RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272357/syria-and-our-foreign-policy-muddle-bruce-thornton

Donald Trump’s decision to pull ground troops out of Syria, followed hard by Defense Secretary Mattis’ resignation effective January 1, has sparked the usual complaints about the unpredictable, shoot-from-the-hip president. And as usual, the most important issue underlying the debate over his decision is ignored––our failure to settle on a coherent, long-term foreign policy strategy.

Apart from the by now reflexive NeverTrump harrumphing, more sober commentators have made serious arguments both for staying and for leaving. The most compelling of the former are the risks of ceding more regional influence to Russia and Iran. Both of these rivals are solidifying their presence in the region, and neither is that serious about destroying ISIS, which still boasts thousands of jihadists intent on wreaking havoc on Western infidels. The terrorist gang Hezbollah, for forty years Iran’s creature, likewise will continue to control territory from which it threatens Israel with missiles supplied via the Iranian Quds Force personnel stationed in Syria. And our allies the Kurds, who have been stalwart warriors against ISIS, will be left hanging, vulnerable to the aggression of Islamist Turkey, which likewise does not consider ISIS a threat to eliminate.

The proponents of withdrawal also have arguments that must be taken seriously. Our strategic aims in Syria have been all over the place the past several years––supporting “moderate” rebels fighting to overthrow the Assad regime; enforcing with noisy, carefully calibrated cruise-missile strikes international sanctions against the use of chemical weapons; and ameliorating the growing “refugee” disaster spilling into Europe. Finishing off ISIS does not seem feasible with the current strategy and low level of troops. And our air power in the region, assuming it remains, along with ground forces in Iraq, can be quickly mobilized to answer any threat to our interests and security on the part of Russia or Iran.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/29/good-riddance-

The media and the political establishment’s excoriation of President Donald Trump for his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the battlefield of eastern Syria has been blistering, as usual. Our exit from the Syrian Civil War is, in fact, well-timed and sensible. President Trump deserves praise for bucking the conventional Beltway wisdom to save the American people and, more importantly, American servicemen from this bloody quagmire.

It pays to recall how we became involved in Syria in the first place. In 2011, in the midst of the chaotic but hopeful “Arab Spring,” a number of global and regional powers, including the United States, decided that now was the perfect time to destabilize the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accordingly, the Obama Administration encouraged a popular rebellion, while denying the rebels the means to succeed in their revolt.

The result was a strategic and human nightmare. A civil conflict raged that wrecked the Syrian economy, obliterated cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and turned millions into desperate refugees. True, Assad is no angel, but the sufferings of the Syrian people since a host of outsiders, including the sage experts in the Obama White House, decided to “rescue” them have far outstripped any indignities that the Assad family could devise.

What was worse was the fact that the Syrian Civil War quickly devolved into senseless and disorganized violence, as the forces “rebelling” against the Assad regime became a multi-headed hydra of terrorists, fundamentalists, and thieves. True, some Syrians fought for democracy and freedom, but the conflict also became saturated with a wide assortment of villains, and with foreign actors—including Russians, Iranians, and Turks—who wished to exploit the opportunity to expand their influence.

Worst of all, Sunni extremists in eastern Syria coalesced into a new movement that became known as the Islamic State. ISIS imposed ironfisted repression, including slavery and torture, on a vast scale, while gruesome executions became the group’s calling card.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/27/4-foreign-policy-establishment-myths-leaving-syria-debunked/

Since President Donald Trump’s directive to withdraw U.S. ground forces from Syria, the foreign policy elite keep levying complaints. While the people opposing Trump’s Syria decision may be loud, that doesn’t make them right.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio called the decision “a mistake,” while Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham used increasingly creative language to get the president’s attention by relentlessly tweeting about how “ecstatic” the Iranians must be. Indeed, with every passing hour, establishment politicians and conventional foreign policy thinkers are deploying increasingly desperate arguments to make their case about why American boots still need to be on the ground in Syria.

