The morning after a summit meeting often holds surprises. Turkey lost no time to follow up on President Recep Erdogan’s hugely successful but “difficult” talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Tuesday.
On Wednesday itself, Ankara formally conveyed to Washington Erdogan’s decision that the Turkish military is stopping combat and is ending the offensive in Syria, codenamed Peace Spring, and making the ceasefire agreed with the United States last week during the visit by Vice-President Mike Pence to be permanent.
President Trump promptly reciprocated by lifting the US sanctions against Turkey imposed on October 14 in response to Peace Spring. Trump, characteristically enough, claimed credit for “an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else, no other nation.”
The Turkish intimation comes handy for Trump to scatter critics who predicted apocalypse now in Syria. Trump sounded confident that the ceasefire will hold.
Enter General Mazloum. Trump disclosed that he spoke to the general who is the military supremo of the YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia), before making his announcement on the lifting of sanctions against Turkey.
Trump hailed the Kurdish chieftain’s “understanding and for his great strength and for his incredible words today to me.” The optics works just perfect for Trump to push back at critics who allege that he’s thrown the Kurds under the bus.
But Trump also disclosed that he is on to something bigger. One, that Gen. Mazloum has assured him that “ISIS is under very, very strict lock and key, and the detention facilities are being strongly maintained.” The Kurdish-held regions have detention camps holding thousands of ISIS cadres and their families.
Two, Trump recalled, “We also expect Turkey to abide by its commitment regarding ISIS. As a backup to the Kurds watching over them, should something happen, Turkey is there to grab them.” Interestingly, Trump also called on European countries to accept the ISIS prisoners.
In the infamous “undiplomatic” letter to Erdogan a few days ago, Trump had voiced an audacious idea that Gen. Mazloum could be a potential negotiator with Erdogan. To quote Trump, “General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you (Erdogan), and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.”
Yet, General Mazloum is Turkey’s most wanted terrorist who worked in the ranks of the separatist PKK for nearly 3 decades and it is necessary to connect some dots at this point.
Looking back, when Erdogan came to power as prime minister in 2003, he had unfolded a bold vision on the Kurdish problem via a negotiated political reconciliation. His approach was encouraged by the US. But he ran into headwinds and eventually lost his sense of direction.
To recap further, in late 2012 Erdogan went public with a dramatic announcement that top Turkish officials had begun negotiations with the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan who was captured in 1998 and is undergoing life imprisonment on Imrali island in the Sea of Marmara off Istanbul.
Öcalan responded in March 2013 to Erdogan’s overture by calling for a cease-fire, and PKK guerrillas actually began to withdraw from Turkey. As peace talks faltered, however, the cease-fire collapsed in July 2015.
But, significantly, Öcalan has continued to advocate for a negotiated agreement to bring about Kurdish autonomy within Turkey. Now, isn’t it an interesting coincidence that Gen. Mazloum, Trump’s interlocutor among the Syrian Kurdish leadership, also happens to be the adopted son of Öcalan?
Gen. Mazloum is likely to visit Washington in a near future; so is Erdogan. Trump is promoting Kurdish reconciliation with Turkey. The last fortnight’s developments on the diplomatic front have removed the single biggest source of tension in the US-Turkey relations — US’ alliance with YPG and the presence of Kurdish fighters along Syria’s border with Turkey.
Curiously, Trump also said in his announcement yesterday, “We’ve secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of U.S. troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we’re going to be protecting it, and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.”
Most of Syria’s oil comes from Eastern Syria, which is now under the control of the US-backed Kurdish militia or YPG. (Before the war, Syria produced 387,000 barrels per day of which 140,000 bpd were exported.)
In February last year, Syrian forces backed by Russian mercenaries made a serious incursion in the area but retreated in disarray after suffering heavy casualties following merciless US air strikes. Relative calm prevailed in the region since then.
Evidently, in the geopolitics of Syrian oil, US, Turkey and the Kurds can have “win-win” partnership, which in turn can also provide underpinning for an enduring political reconciliation between Turks and Kurds.
Trump said Washington is mulling over Syria’s oil reserves. Meanwhile, he’s put across a tantalising proposition for Erdogan to ponder over. It demands a leap of faith on Erdogan’s part, but it could be rewarding.
Erdogan has allowed Öcalan access to his family and lawyers and even to relay messages to Kurdish activists. Erdogan knows that if ever he is to solve the 30-year-long conflict with the PKK, he may have to do so with the involvement of Öcalan.
In December 2017, Erdogan had deputed Turkey’s spy chief and trusted aide Hakan Fidan to Imrali island for talks with Öcalan. Two Kurdish MPs were also allowed to visit the PKK leader.
No doubt, Öcalan is a bridge between the Kurds and Turks. And in today’s circumstances, Öcalan can as well become a bridge between his adopted son Gen. Mazloum and Erdogan.
While accompanying Pence to Ankara last week, state secretary Mike Pompeo had hinted that the US is looking for an expanded regional partnership with Turkey and if Erdogan works “alongside” Trump, it “will benefit Turkey a great deal.”
Countering Iran’s influence / presence in Syria and Iraq is the US policy. The decision to transfer the US troops from Syria to Iraq and the continued stationing of troops in Al-Tanf base highlights that cutting off Iran’s land route to Syria and Lebanon continues to be a priority.
Broadly, many challenges lie ahead in Syria and the US realises that Turkey is irreplaceable as regional partner. Trump always thought of Erdogan as someone he can do business with.
Ankara will welcome a grand bargain between Erdogan and Trump and regards the US’ backing for a Turkey-led “safe zone” on Syrian territory as a step in the right direction. In the final analysis, however, for all of this to happen, one way or another, Turkey’s tensions with Kurds should ease.
October 24, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | Iraq, Middle East, Syria, Turkey, United States, Zionism |
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Stanislav Ivanov writing for the prestigious Russian state-run Valdai Club recently described ‘Israel and most of the Arab countries’ as viewing Turkey’s military presence in Syria as a counterweight to that of Iran. He also added that Iran and Turkey both waged a ‘fierce struggle’ to install a ‘puppet government’ in Damascus.
The Russian perspective is usually channeled, directly or indirectly, by its assorted major think tanks and media outlets and a very clear cut yet under-noticed aspect of Russia’s views on Iran has been made clear as daylight here.
That ‘Most of the Arab countries’ consider Iran’s presence in Syria as something that requires a ‘counterweight’ is a fallacious notion for a number of reasons. Iran’s key allies in the region are Arabs, such as Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army and much of the Iraqi government, clerical establishment and de facto military in the form of the Popular Mobilization Units. The same goes for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups in Gaza.
To describe the Gulf Arabs (GCC) and their consensus on Iran’s ‘need’ to exit Syria as the consensus of ‘most of the Arabs’ is thus disingenuous. Notwithstanding the weakness of that consensus itself, given how the UAE quickly distanced itself from the fiasco in the Persian Gulf through assuring signals to Iran as things heated up there, it is not likely that the author is unaware of these issues with the ‘Arabs’ tag.
Nor is it likely that Russian policymakers are unaware of the illogical, dishonest basis of this classification of ‘most of the Arabs’. It remains, regardless of this vital reality, a key cornerstone of Russia’s current geopolitical approach to the Middle East. This can be seen from the Russian outreach to the GCC it began – together with other extremely important yet under-discussed strategic adjustments – in what can be described the ‘post-ISIS’ scenario in Syria.
The Russian-GCC ‘rapprochement’ was lightning fast, with Russia offering to Saudi Arabia and the UAE what it never did to its Iranian or Syrian ‘allies’ constantly attacked by the Israeli airforce: its much-vaunted S-400 anti-air defense system. As one of the earlier examples of Russian preference for the GCC over their Iranian rival, the clarity of the message Russia was sending was illustrated by the fact that it even pitched the system to the small, militarily-insignificant Bahrain.
Russia has taken clear steps to prop up the brittle GCC whenever it has suffered major setbacks, demonstrating its ties with them are not just cordial but strategic. Saudi Arabia, having last month suffered a deadly missile attack on its Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq, received a boost on 11 October as Russia announced plans to invest $1 billion for a petrochemical facility there.
More than 20 deals were signed between Russia and Saudi Arabia during Putin’s state visit days later, including the purchase of a 30.76% in one of Russia’s leading companies, Novomet, by the two countries’ sovereign investment funds and Aramco.
The economic honeymoon, however, started after Saudi King Salman’s historic visit to Russia in 2017. Its progress since then compares starkly to Russia, contrary to expectations of its ‘Eurasianist’ supporters, having adhered to US sanctions against Iran when they were re-imposed last year.
The strategic element which drove Russo-GCC economic ties did influence the decisions of Russian giants such as Rosneft and LUKoil regarding their Iran investments, but to Iran’s detriment as they withdrew from Iran with Russo-GCC ties being a factor as well.
A team from Russia’s MGIMO university at the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate in November 2018 days after re-imposition of US sanctions on Iran declared in no unclear terms that Russia was not aligned with Iran. The prestigious institution, famed for having top Russian diplomats such as current Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov among its alumni, declared political Islam problematic and Iran to be an expansionist power.
But what are these soft spots Russia tries to hit at in Iran’s geopolitical ‘Resistance Axis’ infrastructure, and is it the GCC’s subsequent empowerment [over] Iran that makes Russia’s ‘contain Iran’ policy dangerous?
The answer lies in Israel and the regional socio-political and military network Iran has forged and sustained since 1979 pivoted around the correct recognition of Israel and Israel Lobby-induced US foreign policy as the premier driver of Middle East wars.
It [Iran] has, thus, through the chaos of Middle East geopolitics since 1979 performed an important task in countering forces of destabilization. Vital to Iran has been its deep involvement in foreign affairs and disingenuously portraying this as ‘Iranian expansionism’ has been a cornerstone of Israeli and GCC propaganda against Iran.
Nobody knows the ‘start the story from the middle’ game better than the Israelis, be it claiming Israel was ‘attacked’ by ‘the Arabs’ in 1948 whilst ignoring the entire pre-planned ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1940s by the Zionists or claiming self-defense in Gaza. The GCC in recent times have latched onto this narrative as well, but with their own crude ‘Iran seeks to dominate the Arab world’ spin.
Had Iran not intervened, the Shia-dominated Lebanese resistance against Israel’s occupation would have lacked a material supporter against the modern Zionist army and Israel would have consolidated Lebanon for both its Jewish colonies scheme and seized its vital water resources. Such had been Zionist ambition as far back as 1919.
Gaza, where the armed resistance born following the First Intifada in the vacuum left by Yasser Arafat’s inept leadership (and subsequent sell-out during the Oslo ‘peace’ hoax) receives arms from Iran, would have by now been fully swallowed by Jewish colonies. It would have shared the fate of the ‘Iran-free’ West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas carries on the legacy of Arafat’s surrender.
Instead, Lebanon today is far more stable than at any other time in its history and the bridges Hezbollah has built with other religious parties have helped augment internal cohesion. Gaza has shown in recent times increased capability to deal with Israeli military aggression, with its Iran-backed Sunni Islamist groups possessing improved weaponry and exhibiting greater unity.
It was not international mediation and ‘conflict-resolution’ attempts that stabilized – or, given the capacity of Israel’s cohorts to rig such attempts every step along the way, ever truly even could stabilize – the parts of the Arab world worst hit by war. It was Iran’s support to these states and state-less victims of Israeli expansionism that enabled them to weather the storm inflicted upon them and mount a thus-far successful resistance.
Few pundits would, retrospectively, describe past ‘peace deals’ be they Camp David 1978 or the Oslo process of the 90s as anything other than smokescreens for unhinged Israeli warmongering.
For containing Israel, Iranian forward-presence in countries near to Israel has always been a necessity. Iran’s elaborate supply chains, part covert and part overt in nature, going to allies such as Hamas and Hezbollah are transnational and involve supporters on the ground zealously committed to Iran or even just zealously committed to opposing Israel.
Syria is one such vital node. Without Syria, Iran could not supply Hezbollah. Russia is not unaware of this when it constantly pushes for Iranian withdrawal from Syria whilst passing this off as its ‘principled’ position that all foreign forces must leave the country. This most salient stance of Russia is deceptive, given that Russia has consistently implicitly excused Israel completely from adhering to this principle.
