(Updated Oct. 19) Turkey Attacks U.S. Ally in Syria, The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2019
Updated (2):
As we are about to post a new Issue of the Week and Message of the Day (which we have left up together for the same period for some time now as a policy in order to increase staying focused on critical issues as explained at length some ago), we leave this issue with a new opinion piece in The New York Times (posted online today, October 19, in print tomorrow in The Sunday Review) by Opinion Columnist Nicholas Kristof which summarizes what has happened on this issue historically through today. The piece follows:
By Nicholas Kristof, October 19, 2019, The New York Times
He was right when he said, “Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for.”
It was just five years ago that an American president, faced with a crisis on Syria’s border, acted decisively and honorably.
Barack Obama responded with airstrikes and a rescue operation in 2014 when the Islamic State started a genocide against members of the Yazidi sect, slaughtering men and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery. Obama’s action, along with a heroic intervention by Kurdish fighters, saved tens of thousands of Yazidi lives.
“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared at the time. “And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.”
Contrast Obama’s move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.
“Who can trust Trump’s America?” The Economist magazine asks on its newest cover. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, added: “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history.”
Updated:
Today, Sunday October 13, The Observer in London has issued a scathing and penetrating analysis in the editorial below on the current events in Syria.
It is followed by an extensive and essential update in tomorrow’s New York Times, posted tonight.
A stunning instantaneous shift in policy by Donald Trump appears to have allowed this, by reversing his own recently stated policy during a phone call with a virtual dictator, apparently without any input from the U.S. officials and advisors with knowledge of the meaning and consequences of such actions who are charged to give this input and carry out these duties, much less with allies in the region and globally.
Indeed the shifts back and forth within moments in expression by Trump, and the forms of expression around these shifts–have been so inexplicable in content, timing, delivery, strategy and motive (even with his history in this regard) and the stakes so monumental, that even Republicans in Congress are revolting en masse, joining alarmed Democrats, at least at the moment.
In terms of the people of Syria, a people largely murdered and displaced in the wake of betrayal after betrayal, and of the other nations in the region, and of the disaster it has increasingly become, and the risks to the world at large–it is the latest psychotic break in an intertangled inferno, which we have visited often, last on August 28.
The post refered to above has at it’s core another Observer editorial, and an extraordinary article in the same edition.
Here’s The Observer again today, and the continuation of the excellent coverage of events by The New York Times:
Turkey’s invasion of north-east Syria, faciliated by the withdrawal of US forces, could lead to a resurgence of Islamic State
The conflict engulfing north-east Syria is a wholly avoidable disaster. It was widely foreseen. It could, and should, have been prevented. Responsibility lies principally with Turkey’s bellicose president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But many others share the blame, including a criminally incompetent Donald Trump, Islamic State jihadists, who previously destabilised the area, and the international community, which has failed, over the course of eight bloody years, to halt Syria’s civil war.
The terrifyingly indiscriminate Turkish artillery barrages and air strikes directed at towns and villages in Kurdish-held areas along the border shame those who ordered them. Erdoğan’s claim that his forces are only targeting terrorists is given the lie by the rising toll of civilian deaths and injuries. Aid agencies have evacuated. Hospitals have closed. The UN says about 100,000 people have fled so far. With Turkey rejecting calls to halt the offensive, it could all get much worse.
This is a calamity foretold. Turkey has longstanding, legitimate border security concerns. It believes the Kurdish militia that controls north-east Syria is in league with its old foe, the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which the US and the EU, like Ankara, regard as terrorists. Erdoğan had been threatening military action east of the Euphrates for months. Only the presence of US troops stopped him.
US officials say an agreement with the Turks was in place, providing for joint border security patrols. But this was not enough for Erdoğan. His impatience arose not from the immediacy of the terrorist threat, which he often exaggerates, but stemmed, at least in part, from his need for a political “win” after recent election setbacks and from rising rightwing nationalist pressure to repatriate Syrian refugees to a Turkish-controlled “safe zone”.
It is at this point that Erdoğan’s agenda converged with Trump’s visceral aversion to “endless” foreign wars and the impeachment furore in Washington. When Erdoğan phonedlast Sunday evening, demanding that the US lift its veto on intervention, Trump saw a chance to both bring the troops home and distract attention from his Ukraine shenanigans.
Official assertions that Trump did not give Erdoğan a green light are pure eyewash. The White House statement issued after the phone conversation makes clear this is exactly what happened. And yet, on one level, this outcome is unsurprising. Erdoğan and Trump are two of a kind: unscrupulous, instinctively authoritarian leaders ever ready to bend the truth. Neither can be trusted.
These two men have something else in common. They do not understand, nor do they sufficiently care about, the consequences of their actions. Trump seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the storm of criticism, including from Republicans, which greeted his decision to pull back US troops. He was rightly lambasted for betraying America’s Kurdish allies and helping Russia, Iran and Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. Fears were raised that Isis jihadists held under Kurdish guard might escape.
The fate of detained Isis fighters, totalling about 10,000 across northern Syria and Iraq, is an issue to which Erdoğan, too, has plainly not given enough thought. He says Turkey will ensure they do not abscond. But his unimpressive ground forces, still thrashing about on the border, cannot be counted on to fulfil such pledges. Already there are reports of an Isis prison break in a town under Turkish bombardment and two Isis suicide bombings.
