Cernovich: Petraeus and McMaster have Taken Over the NSC, Want Massive Ground War with Syria

Discussion in 'West Mall' started by Musburger1, Apr 11, 2017.

  1. Musburger1

    Musburger1 2,500+ Posts

    From the guy who broke the Susan Rice story. (Link). Your foreign policy is who you select to run it. I'm not familiar with most of these players, but it appears we're back to the future.

    Disgraced former CIA director and convicted criminal David Petraeus has been remaking the NSC, and thus America’s national security policy, in his image through puppet H.R. McMaster. In what is being called “Petraeus’ second war,” McMaster has been advising Trump to raise an army to impose a regime change in Syria. Some reports estimate McMaster wants to send 150,000 ground troops to the Middle East.

    Petraus, using his considerable contacts in the media as well as substantial Saudi money, has been manipulating personnel decisions within the NSC for months.


    [​IMG]
    The NSC has already been stacked with Petraus loyalists.
    Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War describes Petraus’ inner circle as including H.R. McMaster, now head of the NSC, Derek Harvey (the NSC’s top adviser on the Middle East), Joel Rayburn (Harvey’s deputy) and will soon include Major General Ricky Waddell if McMaster is able to squeeze out K.T. McFarland.


    [​IMG]
    McMaster is forcing out K.T. McFarland, a Trump ally who opposes a massive ground war in Syria.
    Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg reported earlier today:

    McFarland to Exit White House as McMaster Consolidates PowerK. T. McFarland has been asked to step down as deputy National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump after less than three months and is expected to be nominated as ambassador to Singapore, according to a person familiar with White House personnel moves.
    Major General Ricky Waddell, a Petraeus loyalist, is McMaster’s choice to replace K. T. McFarland.

    McMaster pushed out Steve Bannon earlier last week.
    President Trump on Wednesday removed controversial White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon from the National Security Council, part of a sweeping staff reshuffling that elevated military, intelligence and Cabinet officials to greater roles on the council and left Bannon less directly involved in shaping the administration’s day-to-day national security policy.The restructuring reflects the growing influence of national security adviser H.R. McMaster, an Army three-star general who took over the post after retired general Michael Flynn was ousted in February and who is increasingly asserting himself over the flow of national security information in the White House.
    Petraeus’s manuvering began months ago. Through his connections with deep state, he has been able to have the background checks of Trump supporters sabotaged.

    Trump loyalist Robin Townley had his security clearance application denied, despite the fact that Townley, a war hero, already had a top secret security clearance.
    A senior administration official tells ABC News that Robin Townley, National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s pick for the NSC’s senior director for Africa, had his request for special security clearance denied by the CIA.The move will prevent Townley from being able to serve in the NSC post. Townley currently maintains an active top secret security clearance, but it was his request was for “Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearance that was rejected, the source says. The post is one of nearly two dozen senior director positions on the NSC tailored to a specific focus or geographical area; many of those positions currently remain vacant with no announced appointees.
    Susan Rice, who unmasked Americans in an unprecedent spying scandal, advised H.R. McMaster to purge the NSC of Trump loyalists.

    [​IMG]
    McMaster tried hiring Benghazi liar Linda Weissgold to work for him at the NSC.
    How could a proven fraud like Linda Weissgold obtain a security clearance let alone be hired for the NSC?

    McMaster Interviewed CIA Operative to Replace Trump NSC OfficialDuring the Obama administration Weissgold served as director of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis. She was among those who briefed Congress following the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012, a team of intelligence and military experts who reportedly earned the nickname “the dream team” within the administration.In her position at OTA, she was also involved directly in drafting the now infamous Benghazi talking points, which government officials revised heavily to include factually incorrect assessments that stated the attackers were prompted by protests. According to the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s report, Weissgold testified she had changed one such talking point to say that extremists in Benghazi with ties to al Qaeda had been involved in “protests” in the Libyan city, despite the fact that no such protests had occurred there on the day of the attack.
    Watch NSC personnel moves closely. Trump supporters are out, pro-war Petraeus puppets are in.
    Susan Rice, who unmasked Americans in a spying scandal, is advising H.R. McMaster. McMaster sought to hire a proven Benghazi liar on his team. Meanwhile a war hero (Robin Townley) with a top secret clearance wasn’t able to have his security clearance approved for a position at the NSC.

