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Peter Bergen: Trump's confused message on military

In his State of the Union speech President Donald Trump reveled in his increased confidence in his own military judgments, proudly declaiming that in October he had ordered the operation in which the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had died. Then a month ago Trump also ordered the targeted killing of the de facto leader of Iran's military forces, Qasem Soleimani.

But there was something of a paradox in Trump's speech on Tuesday: At the same time that he lauded those operations, he also said that he was winding down the post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East, for instance, in Afghanistan where he said he was planning to bring American troops home and to end America's longest war.

A graphic illustration of this impulse was Trump's reveal---worthy of the best kind of reality TV show--- when Sgt. First Class Townsend Williams, who had just returned from Afghanistan on his fourth deployment to the greater Middle East, was reunited in the gallery of the House chamber with his wife, Amy, and their two young children, to their great surprise and joy.

But in his speech he conflated America's seemingly endless wars in the Middle East with what should be better explained to the American people as a necessary "persistent presence" in countries where US national security interests remain at stake.
After all, simply pulling all US troops out of Afghanistan runs the real risk that much of the country would be taken over by the Taliban, who could then play host to a variety of jihadist terrorist groups.

Preventing this does not require a large American military footprint, but it does require a small but steady presence of predominantly US Special Forces for many years into the future to advise and assist the Afghan military and perform counterterrorism missions where necessary

Indeed, it was this such military presence in Syria and Iraq that enabled American forces to "find, fix and finish" both Baghdadi and Soleimani.

Simply leaving the greater Middle East to its own devices as Trump often suggests as his end goal is not a recipe for regional stability, nor indeed global stability, as we saw with pullout of all American forces from Iraq in 2011 and the subsequent rise of ISIS there.

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Posted by Erin Burnett to Rush Limbaugh at February 5, 2020 at 1:39 PM