Wednesday, March 19, 2003. The Second Gulf War Commences

F15E over Iraq.

The United States and a coalition of Allies, including its principal western allies, on this day in 2003, commenced operations against Iraq.  The war commenced with air operations.  

The causa belli of the undeclared war was Iraq's lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors.

President Bush went on the air and stated:

At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

Congress is just now considering a bill to deauthorize military force in Iraq, which at this point would be more symbolic than anything else.  

The initial invasion went well and swiftly, but the war yielded to a post-war, war, against Islamic insurgents that lasted until 2011.  Iraq has remained unstable, but not Baathist, and it has retained democracy, although frequently only barely.  Iran has gained influence in the country, which has a large Shiia population, which was not expected.

The war remains legally problematic in that it was a full scale invasion of a foreign power with no declaration of war, setting it apart from any post World War Two war, with perhaps the exception of the war in Afghanistan, that had that feature but lacked such a declaration.  At least arguably it was illegal for that reason.  Amongst other things, Art 1, Section 8, of the Constitution provides that Congress has the power to:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Presidents are the commanders in chief of the armed forces, and in Washington's day actually took to the field with it, so it would not be correct to assume that only Congress can deploy troops, even into harm's way.  But full scale wars. . . that seems pretty exclusively reserved to Congress.

The war also came while the U.S. was already fighting, albeit at a low level, in Afghanistan, and the Iraq episode would prove to be a distraction from it, leading in no small part to that first war ended, twenty years later, inconclusively.

The war redrew the political map of the Middle East, which it was intended to do, so to that extent it was at least a partial success, although it took much longer than expected.  It's effect on the national deficit, discussed this past week by NPR, is staggering and the nation still is nowhere near paying for it, something that will have very long term consequences for the nation going forward, and providing a reason, amongst others, that undeclared wars should not really be engaged in.  Congress, for its part, simply chose not to debate the topic in that context, an abrogation of its duty, although it did authorize military action in another form.

The war contributed to the rise of ISIL, which was later put down.  It increased Syrian instability, which has yet to be fully addressed.  

It also contributed to a rising tide of military worship in the US, while ironically would be part of the right wing reaction to "forever wars" that gave rise to Donald Trump.  

One of only two wars, the other being the First Gulf War, initiated by a Republican President since World War Two, the war had huge initial support from the left and the right, something that many of the same people who supported it later conveniently forgot.

Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part 2. The Gathering Storm.

We're only on to Feb 1 and already on to the second edition of this thread for 2023.

The reason is simple enough, the last version is already so long that certain features, such as the spell check, aren't working for new entries.  It's easier and more convenient to put up a second edition.

The big news remains, of course, the war in Ukraine.  Now a year old, the drama saw an anticipated Russian walk over turn into a monumentally expensive military disaster, with the Russians suffering battlefield defeats and being pushed out of much of what they'd taken in the first weeks of the war.  

Right now, the battlefield is nearly static, recalling the long stretches of World War One where neither side had the ability to defeat the other.  What seems to be really going on, however, is that the Russians have taken a page out of the Soviet Union's playbook and have been buying time with bodies, sending in convicts and conscripts to soak up Ukrainian munitions while they build towards a resumed offensive which is expected to start soon.

The Ukrainians know this, and are trying to prepare for it.  Part of that preparation is the acquisition of modern Western heavy weapons, which have not yet been provided to them. Western military analysts have been critical of the West for this, but frankly, early in the war nobody saw the Ukrainians being in the position they now are in.  

So a race is on, in which the West scrambles to provide modern main battle tanks, and Ukraine asks for any new system, including F-16s, which it thinks it can get and needs, against a Russian build up based on lessons learned and a larger army.

What should be clear is this.  Putin cannot negotiate, at least not unless he fears a disaster that will remove him from office completely.  Ukraine cannot give in.  It's easy to figure out what a Russian victory would be, but harder to figure out how Ukraine can force a battlefield conclusion.

Having said that, Ukraine might be able to push Russia out of Ukraine entirely, and if I were their strategist, which I'm not, advance across the frontier to the western bank of the Don, which would give the country some security and perhaps something to cause a coup in Russia.  But if they are going to do so, they'll have to achieve that in the next several months as it fights a country whose population has 100,000,000 more souls than it does.

Slava Ukraini.

February 1, 2023, continued:

An announcement from the Canadian government:

Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Prime Minister expressed Canada’s ongoing solidarity with the Ukrainian people as they continue to fight Russia’s brutal invasion while facing Russian strikes on civilian targets. The two leaders discussed Ukraine’s military, humanitarian, and financial needs, as well as the recent announcements of significant new support to Ukraine. They also spoke about how Canada and like-minded partners could continue working together to meet Ukraine’s needs due to Russia’s ongoing illegal and unprovoked invasion.

The Prime Minister and the President talked about the upcoming somber anniversary of Russia’s invasion on February 24, and the Prime Minister reaffirmed Canada’s support for Ukraine for as long as it takes. Prime Minister Trudeau welcomed President Zelenskyy’s diplomatic efforts toward a just peace, and the two leaders discussed ongoing engagement with the Global South.

The leaders agreed to remain in close and regular contact.

Canada recently announced it would send four Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, out of an inventory of 112, of which 82 are the combat model and the rest an engineering model.

A couple of things.

The Canadian Army doesn't have a lot of tanks, but its only really likely to need its tanks if Ukraine goes down in defeat and Russia turns its gaze on other territory it once ruled.  Regarding Leopard 2 tanks in general, the British paper the Guardian notes:

There are over 2,300 Leopard 2 tanks available or in storage in 13 Nato countries, according to the IISS, whereas there are only 227 Challenger 2 tanks in the British entire army.

2,300.

The Ukrainians are basically asking for about 300, or at least 100.

There's plenty of them around, although some countries, the Guardian notes, have let theirs deteriorate to such a state they're pretty much unusable. Spain is in that category.

The US has 2,300 M60s in storage. They're not being used at all.  A lot of them are probably not serviceable, but a lot of them could be made serviceable.

Also, Justin Trudeau came into office with a pledge to withdraw Canadian forces from their commitments in the Middle East. This isn't the Middle East, and of course the United States made a dog's breakfast out of its withdrawal from Afghanistan about two years ago.  But it's interesting how events tend to dictate what countries do, as opposed to countries opting how events will proceed.

Canada, FWIW, has a pretty large Ukrainian Canadian population, that being people of Ukrainian heritage.  It's estimated to number 1,359,655 people.

February 2, 2023

Israel-Hamas

Israeli aircraft hit Hamas targets in Gaza following a rocket attack.

Russo-Ukrainian War

Careful watchers of the Op Ed page might note that there's been a growing theme in the last couple of weeks of defeatist "Ukraine can never win" type of opinions being published by pundits. Boiled down, the general gist of them is 1) yes the Ukrainians have managed to hold off the Russians so far, but the Russians have an infinite capacity to absorb losses and 2) they're going to ultimately win through sheer attrition and 3) therefore, NATO support is just prolonging the suffering.

