Displaying posts published in

December 2018

Trump’s Syria Withdrawal Policy Is Correct, But Communicated Horribly Requiring “enduring defeat” in Syria will only result in endless war.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/21/trumps-syria-withdrawal-policy-is-correct-but-communicated-horribly/

“Trump Criticized For Breaking With Longstanding American Tradition Of Remaining In Middle Eastern Countries Indefinitely,” joked the Babylon Bee upon the news President Donald Trump is bringing troops home from Syria, but the joke wasn’t far from the truth at all.

The news deeply angered the Washington foreign policy consensus, which argues that troops should stay in the region indefinitely even though the stated mission of defeating ISIS has been accomplished.

It’s true that Trump’s decision to depart Syria was sudden and poorly communicated. Viewed one way, however, it was not a complete surprise. Since at least 2013, Trump has repeatedly argued against the idea we need a sustained conflict in Syria:

During the campaign, he reiterated his views. But then he started sounding quite different, including getting belligerent with Russia over Syria:

Just a few weeks prior to that last tweet, Trump said he’d bring troops home very soon and laid out a bit of the rationale publicly in the video from March below:

The Neverending, Mysterious Saga of Michael Flynn By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/23/the-neverending-mysterious-

Certainly, no one should defend a top-ranking federal employee’s lying to federal investigators or to his superiors in the Trump Administration, if that is what former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did, as evidenced by his own confession.

Note if Flynn lied to President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence about details of his private conversations, then that is unethical and understandably should be grounds for dismissal. The distinction, however, is whether Flynn deserved to be fired or to be in jail.

What put Flynn in legal jeopardy were the general’s statements to FBI investigators that purportedly were false, and allegedly given deliberately to mislead two federal investigators.

I express doubt here only because of media reports and leaks that Special Counsel Robert Mueller later either pressured Flynn for a confession, by strategies of financial exhaustion or leveraged him by threats to indict his son, or both.

Without that pressure, one wonders how Flynn might have explained his earlier alleged inconsistencies in recounting a private off the record conversation with a foreign diplomatic official to two FBI officials. That is, had he had adequate legal resources or not faced prosecutorial threats to indict his son, would he have later claimed that months earlier that he had been dishonest to Peter Strzok and his fellow FBI investigator?

Had Flynn at the time been apprised of why Andrew McCabe was sending his agents over to the White House, Flynn would have had choices, perhaps Lois Lerner-like to plead the Fifth, or in James Comey fashion he initially could have told chief interrogator Peter Strzok on 245 occasions that he did not know or did not remember, or he simply could have told investigators in James Clapper fashion that he was giving the least untruthful version of the story.

Trump Bests the Geniuses in Syria All those foreign policy wizards who got us into this mess are now screaming. No wonder. Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272339/trump-bests-geniuses-syria-kenneth-r-timmerman

As one Democrat sputtered on national radio, “The Secretary of Defense just resigned, we’re pulling out of Syria. WHAT’S GOING ON?”

What’s going on is that Donald Trump, maligned by Democrats and the media as a petulant dummy, and worse, is doing what they could never imagine: he is making good on a campaign promise.

He campaigned on waging a real war to defeat ISIS, rather than tiptoeing around the battle in Syria and Iraq as Obama had done.

He committed U.S. troops, U.S. aircraft, and U.S. intelligence and diplomatic assets to the war, while making good on yet another campaign promise by having local forces who bore the brunt of ISIS brutality form the tip of the spear.

That was work the geniuses could never imagine. Only a “dummy” could have done it. A “dummy” who campaigned on telling the truth to the American people, and who has spent the past two years making good on his campaign promises.

The campaign to smash the ISIS caliphate in Iraq ended in victory more than a year ago. The battle to drive ISIS out of Syria ended more recently. Today, ISIS has no significant foothold territorially in either country. As the President said, that was the mission, and we have accomplished it.

Of course, for the geniuses who had been advocating a full-fledged U.S. military intervention in Syria, defeating ISIS was not enough. They hope you will forget that in 2012, they wanted the United States to use our might to support Islamist groups – some of whom later joined ISIS—to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Failing total victory, their goal was “establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria,” according to a heavily-redacted 2012 intelligence report.

That would be the same ISIS caliphate that President Trump ordered U.S. forces to defeat.

