So here we are; another crisis in the Middle East and a leader that has his head up his ass. Not that our history isn’t replete with such leaders. Under George Bush, we started an unprovoked war, using lies by a group that included our newly appointed National Security Advisor, John Bolton. Then Obama stood by and calmly watched as the region exploded. He did little but draw lines that meant nothing but at least he left us with an Iran Treaty that seems to be working despite the ravings of the current Liar-in-Chief. .
Our half-assed policies in Iraq led to the emergence of ISIS . Obama never seemed to understand that the only way to deal with them was to crush them. Trump, to his credit, I guess, sent a couple of thousand Special Forces troops into Iraq and Syria to help the very functional Kurdish troops beat the crap out of ISIS and now that they have them almost defeated, and almostis the operative word here, Trump does exactly what he denounced Obama for doing. He announces that we are going to pull our Special Forces out of Syria soon. This is like yelling “Fire,” in a packed theatre and as soon as a couple of hundred people are trampled, you add, “as soon as I find a match.”
Now maybe I’m nuts but I seem to remember the fat idiot screaming that Obama was doing exactly the wrong thing by telling the enemy what he was going to do before he did it. Do all the little Trumpets see this as in any way different?
Of course as soon as Trump told the world he was pulling out of Syria, Assad felt free to gas more of his people. The Russians and the Iranians have been quick to deny any knowledge of this atrocity but you have to be serious bridge buyers, to believe anything these lying punks say. It’s pretty clear that Assad wouldn’t be making this kind of move without the backing of his enablers.
Like any bully, Trump is very good at pushing around the little guys. His bullying tactics may even be working against Kim in North Korea because despite our homegrown coward’s panic over Kim’s nuclear capabilities, North Korea has never presented a real nuclear threat. Kim has maybe one deliverable nuclear bomb. But as soon as he delivers it we turn his country into molten rock. It was never a real threat and for fifty years our presidents subliminally understood that and therefore didn’t move on it. Now Kim has made so much noise that Trump was forced to recognize the situation and being the bully he is; offer the expected threats. Maybe they worked. Kim has gotten the recognition he needed and is finally in a position to meet with an important western leader so maybe they can get something done. At this point Kim’s scenario of using his minimal nuclear capabilities to get recognition has worked, and Trump is such an egomaniac that he thinks he bullied the little guy into a defensive position.
But when Assad gassed his people and the Russians threatened retaliation against possible attacks on Assad the question became would Trump’s bullying tactics work in Syria. Russia and Iran appeared a lot more imposing than North Korea and they appeared to be very invested in Assad’s success. It seemed that Trump couldn’t just rattle a saber and have Russia and Iran back down. It appears that those assumptions were wrong. It seems that Russia was more than willing to lose a little face rather than engage us in a war.
What was needed was a concentrated effort involving enough allies to buffer Russian and Iranian interests. France had already stated that they stood ready. England was almost certain to jump in. What was needed was the rest of the European union to stand firm behind a concerted, American led, attack on Assad. The Iranians had never been up to a really good fight. They like to instigate and back others but have almost no history of putting their own people in harms way. The question became, do the Russians really want to fight for Syria, especially after they went up against our Special Forces with a mercenary unit and got their heads handed to them with over 200 casualties? Nothing pointed to either of them wanting to go up against a concerted effort by an allied force just to save Assad’s ass.
So the pentagon, led it seems by General Mathis, put together a plan and struck. They hit three Syrian chemical manufacturing, research and storage facilities, seeming to completely destroy all of them. Of course Fat Boy came out immediately and took complete credit for the whole thing, but being too dumb to understand its historical embarrassment, used the phrase “ Mission Accomplished.” At least he didn’t wear his military school uniform.
The raid seems to have been a success from a military standpoint. Add to that; there seem so far to be almost no civilian casualties, a big plus. Unfortunately our media have split down the middle on how they see the raid. Sinclair and Fox see it as the biggest thing since Normandy while MSNBC and CNN keep looking for problems that it may cause.
The reality is that it was probably a good thing but it could, in my estimation, have gone further. It sent a message. No matter how casual Assad wants to appear, he heard the message, if for no other reason than it cost him a ton of money. I feel that the message would have been stronger and certainly more personal if we had hit Assad’s palace too. Assad has murdered hundreds of thousands and ruined millions of lives. He needs to feel what that’s like. The fact that he was not a personal target probably has something to do with the involvement of the French and the Brits. Or maybe we just didn’t have the stomach for it ourselves. Maybe we were worried about what the Russians might do if we really took out Assad. Who knows, but considering their lack of follow up on the retaliatory threats, it appears we missed a good chance to rid the world of a serious monster.
It’s interesting to note that despite the noise they made last week about shooting down anything that attacked Syria and retaliating against the sources of any attack, the Russians sat on their hands and did nothing. That’s because the Russians have another problem. Their economy is crashing. Oil, their staple industrial commodity is becoming worthless on the international markets and what was already a shoddy economy is really tanking. Add to this the latest sanction on Russian oligarchs and the facts that the population is one step from starving and another from revolting. Putin has only one course; get the people revitalized by the possibility of a war with the west but don’t actually fight it. He still has a very functional military. He knows he needs to look like he’s ready to use it, not as a real war machine but as a viable threat to make the west back down or at least back up. If he can do that, he can save face and continue his rule. He’s already done that successfully in Ukraine and Chechnya. He had one important card to play. He surrounded the Syrian capital with a missal defense system and has announced that anyone who violated that system will have his missals shot down and will be putting the sources of those missals in consummate danger. What he’s referring to in each statement is the missal attack that Trump ordered after the last gas incident where we fired 59 missals into an all but abandoned Syrian air force base. This time, he’s was saying, if you fire any missals, we will shoot them down and we will attack the carriers from which they came. But we did and they didn’t, proving that Putin knows he just doesn’t have the military might to engage us, let alone the whole of Western Europe, in a war.
