RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/farewell_to_syria.html

An uproar has arisen over President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. military forces out of Syria. But note, it isn’t the American people who are protesting this decision. Rather, it’s those who propose perpetual war — the ivory tower think-tankers, the TV talking heads, and a whole gaggle of Beltway insiders. The cloud of dust they have created distracts from the fact that the Syria is at best a minimal national security interest to the U.S.

One of the arguments the pro-war crowd makes for keeping the U.S. military in Syria indefinitely is to constrain Iran. But this is bogus. There are plenty of other countries in that region who can do that. But why should they bother if Uncle Sam is willing to do the dirty work for them? The bottom line is that America should not be doing everything for everybody.

Some salient points: Donald Trump went up and down the United States campaigning on getting America out of its senseless military involvements. He did not hide his intentions. As for the Afghan adventure, it has been going on for seventeen long years at a cost of over a trillion dollars. Ponder that: seventeen years. And there’s no end in sight. President Trump is now winding down these wars. That some of his national security advisors like James Mattis and John Bolton disagree is irrelevant. They weren’t elected; Trump was.

As far as Syria goes, if senators like Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsay Graham think Syria is so vital to U.S. national interests, then they should get Congress to authorize military action there. To date, there has never been such an authorization or even an attempt at one. Why not? The answer is because it wouldn’t come close to passing.

Trump is right in his decision to pull the U.S. forces out of Syria. Hopefully he will soon follow with Afghanistan. For too long the wars there have played a disproportionate role in U.S. foreign policy. Many American lives have been lost to little purpose and heaven only knows how many of trillions of dollars have been wasted. Instead of squandering our forces in Middle Eastern quagmires and the barren mountains of Afghanistan, America’s military attention needs to be on China, a country that is a true threat to U.S. national interest.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/remember-when-three-of-obamas-former-secretaries-of-defense-blasted-him/

Did you enjoy all that time between the announcement of Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s resignation and the Democrats’ politicization of it? I believe it was about five seconds. The news is certainly disappointing. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Mattis, tremendous progress has been made in cleaning up the mess left behind by Barack Obama—most notably against ISIS. In fact, the success in “defeating” ISIS was cited as Trump’s reason for announcing the United States’ withdrawal from Syria. Given Obama’s fumble with Iraq—his premature departure creating a leadership vacuum that ultimately caused the rise of ISIS—I’m not yet convinced that leaving Syria is the best move. Unlike his predecessor, Trump has deferred much of his military strategy to the advice of his generals, but Mattis’s disagreement over this withdrawal and the reduction of troops in Afghanistan was a major reason for his decision to resign.

This latest high-profile departure quickly had Democrats running to the cameras to attack Trump. They’re not alone though. Several Republicans have already expressed concern over the resignation—citing Trump’s disagreements with Mattis in particular.

Let’s be honest here: The departure of a secretary of defense over foreign policy and military strategy differences is hardly a new thing. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates, resigned without incident in 2011, but would later criticize Obama’s role as commander in chief in his memoir published a few years later. It revealed a troubled relationship between Obama and the Pentagon:

… Gates – who was first appointed to his post by former President George W Bush – reveals, in a series of swipes that are surprisingly combative coming from such a senior former official, problems between the White House and the Pentagon that have made for troubling relations at the very highest levels.

“All too early in the administration,” adds Gates, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials – including the president and vice-president – became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.”

Perhaps most damagingly, he also alleges that Obama did not believe in his own strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan, which he was “skeptical if not outright convinced … would fail,” and that he was skeptical at best about the leadership of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai.

“The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out,” writes Gates.

In 2013, Obama’s second secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, resigned after less than two years on the job over frustrations with Obama. Panetta also wrote a memoir revealing disturbing details about his time in the Obama administration, and told of Obama’s repeated decisions to ignore his advice, citing specifically “the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq in 2011, the failure to intervene in Syria’s civil war by arming rebels and the abrupt reversal of Mr. Obama’s decision to strike Syria in retaliation for using chemical weapons on civilians.”

In 2014, shortly after the midterm elections that saw Republicans take control of the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama fired Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over, you guessed it, policy and strategy disagreements. Hagel said in an interview a year later that the Obama White House tried to “destroy” him and that they had no strategy for fixing Syria. CONTINUE AT SITE

While the following analysis was written several months ago, with President Trump’s recent decision regarding a premature Syrian withdrawal, and a 21st century, would-be Islamist Turkish sultan’s (Erdogan) aim to at least partially re-create the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, this widely-published article is even more timely now than before rsk.

“….Seth Frantzman reported for the Jerusalem Post on September 9, 2018 about a precision Iranian ballistic missile attack on Kurds deep inside of Iraq which hit the exact building–some accounts say exact room–where Kurdish opposition leaders were meeting. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was sending a message to others besides Kurds with this strike.

Like their otherwise centuries’ old rivals for regional hegemony–Turks and (mostly Sunni) Arabs as well–the one thing all three are in agreement about is the denial of political and even basic human rights to some forty million native people who pre-date at least the Turks and Arabs in their region by millennia. Both of the latter have outlawed Kurdish language and culture. The twenty two million Kurds in Turkey–about a fourth of the latter’s total population–have been renamed “Mountain Turks” by Ankara; and besides Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign in “Arab” Iraq in the 1980s, which took some 200,000 Kurdish lives, the title of the Kurdish scholar, Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf ‘Against The Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968), says all you need to know about how Syrian Arabs have dealt with them as well.

The Iranians have continued hanging Kurdish dissidents again this week. All three nations have slaughtered either tens or hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the past century.