Probably all of these commentators have been against NATO support for Ukraine since the onset, for different reasons. Some are likely America Firsters, others highly fiscally conservative, and some probably Russian sympathizers. The message, however, is all the same, and this will keep up for a while in anticipation of the oncoming Russian offensive.

Historically, it might be worth remembering that the "lesson of history" that "Russia always prevails" is not supported much by actual examples.   If we go back a bit, the opposite seems to be the case.

Russia lost the Crimean War, which lead to an unsuccessful effort to modernize the Russian state.  It also lost the Russo-Japanese War.  It also lost against the Germans in World War One, leading to a complete collapse of the Russian government and revolution, replacing the existing regime with a democratic one which was in turn replaced by a Communist one.

It was on the winning side, of course, in World War Two, but its victory in that war has been so heavily mythologized that it became misunderstood.  In reality, the USSR started off as a German ally, taking part of Poland and the Baltic States, but being fought to a standstill by the much smaller nation of Finland.  Its status changed in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany, but it was not able to arrest German progress without massive American and British aid.  Had the Western Allies chosen to ignore the Soviet Union, which they really could not have, it's not really known what would have occurred.  Lenin bargained away Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine to the Germans in 1917 in order to retain control of Russia itself, and it may well have done the same in World War Two but for Allied assistance.  Germany's land lust was vast, but it never intended to take all of Russia and in fact it never occupied very much of it, most of its success being in the lands just mentioned.  Moreover, the Soviets were able to rely upon the Belorussians and Ukrainians, for the most part, to fight against the Germans.  People the USSR regarded as non-Russian nationalities made up to 45% of the Red Army, with Ukrainians making up over 60% of the Red Army on the Ukrainian Fronts.  Jewish soldiers in the Red Army, regarded as a separate nationality, were more likely to be decorated for combat than Russians.

Looked at that way, the current war is the first time the Russians have fought a war in which their army has been more or less ethnically homogeneous since the Russian Civil War.  Moreover, the actual history of Russian wars is that the Russians can endure a long war and then collapse into revolution.  The Crimean War saw Cossack revolts. The Russo Japanese War led to the 1905 revolution.  World War one lead to the complete collapse of the Russian state.

Ukraine can win, but it has to be given the means to do so, and very soon.  If Ukraine could be adequately armed this month, and that is what it may take, the oncoming Russian spring offensive could end up a disaster.  When Russian armies experience collapse, which they never did during World War Two, it usually leads to a downfall in the Kremlin.  

February 3, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War.

Ukraine is reporting that Putin has ordered the Russian forces to  capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by March 2023.

The particularly concerning thing about this is that it's very doubtful that new armor will be deployed in Ukraine by the time of the Russian offensive.

Russians have been seeking passports in mass numbers. Russia has suspended issuing them, and now Russians are seeking foreign passports.

China

China has been overflying the United States with a spy balloon.   The US pondered shooting it down, but concluded its intelligence gathering abilities are limited, and it would be more dangerous as a falling object.  

Yesterday it was over Montana.

February 4, 2023

China

A second Chinese spy balloon has been spotted, this one headed for an overflight of South America.

Secretary of State Blinken cancelled an intended visit to China over this.

Frankly, there's no good reason for the US not to have shot this down over southern Canada, if Canada would have allowed for it to happen, or for the Canadians to do it.  Likewise, while it was over Wyoming or Montana, it should have been shot down.  The junk it's carrying would have hit nothing.

Russia

The US is seeking to expel the Wagner Group from Sudan and Libya.

Feb 4, cont.

China v. US.

Perhaps for the first time since World War One, a US aircraft has shot down a balloon.

February 6, 2023

China v. US.

The Administration has announced that it was discovered that the Chinese flew spy balloons over the US during the Trump administration, but apparently they were not detected at the time.  The revelation was dismissed by Trump as "fake disinformation". The Biden Administration offered to brief the Trumpites.

At any rate, the news that the Chinese have been able to pull this off over the past several years undetected is not good news.

Additionally, with the past week or so a U.S. Air Force general has stated that he's fairly certain there will be a war between the United States and China over the defense of Taiwan.  Interestingly this has been a sort of Republican rallying point even though some sections of the GOP are willing to abandon Ukraine.  While perhaps not obvious to everyone, a Ukrainian victory would perhaps serve to delay that, and delay might serve to prevent it.

As for the balloon itself, there is speculation that this was an intentional provaction designed to demonstrate that the US couldn't react, and would do so ineffectively.  If so, it probably partially succeeded in demonstrating that, given as the US was so slow to shoot it down.

February 9, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War.

Ukraine's president, asking for more arms for the country yesterday, also asked for admission to the European Union.

February 11, 2023

China v. US and Canada

Two more balloons have now been shot down, one over norther Alaska and one over British Columbia.  The US shot them both down, the latter via a Canadian request.

The balloons have not been affirmatively identfied as Chinese, but seeing as China is a 19th Century imperial power and balloons a 19th Century surveillance aircraft, it seems likely.

China has become a full blown menace. Where this is headed seems fairly obvious.

February 12, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War.

There are suddenly a lot of voices coming out of Russia suggesting that it won't be able to launch its anticipated spring offensive due, in part, to manpower losses.

Russia has been taking combat losses like crazy the past couple of weeks, and while its made slight gains, they've been very slight and are comiing at a huge cost.

Ukraine has destroyed a Russian  BMPT Terminator in combat. The much vaunted autonomous combat vehicle was overblown to start with and unlikely to amount much, as has been the case with all prior attempts to deploy weapons of this type.

Lithuanian supplied Bofors L70 anti-aircraft guns have arrived in Ukraine.  Ukraine itself is presssing for Western fighter aircraft.

February 12, cont:

And now another object shot down, this one over Lake Huron.

February 13, 2023

China v. US and Canada

The Aerodrome: Why Canada didn't shoot down the "unidentified" ob...:  An excellent thread on NORAD and the strategic considerations that went into it and the modern RCAF: Why didn't Canada shoot down the o...

One of the things he points out in this post is that the F-22, which Canada does not have, is one of the few aircraft capable of performing in the fighter role at such a high altitude.

The Meet the Press interviews on this were interesting.  A Congressman who is up to speed stated that he doesn't think the second and third objects are likely Chinese.  They may very well not be, and its always possible they weren't threats at all.

It's been pointed out ot me by a highly knowledgable person that the reason we may be picking up so many of these now is that NORAD has adjusted its radar screening to pick these up. The Congressman made the same point.  We have traditionally been looking for Soviet or Chinese ICBMs and Soviet aircraft, not slow moving balloons.

Finally, a commentator made the point that we may call these balloons, but they're really drones.

On a goofball level, lots of people are launching speculation on whether they indicate an alien invasion, meaning alien from outspace as opposed to alien from another country.

I also saw somebody quote Noam Chomsky, to the effect that government and elites need to keep people distracted in order to carry out their agenda.  Frankly, I don't know why anyone quotes Chomsky on anything whatsoever, other than linquistics.  Feeling that the government and elites in this country are so coordinated that they have a plan to keep us distracted while they do whatever deeply evil nepharious, and right wing, plot against the working me of the 1930s is crediting everyone with a lot more organization and foresight than they deserve.  Anyhow, that person thought the whole thing was a false flag operation.

