Turkey, Syria, the Kurds, and Trump

In the midst of the whistleblower scandal, Trump announced a total withdrawal of US troops from Syria. I haven't followed the whole Syria conflict closely--it's complex, far from here, so the news is likely to be fairly low quality. It would be hard for me to sort the spin from reality.

However, Trump's withdrawal announcement was clearly very abrupt. It looks like Turkey's dictator  Erdogan had been threatening to invade Kurdish-held areas for months, and he finally flipped the switch. Trump didn't know what to do, so he claims that he's withdrawing the troops, not due to pressure (which would make him look weak) but because the US doesn't need to be involved in endless wars.

Hew and cry because it looks like the US is abandoning our Kurdish allies to be slaughtered by the Turks (not their friends). Also, the Kurds are holding thousands of Isis fighter and their families in camps, and may release them under the onslaught. Cue Trump to say stupid, insensitive things like where were the Kurds on D-Day?

Two days later, Trump sends VP Pence to try to negotiate. Oh, there was a childish letter in the mix somewhere too. Pence gets an agreement from Erdogan about some limits on the invasion. The stated goal for Turkey is to secure a 20 mile wide strip along the border so the Kurds in Syria can't aid the Kurds in Turkey. When I heard that, it didn't seem too bad to me as long as the Turks weren't killing civilians or Kurdish fighters not involved in Turkey. I have my doubts about Turkey's claims about Kurdish fighters, knowing that Turkey has a long history of oppressing the Kurds. But it's possible that their goal is only to set up a secure zone.

This is a big sudden shift in the military situation, and it's accompanied by new alliances. Turkey has been cozying up to Russia in trade and military equipment for a while, but this is the clearest rapprochement so far. Syria isn't happy about the deal due to the loss of territory to Turkey, and they responded with their own surprising alliance with the Kurds. The US and Iran seem to be left out of the deal-making--we don't think they'll do a deal with each other as the only ones left at the dance.

After a messy war and a messy stand-off, this might bring a more stable peace. We'll have to see. One late change is that Trump was convinced to leave some US troops in Syria to control oil fields. He needed the issue dumbed down to that point since fair treatment and loyalty to our allies mean nohting to him.

The whole Syrian war has defied early expectations. At first it looked like an Arab spring uprising, but then everyone and their brother got involved with providing arms and pursuing agendas. The Islamic butchers known as Isis became the horrid common enemy that appeared even worse than the pre-war status quo. Perhaps they saved Assad even more than Russia did. Very strange indeed.

It's hard for me to guess what the ramifications of the US move will be on the future of the Middle East and US policies there. It seems bad policy to flush longterm alliances away, and even worse ethics if it leads to massacres. I can only hope the price isn't too high for both us and the Kurds.

Image: aa.com.tr

July links

Travel ban ruling. A careful look at the travel ban (from some Muslim majority nations) and the issues involved. The Supreme Court decision and the dissent are haunted by the decision in the 1940s to intern Japanese-Americans. None of the justices want to make a mistake like that again. But there are other interesting issues, like whether waivers are being granted to those with clearly legitimate needs to visit the US. Definitely eye-opening and different from the usual partisan screamfest.

A history of the politics of Supreme Court nominations. A clear, easy read. I prefer the times when competence was the issue. However, the Bork nomination and anger over it eroded that. This prompted me to look into Bork again, and I found this strong statement of opposition to Bork--that he had no problem with discrimination and segregation as a personal choice of a business owner. Nor did he have any sympathy for the accidentally pregnant. It was the right thing to defeat this nomination. (I've written about before about the history of the Supreme Court.)

Poor standards at Fox News again. This time, Fox reported, Trump tweeted and both were wrong. This isn't actually news, but someone should keep score of how bad news orgs are.

Inside look at land management issue. This is a rare topic, but important for the future. Good choices on land management are a boon. Bad choices are a blight. I've seen it first hand on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Why is congress such a circus? There's actually an answer to that question. Gods be praised, and count me surprised. The answer is--messaging is still very important in Congress, but policy isn't. The number of pragmatic policy staff have been greatly reduced, but not the 'communications' people.

The latest winner in Syria... Is Israel. Read about the power plays between Israel, the US, Syria, Russia, and Iran. Fascinating. Seems coherent and solid to me. Will I still think so in a few years?

