#^d 2019-10-13 #^h Weekend Roundup
Trump has gotten a lot of flack this week for his decision allowing Turkey to invade Syria. Turkey's attack is directed not at the Syrian government or ISIS but at the Kurdish militias in norther Syria, which Turkish strong-man Erdogan regards as a potential security threat, as presumingly giving aid and comfort to Turkey's own Kurdish minority. The Kurdish militias had not only opposed the Syrian government, which hardly anyone in America has a kind word for, but also operated as allies or proxies in America's war against ISIS. Hence, the complaints you hear most often are that Trump has abandoned a trusted US ally, and that the invasion is likely to head to a humanitarian disaster -- the emphasis shifting from neocons to their liberal enablers. The only support Trump has found has come from paleocons like Rand Paul who want the US to draw back from foreign wars, but don't much care if the rest of the world destroys itself.
One problem is that Trump (or for that matter Obama) has never had a coherent strategy on Syria, or for that matter anywhere else in the Middle East. A reasonable goal would be to maintain peace among stable governments, biased where possible toward broad-based prosperity with power sharing and respect for human rights. Obama might have agreed with that line at the start of Arab Spring, but he soon found that ran against the main drivers of American Middle East policy: Israel's war stance, the Arabian oil oligarchies, Iranian exiles, arms merchants, and scattered pockets of Christians (except in Palestine) -- forces that had never given more than occasional lip-service to democracy and human rights, and were flat-out opposed to any whiff of socialism.
Obama was able to help nudge Mubarak aside in Egypt, but when the Egyptians elected the wrong leaders, he had second thoughts, and didn't object to the military restoring a friendly dictatorship. Obama had no such influence in Libya and Syria, so when their leaders violently put demonstrations down, some Americans saw an opportunity to overthrow unfriendly regimes through armed conflict. It is fair to say that Obama was ambivalent about this, but he wound up overseeing a bombing campaign that killed Qaddafi in Libya, and he provided less overt support to some of the Syrian opposition forces, and this led to many other parties intervening in Syria, with different and often conflicting agendas.
It's worth stressing that nothing the US has attempted in the Middle East has worked, even within the limited and often incoherent goals that have supposedly guided American policy, let alone advancing the more laudable goals of peace and broad-based prosperity. Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the US is incapable of standing up popular government after invasion and civil war. Libya suggests that ignoring a broken country doesn't work any better. But Syria is turning out to be an even more complete disaster, as the ancien regime remains as the only viable government. Assad owes his survival to Russia's staunch support, but also to the US (and the Kurds), who defeated his most potent opposition: ISIS.
What needs to be done now is to implement a cease fire, to halt all foreign efforts to provide military support for anti-Assad forces, to reassert the Assad government over all of Syria, to convince Assad not to take reprisals against disarmed opponents, and to start rebuilding and repatriating exiles. Trump's greenlighting of the Turkish invasion does none of this, and makes any progress that much harder -- not that there is any reason to think that Trump has the skills and temperament to negotiate an end to the conflict, even without this blunder.
The only American politician who begins to have the skills to deal with problems like Syria is Bernie Sanders, because he is the only one to understand that America's interests -- peace, prosperity, cooperation everywhere -- are best served when nations everywhere choose governments that serve the best interests of all of their own peoples (socialism). Everyone else is more/less stuck in ruts which insist on projecting the so-called American values of crony capitalism and militarism, the goal to make the world subservient to the interests of neoliberal capital. In this regard, Trump differs from the pack only in his reluctance to dress up greedy opportunism with high-minded aspirations (e.g., Bush's feminist program for Afghanistan). Trump's freedom from cant could be refreshing, but like all of his exercises in political incorrectness, it mostly serves to reveal what a callous and careless creature he is.
Short of Sanders, it might be best to concede that America is not the solution to the world's woes, that indeed it is a major problem, so much so that in many cases the most helpful thing we could do is to withdraw, including support for other countries' interventions. Syria is an obvious good place to start. On the other hand, replacing American arms and aims with Turkish ones won't help anyone (not even the Turks).