    Trump ally K.T. McFarland is being pushed out, to be replaced with Petraeus loyalist Ricky Waddell.

    Again, pick up a copy of Surge. Nearly every member of Petraeus’s inner circle is at the NSC or is on their way there.


    [​IMG]
    This is a silent deep state coup led by Petraeus, and Trump must be on guard against McMaster’s false intelligence reports.​
     
  2. Musburger1

    Musburger1 2,500+ Posts

    Today Mattis denied such a large troop present as what Cernovich states. I can't imagine the public allowing 150,000 troops to go into Syria. But something is up. We'll see.
     
  3. Brad Austin

    Brad Austin 2,500+ Posts

    Mus, I've been watching Cernovich for a while and I'd caution even considering his input for the warmongering argument. :rolleyes1: This guy is far from credible in the scope of things.

    After he hit paydirt on Rice he's so full of himself and now just swinging for the fences at every pitch like Alex Jones. He's already changed his demeanor a lot.

    Btw, he spent the last several months boasting he'd never do MSM shows and said he turns them down all the time as his channel dwarfs their exposure. Then recently ABC (or whatever main channel) calls and he came running as soon as they asked.

    Cernovich was pretty annoying during the campaign but had some good content now and then. After his lucky hit on Rice he's become intolerable.

    This is pretty much what he said multiple times when people questioned the wild troops build up claim...

    "Im right about the coming Syrian invasion, I'm the one who hit on Rice, and you're too stupid to even be here so go back to watching the MSM".
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2017
  4. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    Cernovich? Cernovich???? As Brad Austin stated, I'd be careful in citing him as evidence. He's as biased and extreme as he is wrong on many things. He's the king of half-baked conspiracy theories.
     
    • Like Like x 1
  5. Brad Austin

    Brad Austin 2,500+ Posts

    You're on the money here. It would take an overt, unprovoked attack by Assad or his cronies on American soldiers for the public to allow that. No way I see it.
     
  6. Musburger1

    Musburger1 2,500+ Posts

    He does strike me as someone full of himself, not unlike Geraldo, Alex Jones, or O'Reilly. But he did nail the Rice story so he does have contacts. It's hard to know what's fact and what is third hand presented as fact.
     
  7. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    Did he? He identified her as the "leaker" when actually she was simply responsible for the "unmasking".
     
  8. Musburger1

    Musburger1 2,500+ Posts

    Who was the leaker?
     
  9. Seattle Husker

    Seattle Husker 10,000+ Posts

    Who knows? No public evidence has been supplied that Susan Rice was the leaker. Unmasking is an administrative step. Leaking is a felony. Pretty big difference which is why Cernovich most certainly didn't "nail" anything other than furthering another one of his conspiracy theories.
     
  10. Brad Austin

    Brad Austin 2,500+ Posts

    Trump: ‘We’re not going into Syria’

    Amid complaints that his aides are saying different things about Syria and his policy is confusing, President Trump emphatically cleared the air.

    “We’re not going into Syria,” he told me yesterday in an exclusive interview. “Our policy is the same — it hasn’t changed. We’re not going into Syria.”

    The president, speaking by phone Tuesday, called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a “butcher” and a “barbarian” for using sarin gas on his own people, but said last week’s successful missile strike was not the start of a campaign to oust the dictator.

    “Our big mission is getting rid of ISIS,” Trump said. “That’s where it’s always been. But when you see kids choking to death, you watch their lungs burning out, we had to hit him and hit him hard.”

    He called the attack, which involved 59 cruise missiles fired from two Navy destroyers, “an act of humanity.”

    I asked if he, as a new president, found it difficult to make the final decision, knowing the stakes.

