[blind-democracy] PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Mess on Syria's Border with Turkey

From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 16:13:08 -0400

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Mess on Syrias Border with Turkey

October 14, 2019

Trump just missed an opportunity to pull back troops without inducing
another bloodbath.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

In less than a week, a new front has opened in Syrias 8-year, all-but-over
war, featuring hot- and cold-running proxies from its earliest days. Syrian
sovereignty is once again violated as casually as a schoolboy cuts across a
neighbors lawn. The Assad government in Damascus now faces a new threat to
its stability. Thousands of Islamic State jihadists may now escape captivity
and reactivate their savage campaign to turn Syria, a secular state, into an
Islamic autocracy.

All this was set in motion when President Donald Trump advised Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, his Turkish counterpart and one of the Middle Easts most
unprincipled despots, that U.S. troops would withdraw from positions in
northeastern Syria in advance of a Turkish attack on Kurdish forces in the
area. Trump spoke to Erdogan by telephone the Sunday before last. The
Turkish incursion commenced three days later.

Whether or not Trump green-lighted Erdogans long-planned attack on Syrian
Kurds got a lot of ink last week, but it is not an interesting question. Of
course, he did. Here is the interesting question: Is the mess now unfolding
along Syrias border with Turkey precisely the outcome the national security
state desired when Trump let the green light shine? Was the perfectly
predictable chaos, destruction, and desperation enveloping the region
somehow unforeseen? Or was it, from the perspective of Washingtons hawkish,
coup-cultivating factions, the fundamental point of this latest travesty on
Syrian soil?

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By appearances, at least, Washington is now deeply divided on the new Syrian
crisis. A firestorm of tweets burst into flame as soon as Trumps decision
to pull back troops hit the news last Monday morning. If press reports are
accurate, this is a disaster in the making, Lindsey Graham, the South
Carolina Republican, wrote in a series of tweets. If this plan goes forward
will introduce Senate resolution opposing and asking for reversal of this
decision. Expect it will receive strong bipartisan support.

Graham got his bipartisan support swiftly and in spades. By the end of the
day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a bevy of other Capitol Hill Democrats
lined up behind Graham, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other
Republican heavyweights. On Wednesday, Graham and Chris van Hollen, the
Maryland Democrat, introduced a bill in the Senate to impose sanctions
against Erdogan and the Turkish military.

The running theme among Trumps critics is that he has betrayed the Syrian
Kurds, who have fought loyally and effectively against the Islamic State for
years. Graham called this a stain on Americas honor and warned in
Twitter-speak that Trumps decision ensures ISIS comeback. This is one
side of the story in Washington.

There is another.

That U.S. Air Base in Turkey

The Pentagon, the national security apparatus, and the intelligence agencies
have valued Turkey as a sometimes difficult but always essential ally since
the Cold War decades. The air base at Incirlik, which the U.S. military
built in the 1950s, now hosts roughly 5,000 Air Force personnel and stores
its tactical nuclear weapons. Beginning in mid2015, U.S. planes used
Incirlik to fly sorties over Syria. This is the other side of the Washington
story.

What happened last week is easier to understand against this background.
While press reports suggest Trump acted spontaneously and alone when he
telephoned Erdogan, it is highly improbable, if not beyond imagining, that
Trump made his decision to green-light Erdogan in isolation. It is far more
likely, if it is not certain, that the defense and national security
establishments had made a choice by the time Trump picked up the telephone
the Sunday evening before last: Long term, Turkey will prove a far more
effective check on the government of President Bashar alAssad, the Iranians
and ultimately the Russians than Kurdish militias could ever be. Better to
betray the Kurds (for the eighth time in nearly a century) than risk another
kerfuffle with the erratic and irascible Erdogan.

U.S. Air Force members at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, talk to President
Donald Trump via video link, Nov. 23, 2017. (U.S. Air Force/Jason
Huddleston)

It is not difficult to reckon which faction in Washingtons foreign-policy
cliques will prevail in this apparent standoff. Striking noble poses is
nothing new among the grandstanders who populate Capitol Hill. Let us not
forget these are the same people who have long supported an extensive covert
action program against the Assad government. When, in any case, was the last
time the U.S. did anything anywhere on Earth in the name of principle? (Did
someone actually say Americas honor?)

