RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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

American Thinker readers were warned about General Mattis over a year ago in this article. Briefly, Mattis was and remains a supporter of global warming.

The issue of global warming continues to be a reliable and simple litmus test. If someone believes in global warming, then you can be sure he is a globalist who loathes Western civilization.

Then there was his support for the Islamist Anne Patterson, loathed by the Egyptian people for her support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then there was the matter of allowing one of his underlings to throw Fox Company, of Task Force Spartan in Afghanistan in 2007, under bus so he could advance his own career.

Since that article, Mattis’s charge sheet has expanded somewhat. Trump wanted to get trannies out of the military simply because of the costs involved in having them. Mattis pushed back and slow-walked the order. Gender dysphoria is one of the worst mental illnesses, with a 50 percent suicide rate. Who in his right mind would leave people suffering from this condition near weapons or machinery? Someone who ranks ideology above effectiveness and unit cohesion would.

Mattis argued the case for staying in Afghanistan, overriding Trump’s gut instinct. There is no point in staying in Afghanistan. When someone stops paying for the imported grain that allows Afghanistan’s population to double every 25 years, then Afghanistan will collapse. Mattis’s reasoning for staying in Afghanistan is that we either fight them there or fight them here. The opposite is true. By continuing to feed them, we are creating more future terrorists. The way to keep this country safe is to forbid them to enter.

Mattis entered into a “suicide pact” with Steve Mnuchin and Rex Tillerson with the effect that if any one of them was fired, the other two would resign. Normally an employer, upon hearing that his employees have entered into such an undertaking, would fire all three straight away. The president didn’t do that, and Tillerson showed how ineffectual he was. Tillerson won’t be taking much of his time leading the Boy Scouts of America from now on; he allowed gay troop leaders, and now the venerable institution is considering bankruptcy in response to gay rape claims. Like Mattis, Tillerson rose through projecting an image. The reality fell far short of that.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/president_trump_is_right_about_syria.html

On the campaign trail in 2012, President Obama took credit for ending the war in Iraq and bringing all U.S. troops home from that country. Military leaders quietly decried the evacuation of troops from Iraq. To do so created a vacuum for hostiles, such as the displaced Baath Party members loyal to Saddam Hussein. In early 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria appeared, rolling through the upper third of a largely unarmed and unprotected Iraq, setting the country ablaze.

Although removing U.S. forces from an unarmed Iraq was an obvious blunder, by September 2014, President Obama was dismissing complaints of his handling of the outbreak of hostilities. He declared that ISIS was the equivalent of “a jayvee team” and was nothing to worry about. In 2016, we learned from Secretary John Kerry that regime change in Syria, the removal of Bashar Assad, was the Obama administration’s goal. Focused on this agenda, the White House intentionally gave arms to ISIS, betting that ISIS’s success would force the Syrian president to acquiesce toward Obama’s terms and step down.

U.S. political and military leaders knew that Iraq was working to build up its military, but it had not been able to reconstitute its armed forces in effective numbers. They knew that Iraqi recruits and pilots were in schools run by Americans and taught by Americans. The timing was right for war, as Iraq was utterly defenseless if ISIS came to town.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/trump_declares_victory_in_syria_too_soon.html

In the midst of the Vietnam War, Sen. George Aiken is reported to have said, “Let’s just declare victory and get out.” In October, President Donald Trump did “declare victory” over ISIS. “I want to get out,” the president said. “I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation.”

This week, it was announced that our 2,000 or so troops would be pulled out. Job done, go home, right?

There was a bit of a hedge by the Pentagon. Chief spokesperson Dana White said the campaign against ISIS is “not over,” but “we have started the process of returning U.S. troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign. We will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates.”

OK, still, we’re pretty much done, right? In the narrowest sense, perhaps, although ISIS remains a regional scourge. But it raises the question of what to do when your war aims change in the middle of the war. The defeat of ISIS was, clearly, the first American goal. We were not involved in the Syrian civil war and not planning to be. So American forces took on what appeared to be a limited job. But nothing is limited in the Middle East.

By design or default, United States forces were serving two other functions. In September, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton made the case for Iran’s continued presence in Syria creating instability that presented a strategic threat to American interests in the region – and would allow Iran to control the “Shiite Crescent” from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mattis-resigning-tells-trump-to-pick-a-secdef-whose-views-are-better-aligned-with-yours/

With a letter offering a foreign policy critique and remaining mum on his thoughts about the commander in chief, Defense Secretary James Mattis announced that he will resign at the end of February after representing the U.S. at a NATO defense ministerial.

Mattis, 68, was commander of U.S. Central Command before retiring from the Marine Corps in 2013. He is currently the longest-serving secretary in President Trump’s cabinet.

Mattis wrote that he is “proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance.”

He emphasized his “core belief” that America’s “strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

“While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies,” Mattis wrote, adding that doesn’t mean being “policemen of the world” but using “all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances.” He praised NATO’s commitment to fighting alongside the U.S. after 9/11.

“Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” he continued. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions — to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/hail-to-haley/

When Nikki Haley was appointed in November 2016 by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to serve as America’s ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote that there was reason to hope she would live up to the legacies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and John Bolton as “shining beacons in the Midtown Manhattan snake pit.”

Although Haley, the governor of South Carolina at the time, was not well-known beyond the confines of her state, her personal and political history appeared to indicate that she possessed what I called the “kind of clarity on controversial issues that is required in an arena filled with people whose key purpose is to cloud the distinction between good and evil.”

Four months later, when Haley emerged from her first encounter with the U.N. Security Council and blasted its anti-Israel bias, I was even more optimistic that she had what it took “to navigate the Orwellian universe in which the U.N. operates, where Western values are on a lower hierarchical rung than Third World culture, and where a mockery is made of the concept of human rights.”

From that moment on, Haley continued to exceed expectations. She not only served as a proud and fierce defender of American interests in the world, but did so in her own dignified and powerful voice. Indeed, she made the office her own. It is an accomplishment whose significance cannot be overstated.

Her announcement on Oct. 9 that she would be leaving her post at the end of the year was thus a shock and a disappointment, particularly for Israelis. Her popularity in the Jewish state was on full display at this year’s Fourth of July celebration in Tel Aviv, where the mere mention of her name during U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s speech elicited such screeching cheers that one might have mistaken the event for a rock concert.

The ovation was well-deserved. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted upon learning of her resignation, Haley “‎led the uncompromising struggle against hypocrisy at ‎the U.N., and on behalf of the truth and justice of ‎our country.”

Indeed. But that’s not the only extraordinary thing about her. Unlike most people on their way out of a job, she did not slack off for a second. If anything, she upped her game. Her farewell speech at the monthly meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 18 was just as memorable, if not more, than her previous addresses. The gist of her words—a preview of Trump’s yet-to-be-revealed Mideast peace plan—was that the Palestinians have been abused by their leaders and misled by members of the international community.