The Russian Defence Ministry right after Israel got a Russian aircraft downed in September last year reminded everyone of how Russia at Tel Aviv’s request had pushed for ‘Iran-backed groups’ to withdraw 140 km away from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel’s behavior since then remained the same, but Russian attempts at Tel Aviv’s request to distance Syria from its Iranian ally only intensified, even including lobbying for the removal of heavily pro-Iran officials from the Syrian military and incorporation of ‘ex-rebels’ into its ranks.
The façade is crystal clear: Israel gets to continue its attacks but Iran – who along with Hezbollah contributed to the defeat of terrorism in Syria even before Russia intervened in 2015 – must depart Syria. The constant Russian favors to Israel are here are even more see-through than were the fraudulent regional ‘peace-processes’ of the past which leveraged almost no obligations upon Israel to cease its warmongering yet comprehensively de-fanged and neutralized whatever stood in its way.
Propping up the GCC, working to weaken Iran and looking the other way when Israel attacks its ‘allies’ (or even publicly fawn over the Zionist state at events hosted by financial benefactors of Israel’s military) are all part and parcel of Russia’s geopolitical bigger-picture.
Validating the notion that the GCC – the normalization with whom of Israel’s ties Jared Kushner has fast-tracked since 2016 as an anti-Iran front and plan B following al Assad’s survival in Syria – represents ‘most of the Arabs’ has a specific purpose.
That purpose is to rig the selection of stakeholders for any potential region-wide ‘peace initiatives’ against Iran, sidelining it and declaring the pro-Israel GCC the representatives of ‘the Arabs’. Israel would be the benefactor of any ‘peace deal’ to end the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ since both sides would have long ago accepted the need to eradicate longstanding barriers to Israeli hegemony.
What follows next is obvious and has been seen repeatedly in the Middle East ‘peace processes’ in the past: no actual reigning in of Israel, but a thorough neutralization of its foes. For resistance-oriented states like Iran, there is no place in Russia’s vision for the Middle East.
Agha Hussain is a Research Analyst at the Institute of Regional Studies, Islamabad, Pakistan, as well as an editorial contributor to the websites Eurasia Future and Regional Rapport. His writings have a particular focus on Middle Eastern affairs and history and Pakistan’s foreign policy.
October 22, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Middle East, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Zionism |
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Former US Presidential Candidate, Pat Buchanan has written, “the Middle East and world, have been awakened to the reality that, when Trump said he was ending everlasting commitments and bringing U.S. troops home from “endless wars,” he was not bluffing. The Saudis got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh’s oil production, did nothing … thus, the Saudis have begun negotiating with the Houthi rebels, with whom they have been at war in Yemen since 2015. And they are seeking talks with Iran.” In other words, the paradigm has begun to shift.
The Trump decisions indeed, did send shock waves to the world. And in their wake, Twitter in the US has been ‘white hot’ with indignation and outrage.
That is one side of the Syria US forces withdrawal ‘coin’ – the outrage. The other, is that realistically, the US had been trying to achieve too many irreconcilable aims: ousting President Assad; enforcing ‘domain denial’ to both Russia and Iran; plus attempting to install an unpopular minority population (the Kurds are a minority – even in NE Syria) in a blatant nation-building ‘state-let’ project to rival Damascus. With such diverse aims, and with Russia and Iran opposing these aims, the US was achieving none.
In the same vein of an overdue dose of realism, (and as Edward Gibbons highlighted in his celebrated Decline and Fall in respect to Imperial Rome), once certain qualities are lost, decline and fall is fore-ordained. Saudi Arabia has long lost those original attributes that brought Ibn Saud power, and without which, decline follows inevitably (which Gibbons persuasively argued, is exactly what happened earlier, to Rome).
Saudi Arabia today, has not the least energy to rouse itself, and life is flaccid. The Houthis though, by contrast, exactly embody these Gibbons-esque vital qualities and virtues. The outcome to today’s Saudi-Yemeni conflict was foreshadowed in the character of its contestants – irrespective of all other disparities. The Pentagon, to be fair, saw this from the outset, but allowed the momentum of old US strategic alliances and enmities to override this key insight.
So why such hue and clamour in Washington over an overdue recognition of realities? The indignation is not so surprising – for it is not just the contrived hand-wringing over the Kurds that lies behind such a fuss and bother; but rather, it is because Trump has taken a hammer to two (inter-connected) establishment shibboleths — and shattered them into pieces.
One strand here concerns Vietnam: it’s always there, lurking in the US backdrop. In that still formative US war experience, more than two decades of involvement and half a million American troops never managed to alter the basic weakness of a U.S. proxy that could never hold the line, without constant American support. It finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion, in April 1975. (Think Afghanistan today?).
Here is the point. Though a majority of historians subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior American military officers do not.
Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and others entered service, when military prestige was at a low ebb. They and their colleagues were taught that the Vietnam failure was due to political pusillanimity in Washington (or in the nation’s streets), or else due to a military high command that was too weak to assert its authority effectively.
But none of the military analysis done by this post-Vietnam war generation of officers ever addressed the basic question “about whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable” from the first. (Think: Syria today).
No – in this view, the Vietnam war could, and should, have been won – if only the right approach had been pursued. Thus, the ‘forever war’ notion was born: It was designed, empirically to ‘prove’ the two major military theses of the war lacunae (no ‘Clausewitz’ or COIN): That is, if both these strategies had been fully implemented in Vietnam, instead of being neglected, they would assuredly have led to an American ‘win’. (Mattis echoed this thinking when he introduced 2018 Trump’s Defense and Nuclear Reviews: America, Mattis insisted, simply must “start winning” again).
This revisionist version of Vietnam war history began in 1986 with an article by David Petraeus, in the military journal Parameters, in which he argued that the US army was unprepared to fight low intensity conflicts (such as Vietnam); and that “what the country needed wasn’t fewer Vietnams; but better-fought ones”. The definitive COIN doctrine, Field Service Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations, however, was overseen by David Petraeus, working with another officer, Lt General James Mattis (the former US Defense Secretary), who has this week been howling at Trump about the US withdrawal from Syria (the issue – prospective withdrawal – over which he resigned as then Defense Secretary).
Thus, Trump’s original team of ‘my generals’ were precisely those who had spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world’s nations. In an interview in 2017, Petraeus described the Afghan conflict as “generational”. In short, Trump’s original most senior military advisers didn’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars would ever end. Essentially, the Trump Administration’s National Strategy Statement put an ‘America First’ gloss on Bush’s 2002 NSS: that no rival would, or should, be permitted to challenge US political or financial primacy.
But this basic contradiction simply could not be sustained. Forever Wars were precisely those which Trump had campaigned as Candidate to end. And now, with Presidential elections again at hand, he has ditched the whole revisionist Vietnam meme.
Trump then, should be able to weather the criticism from this quarter quite easily. The US public is fed up with ‘forever wars’. And in any event, a new generation at the Pentagon now has shifted from COIN to ‘Great Power Competition’, and is intent on pivoting away from the Middle East, to China.
The other Shibboleth, still deeply embedded in certain strains of US thinking, but which now lies shattered by Trump too, is of a different order – and is far more perilous: It is the ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’, encapsulated in this 1991 exchange the then US Undersecretary for Defense had with General Wesley Clark. And for this act of iconoclasm, Trump can expect severe push-back.
Clark: “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.”
Wolfowitz: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region — in the Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on, to challenge us.”
Wolfowitz’s thinking was then taken up more explicitly by David Wurmser in his 1996 document, Coping with Crumbling States (following on, from his contribution to the infamous Clean Break policy strategy paper written by Richard Pearle for Bibi Netanyahu earlier in the same year). The aim of both these seminal documents was to directly counter American ‘isolationist’ thinking.
Daniel Sanchez has noted: “Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as “expediting the chaotic collapse” of secular-Arab nationalism in general, and Baathism in particular. He [asserted that] “the phenomenon of Baathism,” was, from the very beginning, “an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy”… [and therefore advised] the West to put this anachronistic adversary ‘out of its misery’ – and to press America’s Cold War victory on toward its final culmination”.
This tract, Coping with Crumbling States, which together with Clean Break was to have a major impact on Washington’s thinking during the GW Bush Administration (in which David Wurmser would serve). What aroused the deep-seated neo-con ire in respect to the secular-Arab nationalist states was not just that they were, in the neo-con view, crumbling relics of the ‘evil’ USSR, but that from 1953 onwards, Russia sided with these secular-nationalist states in all their conflicts regarding Israel. This was something the neo-cons could neither tolerate, nor forgive. Both Clean Break and the 1997 Project for the New American Century (PNAC) were exclusively premised on the wider US policy aim of securing Israel.
The point here is that whilst Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region, he added: “Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter – not even – he added, for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism”.
There was, therefore, no other option: The point is that – on this premise – the US had no other choice but to ally with the Kings, Emirs and Rulers of the Middle East. It still is.
And in return, these States benefitted from the US security umbrella — until, that is, when Saudi Arabia lost half of its oil processing capacity with the strike on Aramco, and “Trump did nothing” (in Pat Buchanan’s words). The ‘umbrella’ guarantee expired.
It is in this context – the withdrawal of US security commitment – that Trump is at real political risk. Israel is in a panic. Israeli correspondents see these linked events as Trump’s death blow to Israel, with the “strategic balance of power shifting right before Israel’s eyes”. Israel is left alone: (Smadar Peri writing in Yediot Ahoronot (in Hebrew) : “Trump abandons allies without blinking, and Israel is liable to be next”. As Ben Caspit notes, “The shift in the region is forcing Israel to change its plans, rethink its concepts and prepare for scenarios that were shelved long ago. One of them is the possibility of fighting a war on more than one front in the very near future”.
[Ex-] Israeli commentator, Gilad Atzmon observes:
“Israel has seriously mismanaged its conflict with Iran. For over a decade, Israel has relentlessly threatened and sought to intimidate Iran. Iran’s response has been effective: slowly but surely Iran encircled the Jewish state. Israel doesn’t share a border with Iran but Iran is present on so many of Israel’s borders … The recent attack on Saudi oil facilities achieved an astonishing precision of less than one meter, despite the fact that it was launched from 650 miles away, and delivered with it a clear message to Israel. Iran can attack any target in Israel from Western Iraq with precision, and without being detected. It proved that Iranian technology is decades ahead of anything offered by Israel, America or the west.
It now seems totally unrealistic to expect America to act militarily against Iran on behalf of Israel. Trump’s always unpredictable actions have convinced the Israeli defense establishment that the country has been left alone to deal with the Iranian threat. The American administration is only willing to act against Iran through sanctions, and by now the Israelis have grasped that sanctions can easily boomerang. They nourish technological and strategic independence … As things stand, Israel used the billions of dollars it squeezed from American taxpayers to build an obsolete anti-missile system that at best, might be effective against 1940 era German V2 missiles. Once again Israel prepared for the wrong war”.
Here is the ‘rub’ for Trump: It is not just that Israel’s overwhelming influence in the US Congress and amongst the élites puts him in a risky political corner. It does do that, of course. But a bigger danger is that culturally, Israel cannot change course. Netanyahu’s tardy response to Aramco was that Israel must immediately ‘spend billions on defence’.
Rationally, one might expect Israel, in these new circumstances, to rethink its strategy in respect to Iran. But can it? Is it not too culturally committed to Iran as the cosmic evil? There is little difference here between Likud and the Blue and White coalition of Gantz. Will a panicked Israel rather try somehow to recover its earlier regional military ‘edge’? Will Trump be able to maintain America’s distance, if Israel does try?
Trump probably sees himself as having taken a courageous decision (and it was that — a huge break with conventional thinking) to free America from “endless wars”. But he will need to watch his back from the repercussions arising from the Israeli realisation notes Ben Caspit, “after three years of being convinced that it was on the winning side, Israel is beginning to realise that it is on the one that’s losing; or at least [the side that] has been abandoned”. A cornered, and panicked Israel is a dangerous Israel.
October 21, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, United States, Zionism |
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From the moment that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Davos) announced reluctantly that impeachment proceedings would begin against President Trump I knew this was about his shift in Middle East policy.
It happened on Terrible Tuesday where both Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were handed smackdowns by their respective Deep States over their plans to unwind multiple decades of aggressive foreign policy on the one hand and subjugation to the growing European Union on the other.
Now that Trump has fully embraced ending some of the US’s involvement in Syria the knives have come out in full. There have been nothing but howls of pain from every corner of neoconservatism and liberal interventionism on both sides of the domestic political aisle, about how Trump is unfit for office because he abandoned the heroic Kurds to genocide by the Turks after fighting for freedom against the brutal Bashar al-Assad.
