NP: Syria. part 9

[David Morris]

All Trump's roads lead to Putin.

On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 7:29 PM jody2.718 via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
wrote:

> Turkey, Syria, the Kurds, and Trump’s Abandonment of Foreign Policy
>
> The President’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or
> produced such bipartisan opposition.
>
> By [Robin Wright](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/robin-wright)
>
> October 20, 2019
>
>
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/turkey-syria-the-kurds-and-trumps-abandonment-of-foreign-policy
>
> uch of the world watched aghast, last week, as President [Donald Trump](
> https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump) shattered any notion of an
> informed or sane U.S. foreign policy. He paved the way for President [Recep
> Tayyip Erdoğan](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/recep-tayyip-erdogan), of
> Turkey, to invade Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish partners in the
> Syrian Democratic Forces, who had eliminated the [Islamic State](
> https://www.newyorker.com/tag/islamic-state)’s caliphate in March, after
> five years of gruelling warfare. (The S.D.F. lost eleven thousand soldiers;
> the U.S. lost six.) Erdoğan views Kurds—the world’s largest ethnic group
> without a state—as terrorists, because of a Kurdish separatist campaign in
> Turkey. After a phone call with Erdoğan, Trump ordered the withdrawal of a
> thousand U.S. Special Forces soldiers, who had been backing the S.D.F.,
> even though ISIS sleeper cells are still waging an insurgency in Syria and
> Iraq. The retreat was so abrupt that the U.S. had to bomb a depot full of
> arms that it didn’t have time to remove.
>
> Trump’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or produced such
> bipartisan opposition. The House of Representatives voted 354–60 to condemn
> the pullout. On the Senate floor, Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rebuked
> the President for leaving “a bloodstain on the annals of American history.”
> Yet Trump seemed delighted with his decision to let the Turks and the
> Kurds—both U.S. allies—fight it out. “It was unconventional, what I did,”
> he told the crowd at a campaign rally in Dallas, on Thursday. “Sometimes
> you have to let them fight like two kids. Then you pull them apart.”
>
> Trump and Erdoğan share a crude egotism and a paranoia about deep states
> trying to undo them, but Erdoğan deftly gamed Trump. On October 9th, Trump
> sent a remarkably puerile letter to the Turkish leader, warning him not to
> go too far. History, he wrote, “will look upon you forever as the devil if
> good things don’t happen.” He added, “Don’t be a fool!” Erdoğan reportedly
> tossed the letter into the trash. The same day, he launched Operation Peace
> Spring, to destroy the S.D.F.
>
> Erdoğan’s perfidy dates back years. His government allowed thousands of
> jihadis to cross the Turkish border and join the caliphate. With Turkey as
> a partner, the [Obama](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/barack-obama)
> Administration spent millions of dollars training and equipping Syrian
> Arabs to fight the jihadis; those militias failed. Obama turned to the
> Kurds as a last option, in 2014. Over time, two thousand Special Forces
> soldiers were deployed in Syria. Erdoğan has long pressed Trump to remove
> them. Last December, he persuaded him to do it, even though the caliphate
> had not yet been defeated. The Pentagon called for leaving half the
> soldiers in place, and prevailed. To forestall an invasion, the U.S. agreed
> to get the S.D.F. to withdraw up to nine miles from the Turkish border. In
> August, U.S. troops supervised as the Kurds destroyed their own military
> posts along a sixty-mile stretch of the border; meanwhile, Turkey deployed
> more troops and matériel. “The real salt in the wound,” a U.S. official
> said last week, is that “we told the S.D.F. not to worry. ” He went on,
> “Turkey was building up for an invasion the whole time. We made it easier
> for them.”
>
> (Continues)
>
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>