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‘Very telling’ that Trump didn’t know his own anti-ISIS point man, former official says – The Washington Post
‘Very telling’ that Trump didn’t know his own anti-ISIS point man, former official says – The Washington Post

Brett McGurk, left, at the Pentagon in May 2017. (U.S. Department of Defense)

Alex Horton

December 23 at 4:45 PM

In a May 2017 Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was flanked by perhaps the two most important U.S. officials coordinating the fight against the Islamic State.

One was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph F. Dunford.

The other one was Brett McGurk, a State Department official whom Mattis introduced as “President Trump’s special envoy” to the coalition.

McGurk was tasked with coordinating international efforts, from NATO allies to militia groups, in the effort against Islamic State militants in the region.

But in the midst of his resignation to protest Trump’s sudden decision to pull out about 2,000 troops from Syria, McGurk himself was somehow overlooked by Trump, according to the president.

“Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015,” Trump said Saturday on Twitter. “Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!”

It is not clear whether Trump meant he never met McGurk or was otherwise unfamiliar with him. McGurk was scheduled to leave in February, making his instant resignation symbolic.

But Trump’s assertion raised questions about his awareness of or interest in the intricate policies surrounding one of his cornerstone campaign promises — the defeat of the Islamic State, in which McGurk played a central role in Washington, Baghdad and elsewhere.

[Trump forces Mattis out two months early]

“It’s almost certainly true the president has, in fact, met Brett McGurk,” a former senior defense official who worked closely with McGurk told The Washington Post. Having not done so, the former official said, “would be an indictment of the president himself had he not met the individual coordinating the international coalition against the Islamic State.”

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders did not return a request for comment asking whether and when Trump was briefed by McGurk himself or whether Trump was provided reports or briefings prepared by the envoy.

The State Department replied to a request for comment with a message saying the press office was operating in a “reduced status” because of the government shutdown.

The fallout over McGurk’s departure and the Syria withdrawal brought sharp rebukes from former officials and some conservatives. “Why don’t you know the man who has done more than any civilian to degrade ISIS?” Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser and U.N. ambassador, wrote on Twitter.

McGurk has been described by current and former officials as tirelessly dedicated and respected by militia commanders and ambassadors alike, and his commanding expertise was sought and deferred to within the U.S. government. His involvement at high levels in government and diplomatic circles signaled a trusted presence in the coalition since his appointment as envoy by Obama.

His work in the Middle East started under President George W. Bush and spanned three administrations. That experience is perhaps without equal, Derek Chollet, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration, told The Post.

“George W. Bush and Barack Obama knew and respected Brett and considered him one of their most important advisers,” Chollet said. Trump has shown evidence of disengagement from policy and a disregard for expertise, he said, “and it’s very telling that Donald Trump claims to have never heard of him.”


Brett McGurk, left, and Rupert Jones, deputy commander of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, arrive for a meeting with the Raqa Civil Council in the northern Syrian village of Ain Issa. (Delil Ssouleiman/AFP/Getty Images) (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images)

McGurk was a chief architect of Bush’s troop surge in Iraq and had a senior role in negotiating the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for Obama. That experience carved out trust with Iraqi leaders, Chollet said, which spurred several postings that eventually lead to the envoy appointment.

In the Syria campaign, he was the driving force behind the creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces. His tenacity and personal touch in building relationships served the counter-Islamic State effort well, colleagues told The Post.

McGurk met face-to-face with Kurdish and Arab leaders of the SDF and was a continual presence in Baghdad and Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, becoming the most recognizable American official in the country at a time when an Islamic State blitz threatened both capitals.

Aside from Mattis’s resignation, the most significant factor in McGurk’s decision was an inability to reconcile the president’s decision with his experience as the U.S. diplomat who “spent time with the guys on the ground who have been fighting and dying,” including Kurdish fighters in Syria, said an official familiar with his views. “To just suddenly, in one split second” have to tell them the United States was leaving “is hard to face.”