Even the impressive Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) promoted this narrative at the recent Democratic debate.
This narrative is so wrong on so many levels that it amazes me anyone still promulgating it can do so without their brain seizing up from the cognitive dissonance.
The Kurds were mercenaries in a cynical multi-country operation to atomize Syria into a failed state, a la the Libya model which John Bolton threatened North Korea with (and led to the public reason for his firing). This atomization would have seen Turkey take Idlib and the north eastern Arab lands its moving into now, the Kurds get a country comprised of Southeastern Syria and Northern Iraq with the eventual annexation of Kurdish territory in Iran.
This operation was paid for by the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK as well as sanctioned by EU leadership in Paris and Berlin. Russia’s intervention put the kibosh on all of it and the alliance formed in Syria’s defense between it, China, Hezbollah and Iran not only won back most of the country over the past four years but also defeated the Iraqi Kurds at Erbil after a failed rebellion by Mamoud Barzani and his Peshmerga forces.
Once Aleppo was retaken, Raqqa demolished, and the Peshmerga defeated the Kurds’ fate was sealed. The past two and a half years have been nothing more than delaying actions against the day that Trump finally gained control over the White House insurrections amongst his staff and ordered the operation ended.
Trump ordering US troops out of the region put the Kurds on notice that they either make a deal with Russia and the Syrian government or get slaughtered by the Turks. That took all of a day.
It also, as the great Pat Buchanan points out in his latest article, put the Saudis on notice that they no longer set US foreign policy objectives because they sell their oil in dollars and splash some money around D.C. and the media.
Their bloodthirst for war with Iran can be done on their dime or not at all.
The most shocking part in all of this is Trump just made the same statement to, of all people, Israel.
And that’s where the highest concentration of anguish is coming from in the media and elsewhere.
Finally, a Republican president had the stones to call AIPAC’s bluff and stop kowtowing to them over their highly sought-after election funds. Trump doesn’t need AIPAC’s money anymore. He raised $125 million in Q3 and with these moves will likely raise more in Q4.
His firing John Bolton was the clue you needed that AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson were no longer important voices in Trump’s White House. He doesn’t need favorable media coverage from a media dominated by Saudi and Israeli money.
It’s not like he’s gotten good press from them on any consistent basis since 2015. He only gets that when he’s willing to bomb people in the name of their agendas and call it ‘freedom.’
But at the same time, he made powerful enemies doing so.
This was finally the right move made by a US president standing firm in front of oppressive political and media opposition. Trump is showing a strength we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan pulled troops out of Beirut after the massacre of more than 200 marines in 1983.
That he didn’t immediately cave to the pressure like he did in December is noteworthy. I’ve given Trump no end of grief over his lack of moral courage on this very issue, but now that he’s been unleashed by the move to impeach him, he has little left to lose.
It proves that changing personnel can change policy. John Bolton is out and he’s running his mouth about how terrible Trump is trying to become the Hero of the Resistance in the process.
He and former Trump adviser on Russia, Fiona Hill, dominated the news cycle in the wake of the Kurds making a deal with Syria and Russia, to paint Trump with the Nixon brush of spying on his political enemies.
Meanwhile, his replacement Robert O’Brien is gutting the National Security bureaucracy, reportedly cutting the staff in half. Good. That’s more than a hundred people no longer employed to feed the president false information to suit an agenda that contravenes US security.
These moves by Trump have upset the status quo in a fundamental way. It has blown up the narrative that we were in Syria to defeat ISIS. That was the cover story. And Trump has neatly called it out for exactly that.
The real story is that partitioning Syria has been the long-held goal of Israel, the neoconservatives, PNAC and so many others. And that goal is now looking to be out of reach lest they can convict Trump for doing his job for the first time since he became President.
With the rapid changes happening across the region and the collapse of so many narratives concurrently, Trump is in an excellent position to make good on many of his long-delayed promises.
What’s also clear is that Putin has played everyone in the region perfectly, balancing his relationships with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel so that once Trump made his move to pull back the curtain in Syria, they would all turn to him to broker their terms.
What’s also clear is that any move he makes now will be interpreted through the impeachment lens as proof he’s trying to save himself or that he really is a Putin puppet or whatever random anti-Trump thought flits through the tiny openings in the minds of his opponents.
Trump has stepped on sacred ground here, US interventionist foreign policy. And, right now, only he has the platform and the ability to separate fact from fiction about its efficacy and who it really serves.
Because it doesn’t serve the American people, nor does it serve the people our continued presence is supposed to protect. Trump won’t come out and say that he’s turned his back on Israel’s goals in the Middle East. But with his Deal of the Century dead, its proponents on their last legs politically (Netanyahu and Kushner) it seems likely that he’s cutting bait and changing course.
And even if he doesn’t survive this politically, the vacuum he’s creating right now is big enough that it won’t matter. With Putin signing major deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, China welcoming Iraq into the Belt and Road family and Turkey all but leaving NATO, what are a bunch of feckless and politically spent neocons going to do?
Not much from where I’m sitting.
October 21, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel | Middle East, United States, Zionism |
5 Comments
By Sarah Abed | October 21, 2019
Monday marks the thirteenth day since Turkey began its third cross border military operation in Syria ironically named “Operation Peace Spring”. In the past two weeks civilian and militant lives on both sides have been lost, a large exodus has taken place, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution that opposes US troop withdrawal, a five-day ceasefire was brokered between Turkey and the United States, and Kurdish militias have withdrawn from the “safe-zone”.
On Wednesday, there was overwhelming bipartisan approval for a measure that opposes President Trump’s U.S. forces withdrawal from Syria. The resolution was introduced by Reps. Michael McCaul, Republican from Texas and Eliot Engel, Democrat from NY and it calls on the White House to put forth a plan for the “enduring defeat” of Daesh and demand that Turkey cease its military operations in Syria.
The measure which passed 354-60 with four members voting present and all sixty of the nays coming from Republican’s stated, “An abrupt withdrawal of United States military personnel from certain parts of Northeast Syria is beneficial to adversaries of the United States government, including Syria, Iran and Russia.”
It’s absurd that there’s outrage about ending a war and allowing Syria to handle its own domestic affairs. However, nothing of the sort happened when Nobel Peace Prize winner and former US President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries and creating some of the wars that President Trump has inherited including Syria. Bipartisan support for carrying on with endless wars is mindboggling.
On Thursday, a ceasefire was brokered between the United States and Turkey. This pause was meant to for the Kurdish militias to dismantle their posts and retreat from the 32km “safe zone” and in response the US would not impose any new sanctions on Turkey. However, there’s a lesser mentioned point that prompted the ceasefire and that’s the entrapment of US/UK Coalition Joint Special Operations Task forces in northern Syria. It was necessary for hostilities to cease long enough for them to withdrawal out of harm’s way.
Washington and Turkey do not want the Kurdish militias to work in conjunction with the Syrian Arab Army, but for different reasons. The US would rather see them stay independent from the SAA and keep them as an ally in case US troops return. Remember northeast Syria is advantageous to the US because they can keep an eye on Iran and protect Israel plus there’s oil. Turkey would like to see the Kurdish militias dissolved along with any separatist Kurdish hopes and dreams of establishing an independent Kurdistan on its border.
Ankara has made it clear that if the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) plans on protecting the YPG/SDF that this will be considered an “act of war”. The Turkish administration is worried that the SAA will enter Manbij, Ayn al-Arab, and Qamishli to protect the Kurdish militias, but that wouldn’t be in the Syrian governments best interest.
There’s been some disagreement among the Kurdish militias as to where they need to be withdrawing from, Turkey is demanding that they entirely vacate the 32km border, and not just some of their posts. If the Kurdish militias withdraw entirely from Turkey’s “safe zone” by the ceasefire deadline, what excuse will Ankara have to continue their military operation? None.
In the past week or so Syrian troops have made significant progress in regaining territory previously occupied by Kurdish militias in northern Syria, and Russia tried to broker negotiations between the Kurdish militias and the Syrian government.
Turkey’s stated goals are to fight the terrorist organizations on their southern border, create a safe-zone, and a “peace corridor” for the resettlement of 1-2 million Syrian refugees. They have stated that they are not looking to land grab or encroach but if we know anything about Turkey’s politics it’s that surprises lie behind every corner, much like the United States.
It’s no coincidence that the 120-hour ceasefire ends on Tuesday, and that’s precisely when President Erdogan will be going to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. President Putin has taken on the role of negotiator and is usually the most level-headed adult in the room when it comes to the Syria conflict and dealing with Turkey, Syria, the Kurdish militias, and yes even the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia along with other players.
I assume the seasoned politician serving his fourth term in office will handle the Sochi meeting on Tuesday with Turkey, in the same polite and diplomatic manner we’ve grown accustomed to.
There were some questions as to whether the ceasefire will continue till then, due to violations on both sides. Turkey’s defense ministry stated on Sunday that one of their soldiers was killed and that the Kurdish militias violated the ceasefire over 20 times in the past three days. The SDF is stating that 16 of their fighters have been killed. Also, as part of the agreement between the US and Turkey, an 86- vehicle Kurdish convoy left Ras al-Ayn toward the town of Tal Tamr this weekend.
On Sunday, hundreds of trucks carrying almost 500 US personnel were seen withdrawing troops near Al Hasakah to Iraq’s border. It’s also been noted that US troops are destroying their own airfields and equipment before fleeing.
It appears that out of the supposed 1,000 US troops that about 500-700 will be sent to Iraq and about 200-300 will remain in Syria to perform what a senior US official referred to as a “counter Daesh mission”. Back in December President Trump had said he wanted to bring all 2,000 troops back home, and now it doesn’t seem like any of them will be coming back home anytime soon.
October 21, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation | Middle East, Russia, Syria, Turkey, United States |
1 Comment
The Japanese government has decided to send its own self-defence troops to the Strait of Hormuz area as an alternative to joining the US-coalition to protect commercial vessels passing through key Middle Eastern waterways, according to the Asahi newspaper.
Earlier, media reported that Japan would not join such a coalition due to its close economic ties with Iran, as an important oil producer.
The US announced the creation of a naval coalition in the wake of the detention of a British tanker by Iranian authorities over alleged violations of maritime laws and a series of “sabotage attacks” on commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf. These it blamed on Iran, claiming that the US goal will be to ensure the safety of navigation through a crucial oil-exporting lane – the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has strongly denied any involvement in the attacks.
Washington invited several countries from Europe and Asia to participate in this coalition, but so far few have responded. While the UK has shown interest in participating in the American mission, Germany opted for diplomatic efforts as a mean to reduce tensions in the Gulf and stated that its participation in America’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran has been “ruled out”.
Iran has slammed the planned American maritime mission as endangering the international waterway and expressed scepticism about Washington’s chances of rallying allies for it.
October 18, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Middle East |
4 Comments
Earlier this week, as US troops abandoned positions in northern Syria under the de facto control of local Kurdish forces amid the Turkish onslaught, Russian peacekeeping patrols quietly began operating in Manbij, northern Syria in a bid to prevent fighting between Turkish and Syrian Army forces.
The withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria signals a waning of ‘Pax Americana’ in the Middle East, and presents both “dangers” and “opportunities” for Israel in the region, former Israeli intelligence officials, diplomats and lawmakers have told The Times of Israel.
According to Amos Yadlin, former head of the Israeli military’s Military Intelligence Directorate, “All pairs of enemies in the Middle East enjoy reasonably good ties with Russia: Saudi Arabia and Iran, Israel and the Palestinians, the Kurds and the Turks, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Turkey, and so on.” Russia, Yadlin said, is not a Middle Eastern ‘hegemon’ in the traditional sense of the term, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt sharing that title, in his view. Furthermore, he noted, Washington still has far greater forces in the Middle East than Moscow.
“The Russian success stems from their ability to use very few forces with determination and rules of engagement that only they can allow themselves, with a veto at the UN Security Council and a patriotic audience at home,” Yadlin said, without elaborating.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren said he found the US disengagement in the Middle East much more concerning than Russia’s growing influence. “We have relied for the last 45 years on a Pax Americana that no longer exists. I am not saying that the US won’t come to our assistance, but we can’t be certain of it anymore,” he said. As for Russia, Oren suggested Israel should work to reach a ‘modus vivendi’ with Moscow. “It’s useless for us to pretend that Russia is going to be an ally, but we don’t have to make them enemies either,” he said.