Turkey’s Threats against Greece by Debalina Ghoshal

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13469/turkey-threats-against-greece

The one issue on which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his opposition are in “complete agreement” is the “conviction that the Greek islands are occupied Turkish territory and must be reconquered.”

“So strong is this determination that the leaders of both parties have openly threatened to invade the Aegean.” – Uzay Bulut, Turkish journalist.

Ankara’s ongoing challenges to Greek land and sea sovereignty are additional reasons to keep it from enjoying full acceptance in Europe and the rest of the West.

Turkey’s “persistent policy of violating international law and breaching international rules and regulations” was called out in a November 14 letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres by Polly Ioannou, the deputy permanent representative of Cyprus to the UN.

Reproving Ankara for its repeated violations of Cypriot airspace and territorial waters, Ioannou wrote of Turkey’s policy:

“[it] is a constant threat to international peace and security, has a negative impact on regional stability, jeopardises the safety of international civil aviation, creates difficulties for air traffic over Cyprus and prevents the creation of an enabling environment in which to conduct the Cyprus peace process.”

The letter followed reports in August about Turkish violations of Greek airspace over the northeastern, central and southeastern parts of the Aegean Sea, and four instances of Turkey violating aviation norms by infringing on the Athens Flight Information Region (AFIR). Similar reports emerged in June of Turkey violating Greek AFIR by conducting unauthorized flights over the southern Aegean islets of Mavra, Levitha, Kinaros and Agathonisi.

Turkey Turns on America by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13470/turkey-turns-on-america

How interesting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Turkey and the U.S. “strategic partners,” when he has repeatedly stated that Turkish campaigns in northern Syria are aimed at eliminating U.S.-backed Kurdish groups. Erdogan referred to these groups as “terrorists” whom Turkey is “burying in the wells that they have dug.”

On December 20, Erdogan held a joint press conference with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in which Erdogan announced that Ankara is siding with Tehran against Washington.

President Trump said Turkey “should be able to easily take care of whatever remains” of ISIS in Syria. But Turkey did not bomb or invade Syrian or Iraqi territories when ISIS invaded and took over those lands. In fact, ISIS members and supporters have been operating in Turkey, and the Turkish government has at times treated those who expose ISIS activities more harshly than ISIS supporters themselves.

The U.S. withdrawal will end up costing Americans far more in blood and treasure down the line than the small but deterrent footprint there now. The damage a withdrawal will do at this time is inestimable — and will go down in history as Trump’s legacy, just as Neville Chamberlain’s is the bogus deal Hitler dangled in front of him. It would have been so much less costly in blood and treasure to defeat Hitler before he crossed the Rhine. How ironic it would be if Trump were to go down in history as one of those “losers” he so detests.

Andrea Leadsom is Nearly Right on How to Save Brexit And May has two powerful cards in her hand by Malcolm Lowe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13461/andrea-leadsom-brexit

The whole kerfuffle over the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland – the so-called “backstop” – could be ended by making one simple addition to Article 20 of the Protocol.

The EU keeps insisting that, in order to protect Ireland, the “backstop” cannot be modified. But if that insistence leads to a no-deal Brexit, it will guarantee that Ireland suffers the very damage that the “backstop” was supposed to prevent!

Among the Conservative MPs opposed to May’s deal, there is now an emerging consensus that if she can obtain convincing assurances over the “backstop” from the EU, accepting her deal may be the least bad option. This may be a turning of the tide.

If the EU refuses to give May legally binding assurances to ensure a brief application – if any – of the “backstop,” it alone will be responsible and worthy of condemnation for every misery that ensues from a no-deal Brexit.

Andrea Leadsom is the Leader of the House of Commons, that is, she is responsible for arranging government business. She has also proposed a solution to the problem of the “backstop” which is based on the same principle as our own earlier suggestion, namely, to limit the application of the “backstop” to one year renewable by mutual consent.

If there is anyone fresh to the Brexit drama, let us recall that the deal to leave the European Union negotiated by UK PM Theresa May consists of two documents, the Withdrawal Agreement (WA, 585 pages) and the Framework for the Future Relationship (FFR, 26 pages). The WA both winds up the current UK-EU relationship and defines the nature of the “transition period” from March 29 next, the day that the UK officially leaves the EU, to the end of 2020. During that transition period, the FFR is due to be turned into a full-fledged treaty defining the future trading and other relations of the two parties.