    “It’s very tough to give that final go-ahead when you know you’re talking about human life,” he said. “We went back and forth, and also back and forth about severity. We could have gone bigger in terms of targets and more of them, but we thought this would be the appropriate first shot.”

    Later, he added, “We hope he won’t do any more gassing.”
     
    • Like Like x 2
  11. Crockett

    Crockett 5,000+ Posts

    I don't like Trump much, but what Brad Austin posted above seems sensible and reasonable.
     
  12. Mr. Deez

    Mr. Deez Beer Prophet

    Yeah, I pretty much dismissed this thread the second I saw the name "Cernovich."
     
  13. Musburger1

    Musburger1 2,500+ Posts

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...o-to-troops-in-syria-his-aides-aren-t-so-sure

    By
    Eli Lake
    Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush's war in Iraq and Barack Obama's war in Libya.

    But as Trump's young presidency has shown, many of the candidate's foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It's not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week's chemical weapons attack on rebels outside of Damascus. It's not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president's biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

    Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump's national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster's critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump's new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

    U.S. special operations forces and some conventional forces have been in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama reversed course and ordered a new air campaign against the Islamic State. But so far, the U.S. presence on the ground has been much smaller and quieter than more traditional military campaigns, particularly for Syria. It's the difference between boots on the ground and slippers on the ground.

    Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: "We're not going into Syria," he said.


    McMaster himself has found resistance to a more robust ground troop presence in Syria. In two meetings since the end of February of Trump's national security cabinet, known as the principals' committee, Trump's top advisers have failed to reach consensus on the Islamic State strategy. The White House and administration officials say Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford and General Joseph Votel, who is in charge of U.S. Central Command, oppose sending more conventional forces into Syria. Meanwhile, White House senior strategist Stephen Bannon has derided McMaster to his colleagues as trying to start a new Iraq War, according to these sources.

    Because Trump's national security cabinet has not reached consensus, the Islamic State war plan is now being debated at the policy coordinating committee, the interagency group hosted at the State Department of subject matter experts that prepares issues for the principals' committee and deputies' committee, after which a question reaches the president's desk for a decision.

    The genesis of this debate starts with one of Trump's first actions as president, when he told the Pentagon to develop a strategy to defeat the Islamic State. Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, opposed sending conventional forces into a complicated war zone, where they would be targets of al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Iran and Russia. In Flynn's brief tenure, he supported a deal with Russia to work together against the Islamic State and al Qaeda's Syria affiliate, similar to a bargain Obama's secretary of state, John Kerry's tried and failed to seal with Moscow.

    Inside the Pentagon, military leaders favor a more robust version of Obama's strategy against the Islamic State. This has been a combination of airstrikes and special operations forces that train and support local forces. Military leaders favor lifting restrictive rules of engagement for U.S. special operations forces and using more close air support, like attack helicopters, in future operations against the Islamic State capital in Raqqa.

    McMaster however is skeptical of this approach. To start, it relies primarily on Syrian Kurdish militias to conquer and hold Arab-majority territory. Jack Keane, a retired four-star Army general who is close to McMaster, acknowledged to me this week that the Kurdish forces have been willing to fight the Islamic State, whereas Arab militias have primarily fought against the Assad regime.

    "Our special operations guys believe rightfully so that this was a proven force that could fight," Keane said of the Kurdish fighters. "While this makes sense tactically, it doesn't make sense strategically. Those are Arab lands, and the Arabs are not going to put up with Syrian Kurds retaking Arab lands. Whenever you select a military option, you have got to determine what political end state will this support. Regrettably this option puts us back to the drawing board."

    There are other reasons that relying too much on the Kurds in Syria presents problems. The U.S. Air Force relies on Turkey's Incirlik Air Base to launch bombing raids over Islamic State positions in Syria. The Turks consider the Syrian Kurdish forces to be allies of Kurdish separatists within Turkey and have complained that Obama was effectively arming militias with weapons that would be turned on their own government. (Turkey's own president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, cynically declared war on his own Kurdish population in 2016, exacerbating these tensions.)

