Antiwar.com Blog

President Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

Under your leadership, our nation has achieved unprecedented prosperity. Now, as we observe Veterans Day, I hope you will look abroad and continue to strategically draw down our nation’s military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have both been enormously costly in lives and dollars, In the case of Afghanistan, instead of merely conducting counterterrorism operations in the wake the September 11, 2001, attacks, our troops engaged in full-scale nation-building efforts both before and after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan, a supposed ally of the United States. Having now lasted over 19 years, the war in Afghanistan has been the longest overseas conflict in American history. But, sadly, the situation on the ground today looks much the same now as it did back in 2001, with the Taliban in control of much of the country.

And then there is Iraq. Over the last 18 years, our forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s government and successfully fought terrorists of many different stripes in Iraq, including the Islamic State.

But these achievements have simply not been worth the cost. Instead of focusing on limited aims, we fell into the same nation-building, ” peacekeeping” trap in Iraq that ensnared us in Afghanistan, even after major combat operations officially ended in 2011. Today, Iraq’s government is shaky at best, addicted to continuing foreign assistance , and easily susceptible to pressure from outside actors, especially Iran.

Nation-building doesn’t work, as you immediately recognized upon taking office: Afghanistan and Iraq today are clearly not beacons of democracy, stability, or prosperity, despite the thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars we have sacrificed to try to remake these countries. None of this is a criticism of our brave men in women in uniform, who have performed heroically in these and all other overseas engagements. Instead, it is an indictment of Washington’ s broken foreign policy establishment, which is dominated by arm-chair idealists who never seem to grasp the messy realities on the ground.

I commend your efforts so far to bring our engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq to an end, including your bold decision to open negotiations with the Taliban and your ambitious plan to remove thousands of United States servicemembers from these two countries. I urge you to continue to aggressively pursue these and all other related efforts in the coming weeks. What greater gift could we give the American people as we head into the holiday season?

Sincerely,

Andy Biggs
Member of Congress, Arizona 5th District

Here’s something constructive Trump could do before leaving office at noon on January 20: he could order – demand, insist – that all classified intel and other documents related to the origin of the Russia/election investigation be declassified and released to the public forthwith – unredacted. From what has already gotten out, we know that Russiagate was not a good-faith probe into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election, much less outright collusion with the Trump campaign. All the evidence that has actually been obtained tells the story of a partisan and otherwise self-interested campaign to undercut or constrain an elected president who upset the foreign-policy establishment (although I can’t can’t fathom why), if not drive him from office altogether.

For example, only this year we learned that in 2017 the company that originally and allegedly confirmed that “the Russians” hacked the DNC server and leaked unflattering emails about the Clinton campaign to WikiLeaks actually did not know that that was the case. As Ray McGovern wrote recently that

exactly five months ago, on May 7, 2020, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff was forced to release sworn testimony by former FBI official Shawn Henry, head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, that there is no technical evidence [emphasis added] that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were hacked — by Russia, or by anyone else.

Adding insult to injury, Schiff was able to hide Henry’s testimony from Dec. 5, 2017, until May 7, 2020.

Why did Schiff and the former Intel officials, some of whom now have lucrative TV commentator gigs, lead the American people all those years to believe that Russia hacked the server, which the FBI never even took possession of or examined? The answer won’t suggest good faith, I suspect.

Trump’s out. (I’m not sorry about that.) He could now do something decent and leave the stage after exposing those who, to protect their political and financial status, insanely played with fire by aggravating Russian-American relations.

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest book is Coming to Palestine.

Opening talk from The American Conservative’s Foreign Policy Conference held on November 05, 2020.

• Matt Purple, senior editor, The American Conservative
• Dan Caldwell, senior advisor, Concerned Veterans for America
• John Glaser, director of foreign policy studies, Cato Institute
• Moderator: Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy, Conservative Partnership Institute

Check out the other talks at the conference here.

From The American Conservative:

Eldar Mamedov warns against the push to get the U.S. to side with Azerbaijan in their attack on Karabakh and Armenia:

As fierce fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan continues into a second month, neoconservatives in Washington are pushing the United States to side with Azerbaijan. Their rationale – involving Iran and Israel, as so many of Washington’s priorities in the Middle East do – is facile, naïve and dangerous to the region’s minorities.