Image: economist.com

May links: cleaning up from April

Korean peace? Don't be too hopeful yet. North Korea has pattern of reneging, or getting stubborn.

Syrian peacce? The role France may play.

Trump's fixer. Michael Cohen, who handled a payment and non-disclosure agreement for a paramour of Trump, also worked for Sean Hannity. It might be involve real estate, but maybe it's another fix-it situation. Time will tell, and I'm not convinced it is just real estate.

Parties and race. This article chronicles how the Dems signed up with blacks long before the 60's. Contrast this bravery with the craven behavior of most Repubs. Also from Vox: White evangelicals tolerate racism and character flaws in Trump. An explanation about Kanye West and Trump.

Forge and frame, inc. Software now makes it possible to fake someone's words and facial expressions in a video. What a bonanza for computer-capable liars and fake news generators.

What competence looks like. Saving all but one person when a jet engine falls apart, piercing the plane in the passenger compartment. The dive to lower atmosphere for more oxygen, the successful landing. Even calming the passengers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

No effect from the weakening dollar. The dollar has been getting weaker, so are we exporting more? Not really. Good explainer for why.

Healthcare cost containment. California may try it. Good!

Russia-related stories: McCabe's wrongdoing at the FBI. I want to hold on to this resource about the Inspector General's report and see what happens. Was he conniving? Was he thrown under the bus? Also this article. Comey notes about Trump. His private memos, written to document the weirdness of Trump's communications with him, are now public. Who's the liar? Trump's legal team. Trump has hired Guiliani for his Russia strategy team. Another Russian tactic. (I almost , typed 'Soviet.') Use international committees to harass emigres in other countries. And to think that my favorite shills think that Russia is good and the US is a war-mongering horror. Russian meddling. A link to the House Intelligence report. A real report, not a Nunes tissue of lies.

Image: gulfnews.com

April links 2

Red flag laws for guns. Florida passed one after the Parkland shootings. Vermont just did because they had a very close brush with a school shooter arrested as he was planning his shooting spree. Indiana has had one for a while due to random shootings in a neighborhood.

Also, here is a resource on studies of efficacy for certain policies about guns.

Comey's nasty book. I'm not a fan of Comey, who seems mealy-mouthed to me. However, he had enough backbone to stand up to Trump, which not everyone has. His new book seems to have a lot of filler, some of it being creepy. However, he does reveal a non-surprise: Trump trying to spin the Russian hacking.

US/French/British strike on Syria. Interesting detail. How they faked out the Russian/Syria air defenses. A broader discussion. The US isn't striking hard because it needs to have room to ramp up if Syria continues chemical warfare.

History lesson about the end of the gold standard. One of the important moments of history. However, the US hadn't really kept to the gold standard anyway. Fiat currency has its problems, but the gold standard was simpler impossible to make work.

$21 Trillion missing. A Russian shill wrote that the Pentagon had lost $21 trillion. This was just a shill, so he didn't have any real thought in his comment. Consider this: $21 trillion is a huge amount of money that might have worldwide implications. Just imagine the US having double its current debt, but nobody cares. I pointed this out to the shill. He lamely replied "Well, it's from Forbes."

I have to look into this some more, but I've got to clear those tabs off my browser. So here's the dump: Michigan, missing money, truth in accounting, more Michigan,  maybe some details, Reuters. I don't have a link to the Forbes article because it wasn't particularly readable.

Image: acephalous.typepad.com

April links

I was away for the month of March with only a tablet, and not in the mood for typing on that infernal non-keyboard. I did read a few interesting items, and a few more since I returned home.

Closing the racial achievement gap. According to Charles Murray, this should be impossible because it's inherent in the genomes. An intensive program in New York City has had very good results. However, skimming the published scientific paper, it's not clear that the gap was erased, just that they were heading that way.

North Carolina's blatantly discriminatory voting act. Struck down, but uggghhhh! This couldn't happen in the Supreme Court hadn't decided that the Voting Right Act was no longer needed. Well, that was a partisan decision, not an honest judicial finding. I read elsewhere that the legislation disallowed the types of IDs that were more common among blacks. Yes, very blatant.

Voter fraud investigation in California. I wonder a lot about California, partly because I nearly became a voter there but bailed out before I committed an actual illegal act. This investigation may be ongoing, but hasn't turn up much. However, I like to watch whatever I can in CA.

