RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bit.ly/2AeO6ez

Few people are as perspicacious in understanding Mideast woes and policies as Yoram Ettinger. Among the wise men he mentions, only J.B. Kelly really understood and exposed the role of militant Islam and jihad that drives so much of the violence in the Middle East including the Arab wars against Israel.Too often Professor Bernard Lewis air-brushed it especially when he was so enthusiastic about Camp David and the Oslo Accords. ….rsk

Western policy in the Middle East – from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, through Jordan, Egypt and North Africa – has largely failed due to a multitude of erroneous assessments made by well-intentioned policy-makers, researchers, academicians and journalists.

The track record of past blunders

For example, the State Department “wise men” opposed the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State – which they viewed as a potential ally of the Soviet Bloc – contending that it was doomed militarily, demographically and economically. In 1977-79, the US foreign policy establishment courted Ayatollah Khomeini and deserted a critical strategic ally, the Shah of Iran, assuming that Khomeini was seeking human rights and peaceful-coexistence. In 1981, the US punished Israel – militarily, economically and diplomatically – for destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which spared the US a potential nuclear confrontation in the 1991 Gulf War. Until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US showered the ruthless Iraqi dictator with intelligence-sharing and commercial agreements. In 1993 and 2005 the US embraced the Israel-PLO Oslo Accord and Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, maintaining that they would advance peace, while in fact they fueled Palestinian hate-education and terrorism.

The 2010-11 eruption of the still-raging Arab Tsunami was greeted as an “Arab Spring,” “Facebook Revolution” and “Youth Revolution;” supposedly, leading Arab societies closer to democracy. During 2009-11, the US sacrificed pro-US Egyptian President Mubarak on the altar of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Sunni-Muslim terrorist conglomerate. In 2011, the US led the NATO toppling of Libya’s Qaddafi – who previously surrendered his infrastructure of weapons-of-mass-destruction to the US and systematically fought Islamic terrorism – contending that a post-Qaddafi Libya would be more democratic and pro-Western. In 2018, Libya is one of the largest platforms of Islamic terrorism. In 2015, the US led the JCPOA accord with Iran’s Ayatollahs, which provided the inherently anti-US rogue regime with an unprecedented tailwind to topple all pro-US Arab regimes, intensify terrorism in the Middle East and Africa, and try to push the US out of the Persian Gulf.

Notwithstanding the failure of all well-intentioned US initiatives to advance Israel-Arab peaceful-coexistence, the US may introduce another peace initiative, overlooking the face that the only successful peace initiatives were directly negotiated between Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan. And the list goes on….

Assessing the track record of past blunders

Such a track record provoked systematic criticism by “The Gang of Four,” who were the leading experts/authors on the Middle East: Prof. Elie Kedourie (London School of Economics & Political Science), Professor P.J. Vatikiotis (London School of Oriental and African Studies), Prof. Bernard Lewis (Princeton University) and Prof. J.B. Kelly (University of Wisconsin). Their criticism, which has been in publication since the 1960s, has been resoundingly vindicated by the Arab Tsunami, which has traumatized the Middle East, and threatened the West, since 2010.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/21/trump-is-smarter

A bipartisan consensus among the foreign policy elite holds that America needs to maintain its de facto overseas empire. This includes both preserving stability, as well as fomenting deliberate instability, including regime change in places like Syria. This consensus among elected officials, defense contractors, general officers, talking heads, and various experts is not shared by the vast majority of Americans, who elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump on their promises to end “stupid wars” and put America first.

The American people have good instincts on these matters.

The Confused Syria Campaign
Our Syria campaign has been a confused affair from the beginning. In the waning days of the Arab Spring, Obama supported various rebel factions seeking to oust Bashar al-Assad, as he had earlier in Libya and Egypt. Syrians soon found themselves in the midst of a brutal civil war, and in this vacuum—as in Iraq only a decade earlier—jihad tourists from all over the Middle East soon joined the fray.

The various enemies of the Syrian regime included the so-called “moderate” rebels, Kurds, and Sunni extremists, the latter of which were divided between al Nusra and ISIS. There are no obvious good guys here, and America’s initial support for regime change created the vacuum in which ISIS grew, just as America had created a vacuum in which ISIS’s parent organization began in Iraq. While the vacuum was the outcome of bad planning and misplaced idealism in the case of Iraq, in Syria, it was deliberate . . . and reckless.

Trump inherited this war where we were simultaneously fighting ISIS and the regime with the help of the so-called Free Syrian Army. At first, he defined the mission more narrowly, focusing on eradicating ISIS. This too was controversial, but few could argue with the desirability of defeating ISIS. Most aid to anti-regime rebel groups ended, and the combination of U.S. forces, the Syrian Arab Army, and the Russians fighting alongside the Syrian Arab Army, reduced ISIS from a quasi-state to a ragtag band fighting for survival.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/21/mattis-is-wrong-this

OK, let’s combine today’s two most obnoxious Washington-speak clichés into one ugly mashup:

Trump has thrown the last adult in the room under the bus.