Curiously, they never seem to have a realistic end-game in mind. Let’s dispel some of the myths they are propagating.
1. U.S. Credibility Will Be Eroded

The American people are often told that the United States is only as effective around the world as it is credible. Yet credibility is a subjective term, a politically appealing instrument interventionists invoke when they have no better argument to make. As my colleague Benjamin Friedman wrote back in 2014, “A good rule of thumb for foreign policy is that if someone tells you our credibility depends [on] doing something, it’s probably a bad idea.”

This rule applies in the case of Syria. Washington’s fixation on maintaining supposed credibility can easily lead to terrible foreign policy decisions of dubious import. History is full of examples when presidents, lawmakers, and national security hawks continued or escalated U.S. military involvement in an overseas conflict — Vietnam and Iraq being the two prominent case studies over the last 50 years. The result has almost always been bad for U.S. security, blinding us to the far more important discussion of whether intervention is actually worth the risk.
2. Iran and Russia Will Win

Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez stated in a press conference: “To withdraw without success is failure. … If we leave, Russia and Iran dictate our strategic interests.” In other words: If the United States leaves, the mullahs and Vladimir Putin will swallow Syria whole.

What Menendez and many of his colleagues conveniently don’t mention is the context. For one, Syria’s political future has always been vastly more vital for Iran and Russia’s foreign policy interests than it has for the United States. Under no circumstances would Tehran and Moscow be open to Bashar al-Assad’s resignation; Assad may be a bloodthirsty, sinister, and incompetent dictator, but he was a useful proxy to both countries.

To the Iranians, Assad provided a strategic relationship in an otherwise indelibly hostile Arab world — a man who was willing to take cues from Tehran because his security often depended on doing so. For the Russians, Assad resembled a secular authoritarian who allowed the Russian navy to dock at Tartus, the only warm-water port Moscow had. Both Iran and Russia invested heavily in Syria’s civil war over the past seven years precisely because a post-Assad Syria would be a fundamental blow to both.

To the United States, however, Syria’s strategic position never really mattered. Washington does not require a cooperative Syria in order to fulfill its national security goals in the Middle East, including the establishment of a functional balance of power and defense of Americans from terrorist attacks. The bottom line is that the United States is well positioned regardless of whether Assad is in the presidential palace.
3. The Kurds Will Be Abandoned

While it’s understandable that Syrian Kurdish fighters are angry about the coming U.S. troop withdrawal — viewing any decrease as a betrayal after years of coordination in the field — the fact is that U.S.-Kurdish ties were never more than a tactical arrangement. The Syrian Kurds saw Washington’s airpower as a highly valuable asset to save their communities from further ISIS encroachment, and Washington views the Syrian Kurds as useful local forces to squeeze the organization’s territorial “caliphate.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/12/21/why-the-mourning-for-mad-dog-mattis/

EXCERPT: ”

“But what is the excuse of those liberals, those one-time not-in-my-namers, those would-be pacifists now crying angry tears over ‘mad dog’ Mattis’s departure, as if the Trump administration lost a grand elder statesman rather than a hot and cold warmonger? Are they so blinded by their animus towards Trump that they can’t distinguish between militarism and pacifism? Is their anti-Trump myopia so severe that invasion and occupation look like progress and peacekeeping? It looks that way. Broadsheet op-eds, and right-thinking tweeters, on both sides of the Atlantic, are treating Trump’s troop decision, incredibly, as a blow to the world order. They call it ‘foolish’, ‘strategically stupid’, and ‘reckless’. They say it will cost thousands of lives, that it goes against the oh-so-wise consensus view of policymakers and the US and beyond.”

“Anti-Trumpism is dragging too many into absurd, not to mention dangerous, positions. The largely laudable decision to pull soldiers out of Syria and Afghanistan is being condemned,………all in the service of scoring a few points against Trump. There are plenty of good reasons to criticise the current US administration’s foreign policy, from its trade warring with China and Russia to its involvement in the catastrophe in Yemen. But withdrawing military forces from occupied countries? That’s one we should chalk up on Trump’s ‘plus’ column.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/25/trumps-syria-

Whether pulling the remaining U.S. troops from Syria turns out to be a bold and beneficial move or a stupid, harmful one depends on what Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will do. That, in turn, depends in no small part on what constraints he senses from President Trump—as well as from Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Here, to the best of my understanding, are the circumstances and the possible consequences of the president’s decision to withdraw from Syria.