PS: After writing the above, Trump ordered the last US troops out of Syria. That in itself is good news, but everything else is spiraling rapidly out of control. Meanwhile, Syrian Kurds are looking for new allies, and finding Assad (see Jason Ditz: Syrian Kurds, Damascus reach deal in Russia-backed talks).
Some scattered links on this (some of which are just examples of what I've been complaining about):
Doug Bandow: America doesn't belong in Syria. A paleoconservative example; also note: Scott Ritter: Why the Syrian Kurds aren't necessarily our friends. Finding friends has been especially vexing for neocons out to intervene in Syria.
Patrick Cockburn: Kurdish fighters always feared Trump would be a treacherous ally.
Chas Danner: The Trump-blessed war in Northeastern Syria is already a full-blown disaster.
Karen DeYoung/Dan Lamothe/Liz Sly: Trump orders withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria, days after Pentagon downplays possibility.
Hassan Hassan: Trump and Erdogan risk a resurgent Isis thanks to their reckless in Syria.
Fred Kaplan:
Trump just gave Turkey an open invitation to slaughter the Syrian Kurds: "Trump's betrayal of the Kurds isn't just immoral -- there's no strategic reason for it."
James LaPorta: Official who heard call says Trump got 'rolled' by Turkey and 'has no spine'.
Eric Levitz:
Trump's betrayal of the Kurds may be the dumbest move of his presidency. Dumb, sure, but "dumbest" is a tall order.
Lindsey Graham said Syrian Kurds were 'threat' to Turkey in prank call.
Turkey: Trump knew 'precisely' the scope of our attack plans in Syria.
Trump's (insane) conflict of interest in the Turkey-Syria dispute.
Wesley Morgan: Pentagon sends new wave of troops to Saudi Arabia even as Trump calls for ending wars.
Paul R Pillar: Donald Trump's Syria withdrawal: Are we asking the right questions?
Heidi Przybyla/Anna Schechter: Donald Trump's longtime business connections in Turkey back in the spotlight.
Adam K Raymond: Trump defends Syria policy in series of wild, authoritarian tweets.
Michael Safi/Bethan McKernan/Julian Borger: US warns Turkey of red lines as Syria offensive death toll mounts.
Eric Schmitt/Thomas Gibbons-Neff/Ben Hubbard/Helene Cooper: Pullback leaves Green Berets feeling 'ashamed,' and Kurdish allies describing 'betrayal'.
Jonah Shepp: Trump and Erdogan are only increasing the odds of an ISIS comeback. Not that that is something they might worry about.
Robin Wright:
Some scattered links this week:
Andrew Bacevich: High crimes and misdemeanors of the fading American Century.
Jared Bernstein: The climate crisis and the failure of economics.
Jonathan Blitzer: Why Trump's fourth Secretary of Homeland Security just resigned: Kevin McAleenan, "acting" Secretary for six months now..
John Cassidy:
Rudy Giuliani's two indicted associates could have a lot to say.
What Ed Meese's Presidential Medal of Freedom says about the GOP and impeachment.
Yes, that Ed Meese: the longtime Reagan aide and conservative legal activist who, when serving as Attorney General, from 1985 to 1988, was directly implicated in not one but three major scandals -- the secret sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, a corruption scam involving efforts by the construction firm Bechtel to build an Iraqi oil pipeline, and an even bigger scam involving the allocation of U.S. military contracts to a New York company called Wedtech. Meese was never charged with any crimes, but the evidence suggested that he misled Congress about Reagan's knowledge of the Iran-Contra scheme, which Oliver North ran out of the White House; turned a blind eye to the bribery of foreign governments in the Bechtel case; and did favors from the White House for his close friend E. Robert Wallach, a lobbyist for Wedtech, who, in 1989, was sentenced to six years in prison for racketeering and fraud. In 1988, half a dozen senior Justice Department officials, including the Deputy Attorney General and the head of the criminal division, resigned to protest Meese's leadership of the department.
