Trump cannot win his back-and-forth with the Khans

When Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala appeared last week on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, no one, least of all Donald Trump’s campaign, knew what to expect. The speech that followed unleashed a political whirlwind from a very unlikely quarter, a non-politician immigrant family that just happened to have a message for all of us.

{mosads}For the Democrats, Khan’s speech was, at least in the short-term, a political masterstroke. His message resonated far more than that of any other speaker at the convention, a fact that makes one question where all politicians are getting their rhetorical training these days. In his impassioned appeal, this seemingly unassuming Pakistani immigrant and his stoic wife held the nation spellbound with their eloquent testimonial of their son Humayun’s ultimate sacrifice in the Iraq War. In that sense, this speech was a eulogy to his son, a bona fide American hero.

But Khan’s words went beyond memorializing his son. They were also an indictment of Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump and the policies he has advocated to counter Islamic extremism. In part, they were an appeal to bring back rational discourse into our political dialogue. Whether that appeal succeeds or fails, what is most instructive to the voting public has been Trump’s response to Khan.

Trump has chosen to directly engage in a back-and-forth with the Khan family that he cannot win. He must recognize that the Democrats are capitalizing on Khan’s speech and the American voter has to understand that both sides are shamelessly exploiting a Gold Star family for their own political purposes.

But there is another way we can make both presidential campaigns learn important lessons from Khan’s speech. As a veteran who served in the Iraq War, I’m acutely aware of the issues raised by Khan as well as the imperative articulated by Trump that our nation be kept secure. Security was and is my business. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I’ve worked and traveled there in official and private capacities since the mid-1980s. And as a military officer, I helped execute combat operations in those ancient lands.

What I’ve learned is that in order for us to succeed in a complex environment like the Middle East, we must cultivate strong relationships with those who call this ravaged region home. Those relationships have to be based on trust and mutual respect. That also was one of Khan’s main points.

When it comes to preparing our nation for both wartime and peacetime engagement, there is no question that accurate and actionable intelligence is an important ingredient for success. This is particularly true in the Middle East; just ask anyone involved in the run-up to the Iraq War. One of the ways to ensure that we get the best intelligence is to cultivate and recruit the best available regional experts.

In that vein, it would probably surprise some to learn that some of our best intelligence analysts who specialize in this region come to work every day wearing the traditional dress of Muslim women — the hijab. These analysts understand the local languages and their dialects. They understand the culture. They understand the politics. They understand the local religions and the religious dynamics playing out across the region. The fact that some of these experts choose to wear hijabs does not matter to me as much as what they bring to the table. What I care about is saving American and Arab lives and I would hope that both presidential candidates feel the same way.

Whether we like it or not, we live in an interdependent world. In the Middle East, we are dependent on both our Israeli and Arab allies. Trump has famously advocated for a ban on all Muslim immigrants, which has since been modified to cover immigrants from countries with known terrorist ties. What he seems to be advocating actually already has a precedent. We can and should thoroughly vet all immigrants to the U.S., especially those from conflict zones with questionable backgrounds.

I was involved in an operation where we did just that. When the Kurds fled northern Iraq and Turkey in the mid-1990s, the U.S. set up Operation Pacific Haven to feed, house and vet these Kurdish refugees. A great deal of that work was done on the island of Guam, thousands of miles away from danger to the refugees and thousands of miles away from the continental U.S. and potential danger to the vast majority of Americans.

Operation Pacific Haven was a true interagency affair. Officials from every imaginable government agency (including intelligence agencies) and the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy as well as nongovernmental organizations like the American Red Cross contributed to its success. It’s worth noting that, so far, none of the refugees who underwent the vetting process during Operation Pacific Haven has carried out a terrorist act against the US.

There is also a way to constructively project both strength and compassion on the ground in the Middle East. By taking a page out of U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis’s playbook when he served in Iraq’s Anbar province, we could point the way for U.S. policy to evolve throughout the region. In more colorful language than is printable, he famously told the Anbar sheikhs that the U.S. would be their best friend, but if the sheikhs and their tribes crossed us, we would be their worst enemy.

That is the kind of message Trump should send out to the world. Engaging in petty recriminations with a Gold Star family is not only counterproductive, it is beneath the dignity of the American people.

Leighton is a retired career Air Force intelligence officer and is currently chairman of Cedric Leighton International Strategies.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.