Donald Trump's War on Terror

[grumbler]

LOL, right, Moammar Qadafi had his finger on the pulse os Islamic terrorism. Gosh, we should have supported him butchering his own people!

Yeah, Ghadafi knew the terrorist mindset well enough to plan the state dinners' menus.  He would have been more sympathetic to ISIS as a Sunni nationalist organization than he was to the more modern groups.

[viper37]

He's going to have a very hard time finding generals who will endorse his use of tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS.

He's got his conspiracy nut friend, Flynn.  Together, I'm pretty sure they can find a bunch of like minded officers.
Worst case scenario, promote Siege and Hansmeister, they'll endore his plan.

[viper37]

Lol, didn't Pres Obama fire a bunch of generals? Obama's plan on ISIS wasn't so great either. Now it's a mess for Trump and it was never going to be an easy process anyway. ISIS is in two or three dozen countries. And we so "intelligently" took out Ghadafi so we lost the cooperation we had with his intel services which probably had a good handle on who's who of terrorist activity and groups in northern/central Africa. Ghadafi had changed and was more into cooperation with the west, especially against radical elements. I have to think that his intel services and US and other agencies were working together as they had common goals.

I like you Kronn, but your statements aren't exactly supported by facts. 

I looked for "Generals fired by Obama" and I found a great list saying he gutted the military.
That list is really impressive

Then, I went to some of the names and I checked a little more.  See John R. Allen:

On February 19, 2013, U.S. President Obama accepted Allen's request to retire from the military as his wife fell seriously ill.

How is that firing someone?

Then there is this one:
Army general accused of sexual assault...
Should Obama have kept him in place after complaints were made?

And if you keep looking, you'll see a bunch of such cases, retirements, either early for family or health reasons or for serious accusations.  If I were to look at generals fired by Bush or Reagan, I'd find stuff similar, I guess.  If only Republicans had kept tracks...

As for Gadafi, you can't be serious.  The guy was a major sponsor of terrorism for most of his life and he hated the US with a passion.  The USSR considered him too much of an extremist to be on really friendly term with him, during the Cold War.  That should tell you about how reliable an ally this guy could be.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/world/middleeast/donald-trump-yemen-commando-raid-questions.html

Questions Cloud U.S. Raid on Qaeda Branch in Yemen

WASHINGTON — Just five days after taking office, over dinner with his newly installed secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Trump was presented with the first of what will be many life-or-death decisions: whether to approve a commando raid that risked the lives of American Special Operations forces and foreign civilians alike.

President Barack Obama's national security aides had reviewed the plans for a risky attack on a small, heavily guarded brick home of a senior Qaeda collaborator in a mountainous village in a remote part of central Yemen. But Mr. Obama did not act because the Pentagon wanted to launch the attack on a moonless night and the next one would come after his term had ended.

With two of his closest advisers, Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, joining the dinner at the White House along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., Mr. Trump approved sending in the Navy's SEAL Team 6, hoping the raid early last Sunday would scoop up cellphones and laptop computers that could yield valuable clues about one of the world's most dangerous terrorist groups. Vice President Mike Pence and Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, also attended the dinner.

As it turned out, almost everything that could go wrong did. And on Wednesday, Mr. Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be present as the body of the American commando killed in the raid was returned home, the first military death on the new commander in chief's watch.

The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious 50-minute firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations — which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct — that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. The dead include, by the account of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda leader who was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011.

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured "important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world." A statement by the military's Central Command on Wednesday night that acknowledged the likelihood of civilian casualties also said that the recovered materials had provided some initial information helpful to counterterrorism analysts. The statement did not provide details.

But the mission's casualties raise doubts about the months of detailed planning that went into the operation during the Obama administration and whether the right questions were raised before its approval. Typically, the president's advisers lay out the risks, but Pentagon officials declined to characterize any discussions with Mr. Trump.

A senior administration official said on Wednesday night that the Defense Department had conducted a legal review of the operation that Mr. Trump approved and that a Pentagon lawyer had signed off on it.