Korean strategies. From March. This story is a bit slow, but still an easy read and fairly informative on different ways to view the situation in Korea.

Nazi story. A profile of a leader of a white supremacy group that was involved in Charlottesville.

Unexpected interference in business. Suppose the socialism wasn't the worst enemy of business. Instead, it was a thin-skinned blowhard who ended up as president.

Capsule picture of what's wrong with Trump. This story rings so true to me. Trump as an impetuous glad-hander who doesn't know what he's doing.

Iran's presence in Syria. Very informative story about why Israel is bombing airfields in Syria, and who has missiles where.

Image: dailytarheel.com

Best summation on the Mideast

U.S. post-Arab Spring responses included intervention, non-intervention, and vacillation, and literally none of them turned out well.

— Charles Homans (@chashomans) April 15, 2016

To all of those who claim we should have done this or that in the Mideast, this is plain truth. What's more, it's the truth in 140 characters. For a change, the truth is short and the lies are longer.

Downed Russian plane cools cries for war

After the attacks in Paris, conservatives were complaining how lackadaisical Obama is in fighting ISIS. So what did the conservatives say after the Russian bomber was shot down? Did any of them walk back their calls to increase our involvement? Did any of them say that maybe involvement isn't such a good thing?

Well, no, the conservatives didn't say that. Hardly anyone in politics or punditry admits a mistake, so it's no surprise. But it did mute their cries for the US to get further involved, especially as a strong man dictating what should happen. Maybe it also paused their admiration for Putin as a strong man who gets the job done.

The downing of the Russian plane should give everyone pause. Russia may want to respond by shooting down some Turkish planes or destroying something in Turkey, but there would be a high price for doing that. Turkey is in the NATO alliance, and you can't just start a war with a NATO country without bringing much of NATO down on you. Because of that, I think Turkey isn't going to suffer any major consequences for downing the plane, and Putin is going to have to take his lumps on it.

Charles Krauthammer, a supreme neocon, is backing down somewhat. He said these unexpected words:

"I give Obama credit for this..."

The credit being that Obama doesn't want Russia in the coalition fighting ISIS--the coalition having 65 member countries. Krauthammer was singing a different tune just 6 weeks earlier;

"And he said, oh yes, ‘the community of nations’ will take it on. The community of nations doesn’t exist."

I agree with Obama's limits on involvement. The Syrian conflict is amazingly messy, and no side is going to get a clean win, no matter how much money and troops they commit. If that's true, that there can't be a clean win, what should our strategy be? Does military history provide us with an answer?

Not that I know of. It doesn't look like anyone else has the answer either, no matter know loud they shouted a week ago.

 Image: mirror.co.uk

Extras. HotAir has little analysis of what it means to the US role in Syria. Marco Rubio thinks Russia got what it deserved. Paleoconservatives, being a different breed from neocons, say that this clearly shows what a mess Syria is. Weird theories from the internet here and here. Much more sober analysis here, including a reminder that this would be much more common with a no-fly zone. Hillary will want to rethink her support for a no-fly zone if she's elected. Finally, a round-up of crazy courtesy our presidential candidates.

Where is the battle? Why is it there?

I've been very busy with work and reading a slew of interesting books. That prevents me from going hyperbolic over the terrorist attacks in Paris, but I wasn't likely to go hyperbolic anyway.

The attacks in Paris aren't surprising. There are a lot of Muslims there, and some are radicalized. Military-style weapons aren't readily available, but they can be smuggled easily enough from other places where they are readily available. Perhaps the surprising thing is that there aren't more attacks. And not just in France, but all over Europe, in the US, in Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Jordan. Why are all these places relatively quiet versus the level of bombings in Iraq or in much of northern Africa?

Of course I'm glad that we don't do have all out warfare over much of the globe. But wouldn't it be helpful to understand why some areas are fairly peaceful and others aren't? It is because the security and surveillance networks are working well in the US, but less well in France? Maybe there are other reasons.

Another question is how bombing more targets in Syria, which France has started to do, has anything to do with terrorists acts in France. The problem is in France, not in Syria, isn't that correct? That seems the obvious logic to me, and there would have to be quite an explanation for why the problem is in Syria, and not France. Of course, the French response could be a case of do-something-ism--making a show of a response.