[This time, the United States is betraying more than just the Kurds, allies say]

Robert Ford, the former ambassador to Syria who worked closely with McGurk, told The Post he agreed with Trump’s decision but said the National Security Council did a “lousy job” articulating Trump’s desire to leave Syria after largely eradicating the Islamic State, though fighters remain.

Earlier this month, McGurk said in a briefing that defeating the physical caliphate is just one phase of a “much longer campaign.”

In that way, McGurk got ahead of Trump, said Ford, who is now a fellow at the Middle East Institute and Yale University.

“I think there’s a problem in this system if Brett doesn’t understand what the president’s cautions and policy preferences are,” Ford said.

It is unclear how the United States will manage its military presence in Syria in the coming weeks and months or whether Special Operations troops will assume a greater role in flushing out remaining pockets of militants there.

The U.S. military may also keep supplying SDF forces and launch airstrikes against Islamic State fighters — efforts that would probably be complicated by a reduced American presence.

But any action that requires partner forces risking their lives may be viewed with skepticism after the fallout with McGurk, said the former senior defense official who worked with him.

“Our commitment is only as good as the president’s next tweet,” the former official said.

John Hudson, Ellen Nakashima and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.

Read more:

Patrick Shanahan, Trump’s pick for acting defense secretary, steps into spotlight after Mattis’s ouster

With ‘trimmed’ sails, Pentagon heads into uncharted waters

Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2018/12/23/its-very-telling-trump-didnt-know-his-own-anti-isis-point-man-former-official-says/

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A Shutdown for Weeks? Washington Merely Shrugs – The New York Times
A Shutdown for Weeks? Washington Merely Shrugs – The New York Times

At the same time that Mr. Trump has tried to build support for his insistence on the wall, he has torn open a deep rift with fellow Republicans over his pullout from Syria and drawdown in Afghanistan, which many in the party and in cable news control rooms have deemed a more consequential break.

And, unlike in earlier shutdowns, when lawmakers have worked through the night to try to bridge policy differences, Democrats on Capitol Hill see little reason to compromise, given that the president went back on his word to avert the shutdown and that they will gain even more negotiating leverage come Jan. 3, when they take control of the House.

Mr. Trump has made a somewhat bigger effort to fan the flames, though with mixed results. He canceled a holiday vacation to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and on Saturday convened a handful of the archconservative lawmakers who had pushed him into the shutdown for a private lunch in the White House residence.

“He is not going to yield,” Mr. Meadows, who attended the lunch, said in an interview. “At some point he in some way is going to get money to support our border. He is resolved in that, and I looked him in the eyes yesterday, and I can tell you that he is firm.”

But by Sunday, increasingly isolated inside the White House with no public schedule, Mr. Trump had outwardly moved on to other issues. On Twitter, he announced the expedited departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, said he had spoken with the Turkish president about Syria, expressed condolences to tsunami victims in Indonesia, said the news media had not given him his due for criminal justice and farm legislation, and mocked Mr. Corker.

Mr. Trump, who calls himself a master dealmaker, has made no effort to directly negotiate with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Senate Democrat, who would have to agree to any wall funding. Instead, he has left the job to aides, dispatching one of them, Mick Mulvaney, the budget director and incoming chief of staff, to appear on television on Sunday morning to tamp down expectations that a deal could be coming anytime soon.

“It’s very possible the shutdown will go beyond the 28th and into the new Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/politics/shutdown-trump-democrats.html

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Meet Trump’s acting Pentagon chief – POLITICO
Meet Trump’s acting Pentagon chief – POLITICO

Patrick Shanahan, 56, has played a prominent role in crafting a new National Defense Strategy placing renewed emphasis on military competition with Russia and China. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Defense

When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wanted him to be his top deputy, Patrick Shanahan was instructed to focus “down and in,” as he describes the approach to managing the government’s largest bureaucracy.