However, Ksenia Svetlova, a former Israeli lawmaker from the Zionist Union Party, said Russia’s rise could have “very grave” implications for Tel Aviv. “We already have Russian air defence systems, the S-300, that cover the Syrian and Lebanese shores. As soon as the Russians think that it’s smart for them to operate these systems and to halt the Israeli attacks, Israel would no longer be able to deal with the extension of Iranian power in these countries,” she said, repeating Tel Aviv’s talking point about alleged growing ‘Iranian influence’ in Syria.
Russia initially deployed its air defences only at its airbase in Latakia, northwestern Syria. However, last October, following a friendly fire incident led to the loss of a Russian aircraft and the deaths of 15 Russian airmen, Moscow began deploying S-300s to Syria’s armed forces, complicating Tel Aviv’s campaign of airstrikes into Syria and leading to a reduction in its intensity.
According to Svetlova, Iran, another Israeli adversary, was also a Russian ‘strategic ally’, and “it’s not likely that Moscow will do anything to curb the Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon.”
But Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst at the Belgium-based nonprofit International Crisis Group, believes Russia could help reduce tensions between Israel and other countries in the region. In his view, President Trump’s Syria exit would at least temporarily end “Israeli wishful thinking about the US resolving all problems militarily,” which could force Israel too to move away from military operations and turn to diplomacy and “some temporary de-facto power-sharing,” including agreements on Syria and Lebanon and perhaps even a “non-aggression pact” between Israel and Hezbollah.
The US withdrew about 1,000 troops from northeast Syria last week, thereby greenlighting a Turkish military operation Ankara says is aimed against Daesh (ISIS) terrorists and local Kurdish militants, whom Turkish authorities also classify as terrorists. Turkey’s operation brought it broad condemnation from its NATO allies, with the US slapping the country with sanctions. Late Thursday, US Vice President Mike Pence said he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and agreed to a ceasefire in Syria.
Amid the Turkish operation, Damascus reached an agreement with Kurdish-led militia forces in northern Syria, allowing Syrian Army forces to advance into Kurdish-controlled areas to mount a joint defence of the Syrian-Turkish border area. This week, Russian peacekeepers began patrols in the city of Manbij in eastern Aleppo province, with the mission aimed at preventing fighting between Syrian and Turkish forces.
October 18, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria |
8 Comments
What everyone is most upset about with regard to Syria isn’t the bloodshed or anything having [to] do with human rights. It’s the decline in American control of the Middle East. This is 100% about US imperialism taking a hit. — Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) October 14, 2019
A series of Donald Trump’s decisions, culminating in the decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, has set off a cascade of effects that are dramatically changing the geopolitics of the Middle East and the internal politics of the United States.
Two months ago, I wrote an article opposing the impeachment drive and stating that Donald Trump is not going to be removed from office by impeachment proceedings. I said: “Donald Trump will be removed from office one way: by an election.”
At that time, in the wake of the fizzling out of the Mueller Report and testimony on Russian “collusion,” the new smoking gun was “obstruction of justice.” “The evidence is overwhelming,” Jamie Raskin said, echoing more than 90 of his Democratic colleagues, “10 different episodes of presidential obstruction of justice.” Walls closing in.
Somehow, even after Mueller’s “very, very painful” testimony, the impeachment drive by the Democrats had intensified to the point that it was de rigueur for every major Democratic presidential candidate, and for anyone calling themselves “progressive,” to demand impeachment proceedings. Because “obstruction of justice.”
Of course, the Democrats were not going to create an irresistible political tide that would get enough Republican senators to vote to oust Trump with that “obstruction of justice” issue, and they knew it. The chance of that was effectively zero.
The odds on that are now changing significantly. What happened to change the impeachment calculus that might move enough Republicans?
The answer is nothing that’s in the Ukrainegate smokingburger, which replaced the obstruction-of-justice smokingburger, which replaced the Russiagate smokingburger. Interpretations of the Zelensky phone call are just that—interpretations. Stipulate the worst: Trump tried to wheedle some personal political benefit from a foreign leader. Shocked! Shocked! Are we?
Really? Does anybody think that, if we read through the transcripts of every conversation between US presidents and foreign leaders over the last fifty years, we wouldn’t find scores of such transactions? And, uh, Hunter Biden, not to mention the Clinton campaign and Foundation. The Republicans can bat that phone call away, and they will face no political groundswell among their voters, or even the general public, to take sides in a family feud among different corrupt factions of a corrupt political elite.
To say nothing of the most outrageous examples of using foreign leaders to political advantage. Richard Nixon conspired with the leaders of South Vietnam to prolong the Vietnam War, and LBJ knew it. Ronald Reagan conspired with the leaders of Iran to prolong the confinement of American hostages, and a bipartisan commission covered it up. But they weren’t presidents at the time? Really, that’s an argument for dismissing these cases? What do you think these guys did when they were presidents? No, Nancy, now that I’m president I cannot seek a political benefit from a foreign leader! And why were these cases ignored and actively covered up, except because they were considered—even if a little extreme—SOP in US politics?
The success of the Democrats’ impeachment drive depends on one thing: getting enough Republican senators to vote for conviction. No, nothing in the Trump-Zelensky phone call or anything like it is going to move Republicans to temper their defenses against the Democratic onslaught, let alone move enough of them in the Senate to vote to remove him from office.
If Republicans do stop defending him against that, it will be because they have become radically disaffected with him about something else.
That something else is real, though it probably will not be explicitly stated in impeachment charges. It’s the simmering bipartisan concern about Trump that has been brought to a boil by a recent series of events and decisions: his unreliability as a trigger-puller, his aversion to ordering big military attacks. This is certainly a damning fault in the eyes of most Republicans (as well as Democrats), a disqualifying failure or responsibility from the warden of the US empire. That’s the impeachable offense that could well get enough Republican votes to convict him.
During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump expressed his opposition to wasteful foreign interventions clearly and repeatedly enough, and was skewered by the Democrats whenever he did, as they promoted lies and war and lies about war (specifically about Ukraine, as I noted) for their political benefit.
He also expressed his disdain for the obligatory nod to US sanctimony, when he responded to Joe Scarborough’s complaint about Putin killing people: “I think our country does plenty of killing also,” and when he pushed back on George Stephanopoulos regarding Ukraine: “The people of Crimea… would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
These kinds of thoughts are anathema to hawkish Republicans. They could only be ignored because they assumed: 1) he wasn’t going to win, 2) it was empty campaign rhetoric, and 3) as President, he would be boxed in and managed by the shepherds of the national-security state. Only one of those assumptions turned out to be entirely false, and it’s the uncertainty about how the other two are now playing out that might undermine his support among Senate Republicans.
In the last few months, Trump has made decisions either to reduce US military presence or explicitly not to take military action that was expected and planned. These were rhetorically and substantively anti-interventionist positions that are anathema to imperialist Republicans. The most consequent of these in the impeachment context are those regarding Iran, and, relatedly, Syria.
The dangerous fuse of Republican discontent with Trump was lit with Trump’s decision in June to call off the military strike on Iran, after Iran’s downing of a US drone. That event followed attacks on Norwegian and Japanese tankers in the Persian Gulf that the US government blamed on Iran. A narrative had been established for US politicians and media: Every nasty thing that happens in the Middle East is to be blamed on Iran. It’s a narrative with a specific target and a specific goal: to manufacture consent for a military attack on that target—Iran—when a good opportunity was either concocted or presented itself.
Iran’s acknowledged destruction of a valuable US military asset provided that opportunity. Trump’s decision—on the profound advice of Bolton, Pompeo, et. al.—to launch an attack on Iran was the inevitable next scene in the script. His decision, made a few hours later, to cancel the attack was something else again. It was a decision made “without consulting his vice president, secretary of state or national security adviser,” with “forces… already in motion… more than 10,000 sailors and airmen…. on the move,” and with “only 10 minutes to go.” Per the NYT, that decision “stunned,” ”flabbergasted,” and outraged his closest advisers and key Republican allies. It was an unprecedented deus ex machina, an impermissible interruption that, especially for Republicans, just doesn’t fit in the epic story of American “presidentialness.”
Leftish Trump opponents have not, I think, recognized what an extraordinary, important, and praiseworthy decision this was by Trump. Has there been a more positive decision of such consequence made by any president in the last thirty years?
Yes, it was the reversal of a prior, terrible decision of his. And, yes, it’s subject to reversal again because of his inconsistency and his many other terrible decisions regarding Iran and the region. But on its own, it stopped an onslaught of immense destruction. That it was a reversal of something he had set in motion only makes it more extraordinary as a presidential act.
Moreover, Trump was not alone in the process of re-thinking his decision. The Washington Post tells us that, from the get-go, the decision to strike Iran had “divided his top advisers, with senior Pentagon officials opposing the decision to strike and national security adviser John Bolton strongly supporting it.” And during those hours of reconsideration, as the NYT reports: “there continued to be pushback from Pentagon civilians and General Dunford.”
In other words, this wasn’t just a matter of peripatetic Trump; it was a matter of an ongoing tension between the fervently Zionist neocons, represented by the likes of Bolton and Pompeo, and the military realists, as represented by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dunford. Let’s not—as hawkish Republicans and Democrats certainly will try to—hide that tension in the tale of Trump’s personal inconsistency.
That tension defines something that Trump and every American president is inconsistent about. In the US context, that Trump changed his mind in the direction he did at the last minute is, again, extraordinary—one might even say “courageous.”
Sure, better not to have ordered the attack in the first place, but, in such circumstances, I’ll take reconsideration and second thoughts to sticking to one’s guns.
What we see here is that, for all his bluster, Trump knows when to be scared of a fight that will certainly hurt and not benefit the US, unlike the missionary (whether Zionist, Christian, or secular “humanitarian”) interventionists—including past presidents Obama and Bush, the man “progressive” impeachers would have president, Mike Pence, and every one of the present Democratic contenders, with the possible exception of Sanders or Gabbard. Certainly, in the same circumstances (having decided for the neocons, still getting pushback from the military), none of those Democrats, with the noted exceptions, would have made the re-consideration Trump did, and we would be at war with Iran now.
Anti-Trump lefties may not want to recognize how radical Trump’s decision to call off the Iran strike was, but senior Republicans sure do.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a not unimportant player in the unfolding impeachment drama, said Trump’s decision to cancel the Iran strike “was clearly seen by the Iranian regime as a sign of weakness.” To which Trump responded, in tones matching Obama’s best anti-stupid-interventionist campaign rhetoric: “No Lindsey, it was a sign of strength that some people just don’t understand!” Republicans were likening Trump’s refusal to strike Iran over the drone downing to Obama not striking Syria over the chemical weapons “red line” pretext. Having Republicans and his own advisors see him as “all too reminiscent … of Mr. Obama” is not a look that will help Trump among imperialist Republican senators.
Indeed, that remark of Graham’s was made after Trump’s second dramatic failure to respond with military action—this time to the September 14th Houthi attack on Saudi oilfields, which was framed by neocon Pompeo as an “act of war” by Iran and, implicitly, against the United States. Even the liberal NYT accepted the framing that Trump “let down his Arab partners by failing to respond more forcefully to Iranian aggressions.” quoting one Gulf political scientist that: “Trump, in his response to Iran, is even worse than Obama.”
What’s important for the purposes of impeachment possibility, of course, is whether Trump’s Republican allies see it that way. And they do. Here’s Graham again: “This is literally an act of war and the goal should be to restore deterrence against Iranian aggression which has clearly been lost.” There it is: Trump “lost” deterrence against, is “losing” the Middle East to, Iran.
Former C.I.A. official Reuel Marc Gerecht echoes and amplifies the line to NYT reporters at the ultra-neocon Foundation for Defense of Democracies: “The president’s repeated failure to militarily respond to Iranian actions has been a serious mistake.”
It was a week after this putative “act of war” by Iran and non-military response by Trump, on September 23rd, that a group of “moderate” freshmen Democratic congresswomen who had “formed a bond over their national security background,” joined by two freshmen male colleagues, also military veterans, wrote a Washington Post (WaPo) op-ed that, as CNN puts it: “changed the dynamic for House Democrats, and indeed — the course of history.”
These women call themselves the “badasses,” a name that one of them, Chrissy Houlahan, says, “came organically from the group since we all had either served in the military or in the CIA.”