I may be asking questions that don't take many words to express, but the answers aren't going to be simple. Some people, like too many commenters on this thread, want to wipe out all Muslims, or maybe just all violent Muslims, or all Muslims in the middle east. Ideas like that are fraught with difficulties--moral, ethical, operational, etc.

So when I ask a simple question, I'm not looking for a simple answer. I'm hoping for a greater understanding of very important, difficult, widespread, and deadly issues. Don't try to give me a quick fix. It's not going to work, and most of us know that.

Image: niagarafallsreporter.com

Extras. I googled 'terrorist killings in Egypt' and didn't find long lists. Well-known was the recent bombing of Russian plane. Not well-known was the killing of Mexican tourists.

Complaints that Obama isn't hyperbolic in his response. What part of "It's going to take time" is wrong?

Hillary being stupid on Syria

I think I'm hitting my limit with Hillary. She is making one pandering bad decision after another.

This time it's calling for a no-fly zone in Syria. As a candidate, she can do this without political cost to herself, as she isn't the president who'd have to deploy forces, order missile attacks, order shots fired at Russian aircraft, and deal with the consequences.

She should shut up and rethink her position.

Syria has proven to be a no-win situation. We dislike Assad, but we dislike ISIS even more. The only people we half-way trust have failed and/or been crushed. We should chalk this up as a short term loss, with the long term not visible at all at this point. Unfortunately, the hawks in the US aren't able to accept this loss, and they seem to want to throw more into this no-win situation. BAD IDEA!!! I don't know how much clearer it could be.

You want a piece of this?

Image: middleeastmonitor.com

The crazy debate about which Americans caused the rise of ISIS

Which stupid American or Americans are responsible for the rise of that murder/torture group extraordinaire called ISIS?

The usual conservative story is that it's Obama's fault. He took all the troops out of Iraq, and that's why we have ISIS. (Examples: typical versus more intelligent than usual.) The usual Dem counterpoint is that Bush destabilized the region.

Why isn't someone pointing to players in the Middle East? I doubt that Obama was involved in financing and developing the recruiting strategies. So who was?

This story fits into the narrative that the US is so strong it can do anything or prevent anything, if only we were cognizant and had the will to act. Any failure in the world can be laid at our feet because of something we did wrong or something we should have done right but didn't.

In the case of ISIS, I reject that thinking. The Sunni paymasters have put together jihadi force after jihadi force. I'm not sure how we're supposed to prevent that, short of taking over the oil-rich Gulf states. A bunch of rich Saudi/Gulf guys support jihadis in Afghanistan, and that's good, Then they support a bunch called Al Queda, and that's bad. Then they support a bunch called ISIS and it's bad. However, the pattern time after time is A BUNCH OF SAUDI/GULF GUYS SUPPORTING JIHADIS. Doesn't that tell us how this happens?

It's true that maybe we should have foreseen that the 'Arab spring' uprising in Syria against Assad was going to be an opportunity for the rich Gulf guys to raise another jihadi army. Maybe we became too enamored of the Arab spring idea, and the many brave Syrians fighting for freedom. Maybe we missed all the signs that it was a civil war that would attract outside money that would mushroom beyond Syria. Or maybe there were hopeful, optimistic reasons why we didn't foresee it. Not every Arab spring uprising has turned into a jihadi murder-fest. Tunisia didn't (not yet, at least). Egypt didn't. So we had hope for Syria, and we were wrong. Does that make it our fault?

I don't think so. There were Syrians fighting against Assad. Money and fighters were flowing into Syria, and hardly any of it was from the US. So why is it our fault? Assad wasn't our puppet. The rebels weren't our proxy fighters, dependent on the US. No, the conflict would have developed the same way, regardless of what the US did .. unless we chose to level the entire country. Then it might have gone differently.

But bombing a country out of existence isn't a good tactical or strategic choice. Well, it isn't the usual choice. Has any government tried it and found that it works? Not that I know of. I don't particularly want the US to be the trailblazer of that strategy, do you?

Your donation (or ransom) hard at work buying violence

Image: mirror.co.uk

Extras. Rand Paul is offering a different story. NYT brief on ISIS's hearty finances.

Update 7/27/16. Detailed, frightening story about the beginning of ISIS.