Nothing About the White Houses Syria Announcement Was Normal

[applegrove]

By Heather Hurlburt at NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/nothing-about-the-trumps-syria-announcement-was-normal.html

"SNIP..............


On Tuesday, the administration also offered its story of how the decision played out. Trump received the intelligence Monday morning. By the time the secretaries of State and Defense arrived at the White House for meetings with Indian Prime Minister Modi, Politico reported, they “were informed” of the plan to issue a statement, White House officials said, and had the opportunity to “work the language.” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster “had already been briefed and weighed in on the plan.” Administration officials told the New York Times that cabinet members were “aware of” the plan to issue a statement.

But those passive constructions are not normal. A president’s national security adviser doesn’t get briefed on presidential statements on breaking security issues — he or she proposes them, chairs the meetings at which they are decided, and drafts them. Secretaries of Defense aren’t just “aware” of redline threats to use military force — they have explicitly signed off on them and have the Pentagon humming on plans to implement them. Secretaries of State are intimately engaged, not just “informed,” of plans to issue a military warning to a Russian client state.

It is not normal to move decision-making around highly sensitive intelligence from the president’s intelligence briefing directly to the press office, and only later back to the security professionals to work the text. Who were the objects of all those passive sentences, the senior officials doing the deciding and briefing and drafting? Was it just Spicey at his desk?

Plenty of critics on the left saw this as a Wag the Dog scenario of made-up intelligence. But the conflict in Syria is a dog that can wag its own tail, and ours too if we let it. And if the Trump White House is issuing ultimatums that its own national-security team doesn’t want to take full responsibility for, based on intelligence that is too secret to share with mid-level staff but not too secret to brief to Congress, chances are it’s not fully briefed on how that wagging tail will affect key players like Russia and Iran. That’s worse than cynical. It’s dumb.


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[Sneederbunk]

1. Instability writ large