So, it was no squad of “progressives,” but a cohort of Democrats bound by national-security/intelligence “service” that “opened the floodgates,” and persuaded Nancy Pelosi to move with them “from hard no to hell yes on starting an impeachment inquiry.”
They say their position changed so suddenly and dramatically that week in September because, as CIA veterans and all, they were shocked, shocked that POTUS “may have used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent.” Reading their op-ed, you’ll find no hint that they share their colleague Gerecht’s concern about “the president’s repeated failure to militarily respond to Iranian actions.” No, no, these military and CIA badasses keep their “steadfast focus” on “health care [and] infrastructure.” Sure.
Now, making things worse for himself, Trump “Throws Middle East Policy Into Turmoil” by announcing a “withdrawal” of US troops from northeast Syria. This “touched off a broad rebuke by Republicans, including some of his staunchest allies,” whose response has been apoplectic: “some of the sharpest language they have leveled” against him. Here are the leaders of the Senate Republican caucus that will vote on any impeachment referral:
Liz Cheney: It’s a “catastrophic mistake that … threatens America’s national security”
Marco Rubio: Trump’s decision “is a grave mistake that will have severe consequences beyond Syria. It risks encouraging the Iranian regime [and]… will imperil other U.S. national security interests in the region.”
Lindsey Graham: “if he follows through with this, it’d be the biggest mistake of his presidency.” And: “This to me is an Obama-like decision” and “if President Trump continues to make such statements this will be a disaster worse than President Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.”
Their ostensible outrage is that Trump’s decision “betrays our Kurdish allies,” since it opens the way for a Turkish invasion to subdue Kurdish forces who aligned with the US. And the decision was impulsive, throwing “supporters, foreign leaders, military officers and his own aides off balance,” and does effectively greenlight what is an outrageous offensive by Turkey to steal Syrian territory and ethnically cleanse Kurdish areas.
But Turkey has already invaded Syria with US blessing, under the Obama administration, betraying the same Kurdish allies. As I wrote in a 2016 essay: “Vice-President Joe Biden stood beside Turkish President Erdogan and commanded the Kurds to back off and let Turkey have its way—to actually surrender territory they had won from ISIS to Turkey, and to the Free Syrian Army, Faylaq Al-Sham, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, and re-costumed-ISIS jihadis who follow in the wake of Turkish tanks.”
“We have made it absolutely clear to . . . the YPG that participated” in the taking of Manbij and other towns “that they must move back across the river,” Biden said. “They cannot, will not, and under no circumstances will get American support if they do not keep that commitment. Period.”
Tough love Joe, who at the time was trying to reassure Erdogan that the US was not complicit in the coup attempt against him. The US government was always going to accede to its NATO ally over its more-dispensable Kurdish “partners.”
My point above about the jihadis coming in Turkey’s wake is still quite relevant and undermines the whole “protection from ISIS” narrative. The US itself cheered ISIS on, as Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry admitted. Turkey supported ISIS and trafficked ISIS soldiers, arms, and oil across its border with Syria throughout the conflict. That 2016 Turkish invasion made liberal use of jihadi proxies, including ISIS, which calmly turned territory over to Turkish-backed forces, with some ISIS fighters just changing their uniforms to join them.
In the current invasion, Erdogan is playing the same game. He explicitly says, for example, that “The Turkish army won’t enter Manbij. We’ll be content with providing assistance to Syrian opposition and tribal forces.” Erdogan wants to avoid a direct conflict with the Syrian Army (SAA) and its Russian allies, so those “forces”—now branded the “Syrian National Army” or the “Turkey-Supported Opposition” (TSO)—will be the ground-level fighters of Turkish attacks. They include the various jihadi factions within the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the US created, any ISIS cadres who wish to join as the TSO deliberately releases them, and some angry Syrian Arabs who were thrown out of their homes by Kurd militias (who have been no angels in seeking to establish their ethno-state). You know, the kinds of “forces” that the US government and media insisted for years were “moderate rebels,” and are now acknowledging are ruthless killers who are executing captured Kurd fighters as well as civilian political leaders.
Incredible: US officials are now admitting “rebels” from the “Free Syrian Army” that are embedded with the Turkish army are intentionally freeing ISIS prisoners, while massacring civilians These are some of the “moderate rebels” the CIA armed and trained https://t.co/x5389IgVNx — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 15, 2019
It’s the SAA and its allies that were the most effective at destroying ISIS and jihadi “forces” over the last eight years. For neither Turkey nor the US was ISIS ever anything other than a weapon against the Syrian government and a convenient pretext for “protective” intervention. And the Kurds were always more pawns than “partners.”
And the spectacle of countries/actors like the EU, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom financed and armed an invasion of Syria by foreign jihadis for 8 years, now objecting to Turkey violating the “territorial sovereignty” of Syria demonstrates the death of irony.
Turkey is illegally extending its prior illegal invasion of Syria into sovereign Syrian territory that the US had illegally taken control of. Mark Sleboda puts it well: “Turkey is invading the US invasion of Syria.”
Neither Trump’s staunch Republican allies, nor his Democratic opponents, nor any of those countries give two hoots about the Kurds, let alone Syria’s “territorial integrity.” They are not upset and outraged at Trump because he opened the possibility of Turkey repressing the Kurds; they are upset and outraged because he made the Kurds finally see what fools they were to ally with the US and to turn instead to an alliance with the Syrian government. US politicians’ crocodile tears for the Syrian Kurds are really rage at losing their allegiance.
The Kurdish commander of the US-created Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi, is now saying: “if you’re not [protecting my people], I need to make a deal with Russia and the regime now and invite their planes to protect this region,” and writing in Foreign Policy that “The Russians and the Syrian regime have made proposals that could save the lives of millions of people who live under our protection.” He may also say: “We do not trust their promises,” but he knows very well that some kind of autonomy agreement with Damascus is preferable for Syrian Kurds to Turkish occupation and ethnic cleansing.
So, the SDF has formally “agreed to the deployment of the SAA” throughout the group’s ‘self-administration’ area (“to all areas starting East from Ain Dawar to Jarablus in the north”), calling on the SAA to do its “duty to protect the country’s borders and preserve Syrian sovereignty.”
As I write, the SAA and allied forces have already, often greeted with celebration, entered the towns of Ain Issa, Tel Tamer, Qamishli, Kobani, Raqqah, and Manbij—where they’ve taken over a US base.
As the NYT reports: “If Syrian government forces can reach the Turkish border to the north and the Iraqi border to the east, it would be a major breakthrough in Mr. Assad’s quest to re-establish his control over the whole country.”
The problem now isn’t that the Kurds no longer have any allies; it’s that the Americans don’t.
The Kurds have now recognized and joined the alliance that really is capable of preserving their own lives and Syria’s “territorial sovereignty”—which is precisely what the US, NATO/EU, Israel, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey, have been trying to destroy for eight years.
This is what Trump’s McCain-Republican frenemies are pissed-off at. Led by Lindsey Graham, they’re pissed-off at Erdogan—not for killing Kurds, but for disrupting the game which used protection of the Kurds as a “humanitarian” alibi for dividing Syria and overthrowing its government.
The American troops that Trump moved out of the way were not protecting the Kurds from Turkey, they were protecting Turkey from itself—from Erdogan’s hubris in overplaying his hand and entering into what at best will be a quagmire of occupation and resistance from Syrian Kurds, and at worst a direct conflict with the Syrian army and its Russian ally, which Erdogan definitely does not want.
But most of all, those US troops were protecting the ongoing, long-term project of state-destruction in the region on behalf of Israel. The splitting off of a Kurdish area and the presence of US troops in it—under the pretext of a protective force, but really as a constant dagger pointed at Damascus and maintaining the threat of US-led regime change—were lynchpins of that project, which was supposed to culminate in a state-destroying military attack on Iran.
The McCain Republicans are pissed-off at Trump for completely upending—perhaps even finally ending!—that project.
The suite of decisions Trump has made, starting with the decision to cancel the strike on Iran, were accompanied by rhetoric that gets him into even more trouble, especially with those McCain Republicans.
“I campaigned on the fact that I was going to bring our soldiers home and bring them home as quickly as possible.”
“I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars.”
[Regarding Turkey and Syria] “That has nothing to do with us,” he said. He said he could understand if Syria and Turkey want territory. “But what does that have to do with the United States of America if they’re fighting over Syria’s land?”
[Regarding whether his decision to pull back from Syria had opened the way for Russia and the Syrian government] “I wish them all a lot of luck. If Russia wants to get involved with Syria, that’s really up to them,” he added.
Responding to Lindsey Graham’s criticisms] “The people of South Carolina don’t want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with Syria.”
“Let them fight their own wars.”
“Ridiculous endless wars,” “Let them fight their own wars”—anathema for a serving president to say. Acceptable as campaign rhetoric, but never to be said for real by a president in office—especially a president attacked for his “repeated failure[s] to militarily respond” to designated enemies.
All of this marks a new and real danger for Trump in the impeachment process. When Graham, “usually one of the president’s most vocal backers,” warns that unless Trump reverses (!) his decision, it “will be the biggest mistake of his presidency,” that sounds a lot like a threat.
There’s another element that appears in all the neocon, McCain-Republican (as well as McCain-Democrat) objections, which can be seen, for example, in Lindsey Graham’s remark that Trump’s decision is: “a big win for Iran and Assad, a big win for ISIS.”
Note the logic here: Turkey disappears as the enemy, and ISIS gets added at the end for the scare factor, but it’s the “win” for Syria, which in his view also means a win for Iran, that’s the real problem. It always goes to Iran.
It’s crucial to understand all the implications that underlie and make sense of such a statement. After all, there’s no “win” for Syria in the Turkish invasion of its territory unless it results in the Kurds turning to Damascus and the SAA for their protection. If Graham’s professed interest in protecting the Kurds were real, that would be a good thing. But it also brings Syria closer to finally winning against the eight-year US-sponsored regime-change and state-destroying operation, which is Graham’s and the US’s real agenda, so it therefore becomes a bad thing. This discourse reveals that Graham, like the rest of his colleagues, is not worried about whether the Kurds will be protected from Turkey, but whether they will reconcile with Damascus.
And how can the Turkish invasion of Syria possibly be construed as a “win” for Iran, which has “warned its neighbor not to move forward with its military operation” and held unannounced military drills near its border with Turkey? Only if everything that’s happening in Syria is a function of a project directed against Iran. Only if Syria’s winning back the allegiance of the Kurds as well as its actual territorial integrity is a “loss” for the US in an offensive against Iran.
It always goes to Iran.
Graham is here expressing what’s actually behind the growing urgency of the neocon national-security apparatus to replace Donald Trump with Mike Pence—‘cause, you know, that is what impeaching and convicting Trump will do—and why it may adversely affect Trump’s chances with Republican senators.
One cannot understand what’s happening in Syria, or what’s happening in impeachment, or the relation between the two unless one understands the role of Israel in determining US policy and influencing US politics in general. US policy in the Middle East is completely incoherent until one understands the extent to which it’s Israeli policy.
One cannot complain that Trump’s Syria decision caused “chaos” without recognizing the chaos that US intervention throughout the Middle East since 2001—in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—has already caused, and was designed to cause, for the sake of Israel. Because, as Middle East Monitor reports: “the [former] chief of Israel’s military intelligence, General Aviv Kochav, has said that the chaos in the Arab world favours Israel and is something that he believes should continue.”
And one cannot understand what’s happened and happening in Syria, and what the US politicians really think is “wrong” with Trump’s decision, without placing it in the context of the US-Israeli strategy that was famously revealed by Wesley Clark (and studiously ignored by US media), to “take out seven countries… starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.”
Iran has always been the ultimate target. Syria was a stepping-stone, the part of what Israel saw as the “Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah alliance” that became ripe for removing in 2011-2. This was made explicit in a State Department report, authored by James Rubin (Christine Amanpour’s husband), that appeared in a Hillary Clinton email chain: “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.” Or, as high-ranking Israeli officials gleefully foresaw: “Syria’s fragmentation into provinces, … the formation of an Alawite district in the coastal region… a Sunni province … and … a Kurdish province in northern Syria.”
