The US President’s second pick looks a lot better than his first
Washington DC, Feb.20.─ The 22 national security advisers who served Donald Trump’s predecessors included two army or marine generals. On February 20th Mr Trump equalled that tally in less than a month, by appointing Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster to succeed his disgraced former adviser, Mike Flynn.
Like the belligerent Mr Flynn, whom Mr Trump sacked after 24 days in the job, after it was revealed that he had lied about a private conversation with a Russian diplomat, Mr McMaster appears to conform to the president’s idea of a fire-breathing war-fighter. He is stocky, bullishly charismatic and as a young tank commander in the first Gulf war was decorated for battlefield prowess. After bumping into an Iraqi armoured column, Mr McMaster’s troop of nine American tanks destroyed over 80 Iraqi tanks and other vehicles without suffering a single loss.
Also like Mr Flynn, who was once an innovative intelligence officer, Mr McMaster is a free-thinker. His doctoral thesis in military history was a coruscating takedown of the pliant Vietnam-era military leadership, later published as a book entitled “Dereliction of Duty”. Yet there the comparison ends. By the time of his appointment Mr Flynn was widely recognised as a bad manager, strangely obsessed with jihadism and so feverishly partisan that he represented a threat to the treasured neutrality of the armed forces. Mr McMaster is hugely respected by his peers, among whom he is considered one of America’s most thoughtful soldiers.
He is perhaps best known for his exploits in the second Iraq war. Deployed in 2005 to the northern city of Tal Afar, in command of a cavalry regiment, he showed that it was possible, at least temporarily, to pacify even the most violent and baffling parts of the country. An island of Turkmen people, who are both Sunni and Shia Muslim, in a sea of Sunni Arabs, Tal Afar’s politics were complicated even by Iraqi standards ...
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