Jonathan Chait:
Nancy Cook: Impeachment tentacles spread throughout Trump's team.
Judy Fahys: What the BLM shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact.
John Feffer: Trump's undeclared state of emergency: "Trump is counting on his base to endorse his increasingly open law-breaking."
Tara Golshan: Trump signed an executive order about how much he hates Medicare-for-all: "The order's intent is to promote Medicare Advantage but it has a lot of vague language" -- mostly intended to undermine the Medicare Trump claims he defends.
Constance Grady: Ellen DeGeneres, George W Bush, and the death of uncritical niceness.
Umair Irfan:
Sarah Jones:
Beto O'Rourke doesn't know much about the Constitution: Specifically, First Amendment clauses on freedom of religion and speech.
Fred Kaplan:
Ed Kilgore:
Jen Kirby: US and China reach a "phase one" trade deal: "President Donald Trump announced an agreement to delay tariffs and for China to buy agricultural products."
PR Lockhart: "They murdered this woman": Texans outraged after an officer shoots a black woman in her own home.
German Lopez: The case for prosecuting the Sacklers and other opioid executives.
Ian Millhiser:
Ella Nilsen: Bernie Sanders takes aim at the DNC with his new anti-corruption plan.
Charles P Pierce:
Andrew Prokop:
CNN reports that Rudy Giuliani's financial dealings are under investigation by prosecutors.
Rudy Giuliani's fixers for the Ukraine caper just got arrested: "Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested for campaign finance violations while trying to leave the country."
Gordon Sondland, the ambassador at the center of the Trump impeachment inquiry, explained.
Trump just refused any cooperation with the House impeachment inquiry.
Robert Reich: Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private.
David Roberts: This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve:
Heavy industry is responsible for around 22 percent of global CO2 emissions. Forty-two percent of that -- about 10 percent of global emissions -- comes from combustion to produce large amounts of high-temperature heat for industrial products like cement, steel, and petrochemicals.
To put that in perspective, industrial heat's 10 percent is greater than the CO2 emissions of all the world's cars (6 percent) and planes (2 percent) combined. Yet, consider how much you hear about electric vehicles. Consider how much you hear about flying shame. Now consider how much you hear about . . . industrial heat.
Not much, I'm guessing. But the fact is, today, virtually all of that combustion is fossil-fueled, and there are very few viable low-carbon alternatives. For all kinds of reasons, industrial heat is going to be one of the toughest nuts to crack, carbon-wise.
Aaron Rupar:
Basav Sen: Dig beneath the world's far-right governments -- you'll find fossil fuels.
David K Shipler: Punishing the poor for being hungry: "The Trump administration wages war on food stamps."
Jesse Singal: Anti-free-speechers still aren't taking their own arguments seriously. A critique of Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, as excerpted in Free speech is killing us: "Noxious language is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?"
Matt Taibbi: We're in a permanent coup. Getting a little paranoid here, arguing that as bad as Trump is, the "U.S. intelligence community" that seems out to get him is actually more sinister.
Nick Turse: The forgotten trauma of a forgotten war: "As the world looks away, death stalks the Democratic Republic of Congo."
Anya van Wagtendonk:
Kenneth P Vogel: Giuliani's Ukraine team: In search of influence, dirt and money.
David Walsh: It took decades, but the anti-New Deal crusaders have triumphed: "A decades-long campaign by a handful of well-heeled foundations has succeeded in laundering ideas through academia into law."
Alex Ward:
Trump says he's ending the US role in Middle East wars. He's sending 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia.
Lindsey Graham is leading a Senate bill to punish Turkey with crushing sanctions.
Trump may soon ban Russian observation flights over US military bases. That's a bad thing. "Prepare yourself for the death of the Open Skies Treaty." That treaty also allows the US observation flights over Russian military bases, which is the main thing the US would lose in ending the treaty. It also requires that observation data be shared among signatory nations, so it makes it possible for (e.g.) Ukraine to monitor Russian military positions.
Matthew Yglesias: