by Jiri Valenta and Leni Friedman Valenta
“America will not lead
from behind. America First does not mean America alone. It is a
commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests…”
President
Donald J. Trump departs from the Pentagon alongside Secretary of
Defense James Mattis on Jan. 27, 2017, in Washington, D.C. (DOD photo by
U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jette Carr)
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 500, June 17, 2017
“…if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.”
– Sun Tzu
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: “America will not lead
from behind. America First does not mean America alone. It is a
commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests…” So wrote
President Donald Trump’s NSA, General H.R. McMaster, with Gary Cohn,
head of the National Economic Council, in the Wall Street Journal.
What follows is a discussion of US leaders’ failed strategies in
several wars, Trump’s team of generals, and the emerging Trump doctrine,
which is here termed “strategic savvy”.
1964 Vietnam War; “Lies that Led to Vietnam”
Bullet-headed Lt. General H.R. McMaster, the US National Security
Adviser, is not just a brave warrior. Like his mentor, General David
Petraeus, he is a prominent military intellectual. Both men wrote their
PhD dissertations on the lessons of Vietnam. In The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,
Petraeus concluded, “…significant emphasis should be given to
counterinsurgency forces, equipment and doctrine.” McMasters’s thesis, Dereliction of Duty, addressed the roles of LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. His subtitle was “Lies that Led to Vietnam.”
On August 4, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was pushed through
Congress authorizing military action against North Vietnam as “vital” to
US national interests. It sought to punish Hanoi for an allegedly
unprovoked attack by three torpedo boats on a US destroyer in the Gulf
of Tonkin. In fact, it had not been unprovoked; the US had made repeated
prior attacks on the North Vietnamese coast.
The major reason for the American war against North Vietnam, asserts
McMaster, was the then-upcoming 1964 presidential election. To Johnson,
the prime enemy that summer was not the North Vietnamese but his GOP
opponent, Barry Goldwater, who had accused the president of being soft
on communism. In response, LBJ and McNamara misrepresented the facts and
the pretext for sending US ground forces to Vietnam, and deliberately
concealed the costs of war. McNamara’s thinking was shaped by his “whiz
kids,” DOD civilian nerds, who lacked combat experience and arrogantly
believed quantitative statistical analysis could compensate for their
deficits in geopolitics, history, and military strategy.
Boasting that he had won his election “bigger than anybody had won
ever,” LBJ endorsed McNamara’s strategy of gradual pressure on Hanoi,
seeking to wear it down by “attrition.” To McMaster, this was “not a
strategy but a lack of it … reinforcing arrogance, weakness, lying in
the pursuit of self-interest and above all dereliction of duty to the
American people.”
2001 War of Necessity in Afghanistan
In this century, the one war the US won – at least in its initial
stage – was Afghanistan. There, following the 9/11 attack on the US
homeland, President George Bush defended America’s vital national
interests. Nor was this a regular DoD operation by the US army. US
forces consisted of CIA operators, Special Forces, and an anti-Taliban
Afghan resistance, the Northern Alliance. The 1st Marine
Expeditionary Brigade was also involved, commanded by the current
Defense Secretary, then Major General James Mattis, USMC. In addition,
the US was given logistical help by Russian President Vladimir Putin,
then Bush’s strategic partner. Within three months, the US had defeated
its foe, liberated Kabul, and changed the regime.
2003 War of Choice in Iraq
But afterwards, as Paula Broadwell observed, the initial brilliant
success in Afghanistan “was squandered when the US marched headlong into
Iraq in early 2003.” Instead of finishing the war of necessity in
Afghanistan, Washington entered into a war of choice with Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein – who had had nothing to do with 9/11.
Why? In the words of historian Jean Edward Smith, the
president tried to sell the war on the basis of “the flimsy notion that
he was removing a potential threat to the United States” because Saddam
might have WMD. That threat proved to be nonexistent. In addition, as a
born-again Christian, Bush believed he was divinely guided to bring
democracy to the Iraqi people.
On August 4, 2002, the 38th anniversary of the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution, Senator Chuck Hagel, a distinguished Vietnam veteran,
told Congress, “We didn’t ask any questions before we got into Vietnam …
this is why it’s important to do so now.” Two senior members of Bush’s
team did so: Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, who questioned the
costs of war in Iraq; and Secretary of State General (ret.) Colin
Powell, who prophesied ethnic divisions and insurgency. Both were
subsequently marginalized by the Bush administration.