There is something decidedly upside down at the core of the past weeks
events. Trump has been right since his campaigning days to demand an end to
Americas wars of adventure and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from places
they have no business deploying. He was right to announce the withdrawal of
troops from Syria late last year an executive order swiftly stonewalled.
Now he is right to order the withdrawal of troops from northeastern Syria.
Until Washington learns to act in the name of global peace and order instead
of imperial hegemony, rarely will it be wrong to propose bringing American
troops home.

But in acting on his frequently stated conviction two Sundays ago, Trump is
effectively serving the very interests he set out to counter when he
campaigned for the presidency. These interests have tenaciously sought to
destabilize Syria and depose the Assad government since early 2012 at the
very latest. In net terms, Trump has just given these efforts a boost it is
difficult to believe he intended.

Erdogans Involvement

Erdogans pernicious involvement in the Syrian conflict dates to its
beginning in 2011. By 2013, Turkey was a vital conduit for arms and
chemical-weapons shipments to jihadists active in Syria. By 2015 there was
plentiful evidence that Turkey was a conduit in the other direction this
time for shipments of oil the Islamic State had pumped from captured Syrian
wells. A year later, Erdogan sent troops into northern Syria in pursuit of
Kurdish YPG militias, which he terms terrorists even as they have proven the
most effective force in northern Syria against the Islamic State.

Erdogan is now newly empowered. Press reports over the weekend indicate that
the Syrian fighters accompanying Turkish troops are the same murderous
jihadists the State Department and the media have infamously labeled
moderate rebels for the past eight years. Whose interests are served by
this recrudescence of savagery? Why is the American press again obscuring
the true identity of these ghastly fundamentalists?

Along with Britain, France and several Middle Eastern nations, the U.S.
actively armed, trained, financed and equipped these same jihadists from the
first months of the Syrian conflict. Washington has also been complicit, in
many cases directly and actively, in enabling the Islamic State since it
crossed into Syria from Iraq in 2014. For the disbelieving and the naïve,
this was no more than a rerun of the strategy that former National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski persuaded President Jimmy Carter to adopt in
Afghanistan in 1979: Arm the jihadists and ignore their radical ideology.

President Donald J. Trump in bilateral meeting with Turkeys President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan at G-20 Japan Summit, June 29, 2019, in Osaka, Japan. (White
House/ Shealah Craighead)

There is no indication covert American efforts to topple the Assad
government by arming jihadist militias have ceased. Are we now reading the
latest chapter in the story of these efforts?

Trump has a few good ideas on the foreign-policy side, but he is a dreadful
statesman. He could have navigated this latest attempt to take a small step
back from imperial dominion while averting the contradictions just outlined.
The key here is the principle of territorial integrity. Russian President
Vladimir Putin invoked it over the weekend. So did France and Germany, which
just suspended arms shipments to Turkey. So did the Arab League, in an
excellently worded statement issued Saturday.

Washington honors the sovereignty of other nations only when it serves U.S.
interests. The corporate press never mentions this principle when reporting
on illegal U.S. incursions into nations such as Syria. Trump just missed an
opportunity to pull back troops without inducing what shapes up as another
bloodbath. When Treasury Secretary Mnuchin threatened Friday to impose
sanctions against Turkey, it was intended primarily to forestall Grahams
bill in the Senate penny-ante politics. Erdogans new Syria campaign was
in its third day by then a stark fact on the ground.

As to the Syrian Kurds, they committed Sunday to ally with the Syrian Arab
Army against the Turkish incursion. It is where their best interests have
lain all along. The SAA will now enter northeastern Syria for the first time
in five years. And the Kurds will no longer collaborate with the Americans
to keep Damascus from reuniting the nation. This is a positive outcome.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer.
His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American
Century (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick
Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

[blind-democracy] PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Predictable Mess on Syria's Border with Turkey

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