RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-endgame-in-syria/

Americans are getting the retreat they voted for.

“The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence. It’s a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal by this president of American allies and American values.”
     —Pete Buttigieg, October 15

Mr. Mayor has a point. For 75 years, from Fulda Gap to the 38th parallel, the American soldier has been the last line of defense against violence, chaos, and oppression. From Kosovo to Anbar, he has kept a lid on cauldrons of bloodlust. Remove him, and the poison boils over.

That is what happened when Congress reduced aid to South Vietnam in 1975. It is what followed U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. It is happening now in northeast Syria, and it will happen again when Americans leave Afghanistan. Our forces depart; our allies collapse; our adversaries take command.

The pattern was established well before Donald Trump took office. It will persist after he departs. There is nothing so consistent as American ambivalence toward our superpower status. Most great powers covet hegemony. We hate it. The costs are too high, the demands too stressful.

“For every exercise of the great power’s prerogative, there has been an equally strong recoiling from the use of power,” wrote Robert Kagan in A Twilight Struggle (1996). “While the United States cannot escape behaving as the hegemonic great power, it is also a great power with a democratic conscience, a strong anti-imperialist streak, and an unwillingness to adopt the role of policeman anywhere for more than a brief time.”

https://nypost.com/2019/10/19/trump-didnt-sell-out-the-kurds-by-pulling-out-of-syria/

“The Kurds are paying a heavy price in this battle — not because of a US betrayal — but because they remain stateless and thus powerless. By targeting Erdogan financially, legally and undermining his legitimacy, President Trump has done more to help the Kurds than his critics with their crocodile tears. And for now, he is winning.”

Critics blasted Trump for allowing Turkey to invade Kurdish-ruled northern Syria, but Kurdish fighters are more realistic about US military support.

The national media blasted President Trump’s withdrawal of 50 US military advisors from the Syrian border with Turkey as a “sellout,” a “betrayal” and a “huge strategic blunder.”

Let’s be clear: None of them truly care about the Kurds. Otherwise, they would have been sending correspondents and camera crews to Rojava, as the Kurds call northern Syria, on a regular basis.

Let’s also be clear about the goals of Turkish president Tayyip Recep Erdogan. While he attempted to stylize his military invasion of Rojava as a counterterrorism operation, few international observers bought into it. Why? Because there have been no terror attacks against Turkey from Syrian territory since the Syrian Kurds established their self-governing entity in 2012. None.

Erdogan is not even remotely interested in fighting ISIS, or in taking responsibility for the estimated 12,000 ISIS fighters currently in Kurdish custody at the al-Hol refugee camp. What actually happens to those ISIS prisoners, and the fate of Christian and Yazidi minorities, will be key measures of the agreement hammered out by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with Erdogan on Thursday.

The humanitarian disaster that unfolded this past week helped to paint Erdogan as notorious a mass murderer as Saddam Hussein. And it was to Erdogan’s legacy that the president appealed in his private, and now public, letter to the Turkish president as the crisis unfolded.

Erdogan’s real goal with this invasion was to smash Kurdish self-government, and those 50 US advisors were the last thing in his way.

https://stream.org/what-trump-has-wrought-in-syria/

https://www.iraqichristianrelief.org/

Juliana Taimoorazy is a fellow of The Philos Project, and the Founder of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council. She started the nonprofit organization to help foster awareness about the plight of the Iraqi Christians, and to raise funds to deliver food and medicine to Iraq.

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I’m guardedly optimistic that President Trump’s withdrawal and this agreement might result in stability. And that this will not be a green light for Islamist ethnic cleansing. The Syrian Democratic Forces, however, see this as their forced surrender. They have announced that they won’t abandon their positions to Turkey. They will simply cease fighting over the small areas Turkey has already conquered. But they will hold the rest of the land they have come to possess. They count on help from the legal government of Syria and its Russian allies. That would mean folding the SDF into the regular Syrian Arab Army, and granting the region Russian air protection.

 Turkey doesn’t want to have dogfights with Russian planes. Or to face the heavy equipment Assad’s army commands. Therefore, its land-grab in Syria will prove limited. Its plans to expel Kurds will probably fail. Turkish President Erdogan has alienated world opinion by his actions and threats. (For instance, he warned he might shove 3.6 million Syrian migrants into Europe.) He can’t count on NATO support if war flares up with Russia. Erdogan has asked Russia’s Vladimir Putin for a face to face summit. I don’t expect Putin to cave to Erdogan’s demands for a chunk of Syrian territory. Although there has been an agreement reached by the U.S. and Turkey, the fighting on the ground continues.

So I think the U.S. Congress should move ahead with its sanctions bill targeting Turkey. President Trump should sign it. Aggressors should pay a price when they create 100,000 refugees with wanton attacks on neighboring countries. I have followed the abusive and aggressive actions of Kurdish nationalists in Iraq and Syria toward Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs. So I don’t consider the Kurds a long-term safe option for Syrian Christians either. The legal government of Syria must regain some control of that region. It must include Syrian Christians and the Kurdish Sunni Muslims in negotiation and political talks. Otherwise keeping the peace won’t be worthwhile for them.