Like McNamara, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his two
principal assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, lacked the
combat experience necessary to make sound military decisions.
In the end, the one who did have it – Powell – was proven right. He and
Bob Richer, then head of the CIA’s Middle East Division, also blamed
Bush’s NSA, Condoleezza Rice, for the subsequent attempt at instant
democratic nation-building. As Richer explained, “Rice’s vision that
Iraq had to look like us overnight was catastrophic.” The president, he
observed, “was a realist, but he listened to her and was swayed.”
US forces were sufficient to topple Saddam following a major
invasion. But instead of liberating the Iraqis, the Americans became
hated occupiers. This gave rise to a Sunni insurgency, during which the
US fired the Iraqi military without setting up a stipend program for the
soldiers and their families (thus compelling them to subsist on nothing
for five long weeks). The US then fired all Baath Party members down to
Level 4 without any agreed reconciliation process. This gave tens of
thousands of influential Iraqis – often Western-educated – an incentive
to oppose the new Iraq rather than support it.
In the ensuing struggle over leadership, a virtual civil war erupted
between Sunnis and Shiites, with Kurds in the mix as well – not to
mention al-Qaeda, which was rising in the Sunni community in Iraq. The
unfinished war in Afghanistan and the unending, Vietnam-like quagmire in
Iraq produced two growing insurgencies.
The Surge of Petraeus and his “Shipmate” Mattis
Before he became, in early February 2007, Commander of Multi-National
Forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus worked with Mattis to lead a
prominent team of US Army and Marine experts on an Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Referred to as “King David’s Bible,” this
manual became an outstanding social science study of insurgencies and
counter-insurgencies, as well as a guide to how to win the hearts and
minds of Iraqis (and Afghans).
Those principles and techniques were applied by the forces under
Petraeus in Iraq for over 19 months in 2007-08. The Surge, as the effort
was known (due to the deployment of well over 25,000 additional
American forces), ushered in a new strategy that was a 180-degree shift
from the previous one, which had been assessed as failing in December
2006 by then-commander and ambassador Ryan Crocker.
The result was an 85% reduction in the level of violence and
significant progress in a host of areas. President Bush deserves
enormous credit for supporting the deployment of additional forces and
for backing Petraeus and Crocker.
In late 2011, after some three years of further progress and
additional reductions in violence, President Barack Obama decided to
withdraw the remaining US combat forces and the last four-star US
commander, leaving only a modest training mission. He reportedly was
concerned that there would not be an Iraqi parliament-approved Status of
Forces Agreement. Iraqi PM Maliki subsequently pursued ruinous
sectarian measures – orchestrating legal charges against the Sunni Arab
Vice President and his security detail, and later targeting the Sunni
Arab Finance Minister and a prominent Sunni Arab parliamentarian. He
returned to Iraqi military and police units abusive Iraqi leaders whom
General Petraeus had insisted be removed before US support would be
provided, then had those forces put down peaceful Sunni demonstrations
very violently. He stopped honoring agreements to provide various forms
of assistance to tens of thousands of former Sunni insurgents who had
reconciled with the government during the Surge.
Tragically, these actions undid much of what coalition and Iraqi
forces had sacrificed to achieve, and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq began
to rise again. Islamic State arose out of the ashes of the defeated
al-Qaeda in Iraq.
2011: Obama‘s Leading from Behind in Libya
In 2011, to make matters even worse, Obama and his Secretary of
State, Hillary Clinton, began to militate for yet another war, this time
in Libya at the height of the “Arab Spring.” They did not heed Defense
Secretary Robert Gates’s strenuous objections that it did not encompass
“our vital national interests,” especially amidst two
ongoing wars in the Middle East. Nor did Obama consider the war’s costs.
Once again, the naysayer was ignored. Nine days later, Gates resigned.
Like LBJ and McNamara in Vietnam and Bush and Rice in Iraq, Obama and
Clinton engaged in deceit about the real purpose of the war. Clinton
argued that a NATO intervention was urgently needed to avert a massacre
of Libyan civilians by Muammar Qaddafi’s troops. But her subsequently
hacked e-mails substantiated that the real objective was regime change
in the service of democratic nation-building.
After the rebels murdered Qaddafi, Libya, like Iraq earlier, became a
paradise for tribal fighters and jihadists, and there ensued a
significant flow of migrants to Europe. None of this chastened Clinton.
