Trump Sends the Military-Industrial-Counterterrorism Complex Sprawling
Jul 23, 2017
President Donald Trump deserves a 21-gun salute for twin decisions that have sent the multi-trillion dollar military-industrial-counterterrorism complex (MICC) into a tizzy. The MICC’s aim is a permanent warfare state featuring invented or inflated claims of foreign danger, escalating military spending, superfluous weapons systems, and no accountability for repeated military failure and blowback. That’s not Trump’s foreign policy, however.
First, Trump’s ended the C.I.A.’s covert and utterly wasteful supply of arms and supplies to Syrian insurgents seeking to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The program was initiated by Barack Obama without reasonable assurance that the arms would not be captured or sold to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and that the recipients would not defect to al- Qaeda, al- Nusra or ISIS. Nor was there any assurance that the insurgents would not be a second edition of the Afghanistan muhajaden which used our weapons to expel the Soviet Union, and then metamorphosed into Al Qaeda to perpetrate 9/11 and sequel abominations.
Even if that nightmare might have been avoided in Syria, there was no assurance that overthrowing the Assad regime would not compound Syria’s convulsions, fuel more terrorism, and saddle Europe with more refugees. That is precisely what ensued in Libya from President Obama’s 2011 “humanitarian” war to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.
In the circumstances, we should perhaps be happy that the program was so ineffective. The CIA recruited, trained and armed approximately 60 Syrians to fight ISIS. All but five disappeared from the CIA’s radar screen, probably having joined the various militias we oppose.
Wasteful and ineffective though the CIA’s aid was, its cessation was predictably assailed by echo chambers of the MICC. Washington Post reporters Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous wrote citing anonymous former White House officials:
“Even those who were skeptical about the program’s long-term value, viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria’s future.”
“People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you’d do for free,’ said a former White House official. ‘To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish.”
But Syria’s future is of no more concern to the United States than was Vietnam’s when we fought the Vietnam War. Indeed, after squandering $1 trillion on the war and the lives of 58,209 American soldiers, we are now defending Communist Vietnam against China over maritime disputes in the South China Sea!
President Trump’s second wise decision was to reject the Pentagon’s plan to expand our military profile in Afghanistan by 3,000-5,000 additional troops with the same strategy that has failed for sixteen years and was employed with disastrous results in the Vietnam War: namely, to prop up a corrupt, lawless, and unpopular regime indefinitely, and pray daily that an Afghan George Washington will emerge in the Hindu Kush to excite and unify the country against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.
Last January, John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, cast a spotlight on the lunacy of that military thinking. He reported that “ghost soldiers,” i.e., fictional names concocted by Afghan military commanders to fill their ranks and keep their salaries, have been joined by ghost police, teachers, and civil servants to steal some $300 million annually from NATO.
Last May, Sopko reported that new records for opium production were set in Afghanistan in 2016 despite $8.5 billion in a counter narcotics campaign investment by U.S. agencies.
The MICC insists on remaining in Afghanistan with no endpoint because it knows that our puppet government would fall immediately if our troops withdrew, which would expose its staggering incompetence.
President Trump is the first since President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, to challenge military orthodoxies and exaggerated fears. Military leaders warned President Eisenhower that 1954 would be a “Year of Maximum Danger,” and demanded more bombers to confront the Soviet threat. The President balked, and told congressional leaders that he knew the Pentagon “as well as any man living,” and that it routinely oversold its case.
President Trump should be encouraged to challenge the MICC across the board by remembering President Eisenhower’s sobering remark to staff secretary General Andrew Goodpaster:
“God help the nation when it has a president who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”