General John Allen, Hillary Clinton’s shill for national defense is throwing stones while standing in a glass house. His attacks against Donald Trump include a tirade that a President Trump would cause a civil-military crisis.
His argument is as weak as the abysmal foreign policy performance of the Obama-Clinton team. He is the perfect general to represent their failed paradigm. Allen was in charge of U.S. counter-ISIS strategy at the time ISIS went from being “the JV Team” to being the largest purveyors of global terror in modern history.
Let’s break this down: The Obama-Clinton fight against Islamic Fascism is deficient in every theater of operation. Allen’s beef with Trump is about an interrogation technique used against terrorists called waterboarding. For all the handwringing by the left over this issue, in the end, only three terror subjects were ever subjected to this “enhanced interrogation method.” That’s right, only three known terrorists — all the while, over the last decades, the U.S. military has subjected tens of thousands of its own service members to waterboarding in preparing them for the rigors of possible enemy capture.
Trump said, as president, he would consider using waterboarding again as a method to prevent terror attacks. Perhaps it’s best to listen to both Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and his lieutenant Abu Zubaydah on this issue. According to the U.S. Justice Department memo on waterboarding: “They both expressed their contempt on the will of the American people to defend themselves and that the US population was weak, lacked resilience and would be unable to do what was necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.” Those terrorists made that statement having just experienced 8 years of Clinton defense policy, and clearly their ISIS comrades would welcome more Clinton weakness on the issue.
Candidate Donald Trump has rightly and consistently criticized the NATO alliance and said he would demand that its members actually pay their share of the agreed defense burden. Of the 28 NATO member nations, only 5 countries spend the Alliance agreed amount (2 percent of GPD). Wealthy Nations like Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and UK all fail to meet the 2 percent threshold. Norway, with an $885 billion dollar Sovereign Wealth fund, still barely pays half of the recommended 2 percent amount. All this while, the U.S. taxpayer expends 3.3 percent of our national income on defense, and not only do we not have an $885 billion savings account, rather we have a $20 TRILION dollar debt.
American national interest must be the paramount focus of our national leaders. It is entirely rational and appropriate for Trump to question whether NATO countries are freeloading. The fact is just like in the horribly conceived NATO 2011 operation against Libya, European NATO nations where unable to effectively fight against even tiny Libya. This means that if any NATO nation is attacked (including Islamist Turkey), NATO goes to war totally dependent on American blood and treasure.
George Washington reminded us that, as a nation, we have “neither perpetual enemies or friends.” As we pass the 100-year anniversary of World War 1 (one of the most pointless and unnecessary catastrophes in human history), it is essential as a nation we not make the same horrendous errors of open-ended treaties leading a continent to war. Russia need not be our friend, but as in World War Two, they can be our allies against Fascism, this time Islamic Fascism.
As for Gen Allen’s other concerns about a “civil military crisis,” it’s fair to raise issues he’s been responsible for a real crisis he’s remained mute on.
-While Allen was White House Coordinator of anti-ISIS efforts, the $500 million funded training program for “moderate Syrian rebels” totally failed and was abandoned due to the rebels surrendering weapons to and even joining radical Islamist forces. Allen totally failed to actually combat ISIS, nor did he rebut the repeated misguided policies of the Obama administration half measures to combat terror.
-In September of 2011, the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team killed via a drone strike a U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son born in Colorado. Certainly, the U.S. needs to kill terrorists, but this is the first time ever an American citizen was targeted for death by his government with ZERO due process — no court ruling or Senate vote stripping his citizenship (as was done with Robert E Lee of the Confederacy). The double standard of the left on this is intolerable.
-While an active duty or retired general, Allen has remained silent on the repeated social engineering experiments inflicted on the U.S. military by the Obama administration. These travesties include forcing women into combat and special operations roles, even though extensive third party studies collected for the U.S. Marine Corps show significant degradation of unit performance in combat readiness. Even worse, the army is now paying for transgender treatments for soldiers, including convicted traitor Bradley Manning (convicted for leaking 700,000 classified documents). The Army spends these funds while thousands of wounded veterans wait for months or even years needing essential medical care they have actually earned in battle. This is a real crisis and one inflicted on our uniformed services with the complicity of bureaucrat generals like Allen.
-Lastly, in keeping with his desired commander in chief, General Allen also has an email problem. After serving as commander of ISAF/US Forces in Afghanistan from 2011-2013, he was investigated for having essentially having phone sex via more than 30,000 emails with an attractive Tampa, Florida, married socialite. He retired after this scandal investigation. As odd as this is, how does one have time during 19 months of command of U.S. forces in a war zone to send 30,000 emails, an average of 52 per day? The Taliban now controls more than 35 percent of Afghanistan. This losing trend started under Allen’s Command. America needs warriors in charge of its military forces, not the breed of general represented by General John Allen. Hillary Clinton’s ascendancy to be Commander in Chief would cause the real crisis in civil-military relations and trigger an actual breach of trust by the rank and file looking for real leadership.
Listen to Erik Prince discuss this on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM: