White House responds to U.S. deaths in Niger

NIGER: More than two weeks after the deaths of four U.S. Special Forces in Niger, White House chief of staff John Kelly on Thursday surprised reporters by appearing in the briefing room to deliver a raw and searing monologue on war sacrifice, summoning the 2010 combat death of his own son to defend President Donald Trump against accusations of poor outreach to a grieving military family. Major questions remain about the nature of the Niger mission and the U.S. response to the attack. French aircraft were the first to respond to the attack, and the first American reaction came from an unarmed helicopter operated by a U.S. contractor hired to provide support to 1,000 U.S. troops operating across a country the size of Texas. The death of Sgt. La David Johnson, who apparently survived the attack long enough to send a locator beacon, wasn’t reported for two days—all drawing comparisons to the 2012 Benghazi attack, yet this time few Republicans have questioned the U.S. response.

SYRIA: The ISIS capital of Raqqa is reported to be 98 percent in the hands of U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. As with Mosul, the ISIS stronghold in Iraq, sophisticated explosives are slowing liberation.

IRAQ: Iraqi forces say they have completed their takeover of the oil-rich Kirkuk province after an initial three-hour battle that pitted against each other two U.S.-backed forces, the Kurdish peshmerga that defended the city from Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014 and the central government army. Kurdish media report continuing clashes, but that hasn’t stopped Kirkuk residents from taking to the streets to protest the prevalence of Iranian-backed militias taking control on behalf of Baghdad.

The State Department plans to lead five multiagency teams into Raqqa to help identify and clear munitions and provide humanitarian assistance but continues to provide no assistance to ISIS-cleared territory in Iraq’s Nineveh area that’s home to its indigenous Christian population. Members of Congress this week petitioned the U.S. Agency for International Development to bypass the UN and assist Christian charities helping to rebuild in that region.

PUERTO RICO: A month after Hurricane Maria rolled through, power is still out for the vast majority of people on the island, and restoring it takes heroic effort.

RUSSIA: The meddling you aren’t hearing about—how Russian officials engaged in “bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering” to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States under the Obama administration. By one estimate, the Clinton Foundation took in $145 million from investors linked to Uranium One.

CHINA: Chinese people have long believed in the healing effects of drinking hot water.

UNITED STATES: Worth your time is watching the entirety of former President George W. Bush’s remarks Thursday in New York on U.S. foreign policy and the “casual cruelty” of the current national discourse: “We judge other groups by their worst examples and ourselves by our best intentions, forgetting the image of God we should see in each other.”

I’M READING Raven Rock by Garrett M. Graff.

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