    Keane, who said he was not speaking for McMaster, told me he favored a plan to begin a military operation along the Euphrates River Valley. "A better option is to start the operation in the southeast along the Euphrates River Valley, establish a U.S. base of operations, work with our Sunni Arab coalition partners, who have made repeated offers to help us against the regime and also ISIS. We have turned those down during the Obama administration." Keane added that U.S. conventional forces would be the anchor of that initial push, which he said would most likely require around 10,000 U.S. conventional forces, with an expectation that Arab allies in the region would provide more troops to the U.S.-led effort.

    "The president wants to defeat ISIS, he wants to win, what he needs is a U.S.-led conventional coalition ground force that can take Raqqa and clean out the Euphrates River Valley of ISIS all the way to the Iraq border," Keane said. "Handwringing about U.S. ground troops in Syria was a fetish of the Obama administration. Time to look honestly at a winning military strategy."

    White House and administration officials familiar with the current debate tell me there is no consensus on how many troops to send to Syria and Iraq. Two sources told me one plan would envision sending up to 50,000 troops. Blogger and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich wrote on April 9 that McMaster wanted 150,000 ground troops for Syria, but U.S. officials I spoke with said that number was wildly inflated and no such plan has been under consideration.

    In public the tightlipped McMaster has not revealed support for conventional ground forces in Syria. But on Sunday in an interview with Fox News, McMaster gave some insights into his thinking on the broader strategy against the Islamic State. "We are conducting very effective operations alongside our partners in Syria and in Iraq to defeat ISIS, to destroy ISIS and reestablish control of that territory, control of those populations, protect those populations, allow refugees to come back, begin reconstruction," he said.

    That's significant. Obama never said the goal of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Syria was to defeat the Islamic State, let alone to protect the population from the group and begin reconstruction. Those aims are much closer to the goals of George W. Bush's surge strategy for Iraq at the end of his second term, under which U.S. conventional forces embedded with the Iraqi army would "clear, hold and build" areas that once belonged to al Qaeda's franchise.

    McMaster himself is no stranger to the surge. As a young colonel serving in Iraq, he was one of the first military officers to form a successful alliance with local forces, in Tal Afair, to defeat the predecessor to the Islamic State, al Qaeda in Iraq. During the Iraq War, McMaster became one of the closest advisers to David Petraeus, the four-star general who led the counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq that defeated al Qaeda in Iraq -- and brought about a temporary, uneasy peace there.

    That peace unraveled after Obama withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq at the end of 2011. Obama himself never apologized for that decision, even though he had to send special operations forces back to Iraq in the summer of 2014 after the Islamic State captured Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. He argued that U.S. forces in Iraq would have been caught up inside a civil war had they stayed.

    The cadre of former military advisers to Petraeus took a different view. They argued that America's abandonment of Iraq gave the Shiite majority there a license to pursue a sectarian agenda that provided a political and military opening for the Islamic State. An active U.S. presence in Iraq would have restrained those sectarian forces.

    One of those advisers was H.R. McMaster. It's now up to Trump to decide whether to test the Petraeus camp's theory or try to defeat the Islamic State with a light footprint in Syria. Put another way, Trump must decide whether he wants to wage Bush's war or continue Obama's.
     
  14. Brad Austin

    Brad Austin 2,500+ Posts

    That's about as big of a gulf in options as choosing between hitting a guy with a sledgehammer or mildly poking him in the eye.

    Obama's ISIS campaign was largely driven by political optics and appearance of effort. Telegraphing actions and 'hearts and minds' conscious strikes were never intended or even accepted by military leaders as an approach capable of victory.

    Not to mention ME allies didn't trust his lacking commitment and wanted nothing to do with helping us out. That won't be the case going forward.

    Even changing those two components will provide a more effective strategy and make a big difference. That's without eventual Russian cooperation (which I believe will happen) and other non-invasion military escalation options.
     

Share This Page