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      Rahm Emanuel leads confirmed Biden nominees in late-night logjam break

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      Rahm Emanuel leads confirmed Biden nominees in late-night logjam breakEx-Obama chief of staff will go to Japan after deal for vote on Russia pipeline sanctions ends Republican Senate resistance The former Obama White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was among more than 30 ambassadors and other Biden nominees confirmed by the Senate early on Saturday. Trump condemned by Anti-Defamation League chief for antisemitic tropesRead moreThe Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, broke a Republican-stoked logjam by agreeing to schedule a vote on sanctions on the company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany.With many senators anxious to go home for the holidays, Schumer threatened to keep the Senate in for as long as it took to break a logjam on a number of diplomatic and national security nominees.Emanuel was confirmed to serve as ambassador to Japan by a vote of 48-21. Nominees to be ambassadors to Spain, Vietnam and Somalia were among those confirmed by voice vote after an agreement was reached to vote on Nord Stream 2 sanctions before 14 January.The confirmation process has proved to be frustrating for new administrations regardless of party. While gridlock isn’t new, the struggle is getting worse.Democrats have voiced concerns about holds Republican senators placed on nominees in order to raise objections about foreign policy matters that had little to do with the nominees in question. Holds do not block confirmation but they do require the Senate to undertake hours of debate.Positions requiring confirmation can go unfilled for months even when the nominations are approved in committee with the support of both parties.Biden officials acknowledge the president will end his year with significantly more vacancies than recent predecessors and that the slowdown of ambassadorial and other national security picks has had an impact on relations overseas.Ted Cruz, of Texas, held up dozens of nominees at state and treasury, over objections to the waiving of sanctions targeting the Nord Stream AG firm overseeing the pipeline project. The administration said it opposed the project but viewed it is a fait accompli. It also said trying to stop it would harm relations with Germany.Critics on the both sides of the aisle have raised concerns that the pipeline will threaten European energy security by increasing reliance on Russian gas and allowing Russia to exert political pressure on vulnerable nations, particularly Ukraine.Earlier in the week, Schumer demanded that Cruz lift all of his holds on nominees at the two departments as well as the US Agency for International Development, as part of any agreement on a Nord Stream 2 sanctions. Cruz said he was willing to lift holds on 16. The two sides traded offers on Friday.“I think there ought to be a reasonable middle ground solution,” Cruz said.“Let’s face it. There is little to celebrate when it comes to nominations in the Senate,“ said Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the foreign relations committee.The New Jersey Democrat blamed Republicans for “straining the system to the breaking point” and depriving Biden of a full national security team, “leaving our nation weakened”.“Something’s going to happen in one of these places and we will not be there to ultimately have someone to promote our interests and to protect ourselves,” he said.Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said some of the gridlock stemmed back to four years ago when Democrats, under Schumer, tried to stop many of Donald Trump’s nominees being confirmed in a timely manner.“Senator Schumer doesn’t have anything close to clean hands here,” Blunt said.Emanuel, also a former member of the House, was backed for the post in Tokyo at a time when Washington is looking to Asian allies to help push back against China.Detractors said they would not back him because of the shooting when he was mayor of Chicago of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who died when a police officer, Jason Van Dyke, fired multiple times.Emanuel’s handling of the case was criticized, especially as video was not released for more than a year. Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and jailed. Four officers were fired.Biden nominated Emanuel in August. At his confirmation hearing in October, Emanuel said he thought about McDonald every day and that, as mayor, he was responsible and accountable.Eight Republicans voted with a majority of Democrats to confirm Emanuel. Three Democrats voted no: Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.TopicsBiden administrationUS foreign policyUS national securityRahm EmanuelUS politicsAsia PacificJapannewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s ‘fact-free’ approach caused briefing challenges, CIA report says