Get a grip.

Frank Luke, who won a Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously, for balloon busing in World War One with his SPAD S.XIII.

Russo Ukrainian War.

The Institute for the Study of War credits Russia with a real information false flag, in the form of media propoganda designed to suggest back in December that they were ready for peace talks, when they were not.  This, the Institute maintains, delayed the supplying of armor to Ukraine.

There's no reason whatsoever to believe at this point that the Russians are aiming for anything else than the complete defeat of Ukraine.

February 14, 2023

Russia v. Moldova

Moldovan coat of arms.

Moldova has revealed a Russian plot, first revealed by Ukraine last week, to destabilize the small country and bring it into the Russian orbit.

Moldova is an independent country because of Russia, but not in the way a person  might at first imagine.  It was part of the Russian Empire after 1812 and then declared independence in 1918, and then joined Romania later that same year. The country is essentially Romanian.  The Soviet Union took the territory back in 1940 which was a principal cause of Romania joining Operation Barbarossa the following year. Following the Axis defeat, the USSR took it back, but it left again after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That Russia continues to covet it is interesting. This appears to be at least partially in reaction to Moldova's efforts to move closer to the EU in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

February 16, 2023

British defense estimates figure that the Russians have potentially committed 97% of their Army to combat in Ukraine and have now sustained so many casualties that they no longer can engage in a sustained offensive.

If this is correct, and its a big if, it would likely mean the anticiapted spring offensive is not coming, and beyond that, the Russians might not be able to mount a sustained defense against a Ukrainian offensive.

February 17, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War.

Russians have put in excess of 6,000 Ukrainian children through reducation camps.

Marina Yankina, a Russian defense official whose role in the current war was with finance, fell, supposedly, from a 16 story building to her death.

Hmmm. . . . 

China v. US and Canada

The Aerodrome: Failed Balloon Run: It's now known that the U.S. Air Force did attempt to shoot down the Chinese balloon over Montana, using the F-22's cannons as the i...

February 18, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War.

The Wagner Group has sustained 30,000 casualties fighting in Ukraine.

Parts of the Belorussian defense industry are being taken over by Russia.

February 19, 2023

United States v. ISIS

February 20, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War

Analysts increasingly believe that Russia is in its Spring offensive, but that it has adopted a World War One attrition style strategy where it simply throws men at the Ukrainians knowing that they are expending ammunition, and lives themselves, resisting them.  The strategy isn't to be rapid, but simply cause Ukraine to hemorrhage.

Ukraine is aware of this, which is why it is begging for modern weapons with which to launch its own more mobile offensive.

Russia has committed 97% of its army to combat at its strategy is not without risk.  It's performance has been abysmal and its using up its human resources.

Some, however, believe that the slowness of the Russian advance reflects wartime attrition, and that the Russians are actually deploying per doctrine, but without much armor.

China appears ready to start supplying Russia with weapons.  The US is warning China not to do so.  There's some speculation that China hopes to prolong the war as it does not wish to see Russia fail, and it wants the US to use up its weapons stockpile so that it has nothing with which to aid Taiwan in the (highly likely) event that China attempts to invade Taiwan.

President Biden is in Kyiv.

February 22, 2023

Russo Ukrainian War

Vladimir Putin suspended the START Treaty regarding nuclear weapons, the irony being that a country whose conventional weapons have been shown to be ineffective, and which is using them up at a prodigious rate, can hardly afford to engage in a nuclear arms race.

Putin did this in an epic length speech on the anniversary of the war he launched on his neighbor.  The speech was telling as he claims that he's not waging a war on the Ukrainians themselves.  This raises the question of to what extent Putin might actually be delusional.

NPR released an excellent edition of its podcast State of Ukraine on the one-year anniversary of the war.

Ukrainian newspapers have broken the news that they have a secret Russian document outlining Russian plans to absorb Byelorussia by 2030.

February 23, 2023

China v. United States and Canada

The Aerodrome: United States releases Chinese Balloon photograph ...:  

United States releases Chinese Balloon photograph taken from U2

 In this photo, you can see the U2's shadow.

Russia v. Moldova

Vladimir Putin renounced his 2012 guarantee of Moldova's territorial integrity.

February 24, 2023

Russia v. Ukraine, Byelorussia and Moldova

The UN passed a resolution calling for Russia to leave Ukraine.

Russian troops dressed in Ukrainian uniforms have been moved near Russia's border with Byelorussia in what appears likely to be staging for a false flag attack on that country, in an effort to expand the war.

Russia also appears to be staging for a false flag operation in Transnistria, the Russian enclave/breakaway region of Moldova.  The area houses one of the world's largest prestaged arms and ammunition stockpiles.

All of this suggests that Russia is set to attempt to expand, not contract, the war.

Prior Related Threads:

Wars and Rumors of War, 2023. The Bear and the Trident. The Russo Ukrainian War crosses the calendar year.

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

 I was getting ready for work.  My wife was getting ready to take our son to preschool.

She was watching the Today Show, and called me up because a jet had hit one of the Twin Towers.  I came up and watched the footage.

Then the second one hit.  I was watching from the stairs.  Right away, I told her it was terrorism.

We all seemingly know the story.  Another jet hit the Pentagon.  Heroic passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth and in the resulting struggle it went down, taking all of them, and the Islamic jihadist who justified murder in the name of God, to their deaths.

President Bush promised revenge and retribution.

The nation united.

The Administration soon went off course, mistaking necessarily retribution against Al Queda, to whom the jihadist belonged, with the Baathist of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with whom the same didn't get along.  The nation soon set ground in Afghanistan, but the commitment was small.  A larger one went to war in Iraq, leading to the end of the Baathist regime there, but a guerilla war against ISIL thereafter which was eventually won.  In Afghanistan, the larger commitment, and one to rebuilding the nation with a democratic model after the Taliban regime that gave safe harbor to Al Queda was removed.   The slow commitment lead to a messy and protracted war.

That war was more or less won, but a guerilla war against the armed Islamic students of the Taliban, a force that exists only because of Pakistan's support, continued on for 20 years.  President Obama tried to extract the US and then reversed course.  At the end of his administration President Trump negotiated with the very entity which had given safe harbor to those who attacked us on this day 20 years ago and then committed to withdrawal.  President Biden, whom never approved of the nation building mission in Afghanistan, completed what Trump had started with an inept and messy withdrawal that amounted to a surrender to the Taliban and an abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan.

The nation will look back on this day with sadness, as it should.  But what it should be considering as well is what its recent acts mean in terms of its immediate future.  We've left our enemies in power and rejuvenated in a region which gave rise to this attack 20 years ago and their dedication to an isolated and extreme interpretation to a religion that started as a Christian heresy and spread first by excusing primitive and male vices, and then spread by the sword remains unabated and will not abate.

Killing Osama Bin Laden and devastating Al Queda has made us safer, to be sure.  But the ineffective and misdirected nature of our following efforts, followed by the abandonment of that which we created, has not made the world safe.