She began to support secretly arming the Syrian rebels in a proxy war
with both its dictator Assad and his patron, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Obama’s Strategic Patience
On June 11, 2011, Obama announced that he would withdraw 10,000
troops from Afghanistan by the end of December 2011 and the rest of the
30,000-member surge force by July 2012 (i.e., before the Democratic
Party convention). Once again there arose a troublesome naysayer.
General David Petraeus objected to the premature withdrawal. Aware as
he was of the actual situation on the ground, he was adamant that the
projected timing of the draw-down would jeopardize the progress made in
the previous year of the surge in Afghanistan. Obama was forced to
compromise, but did not forget Petraeus.
Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and one of the president’s
loyalists, suspected that Petraeus was contemplating his own
presidential run in 2016. It did not help that Petraeus emphatically
told Emmanuel he wasn’t. Two days after the 2012 presidential election,
Petraeus resigned his post as CIA director because of an affair with his
biographer, Paula Broadwell. (The mishandling of classified information
did not surface until months later.) When historian Smith queried
“whether the Obama administration had taken advantage of his affair to
cut his head off,” Petraeus smiled, but did not reply.
Towards Strategic Savvy
If there is any solace for Washington’s numerous follies in the
Middle East, it is Donald Trump’s selection of an outstanding national
security team: Mattis, McMaster, and General John Kelly (Homeland
Security). With Trump’s election, America saw the dawn of a new doctrine
to replace “strategic patience,” leading from behind, and the absence
of strategy. We call the new approach “strategic savvy,” meaning the
judicious use of military force, diplomacy, and economic instruments.
Petraeus describes it as a “comprehensive and sustainable commitment” in
defense of American vital national interests. The president and his
security team seek to overturn policies that have produced only failed
states, Islamist-fed chaos, growing terrorist attacks in Europe, and
catastrophic debt.
We have witnessed the first actions defining this emerging doctrine.
On April 7, 2017, US navy destroyers carried out a missile strike on a
Syrian airfield in retribution for Assad’s use of chemical weapons
against his subjects. A tactical move, it bore profound strategic
significance, since it used judicious force to accomplish what Obama had
failed to do in 2013 despite his own declared red line. So did the
dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air
Blast), the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, on ISIS
fighters in Afghanistan on April 14.
Facing what Mattis has called a “clear and present danger” from North
Korea, Trump’s team did not put the problem off in the manner of the
past three US administrations. He is meeting it head on with an
unprecedented deployment of three carrier groups with massive naval and
air power. This is intended to send a clear message on the need to stop a
maniacal leader from accomplishing a nuclear weaponization and delivery
system that could eventually reach American shores. President Trump has
communicated this need to Chinese President Xi very clearly as well.
The era of Obama’s “strategic patience” is finally over.
Future presidents should consider replicating Trump’s placement of
national security responsibilities in the hands of individuals with
combat experience. America’s future leaders should be men and women with
such experience combined with intellectual prowess.
In the meantime, the saga continues. Americans are transfixed by
Russo-gate, much as they were by Watergate. President Trump’s political
opponents seek to undo the results of the 2016 election by painting him
as Putin’s Manchurian candidate.
Trump should now do what Obama did not: pardon Petraeus, whom Gates
called “one of the nation’s great battle captains.” As Senator Rand Paul
observed, Petraeus showed his personal journals, which did contain
classified material, to only one person, an Army reserve intelligence
officer with a top secret clearance. Her book was thoroughly checked for
classified information and any sensitive political items by the then
head of West Point’s Social Sciences Department, Colonel Mike Meese. The
negligent Hillary Clinton, still unpunished, revealed classified
material to the multitudes through her unsecured server.
Petraeus sympathizes with the beleaguered Trump’s predicament, but
only to a certain extent. Like the authors, he realizes that Trump, a
novice at presidential politics, has made big mistakes and then repeated
them, making things worse.
In his final address as a general, Petraeus quoted Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 Men in the Arena speech. The words are now surely applicable to both of them:
It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to
the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and
sweat and blood … who errs and comes up short again and again … but who
knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, who spends himself for a
triumph of high achievement and … if he fails, at least fails while
daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
he authors are indebted to General David Petraeus for his comments and suggestions.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
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Dr. Jiri Valenta and his wife, Leni, are the principals of The
Institute of Post Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net). They are
authors of a forthcoming book on Russia and US interventions in the 21st
century. A prominent author and speaker, Jiri served for decade as a
professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US
Naval Post-Graduate School and former consultant to senior members of
Reagan administration.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/emerging-trump-doctrine-strategic-savvy/
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