The Intelligence people seem to be
extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are
wrong! When I became President Iran was making trouble all over the Middle
East, and beyond. Since ending the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, they are MUCH
different, but....
....a source of potential danger and conflict. They are
testing Rockets (last week) and more, and are coming very close to the edge.
There economy is now crashing, which is the only thing holding them back. Be
careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!
As the above two tweets tell you,
Donald Trump not only does not respect his intelligence experts, he completely
ignores them. Not that the referenced intelligence report discussed below casts
Iran as anything but the malevolent force they truly are. While the report
speaks to Iran’s support of terrorism and fomenting surrogate wars, it also
states that as of now, Iran remains in compliance with the U.N.-sponsored,
six-party nuclear arms limitation accord from which Trump extracted the United
States in May of last year. Trump just doesn’t want to hear the facts.
The federal government spends
billions of dollars every year gathering intelligence. From satellites to local
news, from spies and hacking to conversations with allies to scientific metrics.
The agencies range from the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, National
Security Agency, Drug Enforcement Administration, etc., etc. This is the stuff
upon which every modern president, save one, has directed domestic and foreign
policies. Occasionally flawed, nevertheless, this aggregation of information, is
distilled from the bottom up, layer-by-layer, until the relevant intelligence
reports make their way to the President’s desk… where most of the time they sit
unread.
The President prefers getting his
briefings from Fox News, including direct conversations with his favorite Fox
reporters, or from online material – often generated by conspiracy theorists –
that aligns with his view of the world. Never one to favor reading, evidenced
from his time at Wharton on, Trump prefers a shoot-from-the-hip,
tweet-expressed mode of policy-making.
His own cabinet and closest advisors
are often highly inexperienced or ill-informed about their directed fields.
Think Jared Kushner whose father bought his way into Harvard ($2.6 million) or
Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, Rick Perry as Energy Secretary, Sonny
Perdue as Agriculture Secretary, Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary, Ben Carson
as Housing Secretary, and the list just goes on and on. Perhaps the least
competent cabinet in modern U.S. history.
Despite his decided lack of
experience in government, Donald Trump trusts his instincts over the hard facts
he simply does not want to read or know. To him, those intelligence materials
come from the very swamp he pledged to drain. He is attracted to catchy slogans
that cater to his base, a group of underinformed and often desperate voters
(wanting to undo the present and rekindle the past) who hang on his every word.
Trump is the expert on everything.
He touts that which genuinely hurts
most of us as success. A tax reform act that decimated the federal deficit but
generated virtually no new investment capital was a “success.” Imposing tariffs
that killed Mid-West farmers and sent consumer prices soaring with little to
show for it in terms of new jobs or increased exports is a “success.” His
seeming rapprochement with Kim Jong-un, which has not resulted in any real
steps toward denuclearizing North Korea, is a “success.” His taking credit for
a soaring stock market was a “success” until it crashed. We’ve defeated ISIS
even though we have not. His fourth-century castle vanity wall across virtually
our entire border with Mexico is the only solution for border security likely
to be “successful,” citing as facts horror stories of undocumented aliens that
no one can locate (oddly describing as if fact scenes from a fictional movie, Sicario: Day of the Soldado), despite
experts suggesting a more modern solution to securing our border.
On the other hand, our intelligence
communities generate a unified and unclassified annual national intelligence report
(the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community”) to
Congress that is also provided to the President. It is formulated under our
director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who frequently meets with the
President and often testifies before Congress. But what Coats and that January
29th national intelligence assessment tell us bears little or no
resemblance to the world depicted by Mr. Trump.
By way of example, as the report
deals with the greatest threats to the United States and its interests, insecurity/danger
at our southern border doesn’t even make it particularly high on that list. Not
much of a national emergency according to those who know and hardly
justification for shutting down the government. The assessment is reasonably
thorough, but its findings contradict the President on so many levels.
“[The] new American intelligence
assessment of global threats has concluded that North Korea is ‘unlikely to
give up’ all of its nuclear stockpiles, and that Iran is not ‘currently
undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activity’ needed to make a bomb,
directly contradicting two top tenets of President Trump’s foreign policy.
“Dan Coats, the
director of national intelligence, also challenged Mr. Trump’s insistence that the Islamic State
had been defeated, a key rationale for his decision to
exit Syria. The terrorist group ‘still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq
and Syria,’ and maintains eight branches and a dozen networks around the world,
the annual report to Congress said…
“Mr. Coats told the
Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday [1/29] that ‘we currently assess North
Korea will seek to retain its W.M.D. capability and is unlikely to completely
give up its nuclear weapons and production capability.’… ‘Its leaders
ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival,’ Mr. Coats said…
Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, said the North Korean government was ‘committed
to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile that would pose a direct
threat to the United States.’…
“‘We do not believe Iran is currently
undertaking the key activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device,’
Mr. Coats said, but he added that Iranian officials have ‘publicly threatened
to push the boundaries’ of the nuclear deal it struck with world powers in 2015
if it did not see the benefits it expected… Mr. Trump withdrew the United
States from that agreement last year. He called it ‘defective at its
core’ and said that if the deal remained in place, Iran would ‘be on the cusp
of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.’ The agreement still stands,
largely with support from European capitals…
“Perhaps the
strongest rebuke of Mr. Trump’s security priorities comes in what is missing
from the assessment: any rationale for building a wall along the southwestern
border, which Mr. Trump has advertised as among the most critical security
threats facing the United States. The first mention of Mexico and drug cartels
comes on Page 18 of the 42-page report, well after a range of other, more
pressing threats…
“Much of the new
assessment, as well as testimony at Tuesday’s hearing, focused on cyberthreats
against the United States from China and Russia. For the first time, the report
concluded that China was now positioned to conduct effective cyberattacks
against American infrastructure, specifically citing Beijing’s ability to cut
off natural gas pipelines, at least briefly.
“The assessment
also argues that while Russia’s ability to conduct cyberespionage and influence
campaigns is similar to the one it ran in the 2016 American presidential
election; the bigger concern is that ‘Moscow is now staging cyberattack assets
to allow it to disrupt or damage U.S. civilian and military infrastructure
during a crisis.’
“It specifically
noted the Russian planting of malware in the United States electricity grid.
Russia already has the ability to bring the grid down ‘for at least a few
hours,’ the assessment concluded, but it is ‘mapping our critical
infrastructure with the long-term goal of being able to cause substantial
damage.’
“Taken together, the report paints a
picture of threats vastly different from those asserted by Mr. Trump. Russia
emerges as a disruptive threat, China as a long-term one, and the failure of
the United States to invest heavily enough in research and development for key
technologies as perhaps the biggest concern, allowing new competitors to close
the technological gap.” New York Times, January 29th.
Trump, on the other hand, makes up
stories and presents them as documented facts (seldom with even the slightest
proof), amplifies the stories into immediate priorities, and then creates
policy decisions based on this distorted reality. “The divergent views of a president and his
intelligence agencies may diminish trust from the public and from American
allies about United States foreign policy goals. The disparities could also
discourage Americans from working in the intelligence field.
“‘People risk their lives for the intelligence
he just tosses aside on Twitter,’ Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top
Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of Mr. Trump on Wednesday.”
NY Times. Is
truth relevant to average American voters? Can so many falsehoods and rejection
of hard facts really be good for the United States?
I’m Peter Dekom, and if Mr. Trump can run as
a presidential candidate in 2020 on the same basis as he is conducting his presidency,
can the American voters even afford to give him a second chance?
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