Lex Anteinternet: The Unobservant Fanatic

Lex Anteinternet: The Unobservant Fanatic: And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most Merciful to you. Mohammed in the Koran. The Prophet said, "He who commits suicide by...

And, as it turns out, Al Baghdadi  not only killed himself.  He killed three children who were with him.

And so his association with cowards is complete.  Hitler didn't arm himself with a MP40 and go and take on the Russian soldiers he'd regarded as subhuman.  He killed himself. . .but Eva Braun went with him of course.

Goebbels killed himself as well, but of course he took his entire family, children and all with him.

Al Baghdadi was as religious scholar, so he knew that Islam precludes suicide and murder.

Not much of real Muslim, as it turns out.

We'd note that his final moments were accompanied by fleeing, screaming in terror, from a dog.

So, the rapist zealot turns out to be a cowardly murderer of children.

The Unobservant Fanatic

And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most Merciful to you.

Mohammed in the Koran.

The Prophet said, "He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in Hell Fire and he who commits suicide by stabbing shall keep on stabbing himself in the Hell-Fire.

The Hadith.

It's now reported that Al Baghdadi followed the route of the great cowards who are comfortable with sending others to their deaths, but when the time comes for them to take up the sword, use it on themselves rather than bravely face the vagarities of real combat.  Al Baghdadi therefore turns out in the end to have just as much personal moral courage as Adolph Hitler, which wasn't much.  Getting somebody to storm the bunker for the Fatherland or for the Faith is one thing. . . doing it yourself, well that's quite another.

Hitler seemed to have that courage, we'd note, before he was a full blown racist hater.  In the Great War, serving under the Kaiser, he legitimately received an Iron Cross. But at that time he was a cog on the wheel of Imperial Germany.

And that's important to note.

Al Baghdadi has been hanging around in areas where he was at risk for a 500 lbs bomb whistling in any day, just like Hitler was at risk for a 75mm shell landing in the middle of his units dinner table.  But that isn't really the same as representing vast evil hatred, encouraging others to die for it, and then, when your turn comes, blowing yourself up or putting a pistol to your head.  If French Artillery sends one into your plate of brots and bread and blows you to atoms, or if an F-16 traveling so fast that by the time you'd hear it from where you are, you're already dead, gets you, well, that's not quite as scary as taking on, with deliberation, Ivan and his PPsh or Joe and his M4.

No, it isn't.

It's not, after all, as if these guys drew their Samurai swords, or perhaps more accurately for their place and time, their MP40s or AKMs, and said "follow me boys" and went to their deaths gun blazing.  No, they said "oh crap, my stupidity has run its course, I'm turning my back on everything, because I'm a big chicken bastard".

Hitler didn't show what the Ubermensch could do.

And Al Baghdadi didn't go down fighting either.  He didn't even go down as an  observant Muslim.

Mohammed never said that when your back was against the wall and the infidels coming in, well kill yourself.

No, he wouldn't have either.

And that's an important thing to note.

There's an odd fashion with fanatic movements to look back into an idealized past and imagine  yourself in a reconstructed future version of it, where you are nifty in the extreme and the glorified past is right there in front of you in its present glory. For Nazis, that meant that the good old Germany Aryans, who were never really like the Nazis imagined them, would be in the drivers seat and being all big and blond and whatever.  For people like Lenin, the good old working man would come into his own in a preternatural way and work would be cool, nifty and if Soviet Realism is any example, it would also apparently feature a lot of buxom blonds as well.  For people like Al Baghdadi, the centuries would roll back, a Caliphate would be created, and men would be in the driver's seat taking women as they pleased, apparently, who would be happy to receive them.

Odd.

And they were happy to have people fight for that.  They just weren't willing to fight themselves (with a bit of a pass for Lenin, who didn't kill himself after all).

There's something really narcissistic in all that.

And in Al Baghdadi's case, there's something deeply antithetical to his faith in it as well.  I'm certainly not a scholar of Islam and I'm also not a fan of it, but Muhammad did live at a time when prisoners of war didn't exist in the modern sense and slavery remained common.  I can't and won't sanction Islam's treatment of women, but I'm not really too sure that Muhammad, were he around today, would really be sanctioning enslavement of women for sexual purposes.  I doubt it.

And I'm sure he wouldn't sanction killing yourself.

Assuming that he'd approve of anything Al Baghdadi did, which is pretty doubtful, at the end he'd probably expect him to take up his sword and go down fighting.  This assumes that he wouldn't have found Al Baghdadi to be a scary nut in the first place, which is probably more likely.

A person's actions are, of course, a test of their belief.  And now we know.  As a Muslim, well. . . he could claim the title of Caliph with dubious qualifications, but he certainly didn't measure up in terms of radiance.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi apparently killed by U.S/Kurdish strikes in Syria

Ironies abound.

We've recently been hearing how a U.S. presence in Syria isn't necessary anymore (and I'll concede that I both didn't think we should be in Syria in the fist place but, having gone in, we shouldn't leave and abandon the Kurds).

Now we find that Syria is hotter, ISIL wise, than we supposed.

And we've gotten Al Baghdadi, in a joint operation with the Kurds.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the leader of ISIL.  Not a huge amount about him is known other than that.  He's an Iraqi by birth and had some university education, apparently being a student of Islamic law while attending university.

ISIL started off as the Iraqi component of Al Queda and became active after the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  It's early history is murky but Al-Baghdadi quickly became its leader and has been ever since.  His death would therefore be roughly equivalent to that of Bin Laden's, which came about in a similar fashion.

He took his group in a highly radical direction, at least as radical as that of Al Queda, if not more so.  He proclaimed himself to be the new Caliph, a proposition that's dubious under Islamic law in his case, and found adherents for a brand of Islam that is uniquely severe.  Included in its views are the wide scale use of violence against all opponents and the routine use of violence against non Muslims.  Moreover, his group revived the line from the Koran allowing men to take concubines with "their strong right hand", although that was interpreted, apparently, to amount to forced marriage.* All sorts of horrors have accordingly resulted.

Al-Baghdadi has an odd connection with the U.S. in that he was the apparent direct detainer of American Christian relief worker Kayla Mueller.  Mueller was working with Syrian refugees in Syria but stunned Doctors Without Borders when she showed up with a Syrian boyfriend in Aleppo.  They put her on a bus back to Turkey the next day but it was ambushed and she was taken prisoner and forcibly married to Al-Baghdadi who reportedly repeatedly raped her while she was his captive.  ISIL attempted to force her to renounce Christianity while she was a captive, which she would not do.** She also reportedly acted as a protector and sympathetic ear for younger captive "brides" of Al-Baghdadi.  She was later a casualty of a Coalition air strike.

All of things brings a number of points to the forefront right at the point in which there may still be time to do something about them, even though its highly unlikely the United States under the current administration will.

This raid took place in northwestern Syria, the very region we're currently pulling out of.  While ISIL is an opponent of the Syrian regime in Damascus, our withdrawal or quasi withdrawal is to that regime's benefit.  What would have occurred if Damascus completely reasserted its sovereignty on the portions of the country not occupied by Turkey and Russia isn't clear.