But the former Boeing executive who came to be known as “Mr. Fix-It” — by turning around troubled programs such as the 787 Dreamliner aircraft — will now need to be much more outward facing as President Donald Trump’s acting Pentagon chief following the announcement Sunday that Mattis will depart Jan. 1, two months earlier than planned.

Story Continued Below

Job one will be repairing the relationship between the White House and the top ranks, where Mattis, who is leaving after a stunning public break with the commander-in-chief, is still revered.

Gordon Adams, a former Democratic White House budget official specializing in defense, called Shanahan “a perfectly competent manager.”

“It is not clear how his competence will mesh with a president who is not,” he added.

Shanahan, who has been the Pentagon’s No. 2 for 18 months, is little known outside the halls of the national security community — and even there his views are not well understood.

A mechanical engineer by training with scant policy background, the public record of his positions is slim compared to Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general.

“Imagine if we drew a Venn diagram of Secretary Mattis and his skills and background and history and overlaid mine with it,” Shanahan told an defense industry group earlier this year. “At the very edge they would touch, and it’s because we’re both from Washington state.”

Mattis clashed with Trump over a host of issues — including Iran; Russia; Syria; the wisdom of using the military to police the southern border; Trump’s ban on transgender troops; and most prominently the president’s denigration of historic military allies and diplomatic and trade partners.

As a trusted lieutenant, however, Shanahan, 56, has played a prominent role in crafting a new National Defense Strategy placing renewed emphasis on military competition with Russia and China — a document that Mattis considers one of his major accomplishments.

But Shanahan has also been the Pentagon’s biggest booster for Trump’s proposal for a separate Space Force, which is now in its final stages before going to Congress in early 2019.

Here’s a rundown of some issues Shanahan has wrestled with in recent months and how his nomination to be deputy secretary was a bit choppy:

The Pentagon’s space man

Shanahan has been the Pentagon’s point person on efforts to reorganize the military space mission and a vocal champion of Trump’s Space Force, which remains unpopular in many military quarters.

He’s clashed with others in the department, including the Air Force, which would lose the most with the establishment of a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space.

In November, he pushed back on a cost estimate floated by Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson projecting that standing up a Space Force would cost $13 billion over five years. Instead, he predicted a Space Force could cost less than $5 billion.

The budgeteer

In his role as the Pentagon’s day-to-day manager, Shanahan has played a large role in building out the Pentagon’s fiscal 2019 and 2020 budget requests, in addition to overseeing the crafting of a new National Defense Strategy.

After Trump called for federal agencies to cut their forthcoming budgets to blunt a deficit that’s approaching $1 trillion, Shanahan said the Pentagon would prepare two fiscal 2020 spending plans — the originally planned $733 billion request and a lower $700 billion request — so the department wouldn’t “reverse course on all that planning.”

Ultimately, Trump reversed course and endorsed an even higher $750 billion defense budget request for the coming year.

Ties to the arms industry

His defense industry background raised red flags among lawmakers and others concerned about the Trump administration’s reliance on executives from large defense contractors to staff numerous key Pentagon posts.

The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Shanahan at his June 2017 confirmation hearing that he was “not overjoyed” with his previous industry work.

“I am concerned that 90 percent of defense spending is in the hands of the five corporations, of which you represent one,” McCain told Shanahan. “I have to have confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the hen house.”

It’s unclear what timeline the president has for nominating a permanent replacement for Mattis.

But after spending 30 years at Boeing overseeing commercial aircraft lines and several high-profile weapons contracts, Shanahan doesn’t sound like he wants to return anytime soon.

Asked this fall about how he’s made the transition from the corporate world, he remarked: “I tell people it’s like breaking up with your long-time girlfriend and finding the love of your life.”

Bryan Bender and Gregory Hellman contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/23/meet-trumps-acting-pentagon-chief-1051418

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How the partial government shutdown is playing out and what to expect as it continues – CNN
How the partial government shutdown is playing out and what to expect as it continues – CNN

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