RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/21/trump-is-smarter

A bipartisan consensus among the foreign policy elite holds that America needs to maintain its de facto overseas empire. This includes both preserving stability, as well as fomenting deliberate instability, including regime change in places like Syria. This consensus among elected officials, defense contractors, general officers, talking heads, and various experts is not shared by the vast majority of Americans, who elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump on their promises to end “stupid wars” and put America first.

The American people have good instincts on these matters.

The Confused Syria Campaign
Our Syria campaign has been a confused affair from the beginning. In the waning days of the Arab Spring, Obama supported various rebel factions seeking to oust Bashar al-Assad, as he had earlier in Libya and Egypt. Syrians soon found themselves in the midst of a brutal civil war, and in this vacuum—as in Iraq only a decade earlier—jihad tourists from all over the Middle East soon joined the fray.

The various enemies of the Syrian regime included the so-called “moderate” rebels, Kurds, and Sunni extremists, the latter of which were divided between al Nusra and ISIS. There are no obvious good guys here, and America’s initial support for regime change created the vacuum in which ISIS grew, just as America had created a vacuum in which ISIS’s parent organization began in Iraq. While the vacuum was the outcome of bad planning and misplaced idealism in the case of Iraq, in Syria, it was deliberate . . . and reckless.

Trump inherited this war where we were simultaneously fighting ISIS and the regime with the help of the so-called Free Syrian Army. At first, he defined the mission more narrowly, focusing on eradicating ISIS. This too was controversial, but few could argue with the desirability of defeating ISIS. Most aid to anti-regime rebel groups ended, and the combination of U.S. forces, the Syrian Arab Army, and the Russians fighting alongside the Syrian Arab Army, reduced ISIS from a quasi-state to a ragtag band fighting for survival.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/21/mattis-is-wrong-this

OK, let’s combine today’s two most obnoxious Washington-speak clichés into one ugly mashup:

Trump has thrown the last adult in the room under the bus.

“Mattis Exit Paves Way for Global Chaos” was the sober CNN top headline during the hours following the announcement Thursday of the defense secretary’s resignation.

The end is near. If the Church of Mammon heard confessions, Washingtonians would be queued out along Constitution Avenue waiting to be shriven and wondering if Mammon even cared if they were heartily sorry.

James Mattis will join Nikki Haley on the outside of the Trump Administration, where Bill Kristol has been wanting them to be, the better to be available on Kristol’s dream team of prospective NeverTrump candidates for president in 2020.

Sixteen months ago, Mattis was riding high within a Trump Administration with a different makeup. In August 2017, he joined other top officials in getting the president to postpone carrying out his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“The game plan agreed upon at Camp David,” said a report in RealClearDefense, “was a triumph for Mattis and [then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R.] McMaster, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, a military analyst. The two worked hand-in-hand with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence.”

McMaster had arranged for Pence to cut short an official visit to Latin America, becoming a diplomatic no-show in key capitals in order to join Tillerson and Mattis in strong-arming Trump into postponing the Afghan withdrawal. Four-star General John Kelly, who recently had become White House chief of staff, also was one of the advisers urging Trump to keep American soldiers in Afghanistan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/us-syria-withdrawal-right-way-to-conduct/

American must not abandon its friends.

President Donald Trump stunned Washington and the Middle East with his decision to withdraw from Syria on Wednesday. He doubled down on his move the next day, asserting that the U.S. shouldn’t be the world’s policeman. While the U.S. decision has shocked allies and pleased adversaries, there is still a window of opportunity for the U.S. to do the right thing. That means not abandoning those who led the way in defeating ISIS and making sure U.S. policy in the region is not undermined.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani traveled to Ankara on Thursday, just twelve hours after Trump’s decision, and met with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They discussed working together on security and stability in the Middle East. This comes just two days after the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, and Russia met in Geneva to discuss the future of Syria. These three countries now sense victory in Syria — and all have opposed U.S. policies.

With Washington poised to withdraw from an area in the east of Syria about the size of West Virginia, the main U.S. partners in the war on ISIS may now be attacked by Turkey or be forced to contend with a growing ISIS insurgency on their own. The U.S. is allied with a group called the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and other units recruited over the last four years of the war. The SDF liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa last year. They have sacrificed greatly and control an area home to millions of civilians, as well as 3,000 ISIS detainees. These are the same Kurdish fighters who helped save tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi minority from ISIS in 2014.

Turkey accuses the YPG of being linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — an ethnic Kurdish separatist group in Turkey, which Ankara sees as terrorists — and has vowed to launch an operation against the Kurdish YPG fighters. The U.S. has supported Turkey in its conflict with the PKK over the years, and even recently offered a bounty of $12 million for the top PKK leaders. But Washington has partnered with the SDF, which was created with U.S. support and is not seen to be the same as the PKK. U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey told the Atlantic Council on Monday, December 17, that the U.S. supported the SDF becoming part of a changed Syrian society that would include a new constitution and a multi-party political system. The U.S. achieved this kind of system in Iraq after 2003. Through all its flaws, Iraq is a functioning democracy today. The U.S. wanted this for Syria, but bit-by-bit the Obama administration — and now the Trump administration — has walked away from the groups Washington supported, including the Syrian rebels and now the American allies in eastern Syria.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272315/trump-right-withdraw-syria-robert-spencer

President Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of the 2,000 remaining U.S. troops in Syria, prompting the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and arousing the ire of CNN – both excellent indications that the President is on the right track.

CNN, the 24/7 Hate Trump Network, headlined its story on the withdrawal “Trump orders rapid withdrawal from Syria in apparent reversal,” giving the impression that an erratic Trump was changing course, only to admit in the article itself that the President “has long signaled his desire to get out of Syria.”

Meanwhile, in his self-righteous and condescending resignation letter, which is being heralded by all the usual establishment suspects today as a positively Confucian outpouring of wisdom, even Mattis admits that he agrees with Trump on the salient issue at play in Syria: “Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world.”

That’s why it’s time to bring the troops home from Syria, and why Trump is right to do so. Trump explained it himself: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Yes. In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State (ISIS) has been defeated, although it still has forces there and could experience a resurgence — in which case the situation would have to be reevaluated. Still, on January 19, 2017, the last day of the disastrous presidency of Barack Obama, it looked as if the Islamic State was going to be occupying a large portion of Syria for decades, if not generations, to come. Turkey was buying its oil. The Islamic State was beginning to follow the path of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, making the transformation from terrorist group to a respected member of the family of nations.

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.