That changes the whole picture and it will influence everything that happens from here on. It does not mean that we can just push Russia around. And that’s the part that someone, hopefully Mattis, can explain to Trump. The bullying has already been done. It has, to some extent worked. Now it’s time once again to try to find a diplomatic path that understands the need to save everyone’s face in order to get workable solutions accomplished. Unfortunately our Idiot-in-Chief has left our diplomatic corps decimated in both numbers and talent. What we need now is a Kissinger or an Albright. Unfortunately neither exists on the current scene. Even Baker, who is still breathing would do the trick but Trump is dumb enough to think he can do the job alone and that is the death knell of any functional negotiation.
Even without the deficiencies in our diplomatic corps, those who keep calling for negotiations by Middle East powers to solve the problems of in Syria are mostly whistling in the wind. The various populations of the Middle East, despite reputations as excellent hondlers are not particularly good negotiators. This is primarily due to an almost blanket refusal to accept the principal that a good negotiation leaves each party wanting something more after having gotten something equal to the other.
Middle eastern negotiators have proven over the years that they are not satisfied with a fair result. They are only happy when they have beaten their opponent into the ground. A perfect example are those intelligent Israeli’s who have long understood that the only solution for their fight with the Palestinians is a two state solution. But that would give the Palestinians some stature, some reward and the great body of Israeli’s can’t live with that, even though the smart ones understand that a single state solution will eventually mean the end of Israel because in a few generations the Palestinians will outbreed the Jews and become the majority of voters. Result: no solution.
There are really only two rulers in the Middle East who understand the futility of what has gone on before them and that a continuation of the kind of thought that exists there now will only lead to the eventuality of war across the area. They are Mohammad of Jordan and the young MBS who appears to be taking the reins in Saudi Arabia. But they aren’t enough. The hatred that flourishes throughout the area is so virulent that outside voices really project the only solutions. The problem with that is outsiders have very little understanding of the social, religious and emotional forces that move the region.
Right now there are skirmishes, wars and pre-wars going on all over the region. If we could somehow bring peace to Syria, the nastiest struggle at this moment, it would, at least, give hope to the rest of the Middle East. To do that, we have to find a way to give Putin a face saving out. He got into Syria for the same reason he had been screwing around in the Ukraine. He is desperate to expand the Russian sphere of influence, to somehow make it appear that his nation is rejuvenating the power that once allowed them to rule all of Eastern Europe.
There is a way to accomplish the goals of Putin, placate Iran, help the Kurds to get a nation and create peace in Syria but it all hangs on one action. To do it we have to eliminate Assad. With Assad out of the way a nation much like Germany after WWII could be created. It’s not ideal, but it was a site of virtual peace for almost 40 years before the Soviet Union collapsed and everything split up.
What I am speaking of is a nation split in three ways; a Christian section, protected and in the sphere of Russia; a Shiite Muslim section protected by Iran and a Kurdish section that would be absorbed by whatever Kurdish state evolves. Assad would never sit still for this and that’s why he has to go. Colonial powers have done this throughout the history of the world. Sometimes it works sometimes not, but at least it would give the country a chance to take a breath and start to recover. It would have benefits for Russia, Iran and the Kurds, it would get us the hell out of there and maybe, just maybe, we could stop killing those poor people.
The one fly in the ointment could be Turkey. So of course, your next question is; what the hell is Turkey getting involved in this for? Well it seems that the Kurds occupy large parts of western Iran, northern Iraq and Syria and an especially large section of eastern Turkey. This is the area once known as Mesopotamia. The total area takes up almost half a million square Kim and the Kurdish population numbers around 34 million. Neither Iraq, Iran, Syria nor especially Turkey want to give up this land the Kurds occupy but the Kurds want a nation of their own and are determined to fight for one. They are, by the way, damn good at fighting. They are the principle reason why we have been able to drive ISIS out of Iraq and Syria.
But the Turks seeing that the Kurds are depleted from their war on ISIS have decided that this is a good time to attack them and possibly take back the areas of Turkey they currently occupy. Trump, instead of standing by our only real ally in the Middle East fight announces that he is pulling our troops out; abandoning them. It’s the ultimate cowardly move. What he should be doing is telling Turkey to back off or we will start pulling our bases out of Turkish territory, which is a big economic deal for Turkey and that we will reposition them in Kurdish territory, which would be a boon for the Kurds. I bring this up because the Kurds are the key to a lot of what can happen in the region. If the tripartite split in Syria is to have any chance of working, they have to be a part of it. If they get that territory and eastern Turkey it will be easy for them to get the northern regions of Iraq and Iran. I think the Kurds would be a very stabilizing force in the region and a good ally for us, if we don’t stab them in the back first.
But back to the chemical attack in Syria and our complete lack f policy in the entire Middle East. Trump has had a lot to say about how Obama mismanaged everything in that area. Everyone else has had a lot to say about how Bush/Cheney caused a catastrophe there. No one wants to lose any more of our sons and daughters there but if the area isn’t calmed and controlled in some way it’s a sure bet that we will.
Even though he has taken all the kudos for putting our Special Forces into Iraq and Syria to back up the Kurds it’s hard t believe that Trump actually had anything to do with that decision. Reports are that the Pentagon is compiling plans on how to deal with more gas attacks in Syria because Assad has shown no willingness to cease them but with a President who can’t read and possesses only limited attention span, how can we ever expect any kind of intelligent plan to emerge from our leaders?