Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program, CNN.com

10:40 p.m. EDT, October 1, 2024
Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program
From CNN’s Peter Bergen

During the debate, Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Waltz clashed on the issue of Iran.

Vance claimed that former President Donald Trump had made the world “more secure” by taking the United States out of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018 that had been negotiated by the Obama administration three years earlier, which kept the Iranians from enriching uranium above around 4%.

To make nuclear weapons you need around 90% enriched uranium.

Just hours after Iran had sent missiles against Israeli targets, Vance claimed that the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal had made the world more secure.

This is simply nonsense, and that’s according to Trump’s own top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, who testified before a Congressional committee in 2019 that the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal was working.

Trump soon punched back, tweeting “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”

In fact, because the Trump administration pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, the United Nations says that Iran today has enough fissile material to make several nuclear weapons.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said publicly in July that Iran is now probably “one or two weeks” from being able to make a nuclear weapon.

The Middle East is now a more volatile place than in decades and the fact that Iran is just weeks away from having nuclear weapons is a very dangerous place to be. And that is at least in part on Trump whatever Vance claimed in Tuesday’s debate.

Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, New America/ASU ONLINE

Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue
Event

In recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become a major national security concern, and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and the danger of election results being overturned, are now front and center. How did we get here? And more importantly, how will this affect the future of democracy? In Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, award-winning authors Julian E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg bring together the nation’s top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to examine how the lack of stability and integrity of the electoral process has become a threat to national security.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Karen Greenberg to discuss her new edited volume Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue. Greenberg is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s Future Security program and a research fellow with ASU’s Future Security Initiative. She is the author and editor of many books, including The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, and The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #ElectionIntegrity and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Karen Greenberg
Editor, Our Nation at Risk
Director, Center on National Security at Fordham Law
Fellow, New America Future Security program
Research Fellow, Future Security Initiative, Arizona State University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Revisiting the First MAGA President

Oct 1 2024

Ronald Reagan campaigned on a slogan to “Make America Great Again” and ushered in a new era of conservatism in America. That was more than forty years ago, and his Republican Party today looks very different with Donald Trump at its helm. Does the Reagan legend — a tax cutting, government shrinking, Cold War winning optimist — stand up to close scrutiny? And how did Reaganism pave the way for Trumpism? This week’s guest is Max Boot, who’s just written an authoritative, wide-ranging biography of the 40th President of the United States.

Killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel, but it’s too early to write off Hezbollah, CNN.com

Killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel, but it’s too early to write off Hezbollah

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
4 minute read
Published 12:00 AM EDT, Sun September 29, 2024

On Saturday, Hezbollah confirmed that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead after Israel announced he was killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.

His death marks a major moment in recent Middle East history, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “decapitation strikes” killing the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.

Israel should know from its own history that such strikes don’t always succeed in crippling a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus, Syria, yet the group only gathered strength in the years that followed.

Four years earlier, Israel killed a founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in an airstrike. Yet, the group did not collapse, and almost two decades later it still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

More recently, in July, Israel said it killed one of the October 7 masterminds, Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas military commander, yet the militant group fights on in Gaza.

The US has its own history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope that it will cripple its foes. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was treated as a major breakthrough because al Qaeda in Iraq was significantly contributing to the civil war that was then tearing the country apart.

Yet eight years later, al Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which took over territory the size of Portugal and presided over a population of some eight million people in Iraq and Syria. ISIS also carried out devastating terrorist attacks in the West, for instance, in Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people.

What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not a strike on its leadership but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019 waged by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces backed by thousands of US troops and significant American airpower. ISIS’s base, the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, was largely destroyed during this war.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed the overall leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. Yet, today, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan.

Then-President Donald Trump ordered a strike in Baghdad, Iraq, in early January 2020 that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force who was crucial to Iran’s relationships with its proxy forces in the region such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq.

After Soleimani was killed, Trump said, “Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”

Yet, his death had no lasting impact on Iran’s regional power and ambitions, and Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen have continued their attacks on Israeli targets and Shia militias continued their attacks on American targets in Iraq.

The United States has designated the Taliban, the Houthis, Hamas, ISIS and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

What can disable a terrorist group?

