Analysis: Former White House aide Bannon vs. retired Army Gen. Petraeus on how to defeat Islamic extremism
It’s not just Republican senators any more. From his perch outside the White House, Stephen Bannon is now picking fights with the foreign policy establishment.
David Petraeus reflected on the lessons of the Iraq surge Monday during a daylong conference sponsored by the conservative Hudson Institute on countering violent extremism. “This is a generational struggle,” the retired Army general and former CIA director said. “Therefore, we must have a sustainable and sustained commitment as our strategy… . That is: we need to have a strategy that is sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure, so that we can have the kind of sustained commitment that is necessary in an endeavor that is generational in nature.” Part of that, he explained, means never setting timelines for withdrawal.
Bannon, who was President Donald Trump’s chief strategist into the summer, sought to directly refute Petraeus when he appeared at the conference later in the day. “There’s nobody in the United States that wants to be engaged in combat operations, special forces operations, drone operations (for multiple generations),” he said. “That’s just not where the American people are. It’s not the way our country was founded or formed. … We’re prepared to be allies. What we don’t want is these countries to be protectorates. It’s not our fight.”
He said Petraeus was too focused on “nation building.” “We have to build a nation called the United States of America,” Bannon said. “The way you can have Pax Americana is if we’re a robust and strong society ourselves, not trying to impose our way of life and our beliefs on other people.”
After privately urging him for months to not go along with the military’s recommendation, Bannon also broke publicly with Trump over his decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. “In Afghanistan, I believe we’ve tried to impose our values,” said Bannon, who is back to running Breitbart News. “I believe we’re trying to impose a liberal democratic system on a society that clearly to me doesn’t seem to want it. … We’re not looking to transform the world into our values. The world has got to come to its own conclusions about how it wants to govern themselves.”
Bannon, wearing three layers of black shirts under a black blazer, described the 2016 election as primarily a repudiation of elites and pooh-poohed the value of expertise in policymaking. He said he’d rather have 100 people who show up for a Roy Moore rally in rural Alabama lead the country than the top 100 partners at Goldman Sachs, where Bannon once worked. He added that he’d prefer that same group of citizen populists decide U.S. foreign policy than the globalists who travel to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum.
Insisting that Trump is neither an isolationist nor Islamophobic, Bannon assailed the searing critiques of Trumpism delivered last week by George W. Bush and John McCain as “just more pablum.” “The geniuses in the foreign policy elite, what they left on President Trump is essentially the Bay of Pigs in Venezuela, the Cuban Missile Crisis in Korea and the Vietnam War in Afghanistan – all at one time,” he said. “President Trump didn’t do this. The deplorables that voted for President Trump didn’t do this. This is the geniuses of both political parties. Both political parties delivered this upon us!”
During the panel immediately preceding Bannon’s appearance, the lights abruptly went off in the ballroom. For nearly half an hour before the former White House chief strategist made his entrance, hundreds of attendees chitchatted in hushed tones. An emcee announced three times that no one would be able to enter or exit the room once Bannon started speaking. Finally, with the room still dark, he took the stage to tepid applause. Organizers shined a spotlight on Bannon as he spoke, which projected an ominous shadow onto the wall behind him. For a guy depicted as the Grim Reaper on “Saturday Night Live,” the metaphors were inescapable – especially in a den of establishmentarians and internationalists during the week before Halloween.
Bannon began by reading off his iPhone a passage from Trump’s inaugural address, in which he pledged to completely “eradicate” radical Islamic terrorism “from the face of the Earth.”
He argued that the fall of Raqqa last week demonstrates that Trump is following through. “In nine months, President Trump has accomplished something that people would have mocked and laughed at him for saying in the campaign: Raqqa fell the other day,” Bannon declared. “It was breathtaking… . The world kind of backed off. In eight months of President Trump’s strategy, executed by (Defense Secretary Jim) Mattis, and that strategy was not a war of attrition, he was very specific from day one, this will be a war of annihilation: We will physically annihilate the caliphate. And that’s what’s been accomplished.”
Trump has also personally taken credit for the victory in Raqqa. “I totally changed rules of engagement,” he said in a radio interview last week. “I totally changed our military. I totally changed the attitudes of the military … ISIS is now giving up. They are giving up. They are raising their hands. They are walking off. Nobody has ever seen that before.” The conservative host, Chris Plante, asked why it hadn’t happened earlier. “Because you didn’t have Trump as your president,” Trump replied. “We are fighting now to win, as opposed to fighting to stay there. We were losing. Now we are winning.”
Continuing the victory lap, the White House issued an official statement from Trump on Saturday: “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory, the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight,” the president declared. “One of my core campaign promises to the American people was to defeat ISIS and to counter the spread of hateful ideology. That is why, in the first days of my Administration, I issued orders to give our commanders and troops on the ground the full authorities to achieve this mission. As a result, ISIS strongholds in Mosul and Raqqah have fallen. We have made, alongside our coalition partners, more progress against these evil terrorists in the past several months than in the past several years.”