Murkier yet is what would have happened had this are been occupied by the Turks.  The Turks have shown a surprising level of ambivalence recently in regard to Islamic extremist and their occupation of what amounts to an expansion of their border with Syria has resulted in ISIL adherents being freed and the insertion of radical Islamic Syrian militias.  If Al-Baghdadi's enclave had been found in their territory, which is admittedly unlikely, what would have we done?  This points out that even with the U.S. out, we're much better off with the Turks also not in.

That would raise again my point about UN Peacekeepers.  Not that this is going to happen.
_________________________________________________________________________________

*I'm certain many current Muslims would dispute that the Koran allows the taking of captive sex slaves but the fact of the matter is that it was at one time highly common in Islam and there is in fact a line in the Koran allowing Mohammed's male combatant adherents to have sex with women captives.  I'm  not a scholar on the topic so what the current counters to that within Islam are, I don't know.

In ISIL's case, however, the practice was widespread and apparently limited in the way it was originally was, i.e., the captives are non Muslims when forced into the relationship.  The Koran, however, may sanction taking slaves in that fashion (I don't think it actually requires the captor to marry the slave) but it doesn't appear to actually sanction rape.  That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but its noted here anyhow.  I.e., a woman forced into captivity in the ancient world in the role of  sex slave probably doesn't have a lot of choice in what she does.

ISIL does seem to depart in requiring that there be a "marriage" in these circumstances.  However, in the Christian view of marriage, no such marriage would exist as marriage requires consent of both parties and always has.

**The entire Mueller story was an example of monumentally bad reporting by the American press.

Mueller was only in Turkey as she was a Christian.  She'd previously gone to Guatemala in the same role.  However, Mueller was a Protestant of the supposedly unaffiliated type.

This particular topic is really badly reported in general as "unaffiliated" Christians in fact are affiliated, as they fit into the loose  American protestant tradition. This means that they aren't part of one of the "main line" Protestant faiths, but the "unaffiliated" churches are in fact fairly uniform in their theology and are affiliated, even if they don't realize it.

Her Christian status was nearly completely ignored by the Press.

As was the fact that she was naive.  Apparently the courage of her convictions really showed while she was a captive, but she never should have been where she was in the first place.

A "Ceasefire" in Syrian Kurdistan, maybe?

Yesterday the news was announced that Turkey had agreed to a ceasefire in northern Syria to which the Kurds also agreed.

Putative flag of Kurdistan since 1928.

There's some indication that the Turks may have agreed to the arrangement presided over by Vice President Pence due to the Kurds proving to be much tougher to beat than the Turks had anticipated. Turkey was always going to prevail in this offensive, but it was getting bloodied more than it had figured on.  And the Turks aren't willing to acknowledge that it actually is a ceasefire so much as a temporary negotiated halt in operations.

Flag of Turkey.

The agreement gets Turkey what it wanted, a 30km extension of its frontier into Syria.  In that sense alone it is a halt, as once the Kurds remove themselves, the Turks and their Syrian militia allies will come in.  The Kurds get the opportunity to evacuate that area without molestation, hopefully (although as of typing this out fighting apparently continues).  That's not insignificant, as they were going to lose anyway, but it's not like a peaceful resolution to this dispute. The Kurds who live in that zone are now effectively refugees.

Flag of Syria.

Indeed, the entire arrangement formalizes a sort of Golan Heights status for this strip of land and hence Turkey, long term, doesn't win either.  Syria will resent it just as it has the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights.  The Kurds will not accept it either.  Turkey may have created a Syrian militia manned DMZ, but the history of such zones isn't a happy one.  Violence between Syrian militia forces and Syrian government forces are nearly inevitable, and keeping troops in a DMZ makes them targets to some degree.

Flag of Iraq.

Indeed, in terms of long term goals, Turkey may possibly be the loser.  It's created a snake in the grass with Syrian militias that are likely not reliable and its stripped away any reason for restraint that Kurdish militias who were based in Syria might have had for not going after both Syrian Islamic militias and the Turks.  And by causing the door to open back up in the region to the Damascus government, it might have found a way for Damascus to reconcile with this region of Syria. . . as long as the U.S. continues to give some support to the Kurds.  If that's the case, regional Kurdish autonomy may take a step forward.

Flag of the YPG, which was the actual Kurdish militia in Syria.  It had branded itself something else in order to provide some cover from the fact that it is the armed branch of a Kurdish political party that has rebelled in Turkey within the past fifteen years.

On Damascus, the sober Business Insider both deplored Trumps betrayal of the Kurds while also noting that a long term victory by Damascus was always inevitable.  That's correct, and we've noted that all along.  Business Insider also decried President Obama's muddled backdoor entry into the Syrian civil war which we've also criticized from the very onset.  That put the US in the unrealistic position it went into and which resulted in the betrayal of a Kurdish ally of convenience.  It'll be hard to live down, to say the least, the U.S exit came in the worst way possible, which goes back to the old Colin Powell maxim that when you go into a foreign war, you should have a plan for getting back out.

Goodfellas and Shortsightedness. The disaster in Syria.

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.

Betrayal and Duplicity

Over the weekend the news came that the Kurds, in control of northern Syria but under assault from Turkey, were close to making a deal with Syria such that their enemies the Syrians, whom they have been in rebellion against, will protect that region against the Turks.  This is apparently with Russian support.

It's hard to see this coming out well.

One thing that didn't come out well was the escape of a large number of ISIL prisoners from a Kurdish compound.  This was widely feared as a probable result of the Turkish assault and now it has happened.

And the United States is pulling all of its troops out of northern Syria.

It would be hard to find a worst set of news here.

This puts the Syrian government back in some sort of ultimate control of northern Syria, with all that means.  I think it unlikely that Damascus will tolerate Kurdish independence any more than the Turks are willing to.  And it elevates Russia, which is a second rate power that is a menace mostly because its big and it has nuclear arms, back towards the position of being world power.

It also makes the United States look foolish and cowardly.

And it raises questions about Donald Trump that you'd think he'd want buried.  Once again, in a matter where it didn't have to occur, the Russians have come out on top with there being no good explanation. The only acceptable explanation is a return of the US to a pre 1941 sort of isolationism, but at the same time we're pulling out of northern Syria we're getting into Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is perfectly capable of defending itself and in no way shape or form needs the US to do it.

Indeed, the fact that we're now going into Saudi Arabia demonstrates that the entire "not getting into" logic is at best pretty unevenly applied.  The only good explanation for going in there, to protect a nation that's capable of protecting itself against Iran, is that "it's about the oil", something that American administrations try not to encourage a belief in.

Indeed, in terms of friends, the Kurds are a lot more western and democratic than the Saudis, which are neither in any fashion.

And if it is to protect Saudi oil, why? The United States is now an energy exporting nation.  Not only can the Saudis protect their oil facilities themselves but, if they can't, perhaps those who depend on them can. That isn't us.