Trump repeatedly, untruthfully, boasts that Isis was defeated on his watch. The “caliphate” is destroyed, but the jihadists still pose a threat, as a new International Crisis Group study shows. There are persistent reports that the organisation is regrouping. Trump and Erdoğan have potentially assisted this process. Who could blame Kurdish fighters, with their homes under attack, if they abandoned the detention camps and went to resist the invader?
The international community is at fault, too, for failing to establish a process for bringing Isis terrorists to justice. Leaving them, their families and supporters stuck indefinitely in desert camps was never going to work. Western countries, including Britain, have mostly dodged their responsibilities in this regard, concerned that jihadists who hold British or European citizenship could be freed by domestic courts for lack of admissible evidence. To address this problem, they should consider the creation, under UN auspices, of an international criminal tribunal for counter-terrorism.
Sadly, as the entire history of the Syrian war suggests, the chances of such international collaboration actually happening are all but non-existent. The UN security council, debating Turkey’s action, could not even agree a joint statement, due in part to the usual Russian obstructionism. The EU will discuss it at this week’s summit. Expect little more than stern words. Nato is just looking on. Meanwhile, Trump blusters about sanctions, as if it all had nothing to do with him.
Pity the people of northern Syria, bombed and blasted from their homes by a ruthless autocrat who should, if there were any justice, face a war crimes tribunal. It seems there is no helping them. What an outrage. No wonder the world is in such a mess.
By Ben Hubbard, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Patrick Kingsley, Oct. 14, 2019
Under fire by Turkish forces, the militia that battled ISIS threw in its lot with Syria’s Russian-backed government.
In northeastern Syria on Sunday, a funeral was held for a Kurdish political leader, civilians and Kurdish fighters.CreditCreditDelil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
DOHUK, Iraq — Kurdish forces long allied with the United States in Syria announced a new deal on Sunday with the government in Damascus, a sworn enemy of Washington that is backed by Russia, as Turkish troops moved deeper into their territory and President Trump ordered the withdrawal of the American military from northern Syria.
The sudden shift marked a major turning point in Syria’s long war.
For five years, United States policy relied on collaborating with the Kurdish-led forces both to fight the Islamic State and to limit the influence of Iran and Russia, which support the Syrian government, with a goal of maintaining some leverage over any future settlement of the conflict.
On Sunday, after Mr. Trump abruptly abandoned that approach, American leverage appeared all but gone. That threatened to give President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian and Russian backers a free hand. It also jeopardized hard-won gains against the Islamic State — and potentially opened the door for its return.
The Kurds’ deal with Damascus paved the way for government forces to return to the country’s northeast for the first time in years to try to repel a Turkish invasion launched after the Trump administration pulled American troops out of the way. The pullout has already unleashed chaos and bloodletting.
The announcement of the deal Sunday evening capped a day of whipsaw developments marked by rapid advances by Turkish-backed forces and the escape of hundreds of women and children linked to the Islamic State from a detention camp. As American troops were redeployed, two American officials said the United States had failed to transfer five dozen “high value” Islamic State detainees out of the country.
. . .
(Initial Post, October 9, 2019.)
Tommorrow’s headline story in The New York Times, posted online tonight, is Turkey Attacks U.S. Ally in Syria.
The story began on Sunday.
A stunning instantaneous shift in policy by Donald Trump appears to have allowed this, by reversing his own recently stated policy during a phone call with a virtual dictator, apparently without any input from the U.S. officials and advisors with knowledge of the meaning and consequences of such actions who are charged to give this input and carry out these duties, much less with allies in the region and globally.
Indeed the shifts back and forth within moments in expression by Trump, and the forms of expression around these shifts–have been so inexplicable in content, timing, delivery, strategy and motive (even with his history in this regard) and the stakes so monumental, that even Republicans in Congress are revolting en masse, joining alarmed Democrats, at least at the moment.
In terms of the people of Syria, a people largely murdered and displaced in the wake of betrayal after betrayal, and of the other nations in the region, and of the disaster it has increasingly become, and the risks to the world at large–it is the latest psychotic break in an intertangled inferno, which we have visited often, last on August 28.
We let the article and it’s forerunner on Sunday speak for themselves.
By Ben Hubbard and Carlotta Gall, Oct. 9, 2019, The New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Turkey launched a ground and air assault on Wednesday against a Syrian militia that has been a crucial American ally in the fight against ISIS, days after President Trump agreed to let the operation proceed.
As Turkish warplanes bombed Syrian towns and troops crossed the border, the chaos in Washington continued, with President Trump issuing seemingly contradictory policy statements in the face of strident opposition from his Republican allies in Congress.
Mr. Trump acquiesced to the Turkish operation in a call with Turkey’s president on Sunday, agreeing to move American troops out of Turkey’s way despite opposition from his own State Department and military.
On Wednesday, hours after the operation began, he condemned it, calling it “a bad idea.”
By that time, Turkish fighter jets were streaking through the sky over Syrian towns, while artillery shells boomed overhead. Traffic was jammed with terrified civilians fleeing south in trucks piled high with possessions and children.
After about six hours of airstrikes, Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel allies crossed the border, opening a ground offensive.
