Trump gives "intelligence" a bad name.

A version of this was published on line at the Sky Hi News, February 5, 2019
https://www.skyhinews.com/news/opinion-muftic-trump-gives-intelligence-a-bad-name/

Aside from reports Donald Trump has a short attention span and poor reading comprehension skills, there is another disturbing meaning to Trump's definition of   "intelligence".  Those who have tried to brief him, including his former secretary of state, reportedly called him a “***moron “. There are recent reports by other intelligence briefers who said he was "willfully ignorant" and he exploded in anger when he was given information that contradicted his public statements and agenda.   Not only is he ignoring and dismissing his own intelligence agencies' conclusions, he is forging US foreign policy based on something other than rational use of any objective real-world facts supplied by his own agency appointees. If our country survives the next two years without a major foreign policy blunder, we can count ourselves lucky.

 He has recently dismissed the conclusion presented in their annual report on threats to national security to Congress by US intelligence heads that contradicted his own assertions. No, Mr. President, ISIS is not dead; no, Iran is abiding by their disarmament agreement, and, no, North Korea will not give up nuclear capability because it is too basic to their regime's survival. The "crisis" at the Southern border did not even register in their list of top ten security threats.  Trump called the intelligence chiefs “naive”, he sent them "back to school”, and now he termed in press remarks their findings are just opinions with which he can disagree, as if these professionals were writing an op ed piece with an ideological agenda.  Thousands of agents risk their lives to gather such facts and awesome technology provides even more information. That gulf between Trump's words and the intelligence agencies' conclusions is enough to make us wonder where he ever got some of his ideas.  Could he be   listening to foreign intelligence service findings whispered in his ear by even Russian President Vladimir Putin himself? He has had several one on one secret meetings with him. After all, he has taken Putin's word over our own services in public before.   Last July in Helsinki, Trump dissed US intelligence agency reports that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections, and instead accepted Putin’s words of denial as the truth.

There are good reasons to suspect Trump has been listening to Putin because the foreign policy he is conducting supports Russia’s goals. Trump and Russia do not support US security policies that have created peace and prosperity in Europe post-Soviet era. Trump's foreign policy initiatives aid Russian actions to expand their influence and control to former Soviet spheres of interest.  Putin's stealth invasion of Ukraine and his Crimea annexation resulted in the West imposing punishing sanctions on Putin’s oligarch friends. Trump just lifted sanctions on one oligarch, and would like to remove all sanctions, period. While repeating Putin’s very words, Trump called NATO “obsolete” and he threatens to pull out from NATO, a mutual defense treaty, which would clear the way for Russia to try Ukraine /Crimea - like takeovers in the Baltics and Balkans without triggering an automatic military response. US pulling out of Syria would leave Russia with greater influence the Middle East.  Trump’s recent pulling out of the IMF treaty will allow Russia to develop their mid-range nuclear capability out in the open. No IMF treaty? No sweating compliance or fearing punishment when or if they have been outed and making this a much more dangerous world.

Trump's disdain for US intelligence services has a history in the Iraq war and   faulty US intelligence verification that there were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  There were at that time no international inspectors on the ground in Iraq. Saddam cleverly created the fiction he had the capability in order to deter future attackers. The situation is very different in Iran. Thanks to the multinational Iran nuclear deal, that country has been constantly monitored by inspectors on site and shipments of nuclear material into Iran have been subject to inspection and control.  Trump pulled out of the deal.  Some fear Trump may be cooking up a reason to invade Iran, egged on by hawkish advisers.  Destroying the Iran nuclear deal would end those inspections, but fortunately other signators continue the program without us.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/trump-moron-tillerson-publicly-confirms.html

http://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/01/intelligence-chiefs-diverge-trump-main-threats-us/154511/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/politics/nato-president-trump.html

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/donald-trump-putin-helsinki-summit/index.html

Was the missile strike in Syria the right move? Could be.

Version of this appeared in all editions of the Sky Hi Daily News April 12, 2017

History will judge if the missile strike in Syria was the right move. It was a moral action, justifiably  a dramatic way to object and  to deter further  use of chemical weapons,  but will it lead to a resolution of the conflict? There could be some positive outcomes. At least  it did not start World War III. It could induce  Russia and Syria to begin considering a political solution; makes the use of chemical weapons too militarily costly to be used by even the most evil leader; sends a message to North Korea that they should not take comfort that their nuclear threat  to the US west coast, will be ignored. It could motivate  China to put more pressure on the crazy North  Korean leader to cool his ICBM nuclear plans because he will not know what that unpredictable  Trump will do next, especially since a US missile carrying fleet has moved near the Korean peninsula.

