The Turkish advance in northern Syria continues on and no matter how well the Kurds may resist it, the Turkish forces, comprised of the Turkish army and Syrian militias, are going to prevail.
Those militias are a very problematic aspect of this and now, predictably, atrocities are occurring to at least some degree. The number documented isn't large, but then the conditions for reporting it aren't ideal either. The New York Times reported Syrian militias executing two Kurdish prisoners. The Syrian Democratic Forces, allied to the United States, claim that their Turkish backed Syrian adversaries executed a female Kurdish politician and nine others, which was, as all such things seem to be now, filmed.
None of this is or should be surprising. The militias that Turkey has backed are Islamist militias, with there being some claims that former ISIL members are included in their ranks. As both Arabs and Islamist they are not going to be kind to the Kurds, who are not Arabs and moreover who, while generally (not completely) Sunni Muslims as well. While they have, at least since the rise of Islam, generally been Muslims, culturally they tend not to be zealots and their political parties, which back their militias are almost always socialistic in nature.
The Turks, as we've seen in earlier threads on this disgrace, cite that radical socialistic nature as a reason for occupying northern Syria on the basis that the Kurdish militia in northern Syria has been terroristic in the past, which is in fact true. Indeed, most Kurdish militias have sponsored guerrilla action in the past. But in northern Syria they were our allies and now they're going to be severely treated by Turkish backed Syrian Islamist militias who are definitely not kind hearted. Long term, what this means is that a chance to create a Kurdish region in northern Syria along the model that has been created in Iraq will likely fail and the Turks will in fact guaranty that those they are fighting now will entertain terrorism in the future. There must have been a better means of handling this.
In terms of handling this, a letter from President Trump to President Erdogan has been released, a copy of which is set out below.
This letter is so peculiar in nature that the news media that ran it actually ran headlines verifying that it was not a fake.
It's really hard to know what to make of a communication like this. President Trump has taken a lot of heat, deservedly, for abandoning the Kurds and Republicans joined the Democrats in droves to condemn their abandonment in the first instance in which the GOP has really broken ranks with the President. Open condemnation of the President's actions has been common. The President doesn't seem to know how to handle it and in a recent meeting with Nancy Pelosi he had what she described as a "melt down".
For decades now Americans have condemned career politicians and even career politicians do that, claiming that they aren't career politicians. Trump is the first American President since Dwight Eisenhower who wasn't some sort of career politician and political insider, and we'd have to go back a very long ways to find somebody with no pre office political experience, assuming that we even could. Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, and the Bush's did have business experience, but they all had a lot of political experience by the time they were President as well. In lacking any, President Trump was unique and his supporters claimed that uniqueness, including his business experience, would operate in his favor.
It doesn't seem to be and now, for the first time in my lifetime, I've heard people lamenting that the Oval Office is not occupied by a career politician.
One of the thing the President's supporters cited in his support is that he was a businessman with a long history of deal making, and he certainly cited that himself. His critics challenge the actual degree of his success, but as I'm not familiar with his personal history, I'll forego commenting on it, and indeed, I'm taking this in a different direction anyhow.
People familiar with the long history of American politics will recall that New York contributed a number of really significant and gentlemanly candidates to the nation's political scene, including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Al Smith. There are numerous other examples. Given that, it's remarkable how in recent years, for some reason, that class of New York politician seems to have vanished.
New York itself has always featured a lot of extremely brash aggressive personalities, which is one of the reason that a lot of Americans from elsewhere are not keen on New York. A social study of this from years ago actually concluded that it was weapons related, in that New Yorkers live in dense conditions and have traditionally been unarmed whereas Southerners, who traditionally have an exaggerated sense of politeness, were heirs to the use of commons for cattle raising and went about armed. The thesis is that armed people tend to be polite in the assumption that other people are also armed, whereas those living in dense conditions who aren't, tend to be rude so that they can get their way.
Whatever the merits of that thesis, recent New York politicians, including but not limited to Donald Trump, have been notoriously brash. To outsiders a lot of what New York politicians say sounds like it came out of Goodfellas and indeed it seems like New Yorkers have taken up celebrating that sort of behavior. Not all of them exhibit this by any means, but listening Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders (a transplanted New Yorker), Rudy Guiliani, and Bill de Blasio certainly leaves a person with that sort of impression. Anyhow, while its an extreme view I suppose, the disappearance of the Brahman class in New York and the celebration of the Wise Guy image has, I suspect, seeped its way into the regional culture in a really negative way. For most of the 20th Century no New York politician of any stripe would have told somebody not to be "a tough guy". Now that seems very New Yorker.
People who like that sort of thing or who are behind a person anyhow will celebrate that sort of conduct. Indeed, litigants sometimes like lawyers who are brash if they are working for them, for that reason alone. But almost nobody else does, which is important to remember.
Anyhow, I've wondered in recent weeks if a lot of the President's more troubling actions reflect is prior role as a businessman with few boundaries and being a New Yorker. That experience isn't helping him now.
Nor do letters like this. It's inarticulate, odd and unconvincing. A letter such as this would only be effective upon somebody who had no choice but to "make a deal" or who was an accolade of the writer. Erdrogan isn't in those categories. His decision to go into northern Syria will prove to be a long term mistake, but that won't be evident to him at this time and he has no need to "make a deal" with anyone as he now has what he wants.
At least part of what he wants is motivated by a very unsophisticated political world view and a strong Islamist identity. At the time of the first Gulf War he wasn't yet in power and Turkey remained what it had been since 1919, a highly secularized state. Erdrogan has really made inroads into changing that. Whether people are keen to openly admit it or not the founder of the modern Turkish state, Ataturk, held highly nationalistic and highly secular views, and it was effectively the case that Turkey's role as a leader in the Islamic world was suppressed. The Turkish military viewed strong Islamic roles in the governance of the nation as antithetical to a modern Turkey and the other religions in Anatolia were largely removed from it due the wars of the first fifth of the 20th Century.
No matter how a person might view that, Erdrogan's emergence has really changed that and he's taken the country in a new direction. A Turkey that would back radical Islamic militants would have been unimaginable as late as 1990. Now its doing that.
Turkey is a NATO ally with a real role in regards to the southern flanks of that alliance, although that role is much less important now than it was prior to 1990. It isn't acting like a nation seeking to fulfill that role. Turkey always worried about the Kurds and there are numerous examples of it taking military action against them, but this new alliance with radical militias is distressing to say the least.
This will end up in a Turkish victory, and the Turks will install their militia in a strip along northern Syria. But what then? The Kurds are trying to make common cause with the Damascus government, but pulling that off seems unlikely. The Syrians are, however, not going to willingly tolerate Syrian Islamist militias inside their own country. Turkey is now courting Russia.
Long term, this is a disaster for everyone. Shortsightedness in the extreme.
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