WASHINGTON – Stephen Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump, says the president already has done more to defeat radical Islam and ISIS than all of his predecessors.
Last week, the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces announced that the Syrian city of Raqqa was liberated from ISIS.
The liberation of Raqqa, where ISIS militants carried out many of their gruesome executions and used the city hospital as a command center, is a major milestone in the war against the Islamic State, Bannon explained Monday during the Hudson Institute’s “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood” conference in Washington.
“What’s happened in the last nine months – President Trump has accomplished something that I think people would have laughed and mocked at in the campaign. Raqqa fell the other day. The physical destruction of the ISIS caliphate, which shocked the world on its rapid rise, and I think put the world back on its heels,” the Breitbart executive said. “It was breathtaking, the whole world kind of backed off.”
But in less than a year, Trump’s strategy, executed by Gen. James Mattis, the secretary of defense, is forcing jihadists around the globe to retreat, Bannon said.
“That strategy was not a war of attrition; it was very specific from day one. This will be a war of annihilation. We will physically annihilate the caliphate, and that’s what’s been accomplished,” he said.
Trump created the conditions for better relations in the Middle East by warning U.S. allies there against funding terrorism during the Arab Islamic American Summit he held in Riyadh in May, Bannon argued.
“We went into the summit with UAE and Saudi Arabia and others, and the number one thing is that we must take care of this financing of radical Islam and there can be no more – as President Trump says – ‘no more games’ – you can’t have it both ways, you can’t on one side say you are a friend and an ally and on the other side be financing Hamas,” he said.
In the worst diplomatic crisis to hit Gulf Arab states in decades, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates broke off relations with Qatar in June. The three Gulf countries and Egypt accused Qatar of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region.
Bannon’s comments:
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Bannon said that break was because of Trump’s leadership.
“I don’t think it’s just by happenstance, that two weeks after that summit you saw the blockade by the United Emirates and … Bahrain, Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Qatar,” he said. “I’ve said from day one, even in the situation in the northwest Pacific, Korea, I think the single most important thing happening in the world is the situation in Qatar.”
Bannon rebutted the notion that the president, his administration and his supporters are “Islamophobes.”
“Trump’s speech at the summit was one of the greatest any political leader in the United States has ever given. It put to bed, or should have put to bed, that President Trump is an Islamophobe, or that somehow his administration and the people that work for him, particularly ‘the deplorables’ and the people that voted for him, did not want an active engagement with the Islamic world,” he said. “Understanding that as partners, that we’d have to go through this time together. And as partners, we’d have to work together and the world would be a safer and more robust and vibrant.”
Bannon argued an “America first” policy is not premised on isolationism but on fostering diplomatic relations that are mutually beneficial to the sovereignty and national security U.S. and its allies.
“This whole thing of America first being isolationist – where it’s us against the world is – I just think it’s total nonsense. [Trump] looks at the world in a different way. I think that President Trump looks at things as a Jacksonian – what’s in the vital national security interest of the United States is what you should commit to,” he said. “In those areas of the world, which are in the vital national security interests of the United States, you will have partners that will be in their vital national security interests also in that you work with the northwest Pacific, with Japan and South Korea, or whether it’s in the Gulf, with people like the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Bahrain.
“I don’t think there is anything that President Trump has done that makes us look isolationist at all. He doesn’t want to get into arrangements like TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), where we are just another person at the table and not something that we know is in or vital national security interests.”
Trump believes the fundamental reason he defeated Hillary Clinton is because the American people, who are fed up with establishment politicians, trust him to handle the war on terror at a time when ISIS was establishing “slave markets” and the Obama administration forged the Iran deal, Bannon said.
“President Trump strongly believed that the reason he was on the podium on January 20th and Hillary Clinton wasn’t, was that it came down to a decision of the American people on who would be the best commander-in-chief in a time of war,” he said. “One of the things that President Trump, and candidate Trump at the time, remembered is that, we’re now fighting the longest war in the nation’s history. I think in actual combat time, it’s longer than the Revolution, the Civil War, World War I and World War II. I think if you add it all up, in actual time in combat this is the longest sustained military combat we’ve ever had.”
Despite Clinton’s extensive political background and foreign policy experience, Trump’s candidness ultimately resonated with Americans, Bannon argued.
“President Trump could not have been more blunt, more direct and spoken in a more plain vernacular to the American people about what he wanted to accomplish,” he said. “His whole candidacy, from the very beginning, when he came down that escalator in Trump Tower, was a repudiation of the elites, the repudiation of the foreign policy establishment.”
Bannon said it was “a repudiation of the concept we’ve had of this rule-based international order in which the American working class and middle class underwrite with their taxes, and more importantly with the blood of their children.”
“One of the strongest things [Clinton] had going for her when she was running was her foreign policy experience – her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, her time as secretary of state, her vast knowledge of all the ins and outs of the minutia of foreign policy,” he continued. “Remember at that time … we were seeing a rise of ISIS that really had caught the world by surprise. ISIS had done more than anybody, even the Muslim Brotherhood historically, in actually having a physical caliphate. Eventually, that caliphate was 7 or 8 million people.”