Mr. Trump's new national security team, led by Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired general with experience in counterterrorism raids, has said that it wants to speed the decision-making when it comes to such strikes, delegating more power to lower-level officials so that the military may respond more quickly. Indeed, the Pentagon is drafting such plans to accelerate activities against the Qaeda branch in Yemen.

But doing that also raises the possibility of error. "You can mitigate risk in missions like this, but you can't mitigate risk down to zero," said William Wechsler, a former top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.

In this case, the assault force of several dozen commandos, which also included elite soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, was jinxed from the start. Qaeda fighters were somehow tipped off to the stealthy advance toward the village — perhaps by the whine of American drones that local tribal leaders said were flying lower and louder than usual.

Through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised, but pressed on toward their target roughly five miles from where they had been flown into the area. "They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning," one former SEAL Team 6 official said.

With the crucial element of surprise lost, the Americans and Emiratis found themselves in a gun battle with Qaeda fighters who took up positions in other houses, a clinic, a school and a mosque, often using women and children as cover, American military officials said in interviews this week.

The commandos were taken aback when some of the women grabbed weapons and started firing, multiplying the militant firepower beyond what they had expected. The Americans called in airstrikes from helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft that helped kill some 14 Qaeda fighters, but not before an MV-22 Osprey aircraft involved in the operation experienced a "hard landing," injuring three more American personnel on board. The Osprey, which the Marine Corps said cost $75 million, was badly damaged and had to be destroyed by an airstrike.

The raid, some details of which were first reported by The Washington Post, also destroyed much of the village of Yakla, and left senior Yemeni government officials seething. Yemen's foreign minister, Abdul Malik Al Mekhlafi, condemned the raid on Monday in a post on his official Twitter account as "extrajudicial killings."

Baraa Shiban, a Yemeni fellow for Reprieve, a London-based human rights group, said he spoke by phone to a tribal sheikh in the village, Jabbr Abu Soraima, who told him: "People were afraid to leave their houses because the sound of choppers and drones were all over the sky. Everyone feared of being hit by the drones or shot by the soldiers on the ground."

After initially denying there were any civilian casualties, Pentagon officials backtracked somewhat on Sunday after reports from the Yemeni authorities begin trickling in and grisly photographs of bloody children purportedly killed in the attack appeared on social media sites affiliated with Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen.

Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday that some of the women were combatants.

The operation was the first known American-led ground mission in Yemen since December 2014, when members of SEAL Team 6 stormed a village in southern Yemen in an effort to free an American photojournalist held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the raid ended with the kidnappers killing the journalist and a South African held with him.

That mission and the raid over the weekend revealed the shortcomings of secretive military operations in Yemen. The United States was forced to withdraw the last 125 Special Operations advisers from the country in March 2015 after Houthi rebels ousted the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the Americans' main counterterrorism partner.

The loss of Yemen as a base for American counterterrorism training, advising and intelligence-gathering was a significant blow to blunting the advance of Al Qaeda's branch in the country and keeping tabs on their plots. The Pentagon has tried to start rebuilding its counterterrorism operations in Yemen, however; last year, American Special Operations forces helped Emirati troops evict Qaeda fighters from the port city of Mukalla.

[Syt]

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Attending Chief Ryan Owens' Dignified Transfer yesterday with my daughter Ivanka was my great honor. To a great and brave man - thank you!

[Berkut]

What a fucking douchebag. Even when he is doing something right, he has to tweet about it on his personal account. IT IS ALL ABOUT YOU DONALD!

[CountDeMoney]

LOL a thank you to a dead soldier with an exclamation mark.  What a classless piece of outer-bourough shit.

THANK YOU DEAD HERO! TTFN!
DONALD + RYAN BFF TLA TLF!

[Eddie Teach]

You all might be being a tad overcritical.

[CountDeMoney]

Maybe he got a selfie with the casket.

[grumbler]

You all might be being a tad overcritical.

True, but that was a classless tweet.  You don't tweet about the dead (the family can read that shit and you can say nothing in 140 characters that won't just make them feel shittier) anyway, but if you were classless enough to pick the lazy route of tweeting rather than writing something meaningful, don't make the tweet all about you and who you were with. 

No one gives a rat's ass if Ivanka was there, Donald.  The ceremony wasn't about you and your family.  You were onlookers.

[mongers]

First terrorist attack in the West since the Trump travel ban too effect, an Egyptian man attacks a soldier at the Louvre museum, so quite possible he might well have been able to enter the US on a tourist visa, if he'd targeted the US instead.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/world/middleeast/us-war-footprint-grows-in-middle-east.html?emc=edit_nn_20170330&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=78513733&te=1&_r=0

U.S. War Footprint Grows in Middle East, With No Endgame in Sight

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States launched more airstrikes in Yemen this month than during all of last year. In Syria, it has airlifted local forces to front-line positions and has been accused of killing civilians in airstrikes. In Iraq, American troops and aircraft are central in supporting an urban offensive in Mosul, where airstrikes killed scores of people on March 17.

Two months after the inauguration of President Trump, indications are mounting that the United States military is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames.

Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama. On display are some of the first indications of how complicated military operations are continuing under a president who has vowed to make the military "fight to win."

In an interview on Wednesday, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, said the new procedures made it easier for commanders in the field to call in airstrikes without waiting for permission from more senior officers.

"We recognized the nature of the fight was going to change and that we had to ensure that authorities were down to the right level and that we empowered the on-scene commander," General Votel said. He was speaking specifically about discussions that he said began in November about how the fights in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State were reaching critical phases in Mosul and Raqqa.

Concerns about the recent accusations of civilian casualties are bringing some of these details to light. But some of the shifts have also involved small increases in the deployment and use of American forces or, in Yemen, resuming aid to allies that had previously been suspended.

And they coincide with the settling in of a president who has vowed to intensify the fight against extremists abroad, and whose budgetary and rhetorical priorities have indicated a military-first approach even as he has proposed cuts in diplomatic spending.

To some critics, that suggests that much more change is to come, in difficult situations in a roiled Middle East that have never had clear solutions.

Robert Malley, a former senior official in the Obama administration and now vice president for policy at the International Crisis Group, said the uptick in military involvement since Mr. Trump took office did not appear to have been accompanied by increased planning for the day after potential military victories.

"The military will be the first to tell you that a military operation is only as good as the diplomatic and political plan that comes with it," Mr. Malley said.

The lack of diplomacy and planning for the future in places like Yemen and Syria could render victories there by the United States and its allies unsustainable.

"From harsh experience, we know that either U.S. forces will have to be involved for the long term or victory will dissipate soon after they leave," he said.

Others fear that greater military involvement could drag the United States into murky wars and that increased civilian deaths could feed anti-Americanism and jihadist propaganda.

Some insist that this has already happened.

"Daesh is happy about the American attacks against civilians to prove its slogans that the Americans want to kill Muslims everywhere and not only the Islamic State's gunmen," a resident of the Syrian city of Raqqa wrote via WhatsApp, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He gave only his first name, Abdul-Rahman, for fear of the jihadists.

The shift toward greater military involvement extends into one of Mr. Obama's central legacies: the prolonged American presence in Afghanistan, where more than 8,400 American soldiers and 5,924 troops from NATO and other allies remain, and where the Taliban have been resurgent.

Plans have been announced to send 300 United States Marines to Helmand Province, their first deployment there since 2014. And the American commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., told Congress in February that he would like another "few thousand" American and coalition troops.

But the changes have also been notable in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, all home to overlapping conflicts in failed states where jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have taken advantage of the chaos to step up operations.

Even while being drawn more deeply into those conflicts, the Obama administration sought to limit American engagement while pushing — mostly in vain — for diplomatic solutions. It also launched frequent airstrikes to kill individual jihadists or to destroy their facilities and sent thousands of American troops back to Iraq to train and advise Iraqi forces, and also provide firepower, so they could "degrade and ultimately destroy" the Islamic State.

But under Mr. Obama, the White House often spent weeks or even months deliberating certain raids and airstrikes out of concern for American service members and civilians — and often to the frustration of commanders and American allies.

Mr. Trump's tough statements before coming into office, and the rise in civilian deaths in recent American strikes, have raised questions about whether the new president has removed constraints from the Pentagon on how it wages war.

