RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/25/trumps-syria-

Whether pulling the remaining U.S. troops from Syria turns out to be a bold and beneficial move or a stupid, harmful one depends on what Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will do. That, in turn, depends in no small part on what constraints he senses from President Trump—as well as from Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Here, to the best of my understanding, are the circumstances and the possible consequences of the president’s decision to withdraw from Syria.

Erdoğan had been menacing a military attack on the Kurds in Northeast Syria who, working with U.S. troops, are finishing the dirty work of killing off ISIS. The U.S military has been warning the Turks not to do that, at ever higher levels. But when Trump called Erdoğan to talk him out of attacking our troops’ partners, it seems that Erdogan simply talked him into removing our troops.

Departing Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s anger is understandable. The boss undercut him after, following orders, Mattis had given orders down the line, as well as his word to fellow fighters. National security advisor John Bolton, too, would have been dismayed: he and Trump had agreed that we owe the Kurds a lot, and that the Kurds south of Turkey’s border provide a natural barrier to a variety of enemies of America, not least Erdoğan. Bolton might well have resigned along with Mattis if Trump had merely bowed to Erdoğan. Whether Trump bowed or not depends on whether or not there is more to the story.

Erdoğan is America’ s enemy. As far back as 2003, he forbade use of Turkish ground and airspace for U.S. operations in Iraq, including the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he has turned Turkey from a NATO ally into an Islamist dictatorship.

Neither wise nor competent, he aims to resurrect something like the Caliphate, with Ottoman Turkey its seat and himself as the Sultan in all but name. To this end, he supported the Brotherhood’s attempted takeover of Egypt, supports Hamas in Gaza, and a host of Sunni terrorist groups, in Syria as well. Only with Turkey’s active help was ISIS able to market the oil it got from Iraqi and Syrian fields, buy arms, receive recruits from abroad, etc. ISIS became more than a minor nuisance only because Erdogan provided it with a hinterland.

Erdoğan meant to use ISIS as the head of the Sunni spear to overthrow Syria’s Alawite (a version of Shia) regime. However, Erdoğan also opposes Sunni Saudi Arabia, mainly because he is financed largely by Qatar, which is in a very bitter quarrel with Saudi Arabia. In part because of Qatar, he believes he has some kind of understanding with Iran, though it is on the opposite side of the great Sunni-Shia war. He welcomed Russia’s intervention in Syria, though it brought Iranian influence to his southern as well as to his eastern border. Passionately anti-American and in disregard of Turkey’s secular geopolitical adversary relationship with Russia, he seems to be satisfied with Vladimir Putin’s de facto overlordship of the Middle East.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272335/syria-allahs-armageddon-jules-gomes

“But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make,” says soldier Williams in Shakespeare’s Henry V, before the Battle of Agincourt. In the face of opposition from Republicans and Democrats and international allies, President Donald Trump has ruled that the Syrian cause is not a good one.

“Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing?” tweets the Commander-in-Chief of the United States.

It’s worse than the US getting nothing. Syria is a holy war. Westerners who refuse to concede how central religion is to the Eastern worldview simply cannot see the futility of getting sucked into a jihad that is not ours to fight.

Trump, the ever-astute businessman, doesn’t suffer from the grand delusion of his predecessors. They considered it an evangelical mission to usher in the silver age of democracy to an Islamic world that longs for the golden age of a Caliphate. Trump, the real-estate realist, isn’t infected with the virus of wishful thinking which leads Western leaders to believe that our secular interventions will solve the centuries-old religious problems of the Islamic world.

The jihadists know they can sucker the West into a war with a few video clips and an amateur production of Lawrence of Arabia. They know how to lure naïve infidels like us who sanitise religion from the public square and are supremely unaware of the Islamic theology of the end times. Would General Matthis and his defenders accept the reality that the crisis in Syria is fuelled by the expectation of an apocalyptic countdown to Allah’s Armageddon?

“Muslim apocalyptic has its centre in Syria,” writes David Cook in his monograph Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic. During the first two centuries of Islam, the Muslim armies faced the most protracted fighting on the Syrian front, since it was here that Islam faced its most formidable enemy, the Byzantine Empire. Syria, hence, became the key area for apocalyptic speculation. In fact Syria is the theatre of operations for much of apocalyptic activity.

Muhammad himself insisted that the final wars with the Byzantines would be the one major occurrence preceding “the hour” (Ibn Masud). Although Byzantium is Islam’s main enemy, “our apocalyptic material leaves us in no doubt that the struggle over Syria would be an all-out one with the whole Christian world,” writes Islamic scholar Suliman Bashear.