From the moment Putin began his intervention into Syria the U.S.’s punditocracy said he would get bogged down in a quagmire. That he couldn’t afford the coming war with entrenched ISIS fighters.And this is just choice:This was based on the fact that the U.S. couldn’t defeat ISIS. But that logic only held if you believed the U.S. was actually fighting ISIS which I never did. Once Russia moved into Syria it exposed the lie of ISIS’s strength.
Within days of Russian air operations beginning the Syrian Arab Army began taking large chunks of territory from U.S. and Turkish-backed rebels and from ISIS.[1]
Putin was smart to remain skeptical of Trump’s ability to deliver on his promises. And Trump, for his part, was sent down a path which would define his first term as a shambolic mess thanks to his inability to grasp the enormity of the problem confronting him.NotesHe pushed U.S. policy too far in the pro-Israel, pro-Saudi direction to sell his version of Middle East peace, lobbied for intensely by Benjamin Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and their backers who helped install arch neocons around Trump like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Fiona Hill and Gina Haspel.
These folks were put in place to keep Trump ignorant of the dangers of his policy while Secretary of State James Mattis was there to stoke the hard-line militarily on Iran. Add to that General Joseph Dunford’s role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to suppress strategic conclusions about our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.[2]
[1] "Luongo: A New Middle East Thanks To Putin." By Tom Luong, ZeroHedge, 10/20/19 (emphasis removed).
[2] Id.
3 comments:
The Turkish Ambassador to Thailand wrote the following letter to the Bangkok Post.
I don't know what to think of it. She will be utterly slavish to Erdogan of course, this message I think went out to all Embassies, for Ambassadors to send to news outlets. .
Warning >> Do not read any more of Bangkok Post than necessary It is a drivelling sycophant to NYT, WaPo. Huffington, Bloomberg, anything sickly progressive.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1776489/turkish-forces-are-shielding-syrians-and-kurds
Thank you very much, Paul. I just got around to reading that linked article. Good to see Turkey commit to the territorial integrity of Syria. I admire the YPG/YPD for the good work they did in fighting ISIS but I think the whole picture is not quite as pretty. I don't know much about them but I think it's wise to be a bit skeptical. They did make a grab for eastern Syria with US encouragement and that was unwise. Foolish is the man who purports to understand the ethnic, religious, and historical soup that Asia Minor and the ME are. I'm still not sure what "the Levant" is but that's another story.
The Ambassador is disingenuous about the valiant Turkish war on ISIS. They hosted it on Turkish territory, I believe, and allowed all sorts of jihadi scum and weaponry to cross from Turkey into Syria. And Erdogan's son made himself a few lira marketing ISIS oil back in the day.
I'll disinfect my keyboard now that I've read the execrable Bangkok Post! :--)
PS - The Turkish militia being used by Turkey are just reconstituted jihadi scum, no doubt with a generous leavening of ISIS swine. The realities for Syrian or Kurdish civilians in areas they control are likely to be a good deal more miserable than the ambassador's rosy depiction of Turkish altruism and principled self defense suggests.
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