Trump’s Military Record Makes Milley’s Reported Intervention Even More Alarming

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, September 16, 2021

 

In their forthcoming book Peril, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reportedly detail two alleged phone calls made by General Mark Milley in the final days of the Trump administration. In them, the Joint Chiefs chairman allegedly assured his Chinese counterparts that if Donald Trump decided to attack, he would give them a heads-up. If true, the most serious problem isn’t the calls themselves, but rather that Milley conducted his own foreign policy and arrogated civilian authority over the military, one of the most vital checks on power in a free republic.

 

As Dan McLaughlin noted, former defense secretary Mark Esper might also have been pulling strings here. Regardless, Milley, who is neither an elected official nor a psychiatrist, should explain how Trump’s alleged “mental decline” after the election convinced him that he must allay the fears of a communist dictatorship about his own democratically elected government.

 

Despite his bellicose rhetoric and bluster, Trump had probably been more reluctant to use military force than any president in memory. One of the few (somewhat) consistent political positions held by the former president has been a distaste for military engagement. As others have pointed out, Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter not to have gotten the nation into a new military conflict. One might chalk that up to the luck of history and circumstance — if it weren’t for more concrete examples.

 

In the summer of 2019, after Iranians shot down an American surveillance drone, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton — and other members of his national-security team — reportedly implored the president to launch a strike on Iranian soil as a show of strength. The administration even settled on three missile batteries and radar sites as targets, activating 10,000 sailors and airmen as a precursor to Tomahawk cruise-missiles strikes. Officials told Trump that there would be 150 Iranian casualties — an estimate that was derived from the number of “operators, maintenance personnel, and security guards” usually on site. The president reportedly thought that number too high a price in response to a nonlethal attack. His “stunned” and “flabbergasted” advisers — these are the New York Times’s words — warned that pulling back was a mistake. That doesn’t sound like a guy, for all his faults, who would launch nukes for kicks.

 

There would have likely been no political downside in hitting the Iranian terror regime. And if Trump didn’t move forward because he was nervous that the country would fall into another conflict, then he was weighing options seriously. A few months later, the United States would assassinate Qasem Soleimani and nine of his Iraqi and Iranian cohorts. That was a high-impact strike with limited causalities. At the time, the usual suspects warned of imminent bloody conflict, but the reaction was only some impotent Iranian attacks meant for domestic theater.

 

Joe Biden has already been more reckless with military force. After ISIS murdered 13 American servicemembers in a suicide bombing during our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden launched what turned out to be performative drone strikes that reportedly killed two Islamic State fighters but also ten civilians in Kabul — eight of them children — to prove his toughness and distract from the political fallout over his incompetence. Certainly, Trump had also been less eager to rely on the military than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, who dropped 20,000 American troops into the war in Bosnia without congressional authorization and launched missile attacks on allegedly terrorist-related targets in Afghanistan and Sudan during his impeachment trial, or Barack Obama, who got the U.S. illegally involved in the Libyan civil war in 2011.

 

We’ll find out more about Milley’s actions. (Former acting secretary of defense Chris Miller says he never authorized the calls, calling the allegations a “disgraceful and unprecedented act of insubordination.”) But the “norms must be saved!” crowd is already out in force defending the general’s actions as reported by Woodward. These are the same defenders of “democracy” who cheered on the bureaucratic usurping of the 2016 election. You will recall the anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times, penned by “a senior Trump administration official” (who turned out to be a rather inconsequential Department of Homeland Security official), who claimed a cabal of senior staffers secretly schemed to subvert the policies of the duly elected president simply because they disagreed with him. They were hailed as heroes.

 

These are appalling and corrosive precedents (even if they are activated exclusively when Republican presidents are in power). One could easily make a case that doddering and incoherent Biden has no business running the country. But that’s up to the people, not Milley or any other general or bureaucrat. Because running a shadow government is far closer to the definition of a “coup” than anything else that’s happened over the past five years.