Dr. Sebastian Gorka, chief strategist for the MAGA Coalition, joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the death of four U.S. soldiers in Niger, the reasons behind the Niger deployment, and the controversy over President Trump’s condolence call to the family of slain Sgt. La David Johnson.
Kassam noted that in the wake of an ambush that killed four U.S. special forces troops, Americans are wondering why there is a U.S. military presence in Niger. Gorka said it’s easy to explain: “They’re dealing with the chaotic aftermath of Hillary Clinton and President Obama’s Libya policy.”
“The fact is, we as a nation intervened in Libya against Moammar Qaddafi – rather, Hillary had a plan to do so. She very coldly said one day, ‘We intervened and he’s dead,’ if you remember that famous quote from her. And that was about the extent of their strategic planning. There was no plan for what would happen after a man who had been in power for decades was swept out of his position,” Gorka explained.
“What happened is Libyan capabilities, weapons, flooded the whole of the Sahel region, south and west including Niger,” he continued. “The armed forces of Niger were not capable of dealing with all the jihadis that are roaming across the ungoverned spaces of that region. As such, we have deployed about 6,000 special forces and other troops across the whole continent to assist local forces as trainers, as advisers, to make them more able to maintain sovereignty in their own countries. The individuals that were recently killed, the Green Berets, were part of a mission to assist local forces in their response to the threat of the jihadis roaming across the whole of the Sahel region.”
Kassam asked what Gorka thought of the effort by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) to turn the Niger ambush into “Mr. Trump’s Benghazi.”
“Well, first a little bit of consternation and head-scratching. I thought Benghazi wasn’t a problem, and there was nothing negative,” Gorka replied sarcastically.
“The parallel is of course asinine, and befits a clown like this congresswoman,” he said. “Because in Benghazi what you had is a diplomatic installation, the leader of which, the ambassador, had requested dozens of times for there to be security upgrades because of the danger of the militant jihadi threat in the region. Hillary Clinton had denied those security updates, and on the anniversary of 9/11 he was murdered with a State Department employee and a pair of contractors.”
“This has nothing to do with Green Berets doing their jobs,” he said. “This is their job: going into these kinds of areas to be insurgents or to help local governments fight their insurgent threat. That’s what Green Berets do. The comparison couldn’t be more stupid if you tried.”
“On top of it, it’s very interesting to see the Dems now say Benghazi is a bad thing. I guess we should dig more into Benghazi if Benghazi was a bad thing,” he added.
Gorka saw the political attack on Trump over the Niger ambush as part of a string of severe miscalculations he would like the Democrats to continue making through the next two election cycles.
“This is just absolutely fabulous for the president’s agenda, for my Super PAC the MAGA Coalition, and everybody else,” he said to the Democrats. “Just double down on the stuff that made you lose the last time. Roll out Bernie Sanders again. More interviews with Hillary. It’s just absolutely fabulous, because it means one thing: that they have no idea, absolutely not an inkling, of what actually happened in America November the 8th. So roll on, Democrat Party, doing what you do so well.”
Gorka said the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has become “the biggest untold story since the inauguration.”
“Remember, we were told for so many years that the fight against ISIS is a generational problem – that, you know, my children and everybody’s children will be fighting this war,” he recalled. “Well, not quite. We changed the rules of engagement literally on the morning of January the 21st. We allowed our military to do the job they were trained to do. Secretary Mattis replaced this – technically it’s called a ‘war of attrition,’ I like to call it ‘dickering at the edges of the problem,’ this nibbling at the edges. Because we weren’t serious about war under President Obama.”
“But that was replaced by a war of annihilation,” he said. “I remember it was the third week of my time in the White House, a Tier 1 operator, special operator who was on detail to the NSC, said to me with no apropos, he said: ‘It’s amazing what we can do right now.’ He’s sitting in D.C. kind of chagrined that he can’t be with his buddies in theater, and he said, ‘We are stacking the ISIS jihadis like cordwood.’”
“As a result, Mosul fell, the area where the caliphate was declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, so the spiritual center of gravity. And then just now Raqqa, which is the operational headquarters of ISIS. It’s stunning that in just a matter of weeks and a few months, this president and his military have managed to do that which the president could not achieve against the ‘Jayvee team’ given years to do so. Massive, massive story,” he stressed.
Kassam added the capture on Sunday of Syria’s largest oil fields by the U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab Syrian Democratic Forces, which he called a “major, major strategic victory.”
“Right, because you need money,” Gorka agreed. “ISIS was making hand over fist, not only by local taxation, not only by external funders, but by taking over the local oil resources and the refining centers. To be an insurgency takes money. By taking away this plant, we’re just basically shutting off their capacity to further execute operations regionally or outside of theater. It is another great win.”
Kassam proposed that such dramatic advances against the Islamic State would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election.
“It beggars belief to imagine what would have happened if the woman who said ‘we need no borders in the Western Hemisphere,’ a woman who was responsible for the disaster in Libya, responsible for the disastrous response to the Benghazi attack – if that individual had been at the reins of power and had been the Commander-in-Chief, mentally I don’t even want to go there because of the threat that would have represented to U.S. national security for years,” Gorka said.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is former Deputy Adviser to President Trump, former National Security editor for Breitbart News, and author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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