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What Trump’s Syrian Withdrawal Really Reveals

January 13, 2019

What Trump’s Syrian Withdrawal Really Reveals

A wise decision is greeted by denunciations, obstructionism, imperial thinking, and more Russia-bashing.

President Trump was wrong in asserting that the United States destroyed the Islamic State’s territorial statehood in a large part of Syria—Russia and its allies accomplished that—but he is right in proposing to withdraw some 2,000 American forces from that tragically war-ravaged country. The small American contingent serves no positive combat or strategic purpose unless it is to thwart the Russian-led peace negotiations now underway or to serve as a beachhead for a US war against Iran. Still worse, its presence represents a constant risk that American military personnel could be killed by Russian forces also operating in that relatively small area, thereby turning the new Cold War into a very hot conflict, even if inadvertently. Whether or not Trump understood this danger, his decision, if actually implemented—it is being fiercely resisted in Washington—will make US-Russian relations, and thus the world, somewhat safer.

Nonetheless, Trump’s decision on Syria, coupled with his order to reduce US forces in Afghanistan by half, has been “condemned,” as The New York Times approvingly reported, “across the ideological spectrum,” by “the left and right.” Analyzing these condemnations, particularly in the opinion-shaping New York Times and Washington Post and on interminable (and substantially uninformed) MSNBC and CNN segments, again reveals the alarming thinking that is deeply embedded in the US bipartisan policy-media establishment.

First, no foreign-policy initiative undertaken by President Trump, however wise it may be in regard to US national interests, will be accepted by that establishment. Any prominent political figure who does so will promptly and falsely be branded, in the malign spirit of Russiagate, as “pro-Putin,” or, as was Senator Rand Paul, arguably the only foreign-policy statesman in the senate today, “an isolationist.” This is unprecedented in modern American history.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Reasons To Believe In Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Are Vanishing

January 7, 2019

Reasons To Believe In Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Are Vanishing

On the first of April last year I published an article titled “Ignore The Words Of US Presidents. Watch Their Actions Instead.“, about Trump’s claim that his administration would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon”. Watching the actions and ignoring the words is a personal policy I’ve found very useful in dealing with top government figures who understand that power has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with narrative control, and in that particular case the president’s claims were quickly memory holed after a highly suspicious chemical weapons allegation in Douma a few days later. The president’s words said the troops were leaving, and what actually happened was the US bombing the Syrian government for a second time in a year while troops remained where they were.

Everyone completely lost their shit last month when the president once again made the claim that US troops will be brought home from Syria. Establishment loyalists of the political/media class went into full meltdown, Mattis handed in his resignation, and #Resistance Twitter pundits who’d never typed the word “Kurd” in their lives suddenly became self-appointed experts on the geopolitical dynamics between the Turkish government and the YPG. Support for the president’s words also rushed in from anti-interventionists and anti-imperialists everywhere, as well as from a few surprising places like Democratic Representative Ted Liu and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

So there was a very strong reaction to Trump’s words about Syria. But what have his actions been? If we look at this administration’s actual behavior with the narrative soundtrack on mute, what we see is a significant increasing of the number of troops in Syria, bombing the Syrian government twice, committing war crimes in Raqqa, providing full-throated support for hundreds of Israeli air strikesagainst Iranian targets in Syria, and a steadily increasing number of indications that the troops won’t be coming home at all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Reactions To Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Plan Say More Than The Plan Itself

December 21, 2018

Reactions To Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Plan Say More Than The Plan Itself

President Trump has ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, which is reportedly expected to take 60-100 days or 30 days depending on who you ask. According to Kurdish forces in eastern Syria the withdrawal of American as well as French troops is already underway, though France is saying it’s staying. The number of troops to be withdrawn which keeps getting repeated in the news is 2,000, but there’ve been reports that the actual number of US ground troops in Syria is closer to 4,000. The US-led airstrike campaign against Islamic State will reportedly continue.

Trump says the withdrawal is because ISIS has been defeated in Syria, but others are pointing to the conspicuous timing of his recent chat with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has announced a coming military operation against Kurdish forces in Syria east of the Euphrates in the near future, as the more likely reason. An anonymous senior US official has told Reuters that the two leaders didn’t discuss a US withdrawal from Syria, but the timing of the conversation as well as a recent $3.5 billion arms deal with Turkey indicates the the US withdrawal and Erdoğan’s planned military assault could very well be related. The Kurds put all their eggs in the basket of US support out of a desire to create their own nation, and a US withdrawal means they’ll be forced to either court an alliance with Damascus, as some analysts believe will happen, or risk being trapped between hostile Turkish forces and hostile Syrian coalition forces as the Assad government races to reclaim Syrian territory.

Beyond that, it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Syriasly

April 2, 2018

Syriasly

“Peace with Honor” was President Nixon’s anodyne phrase for futzing around as long as possible in Vietnam to conceal the reality that the US military was getting its ass kicked by what we had initially thought was a 98-pound weakling of a Third World country. That was a half-century ago and I remember it now at age 106 thanks to my diet of kale and pepperoni sticks. Not ironically, the long struggle finally ended a few years after Nixon quit the scene, with the last straggling American evacuees waiting desperately for helicopter airlifts off the US embassy roof. And now, of course, Vietnam is a tourism hot-spot.

And so just the other day, the latest POTUS declared (in his usual way) that “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” The utterance sent the neocon partisans in government into a paroxysm. Cries of “Say What?” echoed up and down the Great Mall. Which “other people” was Mr. Trump referring to? The United Auto Workers? Gandalf the Grey? The cast of Glee?

I doubt that the average Harvard faculty member can state with any conviction what the fuck is going on in Syria. Vietnam was like a simple game of Animal Lotto compared to the mystifying puzzle of Syria. And then, of course, once you get handle on who the players are, it’s another matter altogether to descry what US interests there might be.

One angle of the story is whether it is in America’s interest for Syria to become another failed state in a region of several other failed states. Whatever else you might say about US policy in that part of the world, the general result in places like Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has been anarchy and irresolvable factional conflict. In today’s world of nation-states, a central government is required to avoid that fate, and the embattled one in Syria happens to be the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The US has long militated for the overthrow of Assad, but I would also challenge you (and the Harvard faculty) to name any credible party or person who we have hypothetically proposed to replace him with.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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