Biden names new Counterterrorism Coordinator: Elizabeth Richard, with broad Middle East experience

Laurie Mylroie 2021/11/16 23:30

The State Department building in Washington, DC. (Photo: AFP)

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WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - US President Joe Biden announced on Monday that he has nominated Elizabeth Richard as Coordinator for Counterterrorism with the rank and status of Ambassador at Large. The next step is for the Senate to confirm her in that post.

Assuming it does, she will replace a relatively inexperienced Trump appointee: Nathan Sales. A lawyer, Sales never seems to have served in the Middle East, nor formally studied the region. Rather, he is a post 9/11 expert, whose time has been spent in the Washington DC bureaucracies.

Nonetheless, as Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Sales was responsible for confronting ISIS outside of its core area of Syria and Iraq. Yet ISIS has spread—and continues to spread—far beyond its core area.

Just on Tuesday, a terrorist group, linked to ISIS carried out a double suicide bombing in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, near the parliament building and a police station.

The bombs killed at least three people and injured at least 33 more. Police also discovered other bombs, disabling them, before they could be detonated.

ISIS claimed credit for the Uganda bombing on Tuesday evening.

Elizabeth Richard and John Godfrey

In contrast to Sales, Richard has extensive experience in the Middle East, as well as Central Asia. She previously served as US ambassador to Lebanon (2016-20); Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (2013-16); and Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy in Yemen (2010-13.)

Earlier, she was Border Coordinator at the US Embassy in Pakistan and Director for Counter-Narcotics, Law Enforcement and Rule of Law Programs at the embassy in Afghanistan, as her State Department biography explains.

Since February, when Sales left after Antony Blinken became Secretary of State, John Godfrey has been Acting Coordinator for Counterterrorism, as well as Acting Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

Once Richard is confirmed, Godfrey will leave the first position, while remaining in the latter, until a permanent envoy is appointed. He will also stay as Principal Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

Godfrey, too, has extensive Middle East experience. He was Acting Deputy Chief of Mission and Political Counselor at the US embassy in Riyadh (2015-18) and before that Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns (2013-14.) Burns is now Director of the CIA.

From 2009-10, Godfrey was Deputy Political Counselor for Northern Affairs at the US Embassy in Iraq, while earlier he was Political and Economic Counselor at the Embassy in Libya (2007-09.) He holds an M.A. in Middle East and North Africa Studies from the University of Michigan.

Nathan Sales

By contrast, none of the multiple online biographies of Nathan Sales suggest that he spent any significant time in the Middle East. Rather, as he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2017, at his own nomination hearing, “I came to the field of counterterrorism and national security almost by happenstance.”

“In 2001, I was a young lawyer, fresh off a judicial clerkship, when the Justice Department hired me to work on administrative law issues,” he continued. “I started in mid-August,” and “three weeks later was 9/11.”

The Department of Homeland Security was established in November 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks. Sales then joined the new agency, where he worked on legal issues related to terrorism.

Perhaps, Sales possesses valuable qualities not evident to an outsider, even one who has followed the issue closely, including Sales’ briefings at the State Department in his role as Counterterrorism Coordinator. Perhaps, there was some other reason for selecting him, such as mistrust of a bureaucracy.

1989 Precedent

One example of that would be the 1989 selection of Richard Haas as National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East. The Soviet Union still existed (it collapsed in August 1991.) For the previous 44 years, since the end of World War II, the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union—between democracy and communism—had dominated international politics.

But as George H.W. Bush became president in January 1989, Moscow had mellowed to the point that Bush could speak of a “new world order,” characterized by cooperation between Washington and Moscow, rather than competition.

That gave rise to the view that the US could negotiate, in concert with the Soviet Union, a radical, far-reaching end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Dennis Ross, a senior aide to Secretary of State James Baker, aimed at doing just that—from his position as Director of Policy Planning in the State Department.

But many Middle East experts, including in the US bureaucracies, remained sympathetic to the Arabs and saw Israel as the main obstacle to regional peace .

Ross saw it otherwise, so he arranged for someone with little Middle East background to assume the post of National Security Council (NSC) Coordinator for the Middle East. Haas’s focus had been Western Europe. He was appointed to the Middle East position, because it was expected that he would not interfere with the peace process diplomacy Ross envisaged

That maneuver may well have worked in ordinary circumstances. But Iraq’s war with Iran had ended the year before, and Saddam Hussein soon set his sights on Kuwait.

The Bush administration made significant mistakes in handling that. It did not recognize Saddam’s preparations for invading Kuwait. August 1, 1990, was a routine day for NSC Director, Brent Scowcroft. He left the office as usual that evening—only to be woken around midnight and told that Iraqi forces, which had been concentrated on the border with Kuwait, had crossed it and seized the shaykhdom.

War followed, and the US also made terrible mistakes at the end of that conflict. It seemed to go well. The US quickly decimated Iraqi forces. They were on the run.

But on Feb. 27, 1991, Bush called for a ceasefire, ending the war with Saddam still in power. The entire Middle East was stunned.

Read More: Pulling Punches: 25th Anniversary

Bush believed that after such a rout, the Iraqi military would overthrow Saddam. Of course, that was quite wrong.

Rather, Iraq’s Kurds and Shi’ites rose in revolt. Saddam proceeded to brutally crush them. Yet the Bush administration turned a blind eye. Focused on a military coup, it actually believed that the revolts had interfered with the expected coup, and it gave Saddam a green light to repress them.

Fearing Saddam would use chemical weapons, the Kurdish population fled to the borders with Turkey and Iran. A humanitarian catastrophe ensued, which was only reversed after James Baker, at the urging of his aide, Margaret Tutwiler, visited the border region—and Operation Provide Comfort began.

Had someone more experienced and knowledgeable about the region held the post of the NSC’s Middle East Director, perhaps some of those mistakes could have been avoided.

Post 9/11 US Blunders

When the George W. Bush administration launched the post-9/11 wars, it believed those conflicts would be concluded during its term in office. Even more, it developed an astonishing ambition for the region—one that has proven so-far fetched, people now may not even be aware of it.

As in 1991, US officials were too quick to declare victory in the post-9/11 wars. They believed they had won in Afghanistan in December 2001 and then that they had won in Iraq in May 2003.

Subsequently, Bush was persuaded by the so-called “neocons” that he could transform the Middle East through democracy.

However, that was just not possible. As that became evident, a friend who had risen to a senior White House national security position told this reporter in 2007, “I didn’t pay attention to what you said, because I thought we were going to do it all”—i.e. transform the Middle East through democracy.

Little has changed since. Indeed, the Middle East is in greater tumult than on 9/11, and there is more “radical Islam” in more countries than on that terrible day.

Indeed, in July, as President Joe Biden explained his decision to withdraw forces from Afghanistan, he stated, “Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized beyond Afghanistan.”

“So, we are repositioning our resources and adapting our counterterrorism posture to meet the threats where they are now significantly higher: in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa,” he said.

Although Sales’ portfolio included confronting ISIS outside of Iraq and Syria, one cannot attribute to him any responsibility for its spread and the US failure to deal effectively with it. That problem existed before he became Counterterrorism Coordinator.

However, a more experienced individual might have looked at the issue and concluded: we are not succeeding. That person might have asked: What are we doing wrong? How can we be more effective?

One can only hope that Elizabeth Richard and her team will do just that.