That Iran has been the ultimate target is also made clear in an exceptionally important and detailed NYT report, “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran” (published before the Syria decision), which I urge everyone to read. It chronicles how “Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for war against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program,” and asks “Will Trump finally deliver?” It details Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsessive “personal crusade” against Iran, and his attempts to cajole, browbeat, and bluff the US into attacking Iran for the Jewish state—to the point that the US ambassador to Israel thought: “Israel might consider it an advantage to strike in the final phase of the [2012] election,” believing it “could force the United States’ hand to be supportive or to come in behind Israel and assist. Because otherwise, President Obama could be accused of abandoning Israel in its moment of need.”
Israel used this “can’t refuse Israel” ideology to make sure the Obama administration “meticulously refined” “military plans for an Iran strike” that, if he didn’t use, would be a “loaded gun,” “inherited” by the next president.
But Trump hasn’t picked up that gun. Despite his embrace of so many aspects of Netanyahu’s agenda, Israelis now fear that “the American president in whom they had invested so much hope has gone wobbly.” Why? Because of his “last-minute decision to abort the attack in June,” which has “led to a concern among Iran hawks in both Israel and the United States: that the president ultimately might not have the resolve to confront the threat with military force.”
As Haaretz reports, in a more recent editorial “Netanyahu’s Iran Policy Has Collapsed”: “Trump’s putting up with the attack on Saudi Arabia and leaving the Kurds high and dry are warning signs to Israel, that it cannot count on Netanyahu’s friend in the White House.”
And the BBC: Netanyahu’s “signature Iran policy … was rocked by the president’s reluctance to flex US military muscle in response to an apparent Iranian attack on Saudi oil installations…. [which] evinces the utter collapse of the security doctrine that has been advanced by Netanyahu, [and] has been compounded by Mr. Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of north-eastern Syria.” Israel is now “facing the reality of an unpredictable and transactional president who has deep reservations about using US military might, is afraid of getting involved in another Middle East conflict.”
Those hawks in Israel and the United States may be giving up on Trump, but one would be a fool to think they are giving up. They’re just looking for another “friend in the White House”—and right quick. The election is too far away, and its results too unpredictable.
Trump is slithering filth and dangerously mercurial and random. But the recurring liberal bashing of him for non- and reduced military intervention and for not loving bad guys like the CIA and FBI and John McCain truly is knee-jerk. https://t.co/rQT2KOj1qg — vastleft (@vastleft) October 9, 2019
Leftists may be loath to acknowledge it, but, for whatever reasons he made it, Trump’s decision on Syria—the culmination of a series of non-interventionist decisions—has “marked a major turning point in Syria’s long war” and has, indeed, “upended decades” of imperialist and Zionist plans for the Middle East It deserves to be recognized and supported as such by all leftist anti-imperialists as much as it is recognized and denounced as such by the entire spectrum of US-imperialist politics and media. It’s a very good thing, a positive aspect of the Trump-effect I’ve written about previously.
We leftists can point out that Trump’s non-interventionist rhetoric, and even decisions, do not always translate into reality. All US troops have not yet been withdrawn from Syria. US troop presence in the Middle East increased by 14,000 since May. He just sent another 2,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia. His policies on Palestine, Venezuela, and even Iran are criminally aggressive, even if they have not yet involved a military attack. We know that he’s impulsive and changeable, and, most importantly, weak. Even if he has a sincere desire to end ridiculous, endless, and wasteful wars, it’s a shallow impulse, ungrounded in anything but self- and US-centered principle. That makes him weak, and it’s why he surrounds himself with neocon deep-state actors on whom he depends and who often ignore or actively oppose him—especially when it comes to his non-interventionist instincts. He is certainly as much of, if more erratic, an imperialist/American-exceptionalist and world bully as any US politician.
That’s the dangerous aspect of Trump’s incoherence that we leftists, for good reason, focus on. But his right-wing critics, and would-be and erstwhile neocon advisors like Bolton (“the whistleblower’s Deep Throat”?) see and fear the other side of his “unpredictable and transactional” character—his call for better relations with Russia, his desire for a deal with Kim Jong-Un, etc.
But most of all, and most importantly in relation to the Middle East and the sacred imperatives of Israel, they see that one big flashing yellow light that they despise: he’s reluctant to pull the trigger on a big attack on the principal enemy. They can maneuver around him, and push him largely where they want him to go, but when it comes to a decisive strike, he’s the commander-in-chief; he needs to give the order. In a series of what for them are crucial moments, Trump has shown himself to be unreliable for that. They want a commander-in-chief on whom they can rely to pull the trigger. Like Mike Pence.
And in this Syria decision they see, correctly, that, no matter how many troops and ships he is moving around the Middle East, Trump has effectively collapsed a longstanding imperialist and Zionist project for Syria and possibly Iran that neocon policy makers had no intention of giving up on. They may yet get him to reverse that or over-compensate for it with some worse aggression, but he seems to be “undeterred,” and “doubling down” on it, “despite vociferous pushback from congressional Republicans” and “top advisers.”
The Democrats need at least 20 Republican senators to convict Trump and throw him out of office. That is no longer impossible. Many McCain Republicans are now on record as seeing Trump’s policy decisions as a threat to “national security” and to fundamental US and “allied” interests, especially in the Middle East.
A “veteran political consultant,” cited by a conservative blogger, made it specific: “The price of Graham’s support… would be an eventual military strike on Iran.”
Impeachment and conviction are still unlikely. Perhaps because Trump will pay Graham’s price—in which case, watch the pressure dissipate. Or, in the better case, and the one Trump seems to be sticking with, precisely because ending ridiculous, wasteful wars and keeping campaign promises and “Let them fight their own wars” are very popular pitches with the Republican (and not only Republican!) electorate. That might well prevent too many Republican defections.
So, the Republican politicians who want to vote against Trump for his aversion to military strikes (and their allied media—watch how FOX and Breitbart coverage evolves) will have to go along with the Democrats and the media fronting other issues. They’ll have to subtly soften their defense of Trump against Ukrainegate charges, starting even during formal impeachment hearings in the House. Unlikely, but no longer impossible. Fundamental imperialist and Zionist policies are at stake.
Kid yourself not. No matter what the formal articles of impeachment say, if Donald Trump is removed from office by impeachment, if more than twenty Republican senators vote to convict him, it will not be because of Russiagate or Ukrainegate of Bidengate or any other ruse issues bleated about constantly in the media, but because he is just too “unpredictable and transactional” to be counted on to pull the trigger when it counts. 100%.
Left-socialist analysis from Jim Kavanagh, former college professor and New York City native and denizen.
October 18, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | CIA, Free Syrian Army, Middle East, Syria, Turkey, United States, Zionism |
4 Comments
Several years ago, the United States hired Kurdish fighters to be our mercenaries in Syria. This month we decided we don’t need them anymore, and abandoned them to their fate. Turkey, which considers Kurdish militancy a mortal threat, quickly began bombing them. This set off a veritable orgy of indignation in Washington. It is a classic example of “buffet outrage,” in which one picks and chooses which horrors to condemn.
Among those shedding crocodile tears, often accompanied by vivid threats against Turkey, are politicians and pundits who have never uttered a peep about American bombs laying waste to Yemen or American sanctions devastating lives in Iran. The United States deserves condemnation for abandoning its promise to the Kurds. Much of it, however, is a hypocritical blend of anti-Trump fanaticism and frustration over the emerging reality that we have lost the Syrian war.
Abandoning the Kurds is not a policy that materialized out of thin air. It is the product of two long chains of American error, one dating to the beginning of the Syrian war and the other even further back. The deeper history of our Middle East tragedy begins in 1980, when President Carter declared that any challenge to American power in the Persian Gulf region would be repelled “by any means necessary, including military force.”
A generation later, President George W. Bush recklessly ordered the invasion of Iraq, which set the region afire and led to the creation of ISIS.
The more recent set of causes for our Kurdish misadventure began in 2011, when President Obama ordered President Bashar Assad of Syria to “step aside.” Beyond the arrogance that leads American presidents to think they can and should decide who may rule other countries lay the utter impossibility of achieving that goal.
The head-chopping death cults that fought alongside our partners in Syria, including Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al-Qaeda franchise, and Ahrar al-Sham, which seeks to “build an Islamic State” based on “Allah’s Almighty Sharia,” have as part of their agenda the murder of every Shia Muslim. Since the population of nearby Iran is 90 percent Shia, it should have been obvious from the beginning that Iran would use every ounce of its considerable power to assure Assad’s survival. If Obama had looked at Syria realistically rather than succumbing to fantasy, he would have understood that Assad and his Iranian backers would do whatever necessary to defeat the American project. Instead he plunged ignorantly into a conflict that we had no prospect of winning.
Following the example his predecessor set when invading Afghanistan, Obama looked for “partners” who would fight the anti-Assad war for us. Many of the militias we hired and armed were connected to jihadist terror gangs. That made sense, because the Assad government is resolutely secular and those fanatics hate secularism. We also hired Syrian Kurds. They agreed to fight not because they wanted to commit genocide against Shia Muslims and other infidels, but for a completely different reason. They had watched their Kurdish cousins in northern Iraq establish a mini-state, and dreamed of doing the same in northern Syria. If they supported the American war against Assad, they reasoned, the United States might reward them by helping them turn their piece of Syria into an autonomous region or quasi-independent state.
This was never a realistic possibility. The country that Syrian Kurds wanted to carve out for themselves, which they called “Rojava,” did not have nearly the size, population, or military strength to survive in the unforgiving Middle East. Kurdish leaders understood this, but believed they would thrive anyway because their American friends would defend them. That was a pitifully naive miscalculation. The United States has repeatedly made lavish promises to the Kurds and then betrayed them — most notably in the 1970s, when we encouraged Iraqi Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein’s government and then abandoned them when Saddam made an accommodation with our ally, the Shah of Iran.
Yet Kurds never seem to learn. Their childlike trust in American promises brings to mind the cartoon character Charlie Brown, whose so-called friend Lucy pulls the football away at the last moment every time he tries to kick, but who nonetheless keeps believing this time will be different.
Although the Kurds did not foresee this betrayal, Assad did. “We say to those groups who are betting on the Americans, the Americans will not protect you,” he warned in a speech nine months ago. The Kurds should have listened. In fact, seeking Assad’s protection was always their Plan B. Now, very late in the game and after taking thousands of casualties fighting for their alluring but unfaithful American “friends,” they are doing it. They have effectively surrendered to the Syrian army and asked for its help in defense against Turkey, which thought it had a chance to crush them and establish itself as the de facto ruler of “Rojava.” The Kurds’ alliance with the United States was doomed from the start. Alliance with Assad makes more sense. He may not be the world’s most reliable ally, but he is more trustworthy than the feckless United States.
Although the Kurds’ decision to ask pardon from Assad and join him in rebuilding a secular state is years overdue, it is welcome and wise. It brings Syrians a step closer to the only solution that can end their suffering: reunification. This war will only end when the government re-establishes its authority over all of Syrian territory and hostile foreign forces withdraw. Syria Kurds have belatedly recognized this truth. We should do the same.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
October 17, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Middle East, Syria, United States |
3 Comments
The foreign policy elite is in an uproar. They claim “we have abandoned our allies”. They question “how can America be trusted?” They say the decision to withdraw from northern Syria was a “gift” to Russia, Iran, and Assad, even ISIS. It is true that the policy of US/NATO interventionism is failing. But that has been true since the invasion of Iraq or earlier. After the disastrous invasions and attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and the 8 year undeclared war on Syria, isn’t it time to question the foreign policy elite?
If one believes in restoring international law and the UN Charter, it is GOOD that US military forces have been withdrawn from northern Syria. Here are some facts and history which explain why.
Basic fact: It’s not our country and US troops were never authorized by the sovereign government. Whether or not Washington likes Damascus is irrelevant. Under international law those troops have no right to be there. Even the overflights of Syria by the US air coalition violate international agreements. It’s up to Syrians to defend their country against invading Turkey. If they choose to get support from another country, that is their right.
Another fact: President Obama was correct when he said that “putting boots on the ground” in Syria would be a “profound mistake”. Later he said, “We have a very specific objective, one that will not lead into boots on the ground or anything like that.” But the hawks prevailed. There were not only “boots on the ground”, there was a shifting rationale why they had to be there.
The US and allies have done all they could, short of direct invasion, to overthrow the Syrian government. They have spent tens of BILLIONS of dollars in weapons, training, equipment, recruitment, etc. This is in violation of international law. More than one hundred thousand Syrians have died defending their country against a foreign sponsored army of mercenaries and foreign fighters.
