Posted on 04/09/2017 7:38:52 PM PDT by LS
By way of disclaimer, I have known Steve Bannon for years and we regularly communicate in rather short bursts. So my info on the "inside Team Trump" is pretty one-sided. I don't know Jared Kushner, know OF McMaster and recommended him to Team Trump (as did Victor Davis Hanson). So I know what I know, but it's a pretty limited range of insight.
1. The Syria strikes. I knew going in this would be a firestorm for Trump among his voters, especially the Ron Paul/non-interventionist backers (many of whom you see on Twitter).
I agree with many of you that the evidence was not clear that it was Assad---indeed, it could well have been ISIS. I also agree this does not help in our fight against ISIS. I further agree that regime change is dangerous on a number of levels.
That said, the strike was a multifaceted message, and unfortunately one that absolutely had to be sent, somewhere, somehow.
Recall as many of you have posted, in the past two years, the Russkies have been getting extremely provocative, doing flybys of American ships, sailing into our waters, and so on. Forget who is "responsible" for Ukraine, the fact is Ukraine unloaded its nukes cuz we promised them we would protect them via NATO. Now that promise is vanishing. Our word certainly is not good from the Ukrainian perspective.
I start Syria with Russia because at some point, somewhere, Putin had to get a message that while we want peace and want to work with him, he cannot possibly be allowed to threaten (as he already has) American ships at sea and sail in our waters. This is flat out aggression.
It can be stopped, and nipped in the bud, but how? Consider Syria a "brush back pitch" to the Russian batter. (In baseball, when the hitter takes advantage of the plate and gets too far into the pitcher's zone, the pitcher throws one high and tight to brush him back and say, "No, you have to play by the rules.")
I do believe Putin not only got this message, but was expecting it. He wanted to see if Trump was Obama The bad news is that it had to go on this long, but like any aggressor, the longer you wait, the bloodier it becomes to stop him. I think Putin got the message. Yes, he's making a lot of threats. But he now knows Trump will act when provoked and act DECISIVELY. Whether you agree with the strike or not, you can't accuse Trump of "indecision."
Further, I think the brush-back pitch worked on Iran and the NORKs. Coming as it did when Xi was at dinner (indeed, I hear he was the first one to receive the news of the attack!), it was the equivalent of Trump pulling out a Colt .45 and laying it on the table and saying, "ok, Xi, let's chat." The fact that Xi apparently gave his blessing to American responses to the NORKs--in their own back yard---suggests the meeting was a 100% success. The brush back pitch was felt in China, too.
Many here do not agree with Trump's action. Many think he was being "played." I have heard (haven't verified it) that the "vote" to fire the missiles was unanimous among the NatSec team, including Bannon. He of course would never confirm or deny, nor would I ask. But what we have from "fake" news is one story that it was Kush v Bannon, another that it was Kush/Bannon v Mattis, and a third that it was everyone agreeing.
For the reasons I've outlined above NOT particularly relating to Syria, I believe the latter. Further, this was an opportunity to throw the brush-back pitch without civilian casualties and without a bunch of dead bodies being hauled out of a mosque. In other words, if Team Trump was looking for the "perfect" place to send a message, gas or no gas, this was it.
2. "Chaos/Turmoil inside Team Trump" Lately the Twitter people have been going nuts against Kushner thinking he is engaging in a war on Bannon. First, if you look at the picture of the "bunker" with everyone during the strike, the two people closest to Trump are Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, right behind him. Kush is one person removed. Small things. Second, Bannon himself told me three nights ago, "I ain't goin' anywhere." I'm pretty sure that means DT said so, too. We keep missing this and missing this, but REGULARLY Team Trump throws out a piece of media "cheese" into the maze and the media rats chase it while Team Trump governs. I don't know if the Kush/Bannon "clash" is real or just cheese, but it would not surprise me if the two guys don't go get a beer every night and laugh.
Trump's management style is much like Lincoln's: get a bunch of top, smart people who have different ideas, let them fight, come to a decision that may favor one, the other, or even neither. Don't forget businessmen do not hesitate to drop non-producers. Trump fired Lewandowski, Manafort, and his OWN BROTHER (as did Thomas Watson, Jr. at IBM!) If anyone thinks he won't dump Kush for good reason, think again. Ditto Bannon.
3. McMaster. I vouched for McMaster as did Victor Davis Hanson. McMaster is one of the few people in the Pentagon with actual hands-on success at forming alliances with Muslims against other Muslims. He was a rebel throughout the Iraq war, which kept him from being promoted. He's exactly the type of outside-the-box thinker you want. I'm NOT concerned about his early comments on "radicals" being a minority. Folks, you will not find any commanders in the field, anywhere, saying all Muslims are terrorists. Won't happen, cuz they need locals as interpreters and most of the time as allies. Maybe personally they have different thoughts, but they cannot express those in a combat zone. I think McM's comments were typical of that battlefield thinking.
Bannon's removal from the NSC planning group was predicted in Trump's own plans early on. Bannon was there to de-politicize it, and he has, and he still has top clearance, as you've all seen. I could be wrong, but of all the things to worry about, McM ain't one of them.
Finally, we are in a VERY dangerous position due to Obama. If anyone thinks we could just retreat to our borders, it's way too late for that. The NORK nut could wipe out the entire west coast with a single EMP bomb over the north Pacific. Many here would say "yay," but of course that's crazy. The entire US would be set back massively, Japan would be wiped out and we'd have to retaliate big time. (I do think it's time we reconsider assassination as a policy). Zero let the Russkies run wild. We can nudge them back into their stall, but to act like they aren't out would be a mistake. And we still have to deal with Iran.
None of this is easy, and no one will agree with any one policy. Trump was handed an absolute bag of excrement in foreign policy. I think he is trying to avoid not just one, but three wars, and we all better hope the "brush back pitch" was heeded.
What is the strategy to ensure that Syria does not become another Libya or a destabilized mess and far more dangerous place with a power vacuum left by Assad assuming room temp?
You have to understand that many Americans are antsy about the future as we have seen bungle after bungle for so many years.
I do hope that those who have for so long not taken the US seriously now have a warier eye and some trepidation as to what the president may do if they decide to rattle their sabres.
Moslem societies are self enforcing at the most basic level, neighbors will keep each other in line, but republican democracy is an impossibility in an Arab or Arabized Moslem culture. The Turks managed it for 70 years but are relapsing seriously. Malaysia once looked to be pulling it off and is losing it slowly.
So what’s been done about it? Tell me how you will move a military convoy across the country with tens of thousands of dead cars clogging freeways?
And you’re gonna transport ALL water and food via military flights, with NO local support? Come on. We couldn’t even send troops to the Middle East for the Gulf War without US Air, Delta, and American Airlines. We couldn’t handle Iraq without mercenaries and civilians. The strain on the gubment would be astronomical as hospitals failed by the hundreds, half our troops would be needed to stop riots over no money or food being available.
No, unless the CIVILIAN infrastructure is massively hardened, and EMP blast sends us back to the 600s-—and really even worse, because people largely have forgotten how to make the tools and machines we need to even get back to where we are.
I don’t know. I don’t think it mattered. We were likely at a point where SOME statement had to be made.
For ex., did we REALLY need to go into Grenada? Heck know. What “vital national interest” was at stake at the stupid little island? Some students, who would have been shipped home.
That was Reagan telling Adropov & Breznev, “You think we’re back in Vietnam?”
Oh, great. You post a nice lengthy piece right as I crawl into bed ready to zone out. But it looks good so far.
This is my bookmark for the AM.
After coffee, of course.
