous post, this is not true.

The strike against Suleimani was defensive in nature; it occurred in a country, Iraq, where U.S. military personnel have been fighting and dying for 17 years; and it commenced only after a long-running series of Iranian military actions in Iraq, dating back over nearly two decades, that have resulted in the death of more than 600 Americans.

Iran, moreover, has been waging war against the United States for the past 40 years, ever since its 1979 revolution and seizure of 52 American hostages.

For ordinary people, enough said. Neither international law nor Constitutional law are suicide pacts. However, because media and academic partisans are out in force arguing that the strike was illegal, it is worth revisiting the issue.

International Law. First, international law is real and important because it promulgates rules and norms that govern international conflict and provide some predictability of action, thereby helping to minimize war crimes and atrocities. However, international law is much more malleable and subject to dispute and interpretation than domestic law, and it evolves organically over time to a far greater extent than domestic law.

That is because there is no international legislature and executive branch responsible for passing and implementing international law. Instead, international law develops over time based on treaties, customs and conventions, judicial decisions, and general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.

True, we have a United Nations, but the U.N. is not a unitary world government that rules the planet and whose decrees ipso facto have the force of law. Instead, the U.N. is a deliberative body, where countries argue, negotiate, and try to address problems and difficulties as best they can short of war.

U.N. resolutions sometimes have the force of law, but not always. The United Nations Charter adopted in 1945 is considered binding international law. However, other U.N. resolutions, such as ES-10/L.22, which denies that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, are more controversial and in dispute.

My point is this: anyone who insists that international law, or the application of international law, is clearcut, obvious, fixed, and unchanging is either lying or trying to use international law to pursue a political agenda.

And in fact, using international law for political purposes, as a tool of statecraft, is commonplace. This often is how international law evolves and develops. Countries try to promulgate rules and norms to justify their actions on the world stage. It’s called lawfare: “the strategy of using—or misusing—law as a substitute for, [or a complement to], traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.”

Thus for the United States—and certainly, for Trump administration officials determined to put “America First”—international law is not a problem to overcome, but rather a justification that must be embraced.

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, after all, specifically gives countries the right to self-defense. Everything else is legalistic background noise. And if some legal scholars don’t yet recognize the legitimacy of the Suleimani strike, they soon will, as international law adapts and evolves to reflect changes in weapons and war, as well as the geopolitical landscape.

Constitutional Law. As you would expect, because of the more fixed and settled nature of domestic law, U.S. Constitutional law is more discernible and straightforward: As we’ve previously observed, the President of the United States, as Commander in Chief, has a solemn responsibility to act with dispatch in defense of U.S. military personnel under attack. Failing to do so would be a dereliction of duty.

This is not “initiating a war” against Iran as some critics falsely and hyperbolically assert. Instead, it is wisely prosecuting a long-simmering war in Iraq. The Armed Forces of the United States, remember, have been deployed to Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government and in accordance with a 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force there.

“The power to declare war is different from the power to make war, which belongs to the president in his role as ‘commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,'” explain Constitutional scholars David David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey in The Wall Street Journal. “There are few constraints on that power when the president is defending Americans, civilian or military, against armed attack,” they note.

“Suleimani,” adds David French, a wartime attorney in the Army’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, “was killed lawfully [and] in a properly constitutionally-authorized conflict… Trump’s action was constitutionally legitimate, and that matters. A lot.”

“It is a basic aspect of the law of armed conflict,” French adds, that opposing commanders are a legitimate target.

Soleimani had entered a theater of armed conflict not as a diplomatic guest of the Iraqi government, but rather as a co-belligerent with Shiite militias—the very militias that had attacked an American base and killed an American contractor and had days before attacked and burned part of the American embassy.

The bottom line: Americans need not feel guilty about our strike against Suleimani. It was morally and legally justified. He had it coming, and America’s enemies have been put on notice. With a nod to Liam Neeson, if you kill an American (or orchestrate the death of many Americans), we will look for you; we will find you; and we will kill you. Enough said.

Congress Emboldens Terrorists and Rogue Regimes with ‘War Powers Resolution’

Congress Emboldens Terrorists and Rogue Regimes with ‘War Powers Resolution’

By John R Guardiano on January 14, 2020

Is it asking too much of Congress to support American troops under fire in the Middle East? This, sadly, is not a rhetorical question. The House of Representatives has conspicuously failed to support our troops and the Senate is poised to follow suit.

How so? By passing a “war powers resolution” designed to restrict President Trump’s Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to authorize military action in defense of our troops. The House approved a war powers resolution last week and the Senate is expected soon to do the same.

Why now? Because of the U.S. military strike that took out Iranian General Qassem Suleimani. Congressional advocates of a war powers resolution say it is needed to stop Trump from taking America to war. Never mind that the President has been extraordinarily restrained and tempered in the wake of repeated Iranian provocations.

In fact, it was the only after an American serving in Iraq was killed by Iranian-backed militia that Trump finally decided to strike back by taking out Suleimani. The President has since made clear, in both word and deed, that he has no plans or desire for a larger-scale war with Iran. Yet, says Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), “Congress cannot be sidelined on these important decisions.”

Of course, no one would deny Congress its rightful say in the use and disposition of American military power. Under Article 1 of the Constitution, Congress authorizes and appropriates funding while conducting necessary oversight of the executive branch and U.S. military. But once U.S. forces are deployed—as they have been in the Middle East for decades now—then the President of the United States, as Commander in Chief, has a solemn responsibility to act with dispatch in their defense.

That’s exactly what Trump did when he ordered the strike against Suleimani, a terrorist ringleader who had orchestrated the death of more than 600 Americans. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explains, we simply cannot have 535 Commanders in Chief. That is completely illogical and utterly impractical.

If the war powers resolution ever makes its way to Trump’s desk, it will be summarily vetoed. The President will not allow his Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to be usurped by Congress. Nonetheless, serious damage will have been done to America’s standing in the world, and our troops will be imperiled.

Terrorists and rogue regimes throughout the Middle East will interpret the war powers resolution as an impediment to Trump’s ability to respond to their provocations and defend our troops. They will see the resolution as an opportunity for them to terrorize U.S. and allied forces with minimal fear of reprisal: because, after all, Trump has been constrained; his hands tied by Congress.

Weakness invites aggression, and make no mistake: the war powers resolution signals weakness to America’s enemies.

What should Congress have done and what might it still do? Simple: pass a resolution that: a) condemns the Iranian regime for sponsoring terrorism; and b) supports the U.S. military strike against Suleimani. That would strengthen deterrence vis-a-vis the regime and limit the possibility of a larger-scale war in the Middle East.

President Reagan called this “peace through strength,” and it is still the right and strategically wise approach.