An astonishing fact: The US encouraged the emergence of the Islamic State. Why? Because it put pressure on Damascus and because it justified the entry of the US. While the US carpet bombed Raqqa, it looked the other way as hundreds of trucks conveyed oil from eastern Syria into Turkey to fund the Islamic State. The US air coalition attacked the Syrian Arab Army in the midst of a critical battle against ISIS near Deir Ezzor. In a secretly recorded conversation in New York with Syrian “activists”, John Kerry admitted they were watching ISIS and hoping to use it to pressure Damascus. In other words, US foreign policy was duplicitous and used terrorism as a tool. This is well documented in the book The Management of Savagery.
After the US-backed “Free Syrian Army” failed, the US looked for another means to destabilize Syria. They started to fund the Syrian Kurdish militias known as the Peoples Protection Unit (YPG /YPJ). They gave the militias a new name, Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and encouraged the secessionist tendency. Meanwhile in Turkey, which has the largest Kurdish community, most Kurds want to have their rights within Turkey and have formed a political party (Peoples Democratic Party – HDP) which unites progressives of all ethnicities. In the 2015 Turkish election this party emerged as the third most popular party and stopped Erdogan’s election domination. Currently the HDP is campaigning against Turkey’s invasion of Syria. As of 13 October the Syrian Kurdish militias have come to an agreement to work with Damascus to combat the Turkish invasion. The agreement specifies that the Syrian Arab Army will control and defend the entire area from Jarablus on the Euphrates River to the far eastern border with Iraq.
Advocates of US intervention claim that the Kurds were fighting and dying “for us.” That is not true. They were defending their own community. To the extent that they accepted and welcomed US air support, equipment, weaponry, etc. it was for their own benefit. There were two parties trying to use each other.
Whenever the US attacks or occupies a country it needs a rationalization. In 1991 there were false claims about incubators being stolen by Iraqi troops in Kuwait. In 2003 there were false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2011 there were false claims of civilians being threatened by Libyan troops in Benghazi. All these claims were subsequently found to be exaggerated or entirely false.
One of the main justifications for continuing US presence in Syria is “keeping our word” and not “abandoning” the Kurdish forces. This is a favorite rationalization for war. In Cuba, the CIA trained Cuban exiles that attacked Playa Giron “were counting on us.” Fortunately, JFK resisted the pressure and said “No”. In Vietnam, the US continued the war for a decade because we could not let down our “ally”, the government of Saigon. Millions of Vietnamese were killed plus 55,000 US troops because we could not “abandon” a government that in reality was a proxy.
In the Democratic Debates (15 October) Joe Biden said that the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria was “the most shameful thing any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy.” This is absurd. Over one million died in Iraq including 4500 and at least 100,000 severely injured US soldiers. Joe Biden was an influential supporter of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Later, as Vice President, he supported the overthrow of the Libyan government. The country is still in chaos with tens of thousands dead. These two countries were devastated by US actions. It is evidence of shameless unaccountability in media and politics that Joe Biden is a serious candidate for President after he destroyed so many lives at a cost of trillions. In the same Democratic debates Tulsi Gabbard was honest and accurate as she said that the plight of the Kurds in northern Syria is “yet another consequence of the regime change war we’ve been waging in Syria”.
Despite the howls of indignation and disinformation, withdrawing US troops from northern Syria is a step in the right direction.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who has visited Syria several times since 2014. He lives in the SF Bay Area and can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com.
October 17, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Middle East, Syria, United States |
1 Comment
Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
Slava Zilber: Sam, three years ago, you appeared on Talk Nation Radio with David Swanson and spoke about the case of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. You pointed out that the people involved in the spying on the UN and the people authorizing the Iraq War were not held accountable:
“Virtually everybody who went along with the war, whether it is Kerry or Clinton, of course, the Bush administration themselves has falsified their own records in terms of why, what they did, when they did, why they did it, to the extent that they’ve been scrutinised at all.”
You also address it in a recent article. And recently, Joe Biden has been lying about his position on the Iraq War. How can such an important issue escape meaningful scrutiny?
Sam Husseini: Because the media and the political system uses constant distractions of other issues, of personalities, of punditry to distract from these core issues. The entire US establishment helped lie their way into the Iraq War. More than that, the Katharine Gun case, which is featured in a new movie, Official Secrets, shows how the US attempted to blackmail other members of the Security Council by spying on them to try to get a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing the Iraq War. It shows the length to which they wanted to go to make sure that they got their war, both the US and Britain and others.
So all of these diabolical efforts to launch an aggressive war haven’t been seriously held accountable to it. Biden is a very notable example. I mean, the entire political system is guilty, but he is incredibly important because he was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during the build-up of the Iraq War. It is not just that he voted wrong, as some people say. Even somebody like Bernie Sanders says it was the wrong vote. It was far worse than the wrong vote. Biden, in his hearings, prevented meaningful scrutiny and dissent and the basic facts from being highlighted in terms of the false case that was being put forward for war in 2002 and in 2003.
And he has continued to lie about his own record. Biden recently has said all kinds of things: That he was opposed to the war as soon as it started, which is totally false. He continued to back it. He even said at one point that he was always against it, which is utterly ridiculous. I mean, he always couched his criticism in bizarre ways basically agreeing with the war but saying that Bush had to do a better job of getting the UN on board. Well, as the Katharine Gun case shows, the Bush administration and the Blair government were going so far as to spy on other countries to blackmail them in order to get them on board. So saying that the US needed to do a better job of getting the UN on board is a way of saying that it should have been even more coercive than it was. His story is, in a sense, an indictment of the entire political system since before the Iraq War because he, in the 1990s, said all kinds of aggressive things about Iraq.
And it is also an indictment of the media. Do you see you a connection to what you describe in another FAIR article titled “Triumph of Conventional Wisdom: AP Expunges Iran/Contra Pardons from Barr’s Record”? Are they giving those lies a pass for the same reason they are doing this with the record of Attorney General William Barr?
It is funny that you mention that. Part of what I know about Barr is that Biden was a big backer of his.
The really notable thing about Barr’s record is that he was Attorney General for George H. W. Bush and when Iran/Contra pardons happened. This was a huge scandal during the Reagan/Bush years, and at the end of it, it was basically ended. As the prosecutor, L. Walsh, a straight-shooting Republican, said, it was a cover-up pardon. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and others. And Barr basically approved all of that. And what’s remarkable about that is that just as Barr was rehabilitated by the media, so too was – Biden helped rehabilitate him as well.
Biden’s record closely parallels that of the major media. Very often, his claims dovetail very strongly with them. He is sort of the closest thing that the Democrats have to a John McCain: Somebody who constantly appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and pulled together what the late great journalist Robert Parry called conventional wisdom. So a whole series of fabrications about the Iraq War, before and after it happened, were perpetrated by the major media as well as people like Joe Biden. And Biden was rehabilitating criminal, basically, figures like Barr who was Bush’s Attorney General and helped cover-up the Iran/Contra scandal and who now is Trump’s Attorney General and, I think, playing a major role in terms of ensuring that the Trump administration maintains an establishment orientation in terms of foreign policy as well as other things. I think that he is playing a very nefarious role, and he was largely rehabilitated by Biden. We have transcripts of Biden in the mid-1990s talking him up: “What a great guy! And we have disagreements, but I have a lot of respect for you” and so on and so forth. So Biden continuously helps resurrect figures like that and does other things to maintain a very militaristic orientation in terms of foreign policy.
I had to think about a recent incident: The talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres attended a game with former President G.W. Bush. Could you please talk about what her response to the criticism that followed and the reactions from, for example, Obama administration officials Samantha Power and David Axelrod indicate? Is it also this kind of cooperation that you have just described with Mr. Barr and Mr. Biden?
Yes, I think since the Bush administration there’s been an attempt to rehabilitate it and that has gone into overdrive during the Trump administration: That is the establishment media attempt to contrast the gentlemanly Bushes, both of them, the father and the son now, as fundamentally decent, earnest people who are trying to do the right thing in contrast to this crass baffoon Donald Trump. So you had literal Obama embrace of the Bushes since Bush leaving the White House and then his father’s funeral a year ago. Barr was brought on as Attorney General just after Bush the father’s funeral at the National Cathedral. And in the Trump years, you had a total Trumpwashing of Bush and other people in his administration, much of the former CIA officials some of whom actually were already Trumpwashed before Trump because Obama brought them into his administration. Obama brought in Brennan. Obama even brought in Gates. He kept the same so-called “Defense Secretary” that Bush had. So there is a longstanding cooperation between what are sometimes called liberal interventionists and sometimes called neocons. But they all fundamentally share the same neo-imperial, colonialist mindset in terms of how the US should deal with the rest of the world. And I think that does include certain people like Samantha Power. Her rationale around the Iraq War – sort of backing it without backing it or backing it and facilitating it while attempting to pretend that they had a critique of how Bush was doing it – is actually quite similar to Biden’s as I recall. I have not looked at her record recently but recalling that record, there is a serious interplay there. So it is interesting that you’ve mentioned her as well. But it’s all based on the same sort of falsifications for war.
But again, they started and they were articulated by the major media and by figures like Biden before the Iraq War itself. For example, the weapons inspections regime of the 1990s was ended because then-President Clinton bombed Iraq and withdrew the weapons inspectors. And then he had to figure what the heck you were going to do after that. The media and people like Joe Biden continually talked about: ‘Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors’ and ‘When are we going to get them back in?’ The weapons inspections regime didn’t end because Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors. It ended because the US government pulled them out in order to launch a bombing campaign which people might recall happened just as Clinton’s scheduled impeachment vote was supposed to happen in 1998. And you saw much the same thing happen in 2003. How did the Iraq War begin? It didn’t begin because Saddam Hussein was not cooperating with the weapons inspectors. He was totally cooperating with the weapons inspectors. He said over and over again, including on US shows like 60 Minutes, that he had no weapons of mass destruction. So how did the war begin? The war began with G. W. Bush saying: ‘This process has gone on long enough. You, Saddam Hussein, have 48 hours to get out of Bagdad with your sons.’ And then they put out a statement that even if he got out of Iraq in 48 hours with his sons, they would still start the bombing. And they told the UN to get the weapons inspectors out of the country so they wouldn’t bomb them. And then they started their shock and awe bombing campaign. That’s how the war started.
Some people claim that Biden is now becoming senile or something. And that’s why he hasn’t been able to articulate his position on Iraq. Hardly! He has been lying about his position on Iraq for years. In 2007, he was asked about his Iraq War vote, and he actually had the temerity to say: ‘Why didn’t Saddam Hussein say that he didn’t have the weapons!’ Of course, Saddam Hussein was saying that he didn’t have the weapons! But there he is: Biden pretending that it wasn’t known that Saddam Hussein was denying they had the weapons. And that’s also another lie that major media themselves perpetrated, including 60 Minutes itself. 60 Minutes had an interview with Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War in which he said ‘I don’t have any weapons of mass destruction.’ And then several years later, after the Iraq War, they did some so-called reporting about: ‘Why didn’t Saddam Hussein say that he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction?’ So it’s the level of absurdity you have with the record of establishment media and establishment figures like Joe Biden. And there is a remarkable lack of scrutiny, especially when it most matters. One of Biden’s falsifications, when he had an interview with NPR, got a little bit of scrutiny. It wasn’t nearly enough, and sometimes the scrutiny actually helped build up other Iraq War lies. But none of the scrutiny in the major media happened right after the Democratic debates. He has lied about his Iraq War record during each of the Democratic debates. It is Sanders who I think needs to be far more forceful if he is to comport with the indicting facts in this case. But he at least brought it up. In his words: He led the effort against the Iraq War in the Senate, and Biden voted for it. That’s an understatement again. But at least he has brought it up, and that has compelled Biden to explain his position and lie about it in the process.
It is such a loser strategy as well because it’s quite similar to Kerry’s position. You remember Kerry looked ridiculous in 2004 because he was forced to explain his position then, and he was saying things like ‘I was for the war before I was against it’ and this kind of doubletalk. Biden, if anything, is even worse than that. So it’s factually vacuous and demented, and it is probably not going to galvanize voters and be a very poor strategy electorally.
You have been covering the Iraq War and the discourse about the Iraq War. Do you have the impression that invading another country and causing immense suffering is either considered irrelevant or treated just as something one disagrees with, especially from episodes like the one with Ms. DeGeneres, Samantha Power, and David Axelrod? Do you think it would have been different had there been an Iran/Contra trial with convictions and had the Obama administration prosecuted the people involved in torture? Would it have made a difference?