What can cripple a terrorist group is a sustained campaign to take out as many of its leaders and middle managers as possible. A CIA drone campaign that was ramped up in 2008 in Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan killed many of al Qaeda’s leaders, according to New America, a research institution (where I am a vice president).

Documents recovered by the US Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 show that al Qaeda’s leader regularly wrote to his followers living in the country’s tribal regions, urging them to move around only on cloudy days when the drones were less effective. As a result, bin Laden was planning to pull all his followers out of the tribal region and resettle them in other parts of Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s death certainly significantly contributed to undercutting al Qaeda’s appeal to terrorists and its abilities to carry out attacks since it was bin Laden who had founded the group, had directed its most lethal operations, and members of the group had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to him.

Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, didn’t have the charisma or the organizational skills to resuscitate al Qaeda, and Zawahiri himself was killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan two years ago. The UN estimates there are about four hundred members of al Qaeda living in Afghanistan today.

While al Qaeda is a relatively small terrorist group, Hezbollah has been in existence for four decades and is backed by Iran, which is a key player in the region and has an army of some 30,000 soldiers armed with an extensive arsenal, including some 150,000 rockets and missiles.

The killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah that intensified earlier this month with its covert action exploding thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies followed by massive airstrikes that have taken out infrastructure and other senior leaders.

But it’s too early to write the militant group off, though it’s clearly in disarray. History suggests it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long fight against Israel.

How Modern Autocrats Keep Each Other in Power

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has been observing and writing about the rise of authoritarianism for years. And she’s sounding the alarm about a growing trend: how strongmen from Russia to Venezuela are collaborating with one another in an effort to maintain their power and undermine the influence of democratic countries like the United States. So, is there anything democratic nations can do about it?

Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims book event online w Adriana Carranca

[Online] Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims
Event

U.S.-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many might be unaware. In doing so it has become part of the story of the global reverberations of the post-9/11 era. In Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims, journalist Adriana Carranca tells the story of American evangelicals’ mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a movement that triumphed in the Global South, challenged the Vatican, and then turned east after 9/11 to spread the Gospel among Muslims. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set off a wave of anti-American attacks, increasing the risks for missionaries from the United States, thousands of disciples, particularly from Latin America, carried on the missionary work. Soul by Soul follows the pilgrimage of one such missionary family from Brazil to Afghanistan.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Adriana Carranca, author of Soul by Soul, to discuss the book and the evangelical movement’s experience in the Muslim world. Carranca is a journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Granta, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Overseas Press Club Scholars Award and has five books published in Portuguese, including Afghanistan after the Taliban and Iran under the Chador, and has spent a decade reporting from the field along Christian-Muslim faultlines in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, where contemporary religious wars are being silently fought. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

Join the conversation online using #SoulbySoul and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Adriana Carranca
Author, Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

When
Oct. 9, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

The General Who Told Trump What He Didn’t Want to Hear

H.R. McMaster, a decorated lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and an historian, served as the second national security advisor to President Donald Trump. He recently published a non-partisan yet blistering account of his time in the White House. Hear what McMaster says Trump got right on foreign policy, where things went wrong, and what he thinks Trump’s character would mean for a second term.

Analysis: The US withdrawal in Afghanistan was in focus during the debate. Here’s key context to know, CNN.com

From CNN’s Peter Bergen

During the debate, former President Donald Trump pinned the blame for the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago on the Biden-Harris administration during which 13 American servicemembers were killed by an ISIS suicide bomber along with some 170 Afghans on August 26, 2021.

There is some merit to Trump’s argument, after all, the Biden Harris administration was in charge when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened and during the debate Vice President Kamala Harris said that she endorsed the withdrawal.

Yet, as Harris also pointed out, it was the Trump administration that had negotiated the US withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in 2020, an insurgent group, rather than with the elected Afghan government.

The Taliban did not observe the terms of the withdrawal agreement; neither negotiating in good faith for power-sharing with the Afghan government nor did they separate from terrorist organizations.

For his part, Trump had no problem pulling out of the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, even though this agreement was negotiated together with American allies, not with an insurgent group. So, the idea that Biden-Harris administration was bound by Trump’s agreement with the Taliban as the administration has claimed makes no sense.