So, we betrayed somebody we armed, while going into protect somebody whose values are completely the opposite of our own, while causing our former field ally to make common cause with an enemy, and which also results in enemies escaping.

The Turkish Spin and a proposal that will be ignored.

According to Turkey, it's invading northern Syria in order to allow 2,500,000 Syrian refugees to return home.

Saladin, the Kurd who conquered the Middle East (and who spent more time fighting fellow Muslims than he did Christians, although he certainly fought Christians too).  He lived in the last era in which things were on the downside for the Kurds, 800 years ago.

Hmmm . . . all for humanitarian reasons you see.

The endless spins that the current situation in Northern Syria creates are mind boggling.  We armed a Syrian rebel group composed of Kurdish militias to take on the Syrian government under the quixotic belief that disparate light infantry bands could take on a modern armored army back by the Russians without direct U.S. involvement.  That was naive in the extreme, and no less of military expert (and I mean that sincerely) as John McCain lobbied for it. 

We should have know that was absurd from the onset. 

Toppling the Syrian Baathist regime was always going to require direct western military involvement to be followed by at least a decade, if not more, of western occupation of the country.

No matter, we ended up committing some troops and, beyond that, we gave moral and material support to the one entity in the war that wasn't either comprised of Islamic extremist or incompetents, the Kurds.

The Kurds can't be blamed for rising up in rebellion on their own ground.  They now have a quasi state in Iraq and they've been where they are on the ground in Syria for eons.  They'd have their own country now if Woodrow Wilson's alterations of the map of Turkey that ended up in the Treaty of Sevres had come into full fruition.  That would have required more American involvement in diplomacy in 1919-20, more military backbone for an already tired France and Britain at the same time (heck, they were both already bogged down in Russia and the British were fighting a war in part of its own "united" kingdom, who can blame them for not getting tied down in Turkey), less greed and blood lust on the part of Greece, and less bizarre territory avarice on the part of Italy.

That would have been asking for a lot.

So, the Ottoman's fell and the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire as they saw fit, splitting the Ottoman Kurdistan into three separate state administered by three different sovereigns, to which we might add that a World War One neutral, Persia, already was another entity they had to deal with.

And so now, one of our NATO allies is invading a region occupied by one of our Syrian rebellion allies, which we armed, with the invading army using military equipment designed by us and our ally, Germany (most Turkish weapons, but not all, are produced in Turkey) because our President decided to stand aside after we'd already made all the inconsistent commitments. Added to this, this means that Turkey is now effectively the military ally of the Syrian government which will come in and occupy northern Syria as soon as the Turks have subdued the Kurds.

What can be done about this now?

Well, maybe not much. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trumps most solid supporters, is outwardly outraged and has sponsored a bill to sanction Turkey.  It'll pass. Wyoming's Congressman Liz Cheney, who has been more independent regarding Trump than we might suppose, is also supporting it.

But what will sanctions do now?  It won't force Turkey out of Syria and it won't stop their invasion.  Shoot, by the time any sanctions come into effect, the Turks will be out and the Syrians back in.

Just how successful have our sanctions in the region been anyway?  Iran hasn't collapsed.  Syria's government is going to win its civil war.

No, what the sanctions will likely do is to drive Turkey into the arms of the arch conspirator Vladimir Putin.  And we don't need that.  It'll be a marriage of convenience, but Putin will be just fine with that.

A better proposal, now that we have blood on our hands and have allowed this mess to occur, would be to require the Turks to remain where they are supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force. That would be a direct UN intervention in the Syrian civil war and it might be hard to bring about. Absent that, as Turkey remains a NATO ally, the next best proposal would be for a joint NATO force to occupy the region until a real peace settlement can be reached. Failing that, we should see about occupying it in place of the Turks, which the Turks probably wouldn't be too keen on now. And failing all of that, the Turks should just stay there in a supervised fashion until Syria joins the 21st Century with it being made clear that should they screw up, they'll have no friends in the west at all.

But none of this will occur.

An actual reason, if not a necessarily a moral one, or even a good one, to stand aside in northern Syria. . . Realpolitik

But there's a catch to it.

Kissinger.  He probably wouldn't have stopped the Turks either. . . but he wouldn't have gone into Syria in the first place and he wouldn't have offered the Kurds false hopes.  Shoot, he'd have made it look like we were doing the right thing, even if we weren't.

Turkey has been our ally since 1945. Technically, but fairly hypocritically, Turkey became an American ally when it declared war on Germany in February 1945.

Turkey never fired a shot in World War Two (making Donald Trump's line about the Kurds not being with us in Normandy all the more odd).  And Turkey was courted for most of the war by the Germans.  Turkey didn't enter World War Two as it guessed German chances correctly, which didn't mean that it was our pal.  Rather, Germany had been close to Turkey since the Imperial German and Imperial Ottoman days. The fall of the Kaiser and the Emperor hadn't disrupted that.

And Turkey both had designs on Turkish Central Asia and feared the Soviet Union, which it had good reason to do.  There's little reason to doubt that if the Germans had entered Moscow in 1941 and pushed the Soviets over the Volga at Stalingrad in 1942 the Turks would have entered the war and crossed the Soviet frontier, taking Soviet Central Asia.  But Ataturk and his men had a better historical memory than Hitler and his cronies, and the Turks weren't convinced that the Soviets would fall.

They also weren't convinced that they wouldn't cross the Turkish frontier in 1944 or 45, so they threw in with the Allies at the bitter end to help avoid that.

After the war the Turks sided with the west as it feared the Soviets, and rightly so.  Turkey fought with the United Nations in Korea.  It was a steadfast NATO and American ally against the Soviet Union.  It allowed the US to position nuclear missiles on its territory in the late 50s and early 60s.  It allowed U2 flights to take off from its airfields and cross its frontier into the USSR.

And it might be a useful ally against the Russians today.

All of that is highly cynical.  Turkey has gone from being a country basically ruled by its military, which possessed a veto power over its civilian government, to a shaky democracy with an Islamist prime minister.  As its done that, it's been less and less friendly to American positions in the world, but the relationship remains.

Presuming that Turkey doesn't fall into being an Islamic republic, and take the same path as Pakistan or, worse yet, Iran (and it probably won't), the alliance between the two nations could remain useful.

But that means that the United States has to accommodate itself to Turkish suppression of the Kurds. Or at least it might.

Playing both side of an alliance; being an ally of a sovereign nation and opposing its armed foreign positions can be done, but it's really tricky.  Dwight Eisenhower followed by John F. Kennedy did that in regard to the French in Algeria, whom we did not support even though they were a NATO ally.  Eisenhower also managed that in regard to Israel, France and the UK during the Suez crisis, telling those nations close to us not only that they were on their own but that they had no business intervening in Egypt.  And the US sort of managed that with the UK in Ireland, although never in any official sort of way.

Maybe we could pull that off in regard to the Kurds, who deserve their own state, and a state that would make Turkey a smaller one. But that would be really tough.  That worked in regard to Ireland only because the British were headed in that direction anyhow, and they judged an ongoing relationship with the United States something not to be disrupted.