The U.S. has no vital interests in this conflict, so it would be a serious mistake to take sides in it. If the U.S. were to tilt towards anyone in the conflict, it ought to be towards the Armenian side that came under attack, but neutrality is the wisest course. The best thing that the U.S. can do is to use whatever influence it still has with Turkey and Azerbaijan to halt the offensive, and to support Russian mediation efforts that have the best chance of succeeding in stopping the fighting. Armenian and Azerbaijani civilians will pay the heaviest price if the war is not stopped, and preventing further attacks on civilians should be the focus of U.S. diplomatic efforts. Azerbaijan is not an ally of the United States, and our government has no obligations to assist or defend them. While Turkey is formally an ally, they are acting as a regional arsonist and the U.S. should be reining them in rather than helping them.

The death toll from the conflict is already in the thousands, many of them civilians killed by indiscriminate use of missiles and shelling. Both governments have launched unacceptable, illegal attacks on civilian areas, and the U.S. should warn both governments against further such attacks. There are credible reports of war crimes being committed against Armenian prisoners of war by their Azerbaijani captors. Ethnic cleansing of Armenians in parts of Karabakh has already been carried out by Azerbaijani forces:

7 Diplomacy is still missing in action sadly. No predictions then, only to say that outsiders should pay close attention to events around Shusha/i, despite all else that’s going on in the world.

— Thomas de Waal (@Tom_deWaal) November 5, 2020

Siding with Azerbaijan makes no sense for American interests. It is being promoted by Iran hawks that hope to use this conflict as part of their fixation on destabilizing the Iranian government and potentially breaking up Iran’s territorial integrity. Michael Doran is one of the leading hawkish cheerleaders for Azerbaijan, and he has been making the case for siding with Baku explicitly for quite some time. In the quoted tweet, he is promoting Azerbaijan on account of its supposed diversity and tolerance:

Yes, Azerbaijan is a "bastion of diversity and tolerance" under Aliyev in the same way that, say, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, and Mobutu's Zaire were also "bastions of diversity and tolerance." https://t.co/gJASTMQads

— Casey Michel ???? (@cjcmichel) November 6, 2020

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From The American Conservative:

Anatol Lieven explains how strategic empathy is supposed to work:

This kind of empathy has very valuable consequences for foreign policy. It makes for an accurate assessment of another state establishment’s goals based on its own thoughts, rather than a picture of those goals generated by one’s own fears and hopes; above all, it permits one to identify the difference between the vital and secondary interests of a rival country as that country’s rulers see them.

A vital interest is one on which a state will not compromise unless faced with irresistible military or economic pressure. Otherwise, it will resist to the very limit of its ability, including, if necessary, by war. A statesman who sets out to challenge another state’s vital interests must therefore be sure not only that his or her country possesses this overwhelming power, but that it is prepared actually to use it.

American policymakers are notoriously bad at understanding how other governments perceive things and the reasons why they act in the way that they do, and we have seen on many occasions how this failure to understand the other side’s thinking has led us into one crisis after another. Our leaders often fail to grasp that they are threatening another country’s perceived vital interests, because they frequently deny that the other government has any legitimate interests at all. Instead of trying to see an issue from the other side, our leaders will often insist that there is only one acceptable way of seeing it and it is invariably the same as ours. If the other government responds angrily to this approach, they are then deemed hostile and “revisionist” rather than a normal state reacting as any other state would. Practicing this kind of empathy does not mean agreeing that the other government is right, but it does mean acknowledging what their actual position is rather than projecting one onto them.

H.R. McMaster likes to talk a lot about practicing strategic empathy, but in fact he refuses to understand how other governments see the world. He prefers instead to imagine that they are all driven to achieve ideological, expansionist goals just as he is, and then he warns about the aggressive intentions that he has imputed to them. This is exactly the opposite of what Lieven is talking about, and it is nothing more than reading his own hawkish inclinations into everyone else’s worldview. If McMaster were willing to see things as the Russian government or Chinese government did, he would understand that they perceive aggressive U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War as a threat, and at least some of their conduct over this same period has been in reaction to American overreaching. But McMaster doesn’t understand this at all. Instead, he insists that the behavior of other states has nothing to do with US actions whatsoever, because to admit this would be to acknowledge that an interventionist foreign policy can create more problems than it solves.

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“Fortress on a Hill” hosts Danny Sjursen, Chris “Henri” Henriksen, and John Kerry speak with Chris Lombardi, editor at Democratic Left Online. She stops by the podcast to discuss her new book “I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars”. It’s an amazing history of military dissenters, conscientious objectors, and their hard, but determined path of dissent.