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      Trump’s ‘fact-free’ approach caused briefing challenges, CIA report saysEx-president’s chaotic style resulted in presidential daily briefing being delivered more regularly to Mike Pence Donald Trump’s “fact-free” approach to the presidency created unprecedented challenges for intelligence officials responsible for briefing him, according to a newly released account from the CIA.Trump challenges media and Democrats to debate his electoral fraud lieRead moreThe 45th president’s chaotic and freewheeling style, and his disinclination to read anything put in front of him, resulted in the presidential daily briefing, or PDB – a crucial security update including information about potential threats to the US – being delivered more regularly to Vice-President Mike Pence instead, the report states.By the middle of Trump’s term in office, his briefings were reduced to two weekly sessions of 45 minutes each. Briefings were discontinued altogether after the deadly insurrection of 6 January, which was sparked by Trump urging his supporters to march on the US Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.The analysis comes in a 40-page unclassified update to the CIA’s Getting to Know the President, a publication that chronicles efforts to brief presidents-elect through transition periods and into office for every administration since 1952.“For the intelligence community (IC), the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents,” the new chapter, posted to the CIA website, concludes.“Trump was like [Richard] Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it but attacked it publicly.”Nixon, who resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal, refused to accept any intelligence from the CIA and received briefings instead from trusted insiders such as his national security adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.Trump regularly assailed intelligence officials and famously chose to believe the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over agencies including the CIA which concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.The CIA report’s author, retired career intelligence officer John L Helgerson, said briefers achieved “only limited success” in their mission to deliver timely and relevant intelligence to Trump and to establish a working relationship with him.Pence, by contrast, “was an assiduous, six-day-a-week reader” who made efforts to try to keep Trump focused. The vice-president urged briefers to “lean forward on maps” in graphics-heavy presentations much shorter than those presented to Trump’s predecessors, and “would sometimes ask leading questions” during joint sessions with Trump “so the president would hear his concerns”.Pence’s efforts were largely unsuccessful, Helgerson suggests. James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, said Trump “was prone to fly off on tangents”, according to the CIA report, and said “there might be [only] eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour’s discussion”.Additionally, Clapper said, while “the IC worked with evidence, Trump ‘was fact-free – evidence doesn’t cut it with him’.”Helgerson writes: “Trump preferred that the briefer take the lead and summarise the key points and important items from the days since they had last had a session. The PDB was published every day, but because Trump received a briefing only two or three times a week, he relied on the briefer to orally summarize the significance of the most important issues.”Michael Cohen: prosecutors could ‘indict Trump tomorrow’ if they wantedRead morePerhaps unsurprisingly, the subjects to which Trump paid most attention were China and developments involving Russia and Ukraine. The first of the former president’s two impeachments was for pressing Ukraine to investigate Biden, then his likely 2020 election opponent. He was also investigated for allegedly colluding with Russia.“A few subjects and areas of the world were notable by their relative absence,” the CIA report states. “Regarding Europe, only Nato budget issues, Turkey and approaching elections in France and Germany stimulated much discussion. Latin America, Africa, and south-east Asia received almost no attention.”Overall, Helgerson believes, the briefing process barely survived Trump’s presidency.“[He] publicly criticised the outgoing directors of national intelligence and the CIA, and disparaged the substantive work and integrity of the intelligence agencies. From the outset, it was clear that the IC was in for a difficult time.“The system worked, but it struggled.”TopicsDonald TrumpMike PenceCIATrump administrationUS national securityUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished

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      Betrayal review: Trump’s final days and a threat not yet extinguished ABC’s man in Washington delivers a second riveting and horrifying read about how close America came to disasterTrumpworld is in legal jeopardy. The 45th president’s phone call to Brad Raffensperger, urging the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, may have birthed a grand jury.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreIn Manhattan, the outgoing district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, has empaneled one of those, to look at Trump’s business. As a Vanity Fair headline blared, “The Trump Organization should be soiling itself right now.”In Washington, the Department of Justice ponders the prosecution of Steve Bannon, chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and a pivotal figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement second time round.For Trump, out-of-office has not translated into out-of-mind. He thrives on all the attention.Amid it all, Jonathan Karl dives once again into the Stygian mosh pit, this time with Betrayal, a sequel to Front Row at the Trump Show, a New York Times bestseller.In that book, in the spring of 2020, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent prophesied that “Trump’s war on truth may do lasting damage to American democracy”. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong. Front Row preceded by months a coup attempt egged on by a defeated president. Looking back, Trump’s embrace of birtherism, “alternative facts” and crowd violence were mere prelude to the chaos that filled his time in power, his final days in office and all that has come and gone since then.In his second book, under the subtitle The Final Act of the Trump Show, Karl gets members of Trump’s cabinet to speak on the record. They paint a portrait of a wrath-filled president, untethered from reality, bent on revenge.Karl captures Bill Barr denouncing Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories and criticizing his election strategy. Appearing determined to salvage his own battered reputation, Trump’s second attorney general tells Karl his president “was making it too much of a base election. I felt that he had to repair the bridges he had burned [with moderate voters] in the suburbs.”By that metric, Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s governor-elect, has a bright future, a politician who puts suburban dads and rural moms at ease. No wonder Republicans think they have found a star, and with him a winning formula.As for Trump’s claims about rigged voting machines, Barr “realized from the beginning it was just bullshit” and says “the number of actual improper voters were de minimus”. No matter, to Trump: he continues to demand Republican legislatures carry out post-election audits.Karl delivers further confirmation of Mitch McConnell’s fractious personal relationship with Trump, a man the Kentucky senator reportedly repeatedly mocked. According to Karl, McConnell, then Senate majority leader, sought to formally disinvite Trump from Joe Biden’s inauguration. Kevin McCarthy, the chief House Republican, leaked the plan to the White House. In turn, Trump tweeted that he would not attend.McConnell attempted to thread the needle, placating Trump while keeping the GOP’s Koch brothers wing onside. But once he acknowledged Biden’s victory, the damage was permanently done. McConnell was an object of Trumpian scorn.That the senator jammed Amy Coney Barrett on to the supreme court days before the 2020 election and before that played blocking back for Brett Kavanaugh is now rendered irrelevant. Trump wants McConnell out of Senate leadership. Adding insult to injury, Trump recently told the Washington Post McConnell wasn’t a “real leader” because “he didn’t fight for the presidency”, and said he was “only a leader because he raises a lot of money”.“You know,” Trump said, “with the senators, that’s how it is, frankly. That’s his primary power.”He’s not wrong all the time.Betrayal also documents a commander-in-chief who scared his own cabinet witless. After Trump junked the Iran nuclear deal, for example, Tehran thumbed its nose back. Drama ensued, because Trump wanted to know his options.Chris Miller, then acting defense secretary, tells Karl that to dissuade Trump from ordering the destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, he chose to play the role of “fucking madman” – his words, not Karl’s – which meant advocating that very course of action. According to Karl, not even Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state and an Iran hawk, played along.“Oftentimes with provocative people, if you get more provocative than them, they then have to dial it down,” Miller explains to Karl. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, I was fucking crazy, but that guy’s batshit.’”Here, the reader might pause to imagine a campaign slogan for Trump in 2024: “Fucking crazy, but not batshit”.On a similar note, Karl depicts Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s crony and attorney, as a walking timebomb. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, avoided the former New York mayor. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, saw him as a corrosive force.“I’m not going to let Rudy in the building for any more of these,” Meadows reportedly told Chris Christie, New Jersey’s former governor, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, as they prepared for debates with Biden.These days, Giuliani is suspended from the bar, reportedly under investigation and unable to persuade Trump to pay his bills. Christie and Trump are at loggerheads too, over sins real and imagined, past and present.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreAs for Meadows and Stepien, they are in the crosshairs of the House select committee focused on the US Capitol attack. From the looks of things only Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have so far remained intact, ensconced in Florida, sufficiently distanced from Big Daddy.Despite such fallout, Betrayal concludes with words of warning. Karl rightly contends that Trump’s “betrayal” of American democracy highlighted “just how vulnerable” the system is.“The continued survival of our republic,” he writes, “may depend, in part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”In a hypothetical rematch, Trump leads Biden 45-43. Among independent voters, he holds a double-digit lead. Don’t hold your breath.
      Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show is published in the US by Dutton
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansreviewsReuse this content More

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      Master of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neither

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      BooksMaster of the Game review: Henry Kissinger as hero, villain … and neitherMartin Indyk’s well-woven biography is sympathetic to the preacher of realpolitik condemned by many as a war criminal Lloyd GreenSun 31 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 02.02 EDTAs secretary of state, Henry Kissinger nursed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war to a close. The disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel ultimately yielded a peace treaty. The Syrian border remains tensely quiet. Unlike Vietnam, in the Middle East Kissinger’s handiwork holds.Friendly Fire review: Israeli warrior Ami Ayalon makes his plea for peaceRead moreThe Sunni Arab world has gradually come to terms with the existence of the Jewish state. Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have diplomatic ties with Jerusalem. Relations with Saudi Arabia are possible.For Kissinger, student and preacher of realpolitik, peace was seldom an end in itself. His pivot to China was about boxing in the USSR. To him, the cold war and existing nation states were what mattered most. The Viet Cong earned a seat at the table because US troops were bogged down. The Palestinians were not so high on Kissinger’s agenda.Now comes Martin Indyk with a 688-page, well-woven history fittingly subtitled “Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy”. The book reflects the author’s admiration for and access to his subject.Kissinger last granted Indyk an interview at the age of 97. Now he’s 98. Indyk’s wife, Gahl Burt, once worked on Kissinger’s staff. Indyk himself is a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations. His gigs included ambassador to Israel and Middle East envoy. A former Australian national, he volunteered on a kibbutz. He checks many boxes.Master of the Game does convey a sense that Indyk wishes his own attainments equaled those of his subject. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1998 Wye River Memorandum between the Israelis and Palestinians quickly degenerated into the second intifada, flareups in Gaza and Hamas vying with the Palestinian Authority for power on the ground.In the Obama years, Israel emerged as a partisan flashpoint in the US, like abortion and taxes, to the chagrin of the Democratic establishment and Israel’s diplomatic corps but to the delight of the Republicans and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister.In Master of the Game, Indyk lays out the run-up to the October war of 1973, the responses of the US and the USSR, and Kissinger’s nearly two-year hopscotch between Jerusalem, Cairo and Damascus.Indyk confirms what is widely known, that while Kissinger did not explicitly give Egypt the green light to attack Israeli-occupied Sinai, he was pleased with the outcome. The war and its aftermath presented the US with the opportunity to lure Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, even if Israel had to pay a price.The war Kissinger “had not expected at the moment”, writes Indyk, “would provide him with the opportunity to manipulate antagonisms”. Those, in turn, would help “begin the construction of what he intended to be a new, more stable American-led order in the Middle East”.Israeli combat deaths topped 2,600 – reportedly more than 1,000 in the war’s first five days. At the time, Kissinger noted that the latter figure would be proportionally equal to twice the number of US deaths in eight years in Vietnam. As a result, Kissinger coldly “assumed that when he needed Israel to accept a ceasefire it would have no choice but to do so”.Kissinger saw that a ceasefire would yield territorial concessions. He got that right but the pace was not necessarily to his liking. Disengagement arrived too quickly and then too slowly for him.In spring 1975, Gerald Ford announced the reassessment of America’s relationship with Israel. Months later, in early September, Egypt and Israel entered a second disengagement agreement, a precursor to the 1978 Camp David Accords hashed out by Jimmy Carter.While “Start-up Nation” has emerged as durable military power, Indyk yearns for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.After noting the Abraham Accords, agreements between Israel and Gulf states, Indyk contends that the “Trump administration actually made matters worse” by proposing a Palestinian entity “as a heavily circumscribed enclave within Israeli territory”. He also acknowledges that the accords took Israeli annexation of the West Bank off the table.As a Talmudic dictum goes, “avar zemano, batel korbano”. Loosely translated, the train has left the station. What applies to a sacrificial rite may pertain to politics. Even the peace process came with a sell-by date. Indyk admits that “the three presidents who succeeded Clinton” tried but failed to reach a lasting agreement, but while Jared Kushner failed to snag the deal of the century, his diplomatic achievement is tangible.In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024Read moreIndyk also explores the competing tugs on Kissinger, a refugee, of loyalty, religion and ethnicity. Richard Nixon told Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, Kissinger was prone to “indulge Israel’s nationalist sentiments”. On the other hand, Israeli protestors outside Kissinger’s hotel once bellowed: “Jew boy go home.” The Jackson-Vanick amendment, which linked preferred trade status for the USSR to its performance on emigration, infuriated Kissinger.Kissinger has plenty of detractors. Against the backdrop of Nixon’s Vietnam policy, the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor and a coup and invasion in Cyprus, he has been called a war criminal.On the right, the late Phyllis Schlafly dangled Kissinger’s otherness in the face of Ford’s bid for the nomination in 1976. She said Kissinger did not understand “typical American values” and claimed that the loyalty of the German-born and accented diplomat rested with a “supranational” order.Indyk writes: “When it came to managing violent middle eastern passions and preserving peace, history’s judgment should surely be that Henry Kissinger did well.”Reasonable people will freely differ.
