THE STRONG HORSE

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, perpetrator of 9/11

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”

This was the justification of Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on America, thinking it would demonstrate Al Qaeda was the horse for the world to follow, not that of a weak America.

He expected the U.S. to treat 9/11 as a law enforcement matter, as President Clinton had al Qaeda’s attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole.  And indeed, that’s exactly what would have happened if his vice-president had been president in September 2001.

Thus Osama and his henchmen got the greatest shock of their lives when the American president turned out to be the opposite of a pussy like Algore.

As Osama’s 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told his CIA interrogator James Mitchell:

“How was I supposed to know that cowboy George Bush would announce he wanted us ‘dead or alive’ and then invade Afghanistan to hunt us down?”

The “ferocity and swiftness” of President Bush’s response stunned al Qaeda, forced KSM to cancel a second wave of attacks he’d planned, according to Mitchell’s new book: “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America.”

After Mr. Mitchell, then a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force under contract to the CIA, “broke” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” KSM became quite garrulous. The book is based on thousands of hours of conversation.

Large scale attacks were “nice, but not necessary,” the planner of the 9/11 attacks told his interrogator. Low tech attacks could bring down America the same way “enough disease-infected fleas could bring down an elephant.”

Jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States, “wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws” until they were strong enough to rise up and attack,” KSM told James Mitchell.  “We do not need to defeat you militarily. We only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting. Eventually, America will expose her neck for us to slaughter.”

Good strategy that could have worked with a weak horse in the White House like Barack Obama.

President Zero sought to be loved, with catastrophic results. His passivity in the face of provocations emboldened enemies, unnerved allies, led to bloody chaos in the Muslim world, a rising threat from Islamic terror at home.

KSM’s strategy died on November 8.  America will now have a president who understands, as Niccolo Machiavelli counseled a half millennium ago (in 1513), that “It is better for the prince to be feared than loved.”

Historian Mark Moyar, in the pages of the New York Times (12/09) made this clear in The World Fears Trump’s America.  That’s a Good Thing:

“Among global elites, Donald J. Trump’s recent phone call with Taiwan’s president has induced fear on a scale seldom matched since Ronald Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ speech… The United States must care more about whether it commands international respect than whether it is loved by international elites.”

Mr. Trump’s nominees for key national security posts indicate a big change is coming in how people around the world regard the United States of America.

Yet James Mitchell has a caution.

During their meeting, Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis told Mr. Trump he could get better results interrogating prisoners with “a pack of smokes and a couple of beers” than with waterboarding.

This prompted a rebuttal by Mr. Mitchell in the Wall Street Journal (12/09):  “Sorry, Mad Dog. Waterboarding Works.” His essay was subtitled: I respect Gen. Mattis, but he has never employed enhanced-interrogation techniques. I have.

Actually, both Mitchell and Mattis are right. Under the Geneva Convention, it would be a war crime to use enhanced interrogation techniques on prisoners of war. “Enemy combatants” such as Islamist terrorists are not protected by the Geneva Convention, but it isn’t a good idea for soldiers and Marines to use EITs on terrorists they capture.

“We started out with the ‘tea and sympathy’ approach and only escalated to harsher methods when it became clear that the detainee held vital information that might save innocent lives and was determined not to provide it,” Mr. Mitchell wrote.  Enhanced interrogation techniques should be used only in special circumstances, and employed only by experts.

Such as James Mitchell. An Air Force psychologist, he oversaw SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training at Fairchild AFB in Washington state. In the final, most critical phase of SERE training, pilots are subjected to the types of abuse they could expect to receive if they were captured by an enemy who doesn’t respect the Geneva Convention (everyone we’ve fought since WWII).

EITs – being deprived of sleep, food, subjected to extremes of heat and cold, being forced to stand for long periods, and, yes, waterboarding – are highly unpleasant. But they are not “torture.” We do not torture our own people. No EIT is life threatening, causes serious injury.

Proof that waterboarding is not torture is the number of journalists who volunteered to be waterboarded to claim that it is. No journalist has offered to have his fingernails pulled out, or electrodes fastened to his genitals, or any of the other things that constitute actual torture.

I trust that under President Trump, we’ll be less solicitous of the comfort of terrorist masterminds, more concerned about their victims.

The nominations of Gen. Mattis, of retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly for Homeland Security, and of Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-KS (first in his class at West Point) for CIA Director indicate President Trump plans to treat the War on Terror as a war – and intends to win it.

President Bush’s fatal mistake wasn’t invading Afghanistan or Iraq. Staying to “nation-build” converted swift military victories into bloody long term defeats.

Nation building is a conceit of civilians unclear about what can and cannot be accomplished with military force, who grossly exaggerate the enthusiasm for democracy of primitive peoples.

Team Trump’s foreign policy figures to be Jacksonian. To oversimplify, Jacksonians think we shouldn’t meddle in the affairs of other nations – unless they (screw) with us, in which case we should stomp them, then go home.

Even allies “must know that the world’s most powerful nation is prepared to practice tough love if they take actions inconsistent with the strength of the United States or the stability of the international system,” Mr. Moyar says.

The president-elect’s handling of China is heartening. By conversing with the democratically elected president of Taiwan, Mr. Trump fired a shot across the bow of the Chicom Politburo.

Then he chose a personal friend of Chinese leader Xi Jinping for U.S. ambassador. Don’t take me for granted, but we can do business, The Donald signaled.

Not bad for a guy who isn’t supposed to know jack about foreign policy.  So if I were Mr. Putin, I’d be wary of alienating the world’s new strong horse.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.