There is a lot of diplomatic nuance in the “brush-back” pitch. Of course the pitcher and batter are in constant conflict for control of the strike zone. It behooves the pitcher to know what he can get away with each individual batter. Sometimes you want to send a ball straight at the batter’s noggin, a ball that curves at the last moment to miss the batter by a wide margin. This makes the batter look stupid because he “bails out” on a ball that doesn’t come close to him. But the next pitch may start off looking the same, so the batter hangs in, but much to his surprize, this time the ball doesn’t curve at the last second and instead gives him a good beaning. A pitcher who is known to throw at a batters head becomes known as a “headhunter”. My favorite term for the brush-back pitch is “chin music”. A real finesse pitcher becomes a maestro with chin music. Pedro Martinez said he could knock a button off of your shirt if he wanted to. It’s all diplomacy. Are you going to believe and respect that he could?......... or are you gonna taunt him to prove it? I sure hope Pres Trump has a bag of tricks.
Ability to do an airburst at a precise locale, hopefully we know what we know, and that they can’t, making it more like a “dirty” bomb incomplete detonation. The next move for cooperation is said to be that Assad said he would double up on his efforts to wipe out ISIS... so far so good.
The Russians and US have a mutual enemy who was given a warning... chicoms. The Japanese are making their presence known— and are in dire financial need to express it, from a country protection point of view, glad to assist the US, and to threaten the olde country (since they do the shipping, aside from COSCO consortium, of chi-com goods).
LS -
First, THANK YOU for posting and please continue do share your insights in this way. Most of us understand you do not play 20 Questions with Bannon, but having a channel to a primary source is really great.
Second, with regard to last weeks attack, I don’t think it matters “who” used the sarin gas, It is something all civilized people abhor, and the perception is that Assad did it, and Madison Avenue teaches us that “perception becomes reality.
Not minimizing the humanitarian horror of it, as Rahm once said it provided Trump with a crisis that could be taken advantage of. The rest of your analysis dovetails right in here - this was a low-risk way of delivering the brush-back pitch. And having been flawlessly executed, it also demonstrated competence, or as Scott Adams puts it, elevated Trump from being Hitler to “maybe he’s competent but I still don’t like him”.
This attack was carefully engineered to do a minimum of real damage but to be decisive and spectacular. There were too many major players in the world that had to be told NOW that the days of no consequences are over. This attack pointedly reverses Hussein’s Red Line mumblestumble. He is keeping a silly promise made by Hussein. Essentially America made the vow and it was important that it be redeemed.
It wouldn’t convince skeptics. Even now, I don’t know whose gas it was. We still don’t know if there were WMDs in Iraq (I tend to think so, cuz that’s where Assad got them).
I gave that about a minute and it is true.
We learned about EMP from our own tests.
I am an area 51 nutjob.
It’s always dangerous. But better now, in Syria, than in Ukraine, with a land war in Europe at risk.
Thank you for the info.
I’ve been reading this post for a while, and I have more questions than answers.
Is this really the only move open on the chess board ? If it is, he’s handling the situation like a cool, collected business man (Hitting the golf course and playing well while the competition stews, simmers and gets flustered). I’m not sure I’m good with this.
And where is my national carry reciprocity ?! I’m really made to feel like I’ve been shafted.
Yes, there are many things going on in Syria that I (And we) are not aware of, and yes he can’t just explain himself. I get all of that. But was Putin actually ticked off by us in a move just to intimidate China ? Why not send a carrier group for exercises in the pacific ? Why not instead poke at the Chinese censor firewall ?
So many campaign promises. I’d like to understand the picture as you do and get my confidence back.
I don’t have that answer.
Only hardened targets will make it.
I am going to trust my Radars and missiles to prevent it.
That’s all we have.
One set of dictatos is gone but replaced by another set of meaner mfs and/or by bloody chaos.
Trying to wade through all the fake news is mind boggling so I appreciate and thank you for such a clear, concise and informative explanation.
The civilians haven't.
Imaging the vibrants and Third Worlders from L.A. to Seattle when their ATMs / welfare payments cease.
Or, South Korea or Japan.
The "canonical example" of EMP was Starfish Prime. Height of 250 miles IIRC. But there are ways to enhance the EMP effects with a smaller weapon. The question then in what trajectories are necessary to put the device at altitude, vs. the profiles for which the US is ready to shoot down the missile in the boost phase.
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