      Master of the Game is published in the US by Knopf
      TopicsBooksUS foreign policyUS national securityUS politicsIsraelPalestinian territoriesMiddle East and North AfricareviewsReuse this content More

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      The Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies

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      BooksThe Afghanistan Papers review: superb exposé of a war built on lies Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post used freedom of information to produce the definitive US version of the warJulian BorgerSun 5 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 02.02 EDTIn the summer of 2009, the latest in a long line of US military commanders in Afghanistan commissioned the latest in a long line of strategic reviews, in the perennial hope it would make enough of a difference to allow the Americans to go home.‘The intensity has not changed’: Jason Kander on the fall of Afghanistan – and trying to get friends outRead moreThere was some excitement in Washington about the author, Gen Stanley McChrystal, a special forces soldier who cultivated the image of a warrior-monk while hunting down insurgents in Iraq.Hired by Barack Obama, McChrystal produced a 66-page rethink of the Afghan campaign, calling for a “properly resourced” counter-insurgency with a lot more money and troops.It quickly became clear there were two significant problems. Al-Qaida, the original justification for the Afghan invasion, was not even mentioned in McChrystal’s first draft. And the US could not agree with its Nato allies on whether to call it a war or a peacekeeping or training mission, an issue with important legal implications.In the second draft, al-Qaida was included and the conflict was hazily defined as “not a war in the conventional sense”. But no amount of editing could disguise the fact that after eight years of bloody struggle, the US and its allies were unclear on what they were doing and who they were fighting.The story is one of many gobsmacking anecdotes and tragic absurdities uncovered by Craig Whitlock, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post. His book is based on documents obtained through freedom of information requests, most from “lessons learned” interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a watchdog mandated by Congress to keep tabs on the hundreds of billions flowing into Afghanistan.In the Sigar files, and other interviews carried out by military institutes and research centres, Whitlock found that soldiers of all ranks and their civilian counterparts were “more open about their experiences than they likely would have been with a journalist working on a news story”.Blunt appraisals were left unvarnished because they were never intended for publication. The contrast with the upbeat version of events presented to the public at the same time, often by the very same people, is breathtaking.The Afghanistan Papers is a book about failure and about lying about failure, and about how that led to yet worse failures, and so on for 20 years. The title and the contents echo the Pentagon Papers, the leaked inside story of the Vietnam war in which the long road to defeat was paved with brittle happy talk.“With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict,” Whitlock writes. “Instead, they chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”As Whitlock vividly demonstrates, the lack of clarity, the deception, ignorance and hubris were baked in from the beginning. When he went to war in Afghanistan in October 2001, George Bush promised a carefully defined mission. In fact, at the time the first bombs were being dropped, guidance from the Pentagon was hazy.It was unclear, for example, whether the Taliban were to be ousted or punished.“We received some general guidance like, ‘Hey, we want to go fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan,’” a special forces operations planner recalled. Regime change was only decided to be a war aim nine days after the shooting started.The US was also hazy about whom they were fighting, which Whitlock calls “a fundamental blunder from which it would never recover”.Most importantly, the invaders lumped the Taliban in with al-Qaida, despite the fact the former was a homegrown group with largely local preoccupations while the latter was primarily an Arab network with global ambitions.That perception, combined with unexpectedly easy victories in the first months, led Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to believe the Taliban could be ignored. Despite offers from some leaders that they were ready to negotiate a surrender, they were excluded from talks in December 2001 on the country’s future. It was a decision the United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, called the “original sin” of the war.Rumsfeld declared there was no point negotiating.“The only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them,” he said in March 2002. “And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone.”Not even Rumsfeld believed that. In one of his famous “snowflake” memos, at about the same time, he wrote: “I am getting concerned that it is drifting.”In a subsequent snowflake, two years after the war started, he admitted: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”’The Taliban had not disappeared, though much of the leadership had retreated to Pakistan. The fighters had gone home, if necessary to await the next fighting season. Their harsh brand of Islam had grown in remote, impoverished villages, honed by the brutalities of Soviet occupation and civil war. The Taliban did not represent anything like a majority of Afghans, but as their resilience and eventual victory have shown, they are an indelible part of Afghanistan.Bruised Biden tries to turn the page after US debacle in AfghanistanRead moreWhitlock’s book is rooted in a database most journalists and historians could only dream of, but it is far more than the sum of its sources. You never feel the weight of the underlying documents because they are so deftly handed. Whitlock uses them as raw material to weave anecdotes into a compelling narrative.He does not tell the full story of the Afghan war. He does not claim to do so. That has to be told primarily by Afghans, who lived through the realities submerged by official narratives, at the receiving end of each new strategy and initiative.This is a definitive version of the war seen through American eyes, told by Americans unaware their words would appear in public. It is a cautionary tale of how a war can go on for years, long after it stops making any kind of sense.TopicsBooksAfghanistanSouth and Central AsiaUS militaryUS foreign policyUS national securityGeorge BushreviewsReuse this content More