But administration officials say that has not yet happened. And military officials insist that the streamlined process for airstrikes does not exempt commanders from strict protocols meant to avoid civilian casualties.

Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, General Votel said the Pentagon had not relaxed its rules of engagement. He called the mounting toll of civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria "absolutely tragic and heartbreaking" and said Central Command was investigating their cause.

The complexity of these wars and the American role in them is clear in Yemen, where the United States has two distinct roles, both of which have increased under Mr. Trump.

The country, the Arab world's poorest, has been split in half since militants known as the Houthis allied with parts of the military and seized the capital, pushing the internationally recognized government into exile.

Two years ago, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing the rebels, hoping to weaken them militarily and restore the government. They have made little progress, while more than 10,000 people have been killed and large parts of the country are on the verge of famine, according to the United Nations.

Under Mr. Obama, the United States provided military support to the Saudi-led coalition, but halted the sale of precision-guided munitions over concerns that airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and its allies were killing too many civilians.

But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has advanced some arms deals for coalition countries, while approving the resumption of sales of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, according to an American official familiar with Yemen policy.

Mr. Trump's more muscular approach has been hailed by Gulf leaders, who felt betrayed by Mr. Obama's outreach to Iran and who hope that they now have an ally in the White House to help them push back against their regional foe.

"It understands that it is uniquely positioned to play a unique role in bringing some stability to the region, and I think there is a meeting of the minds between the Saudi leadership and the Trump administration," said Fahad Nazer, a political consultant to the Saudi Embassy in Washington who said he was speaking on his own behalf.

At the same time, since Mr. Trump's inauguration, the United States has stepped up its long-running drone campaign against the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, believed to be the organization's most dangerous.

Mr. Trump granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces in Yemen as an "area of active hostilities," giving commanders greater flexibility to strike. Later, a Special Operations raid in late January led to the death of many civilians and an American commando.

So far this month, the United States has also launched more than 49 strikes across Yemen, most of them during one five-day period, according to data gathered by the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. That is more strikes than the United States had carried out during any other full year on record.

Some analysts note that this military surge has not brought with it a clear strategy to end Yemen's war or uproot Al Qaeda.

"As the military line has surged, there has not been a surge in diplomacy," said Katherine Zimmerman, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The United States faces a similarly complex set of overlapping conflicts in Syria, where a brutal civil war opened up opportunities for Al Qaeda to infiltrate the rebels seeking to topple the government while the Islamic State seized an area of territory that extended over the border into Iraq.

While intervening covertly to support the rebels, the United States has ordered airstrikes on the jihadists — alone in the case of Al Qaeda and as part of a coalition against the Islamic State. It has also built ties with the Iraqi security forces, and with Kurdish and Arab fighters in Syria to battle the jihadists on the ground.

But recently, a string of airstrikes have exposed the United States to allegations of killing large numbers of civilians. More than 60 people were killed in a strike on a mosque complex where local residents said a religious gathering was taking place. The United States said it was targeting Qaeda leaders. The military has been accused of killing about 30 Syrians in an airstrike on a school, but has insisted that the early indications show it hit Islamic State fighters. A strike in Mosul killed scores of civilians, although the military is investigating whether militants herded the people into the building or possibly rigged it with bombs.

The rise in reports of civilian deaths linked to the United States and its allies has been so significant that Airwars, a group that tracks airstrikes, said last week that it was suspending its investigations into Russian airstrikes to avoid falling behind on those by the United States.

American officials have attributed the rising number of strikes and the danger to civilians to the urban battlefields in Mosul and Raqqa and the high concentration of civilians in areas held by the jihadists. They say they try to avoid civilian casualties while the Islamic State deliberately kills anybody who stands in its way.

This month, American officials also said they would send an additional 400 troops to Syria to help prepare for the assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State's self-proclaimed capital, nearly doubling the total there.

In Iraq, General Votel said that in just the past 37 days, as the fight moved into the denser western side of Mosul, 284 of the Iraqi forces had been killed and 1,600 more wounded, underlining the ferocity of the battles.

[CountDeMoney]

Yay!  Moar wars, now with moar moose lambs on monkey bars!

[CountDeMoney]

[Grey Fox]

My seat.