Which is part of the reason that you need to think out your interventions before you get in.

When we went into Syria, there was no way that we weren't going to end up supporting the Kurds there. After all, we had done that very thing with the Kurds in Iraq.

And that was always going to make Turkey highly uncomfortable.

So at that point, you really have to ask, do you value Kurdish liberty over Turkish support against the Russians, if you need it?

If you don't ask that question, you're going to end up blowing something. Either the Turks become enraged with the US, or the Kurds do.

Make no mistake about it.  We have betrayed the Kurds. And we didn't even do it in the Machiavellian Kissinger way of selling somebody out while pretending we aren't.  We've done something wrong.

And that error started when we didn't think out Syria well in the first place.

And perhaps now, all the damage that can be done, has been.  We've betrayed the Kurds and the Turks have already started to become a shaky ally. So nothing has been achieved.

Blood on our hands

The fate of prisoners taken in war uniformly depends upon the views of the captors, combined with their capacity to act in compliance with their ideals.

It's never been an enviable fate to be a prisoner taken in war.  And by that, I don't just mean prisoners of war, those combatants taken in battle, but also those individuals who become captives because of war.

In the Old Testament the Law modified the custom of the pagans in providing that women who were taken as prizes in war were allowed to morn their dead  husbands and were to be treated fairly by those Jewish captors who took them as prizes.  This is often misunderstood to mean that the Old Testament sanctioned taking widows of combatant opponents as forced brides.  It did not.  It restrained an existing universal custom by putting some elements of kindness and humanity into it.

And so commenced a long tradition in the Jewish world, and then the Christian world, of trying to treat prisoners of wars humanely.

It's not a universal norm, and it hasn't been even among those peoples who Christianity has reached.

During the Revolution, at least at the start, the British kept American prisoners, who after all were rebels, in horrible condition contributing to their high death rate.  A way out was to switch sides and join the British, which more than a few did.

During the American Civil War both sides, for much of the war, paroled enemy prisoners, simply sending them home on the promise not to fight again.  Some did fight again, and eventually both sides stopped the practice.  In the prisoner of war camps on both sides the conditions were awful, with those in the resource starved South the most horrific.

During the Boer War the British found it expedient to depopulate the countryside and make prisoners of the Boer women and children. The British have generally been decent, post 18th Century, to captives in war but these concentration camps had appalling conditions and many of the prisoners died.

During the Great War the Allied nations treated the prisoners it took fairly well, as they did those that they interned during the war. The Germans less so, but still not like what was to come.

During World War Two a soldier surrendering to the Allied in Europe, who survived the tense first moments of that experience, were treated quite well.  The Germans were less kind, once again, to western Allied POWs in their hands, ultimately shooting quite a few in one spectacular instance of mass escape from Stalag Luft III.

In the east, it was different.  The Germans were brutal to Russian prisoners, assuming that they survived the experience in the first place.  The Soviets reciprocated as the war went on.  Civilians on either side ran great risks from the enemy in their midst.  Civilian foreign prisoners of the Germans faced dreadful uncertainties.

Of course, anywhere, prisoners falling into the hands of the SS risked death for that reason alone.

In the Pacific, the Japanese tried to avoid surrendering, and as the war went on the Allies didn't make much of an effort to take them prisoner.  Allied soldiers falling into Japanese hands were horrifically treated, and civilians weren't treated much better.

During the Korean War prisoners of the United Nations forces were fairly well treated.  UN POWs were not well treated by the Communists.  ARVN and US troops who fell into North Vietnamese hands were horrifically treated by the North Vietnamese.  Treatment of NVA and VC prisoners by the South Vietnamese was mixed.

The point?

All of this points out the difficult nature of this question to start with.

And now the Turkish army is set to overrun the areas of northern Syria held by the Kurds.

And he Kurds are holding a lot of ISIL prisoners, including a lot of women and children of ISIL combatants.

Under the Christian world view the west possesses, whether it is willing to admit the origin of that view or not, these people are people, and they should be allowed to live as humanely as possible. And while I suppose its possible that the Kurds have been acting in this manner is due to their own views, I sort of doubt it.  My guess is that prisoners of war of one Middle Eastern combatant who fall into the hands of another, or just prisoners in general, aren't treated really well.

I could be wrong, of course.

In any event, in very quick time, the Kurds will have to leave these prisoners.  I don't think they'll hang around to do a change of flag ceremony.

So, what will become of them?

Well, we're not going to take them.

The Kurds might simply kill them.  That's horrific, but its expedient, and the Kurds have plenty of enemies, don't need any left alive, and don't have a lot of time. 

Or they might let them go, in which case these still very radical ISIL adherents will see their situation as a just perseverance vindicating their views, and go on to be trouble for us, Syria, and Iraq. Trouble we don't need. 

President Trump has suggested that its a European problem as they were "headed to Europe". Maybe some would head to Europe, but trouble for Europe doesn't help us.  And disregarding a problem and suggesting its a European problem will come back to haunt us.

Or perhaps they Turks will overrun them. They don't want to deal with them either, however, and what happens next isn't clear.  They won't hold them for years.

Maybe they'd turn them over to the Iraqis, or the Syrians.  It'd certainly be better to be turned over to the Iraqis.  The fate of people turned over to the Syrians would be grim.

All of this, of course, is something we wouldn't have to face if we hadn't have gone into Syria in the first place. But we did. And we supported the Kurds whom we're now abandoning. By doing that, we encouraged the Kurds to hold the prisoners we did.

So we are responsible for whatever occurs.

"shortsighted and irresponsible."

So says Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump's stoutest defenders, about Trump's decision to betray the Kurds and leave them to the mercy of the Turks.

And it is an outrage.

To be clear, I opposed the United States intervening in Syria militarily.  This isn't because I think the Baathist regime there is nice. Rather, I was, I think realistic about the nature of the combatants there.

When the civil war broke out in Syria, the United States, both its population and its government, Americanized it in their minds.  To us, all revolutions against are by the good guys against the bad guys.  Indeed, it's summarized that way in the 1960s movie The Professionals, with the follow up line by Burt Lancaster's explosive expert characters adding; "the question is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."

Well, it's not that simple.

In Syria there was one main westernized force set for overall control of the nation, realistically, and then there were Islamist theocrats.  One or the other was going to be the one that prevailed.  Trouble was, the westernized force their was the government, and the western ideology it had adopted was fascism.  Fascism is a western creation, and the Baath Party are fascists.  Indeed, the Middle Easter fascist party, the Baath Party, is the most successful fascist party of them all by some measures as its been in power far longer in various places, principally Iraq (formerly) and Syria, than any other fascist party was anywhere else.

The prime opponents of the Syrian government were Islamic radicals who sought to impose a theocracy. Oh, sure, there were other forces, but they were disorganized and inept.

Really effectively intervening in that situation would have required creating a Syrian rebel force out of something while also wiping out the Islamic elements.  That would have required the commitment of thousands of troops, probably 20,000 or more.  And it would have required a long occupation.

We weren't going to do that and it was obvious from the first.