Ash Carter, who was Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, pushed back on Trump’s claim that he deserves credit: “The plan … was laid out two years ago and has been executed pretty much in the manner and the schedule that was foreseen then,” he said on CNN.
Regardless of who gets credit: Don’t unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner just yet. Veterans of the war in Iraq caution against declaring that the Islamic State is in its last throes, as Dick Cheney infamously did in May 2005.
To be sure, retaking Raqqa was a big win for the U.S.-led coalition. “Three years after seizing a swath of land the size of Belgium across Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State no longer holds any major cities and is clinging to only one sizable stretch of territory spanning the border between the two countries,” The Post’s Louisa Loveluck reports from the region.
But the cost of victory has been high: “Much of the city now lies in ruins,” Loveluck notes. “The water supply and electricity grid have been shattered. According to monitoring groups, more than 1,000 civilians were killed in the fight. More than 270,000 people had fled the city since June. Many are camped across a network of poorly supplied displacement camps with little hope of being able to return home anytime soon.”
And more conflicts loom. Now that their capital is gone, the group will likely shift back toward guerrilla warfare.
This is one reason why members of Trump’s national security team have been much more circumspect than the president and his former top strategist.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo warned last Thursday that Islamic State militants remain capable of orchestrating and carrying out an attack against the United States, possibly downing an airplane, even after being evicted from Raqqa. “IS’ capability to conduct an external operation remains,” Pompeo said at an event sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “But I wouldn’t put them in a singular bucket. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has for a long time had this mission statement, which includes the taking down of a commercial airliner bound for a western country. Certainly, among those would be the United States.” In addition to worrying about America’s enemies “using commercial aviation as their vector to present a threat to the West,” Pompeo also expressed concern about a terrorist capability “we just don’t see.”
Trump’s quotes from the past few days could come back to haunt him if ISIS successfully executes a major terrorist strike on U.S. soil despite losing its capital.
There are many other reasons to worry:
“Rapid advances by Russian- and Iranian-backed government forces in eastern Syria are thwarting the U.S. military’s hopes of pressing deeper into Islamic State territory after winning the battle for Raqqa,” The Post’s Karen DeYoung and Liz Sly reported last week. “An expansion of territory held by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad is also likely to provide Assad with additional leverage in political negotiations over Syria’s future, talks the United Nations hopes to reconvene next month. The recent government gains have cut off the approach of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces to remaining militant strongholds in the southeastern part of the country, including the crucial town of Bukamal near the Syria-Iraq border …
“Aided by Russian airstrikes, in apparent violation of a deconfliction line along the Euphrates River that U.S. officials said had been tentatively agreed on with Moscow, (Syrian) government forces have encircled and claimed control of another location that had been on the wish list of U.S. military planners – the town of Mayadeen, where many senior Islamic State leaders are thought to have been hiding. The militants put up little resistance, and most appear to have escaped.”
Bigger picture, the U.S. still has no long-term plan to keep the peace. ”The problem with this campaign from the beginning was that our military dominance was patched on top of political quicksand,“ The Post’s David Ignatius wrote in his column last Thursday. ”That’s still true. Obama never had a clear political strategy for creating a reformed, post-Islamic State Syria and Iraq; neither does Trump. Our military is supremely effective in its sphere, but the enduring problems of governance, it cannot solve.“
Most of the speakers at the Hudson conference agreed that the administration should not spike the football after Raqqa.
“It’s a good thing that Raqqa fell last week… . But we can’t just assume that that fight is over,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said at the Hudson event. “The Islamic State still controls territory in eastern and southern Syria, which is vital to Iran and the Assad regime and Hezbollah having a land bridge built. It’s in our paramount interest that we stop it from happening.”
Cotton, who led an Army platoon in Iraq a decade ago, warned of Iran filling the vacuum left over by the retreat of ISIS and the strengthening of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. ”We need to take a firmer hand in trying to reach a negotiated compromise solution between some of the factions while also pushing all those factions away from Iran,“ the senator said.
Discussing the botched mission in Niger that left four U.S. soldiers dead, Cotton harkened back to Iraq. ”As the actual caliphate falls, one fear is that we may see growing numbers of Islamic State cells in places like Africa or Afghanistan or around the world,“ he noted. ”It’s possible you could see some of the most dangerous foot soldiers or high commanders of the Islamic State escaping Iraq and Syria and getting into some of those new safe havens.“
“The apparent recent success against the Islamic State … should not result in hubris or complacency,” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, after questioning Bannon on stage. “Radical Islamism has been defeated or suppressed in one region only to raise its head elsewhere. Just as the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan soon after 9/11 did not mark the end of the problem, extremist forces in the Muslim world will try and resuscitate themselves in another form in another theatre. If al Qaida was Jihad 1.0 in our era, and ISIS was Jihad 2.0, we should now start preparing ourselves for Jihad 3.0.”