US military intervention is not the solution to Syria.  There is real fear that if  Syrian President Assad is taken down, those who fill that vacuum could be worse. There are those who oppose even a threat of military action because they support peace.  Peace is a goal, not a strategy. For those who believe in peace, how we get to peace should be the question. Empty threats and name calling accomplish very little in convincing those to change their ways when they do not  see peace supporting their personal or national interests.

To reach peace, we could take a page from the 1990's in the Balkans. Bosnia had a large Muslim resistance movement which NATO helped with military aid and by taking out the Serbian air force which resulted in the Dayton Accord peace settlement.  Unlike Bosnia, the resistance in Syria is fragmented and contains even those we are fighting, including ISIS. The hope is that the Syrian Sunni population gets assistance from the Saudis, Jordanians, and Gulf States and they become the non ISIS military resistance on the ground, leading to a stalemate or power shift resulting in a diplomatic settlement.

There are other means to force a diplomatic solution such as placing economic sanctions on the offending regime or its allies.  That pressure is already being hinted with threats of more economic sanctions beyond those  already imposed on Russia, the Assad regime’s enabler,  for their stealth invasions of Crimea and Ukraine.  

The risk with threats to  use military force to reach a peaceful resolution  is that if the threat is not backed up , threats in the future lose their effect as a  credible tool later.  President Obama came under extreme criticism for not taking military action when Syria crossed the red line when they  used chemical weapons, Russia negotiated their removal to stop the US threat in 2013. Obviously they failed to get them all removed.

But striking Syrian airfields and taking out the Syrian air force  is risky business, putting us in direct military conflict with Russia’s military presence there.  So serious are such repercussions, that Congress is correct in demanding approval first  to authorize further military action. Relying on a past authorization of the use of force early in the Iraq invasion is not enough because the  risk of war with Russia was not a factor then.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23876085

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War

Donald Trump and the Hiroshima effect

The President’s visit to Hiroshima last month, site of the first atomic bomb ever dropped, is a grim reminder of the consequences of nuclear war.  So horrendous was the destruction and the pictures of those who survived, that after Nagasaki was nuked three days later, no more nuclear weapons have been used since 1945.  The graphic videos shown around his visit of the consequences  of nuclear weapons should remind us of the reasons why increasing that probability of such use is a formula for ours and others’  self-destruction since so many others have already acquired that retaliatory intercontinental capability. It is also a reminder of why Donald Trump’s proposal to arm Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons and to cancel or try to renegotiate the Iran deal would open the dam to an arms race, especially in the Middle East.

For the post 1945 succeeding generations, most of the world pursued nuclear disarmament agreements to limit the ability to produce it and to get agreements with nations who did not yet  have nuclear military capability to attain it.  So long as rational leaders understand the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, we may have a shot at preventing such catastrophes.  North Korea is right now the exception and its leadership could be considered irrational.

 Iran was knocking at the door with predictions it would be nuclear weaponized in three months.   The nuclear disarmament agreement with Iran has been attacked by Pres. Obama’s domestic opponents as a bad one because it did not require Iran to cave in on its terrorist activities or to forswear attacking Israel. There was a great deal of doubt if Iran would comply in spite of the historically stringent verification measures in the agreement. So far it appears Iran has lived up to the requirements of the agreement.

There is also fear that the more countries who have nuclear weapons, the easier it is to spread the capability to other countries who would have no scruples in  using them.  There is a direct line to North Korea from Pakistan’s rogue scientists.  The fear is real. It has happened.

That same fear was the main rationale driving the United States to launch the attack on Iraq.  WMD were never found. Use of small scale and nuclear weapons and primitive “dirty” bombs has fed current fears as well. What if the terrorists in Paris used a dirty bomb instead of automatic weapons? Many more would have been killed and injured.

US foreign policy has worked hard to keep the world safe from nuclear destruction. What Trump is proposing is an irrational break from our policies in effect since World War II. For those of us long in tooth remember the fear of a nuclear war in the Cold War, the drive to build back yard bunkers or drills in schools ducking under desks to survive a nuclear attack.  In the Cuban missile crisis, I was tense sitting at my desk in New York City fearing that I might be vaporized.  It was real to me but subsequent generations have no such memories thanks to nuclear disarmament agreements.  The prospect of Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button and his nuclear proliferating foreign policy is personally frightening.