We can, however, expect to hear more on this issue as the presidential campaign continues, after all, some 800,000 American men and women have served in Afghanistan; many of whom will surely be voting in this close election.

Trump’s claim terrorists are pouring over southern border does not stand up to scrutiny CNN.com

Peter Bergen
Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
4 minute read
Published 1:00 AM EDT, Sun September 8, 2024

At a Fox News town hall on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump previewed some of the themes that we will likely hear more from him on the campaign trail and during his September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Discussing the US southern border, Trump asserted that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.”

As we approach the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this seems like an odd claim to make when 19 Arab hijackers, none of whom had crossed the southern border into the US, killed almost 3,000 people, the vast majority of them in Trump’s hometown of New York City.

And if it were really the case that jihadist terrorists were pouring across America’s southern border during the past three years as Trump claimed, wouldn’t there have been, you know, some terrorist attacks in the US as a result? Or, at the very least, a lot more terrorists being arrested in the US during that same time frame?

In fact, there have been no reported terrorist attacks in the US during the past three years carried out by jihadist terrorists crossing the southern border.

Indeed, the most recent lethal terrorist attack by a jihadist terrorist happened when Trump himself was in office in 2019 when a Saudi military officer killed three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and he had arrived legally in the US as part of a Pentagon training program.

Meanwhile, during the past three years, 22 people have been murdered in the United States by far-right domestic terrorists in places such as Buffalo, New York, and Allen, Texas, according to data collected by New America, a research institution (where I am a vice president.)

The ordinarily voluble Trump typically doesn’t have much to say when far-right domestic terrorists perpetrate terrorism in the United States.

At the Fox town hall, Trump also claimed that there were no acts of “radical Islamic terror” while he was president. Yet, the Pensacola terrorist attack happened on Trump’s watch, as did the attack in Manhattan in 2017 by an ISIS-inspired terrorist who killed eight people using a truck as a weapon.

The ‘terrorists crossing the southern border’ trope is a 2024 remix of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban during the 2016 election campaign, which conflated Americans’ widespread concerns about immigration with their fear of terrorism, which since the 9/11 attacks has been imprinted on many American’s minds.

To be sure, there are reasonable concerns about the southern border, like the fact that, as CNN reported in June, eight Tajikistan nationals in the US who had crossed the southern border were arrested on immigration charges “following the discovery of potential ties to terrorism,” including possibly to ISIS. There was, however, no evidence these men were plotting a terrorist attack.

Also, FBI director Christopher Wray testified last year before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, “I am concerned that we are in … a heightened threat environment from foreign terrorist organizations for a whole host of reasons and obviously their ability to exploit any port of entry, including our southwest border … We have seen an increase in so-called KSTs, ‘known or suspected terrorists,’ attempting to cross over the last five years.”

It is the case that according to the US Customs and Border Protection’s most recent statistics, in 2024 so far, there were 43 “encounters” with people on the terrorism watch list on the southern border.

Also, in 2024, Customs and Border Protection Patrol had 281 encounters with people on the terrorism watchlist on the US border with Canada. Yet, Trump is not calling for draconian immigration enforcement for people crossing the Canadian border, even though so far this year around six times more people on the terrorism watch list tried to cross that border.

Also, being on the terrorism watch list doesn’t mean you are a terrorist; CBS News has reported that there are some two million people on it.

This is all a far cry from Trump’s claim on Fox that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years” and that there was no Islamist terrorism in the US during the four years he was in office.

However, if past performance is predictive of future performance, Trump will likely make similar claims during the final weeks of the election campaign.

The Right-Wing Plan for Trump-Friendly Spies

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Sep 3 2024
Length: 43 mins

Donald Trump’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence community during his time in office was often tumultuous. Now, former top Trump administration officials have put together a plan to reshape intelligence gathering should Trump return to the White House, taking aim at what they see as social engineering and a lack of loyalty to a conservative president’s agenda. Several long-time intelligence officials, including the first Director of National Intelligence, weigh the pros and cons of the right-wing plan to overhaul the intelligence apparatus.