Instead, over time, when we realized what was going on there we supported efforts to quash ISIL and support regional rebel forces where possible. In the meantime, Russian backed Syrian forces with quite a bit of support from actual Russian troops of one kind or another (not officially Russian, but clearly supported by the Russians and made up of Russian military men) crushed the rebellion.  Overall, our small scale intervention was much more effective than I would have supposed, although the winner overall is the Syrian regime which is now closer to Russia than ever.

And then there are the Kurds.

The Kurds are claimed to be the largest ethnicity in the world with a distinct territory that lacks a state. Their territory is spread over Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. All of those nations have suppressed the Kurds. Right now, probably ironically, the Kurds are best off in Syira and Iraq.

That's about to end in Syria.

The Kurds deserve a country. They've long demonstrated that and they're fairly politically adept and cohesive.  By and large, politically, the Kurds would make most American politicians wince as they're on the Marxist end of the scale without being full blown Communists.  They're basically what we hoped the Castro lead Cuban revolutionaries would be and what we still like to pretend the Spanish leftist combatants, who were really Communist, in the Spanish Civil War were.  They've been fighting for political independence for decades.

Now they're running a quasi state in northern Syria where they successfully threw off the Syrian government and defeated ISIL.

Let me note that again, they defeated ISIL.

Central Intelligence Agency map of Kurdish regions.

And they're running their own state, uneasily and quasi officially, within the Iraqi state.

The number of American servicemen in norther Syria, supporting the Kurds, is quite small.  The exact numbers are likely unknown publicly, but President Trump claims its only fifty men.  Maybe, but at least as of a couple of years ago there were at least 4,000 Special Forces troops in Syria and additionally there was a small contingent of U.S. Marine artillerymen. Indeed, at one point American troops and unofficial Russian troops engaged each other with the Russian unit being utterly destroyed.  And this doesn't include the air contingent.

If its small, does it matter?

It certainly does. The map tells the reason why, as well as the history of the region.

American troops in the Kurdish region keep the Turks from going into that area.  The Turks would, and now will, as the Kurds are there.

Turkey is a patch quilt country created in part by ethnic cleansing.  The Turks invaded Anatolia during the 15th Century, completing their conquest of the Greek Byzantine Empire in 1453.  Coming out of Asia Minor, where many of the Turkish culture remain, the Ottoman Turks ruled from Constantinople until the Empire fell under the stress of the Great War.  At its height it threatened Europe before being contained by efforts in the 1500s which coincided with the Reformation and which constituted the one thing that fractured Christianity could agree upon.

The Ottoman Empire was just that, an empire, a conglomeration of peoples and nations which, in its case, were ruled by one nation, the Ottoman Turks.  The Empire was vast, stretching into Europe and over North Africa, but unable to spread into Asia Minor, ironically, where the Turks had their ethnic base.  Even on Anatolia the population was far from uniformly Turkish, but included substantial populations of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds.  World War One changed that.

During the war the Turks slaughtered gigantic numbers of Armenians in what may be legitimately be regarded as the first ethnic holocaust of the 20th Century.  Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the surrender of the Ottoman state to the Allies, the Greeks intervened in Anatolia and proved to have a grasp that exceeded their reach. In the areas of Anatolia that they occupied, atrocities occurred against the Turkish population, often the majority in these areas, that were both horrific and inexcusable, and which are now largely forgotten. This caused the Turks, who beat the Greeks in the Greco Turkish War, to do the same to the Greeks in the areas that they came back into control of, as they did so, and in the peace the Greeks were basically expelled.

The Kurds and the Armenians remain, and the Kurds have been fighting for their own country ever since.  The Turks want no part of that for the reason that the map makes plain.  If the Kurds secure their own country, Turkey will be considerably smaller.

Well, so be it, and the same for Iran, Syrian and Iraq.  Putting aside all old rights and wrongs, the Kurdish part of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran is Kurdish. A Kurdish state should be there.

But we're pulling out, and the Turks are coming in.

And by coming, let's be clear. They intend to invade northern Syria to deal with our allies the Kurds.

That is what Graham had to say:

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

 · 6h

Replying to @LindseyGrahamSC

The most probable outcome of this impulsive decision is to ensure Iran’s domination of Syria.

The U.S. now has no leverage and Syria will eventually become a nightmare for Israel.

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

I feel very bad for the Americans and allies who have sacrificed to destroy the ISIS Caliphate because this decision virtually reassures the reemergence of ISIS. So sad. So dangerous.

President Trump may be tired of fighting radical Islam. They are NOT tired of fighting us.

1,284

7:49 AM - Oct 7, 2019

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Exactly right.

The Kurds have been our allies and now we're betraying them.

Flat out betraying them.  We're literally stepping aside so that an enemy of theirs, Turkey, can put them down.

And in doing so, we're doing that by way of what appears to have come about in a telephone call between President Trump and President Endrogan.

In fairness to Trump, he signaled a desire to pull out of Syria earlier, and was backed down by opposition within the GOP and his own administration.  He apparently returned to his earlier views in his phone call with the Turkish president.

And that president, Endrogan, is an Islamist himself, the first one to really rule Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans (and they weren't terribly Islamist in their final years, even though the Turkish Emperor claimed the title of Caliph).  Those following Turkey have been nervous ever since Endrogan came to power as he's sidelined his opponents and seems from time to time set to take Turkey in a non democratic, Islamist, directly, and away from the strongly secular government it had featured (not always democratic by any means) since 1919.

That's not a direction the Kurds would go in.

And beyond that, while I didn't think we should go into Syria, once you do, you have an obligation to the people who you are allied to, and who are allied to you.  Graham, who has been a strong supporter of Trump, is exactly correct.  We're abandoning our allies.

We have a history of doing that. We set the South Vietnamese up for betrayal with horrific results.  Our messing around in Cambodia lead to a Cambodian disaster in a country we never intended to become directly involved in.

Now we're doing that in Syria.

That's disturbing in and of itself, but the President's reply is disturbing as well.

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...

8:38 AM - 7 Oct 2019

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15,382 replies7,567 retweets21,692 likes

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1. 1. Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 37m37 minutes ago
      

      ....the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!

First of all, let's deal with the blistering absurdity of the proposition we'll punish the Turks if their invasion gets out of hand.

What the crud would that mean? An armed invasion is out of hand in the first place.  When you send in an army it's not the same thing as a local church coming to your door and asking you to convert or something.

Secondly, we haven't ever "obliterated" the economy of Turkey.  If that's a reference to Iran, well we've badly damaged the Iranian economy, but the regime there is still keeping on keeping on and probably diligently working on acquiring an atomic bomb. The economy of North Korea is a rampaging mess and has been for a long time, but it's Stalinist court is still in power and they have the bomb.

And using the phrase "great and unmatched wisdom" is amazingly inept for a man who must know that there are those who seriously question his mental stability.  That this came about by way of a phone call, where the individual in question is already in trouble due to a phone call, is stunning.

Of course this may mean nothing more than Trump has returned to his isolationist view of the world, one in which the consequences do not so much matter as long as U.S. troops are involved.

If that's so, or in any event, this decision is flat out wrong.