Yes, I think it would have made a difference. All of those things could have made some difference to try to have some kind of meaningful accountability in US law and political life, that people who engage in torture or launching war of aggression or other war crimes be held accountable for that. It would get those people out of public life, make them pay some measure of penalty for their own conduct, and become an example so that others don’t simply perpetuate as it is. We have some of the same figures coming back. There you have Elliott Abrams, and John Bolton, who committed criminal acts under the Bush administrations, come back under the Trump administration. In spite of its isolationist veneer, it has basically adopted a Bush type of foreign policy in many respects.
And I mean this ‘Let’s all get along even if we have disagreements!’ Well, you know, ok. So I fully expect Ellen DeGeneres to have somebody from ISIS on to talk about how she can have disagreements with him. But perhaps they can be fond of each other personally. Or pick the group of your choice that is totally distasteful or allegedly totally distasteful. I mean, in some ways, people allege the US has coordinated with groups like ISIS in terms of destabilizing Syria. But pick whatever group the US establishment most despises, and it’s not as if their members or leadership are humanized. I mean Hezbollah and Hamas are regarded as terrorist organizations even though they are political parties that do a lot of good for people. I have serious disagreements with them. And they do use violence, on a far smaller scale than the US and Israel and other states do. But it would be very refreshing if Ellen DeGeneres and other political talk show hosts took their word seriously, that they want to have a dialogue with people, even people they disagree with, and they still view them as human. So let’s have Nasrallah and the leader of Hamas on late-night talk shows. Well, I don’t think it is going to happen any time soon. It is just an exercise in making the criminality of the US establishment palatable to the public.
And it is interesting that in this case there was a fair amount of pushback. I think that’s partially because you still have some semblance in social media of evenhandedness of discourse, but I think that that has been pushed away gradually as Twitter and Facebook and other social media are tilting the playing field more and more, excluding voices, using opaque algorithms to marginalize some voices further and increase others. So the war against accountability and for meaningful dialogue about issues of war and peace – on many levels, that fight is happening.
Sam, are there cases where the question of whether one opposed the war in Iraq or supported it is being reduced to a talking point, for example, in 2016 against Hillary Clinton? How many people actually care about the human cost of that war to Americans and Iraqis?
I think a lot of US political system is trying to make the Iraq War an irrelevant thing in the distant past and the decision and the mechanisms used to launch the Iraq War. It is not a coincidence that Obama cast himself as an anti-war candidate. And he won. Trump cast himself as an anti-war candidate. And he won. I think there is a hunger in the American public for a different way to orient itself to the rest of the world. It’s a very difficult thing for the American public to sort out because it doesn’t get adequate information. Instead, it gets lies upon lies upon lies. But it is notable that the candidates that were brazenly part of the pro-war establishment have generally lost on the national stage. Now, Obama and in different ways, Trump were deceitful in casting themselves as anti-war. But I think it doesn’t change the fact that there is this underlying hunger. And there are serious opportunities because the wars continue and they continue to threaten to spiral further out of control, and they continue to have this devastating effect as most recently Turkey killing Kurds not only on its side of the border but dramatically escalating their killing of Kurds on the Syrian side of the border. And the colonial prerogatives are still the same: We can invade Iraq because we can invade Iraq. And now we can do all kinds of things in Syria because we can do all kind of things in Syria.
I think there is an attempt to reduce the Iraq War to a mere talking point. And it is facilitated in part because virtually nobody left in ruling circles got it right. Sanders did not get the Iraq War right. He bought some of the establishment lines. And I think it would do him some good to say: ‘Even I bought part of the establishment line!’ Sanders was not out there saying: ‘Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction.’ There were some people like Scott Ritter, who was saying that. I was saying there has been no evidence for saying that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. But Sanders was not saying that. He was simply saying: ‘War is a bad idea. It is going to make things worse. It could compel Saddam Hussein to use his weapons of mass destruction.’ Sanders actually made that argument. Pelosi and others made even worse arguments even though they cast their votes against war. Some of them actually helped to facilitate war even though they technically cast their votes against it.
So the entire political system – right now, I feel the correct analogy is geology in the 17th century. Geology in the 17th century was a debate between people who thought that the earth was 5000 years old versus people who thought that the earth was maybe a hundred million years old. The correct answer – that the earth was over a billion years old – was off the charts. It wasn’t part of the mainstream discussion. And I think we have a similar thing right now with coming to grips with fundamental questions of US foreign policy like the Iraq War. The correct, empirically-driven answer is well outside the current acceptable discourse. And this leads to all kinds of perversities one of which is the rise of somebody like Trump who does say perverse truths at times and that grants him a measure of legitimacy because nobody who articulates those truths in a principled way is allowed to take part in a meaningful way in public discourse because of the constrictions of major media. So these are some of the problems that have to be overcome.
Do you see them being overcome? What can be done to change things?
There is a pat answer to that: Getting information out, doing what you can. And there are all kinds of good webpages and periodicals out there. And some people try to use social media as best they can. Your program is a very good example, as well.
But I think we need to get to concrete proposals. One proposal I wanted to start building for some time and perhaps some of your listeners can help is to build what would now be called a Wiki with the relevant lies and fabrications of the establishment figures: In very short concise format so there would be a go-to place for whatever establishment figure, whether it is Biden or Wolf Blitzer or Samantha Power, to in very concise form have a thing contríbuted to by many people doing research, but then distilled so it is not a mass of treaties. So it is literally about 500 words but linked to, with substantial documentation of their various fabrications, whether it is about Iraq WMDs or other issues that we might achieve a culture of accountability so that these people could be challenged when they speak at universities or elsewhere. You could have it as a PDF so that it can be printed out and then distributed at events where these individuals are speaking. It could be distilled into a graphic form that could proliferate over social media, for example. I think it is a matter of people who do have a commitment to relevant facts and to a fundamental humanity, driven by respect for things like opposing aggressive war to organise our efforts better so we can more effectively challenge and expose people who deceit on such a massive scale to do things that have caused such harm and will continue to cause more and more harm, potentially threatening nuclear war.
I’ve been doing work lately with the Institute for Public Accuracy about the Plowshares actions. They have had an action in Georgia with these religiously-driven activists to destroy nuclear weapons symbolically. And many of them have spent much of the last year and a half in jail. Now they are facing decades in prison, and their trial begins in a couple of weeks.
I wanted to be inspired by their dedication in terms of their actions: to try to have the same dedication for laying out the critical facts in a way that is irrefutable and solidly documented and working with others to do that so that the force of that is so great that it, in effect, winds its way into the mechanisms of war and the lies that feed them and causes them to come to a grinding halt.
Slava Zilber is the host of the political podcast “Conversations with Slava” and a guest contributor to The Canary.
October 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Iraq, Middle East, United States |
1 Comment
Last night, Kurdish officials in northeastern Syria issued a statement that an agreement has been reached with the government in Damascus allowing the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to takeover key strategic positions along the Syria’s northern border with Turkey.
Not surprisingly, cheers can he heard from Damascus to Moscow, and Tehran too, while leaving Washington’s foreign policy blob visibly moaning in agony.
The reality of the situation is that Turkey sprung a trap set by Damascus and its allies. In doing so, Turkey helped to clean up what was previously a near impossible situation for Damascus.
While much of the western mainstream media has laboured over ‘Trump’s decision‘ to pull-out US troops from Syria, there are other factors which have been driving the current situation. If you’ve been monitoring the Turkish press over the last few years, you would know that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been eager to fire-up his AKP base at home and project Neo-Ottoman power regionally, so this latest Turkish foray into Syria can be seen as a resumption of the ‘New Turkey‘ – the AKP’s gradual transformation of Turkey from a secular Kemalist state, to an Islamic one. This gradual revolution is not confined within Turkey’s own borders though, as it hopes to extend its micro-colonial project of Sunnification to include areas in question located inside and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. Hence, Ankara has moved its forces into Syrian territory for the third time in as many years, this time dubbed “Operation Peace Spring,” and with Erdogan justifying the move under the auspices of ‘fighting terrorism,’ vowing once again to secure the country’s national security by stamping-out the Kurdish YPG-PKK ‘terrorist threat’ embedded in northern Syria. He may have achieved some marginal success in this department, but not in the way most mainstream pundits think.
Unknowingly perhaps (or not), Turkey helped towards resolving at least three separate problems which had been grating at Damascus and Moscow for at least the last three years. Firstly, the Turkish incursion has finally displaced uninvited US military forces that had begun illegally occupying northeastern Syria since late 2016, effectively propping-up their SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) Kurdish-led proxy militants, many of whom share membership with Kurdish YPG/PKK militant groups. This weekend has shown the world that without its US protection, Kurdish-led forces are not as viable as they have been depicted in the western media, now exposed to the painful reality that their ‘autonomous’ status in northeastern Syria is on borrowed time, evidenced by the fact that they failed to protect Kurdish residents from the Turkish military and their jihadi vanguard ground forces, formerly known as Free Syrian Army (FSA), who’ve rather cynically rebranded themselves now to the ‘Syrian National Army’. With Syrian Kurdish forces now on their back heels, they were left with no other option than to approach Damascus to negotiate an alliance. That agreement was inked this weekend, with the SAA now heading towards key towns and cities in the northeast of Syria including one of the centers of fighting – the hotly contested Syrian border town of Kobani. This new reality also means that Turkish military will not willingly fire upon SAA forces inside of Syrian sovereign territory, although Turkey’s jihadist FSA/SNA militias might engage with its old nemesis. Those side skirmishes could prolong instability, but they are not nearly as insurmountable as entrenched US forces in the area.
Reports show the SAA’s arrival in these areas as being met with cheers from crowds – which is a public relations disaster for Washington and its Kurdish ‘Rojava’ nation-building project in northern Syria.
Lastly, aside from securing its key northern border crossings, Damascus in now one step closer to reclaiming its oil and gas fields situated north of the Euphrates river near the city of Deir Ezor, and which have been continuously occupied by ISIS and SDF forces respectively since 2014. Liberating its own domestic energy supply will go a long way towards helping Damascus mitigate some of the economic suffering felt as a result of the imposition of joint EU-US sanctions, a punitive embargo designed by western powers to strangle the country and foment more domestic unrest.
A New Middle East
The Kurdish request for Damascus protection also flies in the face of years of western propaganda which tried to justify Washington’s policy of military occupation and nation-building by convince the world that the Syrian government was unwelcome in the northeastern region of its own country, and that “Kurdish independence” was a fait accompli. Moreover, Damascus is a step closer to securing previously vulnerable stretches of is eastern border with Iraq which the US was previously ‘managing’ and which allowed ISIS the move through and use as a staging ground for attacks further afield in areas like Sweida and Al Tanf. If a mutual security arrangement can be reached between Syria and Iraq to secure its shared border, then this would potentially revolutionise political and economic affairs in the region, and even globally.
If these events do come to pass, it would be a complete defeat for decades of Washington-led efforts in the region. Together with its allies, the US has worked long and hard to keep this part of the Middle East unstable and divided. It was in this US-led and Saudi and Israeli-engineered environment of destablisation that both al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists were able to emerge and thrive for so long. Its adversaries should remain vigilant though, as history demonstrates, both Washington and Israel are not above provoking instability in order to achieve their shared short-term and long-range goals for the region.
Regardless, the board has been flipped in Syria. Unable to either hold territory or keep thousands of ISIS prisoners in custody, US-backed SDF militias have been exposed as the latest in a long lineage of hapless pawns of Washington in the Great Game. Once new ground locations are secured by SAA forces, then Damascus could invite Russian air support to secure this airspace – an outcome which can only mean that terrorists’ days will be numbered going forward. Any remaining ISIS or Al Qaeda terrorists brigades active in north of the Euphrates will have few remaining escape routes, other than north to seek refuge in the various AKP-sanctioned terrorist enclaves located across the border in southern Turkey.
As this author said back in early 2018, the US-Kurdish dance in northeastern Syria was always a game of musical chairs, and sooner or later, someone had to leave. And that someone is the USA, and immediately followed by ISIS.
As President Bashar al-Assad said already, Syria is determined to reclaim “every inch” of its territory. So it might behoove western powers not to underestimate the will and determination of a country and army which has withstood eight years of a fully internationalised regime change war waged against it.
***
Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq.
October 14, 2019
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation | Middle East, Syria, Turkey, United States |
2 Comments
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