“Mattis Exit Paves Way for Global Chaos” was the sober CNN top headline during the hours following the announcement Thursday of the defense secretary’s resignation.

The end is near. If the Church of Mammon heard confessions, Washingtonians would be queued out along Constitution Avenue waiting to be shriven and wondering if Mammon even cared if they were heartily sorry.

James Mattis will join Nikki Haley on the outside of the Trump Administration, where Bill Kristol has been wanting them to be, the better to be available on Kristol’s dream team of prospective NeverTrump candidates for president in 2020.

Sixteen months ago, Mattis was riding high within a Trump Administration with a different makeup. In August 2017, he joined other top officials in getting the president to postpone carrying out his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“The game plan agreed upon at Camp David,” said a report in RealClearDefense, “was a triumph for Mattis and [then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R.] McMaster, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, a military analyst. The two worked hand-in-hand with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence.”

McMaster had arranged for Pence to cut short an official visit to Latin America, becoming a diplomatic no-show in key capitals in order to join Tillerson and Mattis in strong-arming Trump into postponing the Afghan withdrawal. Four-star General John Kelly, who recently had become White House chief of staff, also was one of the advisers urging Trump to keep American soldiers in Afghanistan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/us-syria-withdrawal-right-way-to-conduct/

American must not abandon its friends.

President Donald Trump stunned Washington and the Middle East with his decision to withdraw from Syria on Wednesday. He doubled down on his move the next day, asserting that the U.S. shouldn’t be the world’s policeman. While the U.S. decision has shocked allies and pleased adversaries, there is still a window of opportunity for the U.S. to do the right thing. That means not abandoning those who led the way in defeating ISIS and making sure U.S. policy in the region is not undermined.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani traveled to Ankara on Thursday, just twelve hours after Trump’s decision, and met with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They discussed working together on security and stability in the Middle East. This comes just two days after the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, and Russia met in Geneva to discuss the future of Syria. These three countries now sense victory in Syria — and all have opposed U.S. policies.

With Washington poised to withdraw from an area in the east of Syria about the size of West Virginia, the main U.S. partners in the war on ISIS may now be attacked by Turkey or be forced to contend with a growing ISIS insurgency on their own. The U.S. is allied with a group called the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which includes the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and other units recruited over the last four years of the war. The SDF liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa last year. They have sacrificed greatly and control an area home to millions of civilians, as well as 3,000 ISIS detainees. These are the same Kurdish fighters who helped save tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi minority from ISIS in 2014.

Turkey accuses the YPG of being linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — an ethnic Kurdish separatist group in Turkey, which Ankara sees as terrorists — and has vowed to launch an operation against the Kurdish YPG fighters. The U.S. has supported Turkey in its conflict with the PKK over the years, and even recently offered a bounty of $12 million for the top PKK leaders. But Washington has partnered with the SDF, which was created with U.S. support and is not seen to be the same as the PKK. U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey told the Atlantic Council on Monday, December 17, that the U.S. supported the SDF becoming part of a changed Syrian society that would include a new constitution and a multi-party political system. The U.S. achieved this kind of system in Iraq after 2003. Through all its flaws, Iraq is a functioning democracy today. The U.S. wanted this for Syria, but bit-by-bit the Obama administration — and now the Trump administration — has walked away from the groups Washington supported, including the Syrian rebels and now the American allies in eastern Syria.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272315/trump-right-withdraw-syria-robert-spencer

President Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of the 2,000 remaining U.S. troops in Syria, prompting the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis and arousing the ire of CNN – both excellent indications that the President is on the right track.

CNN, the 24/7 Hate Trump Network, headlined its story on the withdrawal “Trump orders rapid withdrawal from Syria in apparent reversal,” giving the impression that an erratic Trump was changing course, only to admit in the article itself that the President “has long signaled his desire to get out of Syria.”

Meanwhile, in his self-righteous and condescending resignation letter, which is being heralded by all the usual establishment suspects today as a positively Confucian outpouring of wisdom, even Mattis admits that he agrees with Trump on the salient issue at play in Syria: “Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world.”

That’s why it’s time to bring the troops home from Syria, and why Trump is right to do so. Trump explained it himself: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Yes. In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State (ISIS) has been defeated, although it still has forces there and could experience a resurgence — in which case the situation would have to be reevaluated. Still, on January 19, 2017, the last day of the disastrous presidency of Barack Obama, it looked as if the Islamic State was going to be occupying a large portion of Syria for decades, if not generations, to come. Turkey was buying its oil. The Islamic State was beginning to follow the path of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, making the transformation from terrorist group to a respected member of the family of nations.