Erdoğan had been menacing a military attack on the Kurds in Northeast Syria who, working with U.S. troops, are finishing the dirty work of killing off ISIS. The U.S military has been warning the Turks not to do that, at ever higher levels. But when Trump called Erdoğan to talk him out of attacking our troops’ partners, it seems that Erdogan simply talked him into removing our troops.

Departing Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s anger is understandable. The boss undercut him after, following orders, Mattis had given orders down the line, as well as his word to fellow fighters. National security advisor John Bolton, too, would have been dismayed: he and Trump had agreed that we owe the Kurds a lot, and that the Kurds south of Turkey’s border provide a natural barrier to a variety of enemies of America, not least Erdoğan. Bolton might well have resigned along with Mattis if Trump had merely bowed to Erdoğan. Whether Trump bowed or not depends on whether or not there is more to the story.

Erdoğan is America’ s enemy. As far back as 2003, he forbade use of Turkish ground and airspace for U.S. operations in Iraq, including the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he has turned Turkey from a NATO ally into an Islamist dictatorship.

Neither wise nor competent, he aims to resurrect something like the Caliphate, with Ottoman Turkey its seat and himself as the Sultan in all but name. To this end, he supported the Brotherhood’s attempted takeover of Egypt, supports Hamas in Gaza, and a host of Sunni terrorist groups, in Syria as well. Only with Turkey’s active help was ISIS able to market the oil it got from Iraqi and Syrian fields, buy arms, receive recruits from abroad, etc. ISIS became more than a minor nuisance only because Erdogan provided it with a hinterland.

Erdoğan meant to use ISIS as the head of the Sunni spear to overthrow Syria’s Alawite (a version of Shia) regime. However, Erdoğan also opposes Sunni Saudi Arabia, mainly because he is financed largely by Qatar, which is in a very bitter quarrel with Saudi Arabia. In part because of Qatar, he believes he has some kind of understanding with Iran, though it is on the opposite side of the great Sunni-Shia war. He welcomed Russia’s intervention in Syria, though it brought Iranian influence to his southern as well as to his eastern border. Passionately anti-American and in disregard of Turkey’s secular geopolitical adversary relationship with Russia, he seems to be satisfied with Vladimir Putin’s de facto overlordship of the Middle East.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272335/syria-allahs-armageddon-jules-gomes

“But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make,” says soldier Williams in Shakespeare’s Henry V, before the Battle of Agincourt. In the face of opposition from Republicans and Democrats and international allies, President Donald Trump has ruled that the Syrian cause is not a good one.

“Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing?” tweets the Commander-in-Chief of the United States.

It’s worse than the US getting nothing. Syria is a holy war. Westerners who refuse to concede how central religion is to the Eastern worldview simply cannot see the futility of getting sucked into a jihad that is not ours to fight.

Trump, the ever-astute businessman, doesn’t suffer from the grand delusion of his predecessors. They considered it an evangelical mission to usher in the silver age of democracy to an Islamic world that longs for the golden age of a Caliphate. Trump, the real-estate realist, isn’t infected with the virus of wishful thinking which leads Western leaders to believe that our secular interventions will solve the centuries-old religious problems of the Islamic world.

The jihadists know they can sucker the West into a war with a few video clips and an amateur production of Lawrence of Arabia. They know how to lure naïve infidels like us who sanitise religion from the public square and are supremely unaware of the Islamic theology of the end times. Would General Matthis and his defenders accept the reality that the crisis in Syria is fuelled by the expectation of an apocalyptic countdown to Allah’s Armageddon?

“Muslim apocalyptic has its centre in Syria,” writes David Cook in his monograph Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic. During the first two centuries of Islam, the Muslim armies faced the most protracted fighting on the Syrian front, since it was here that Islam faced its most formidable enemy, the Byzantine Empire. Syria, hence, became the key area for apocalyptic speculation. In fact Syria is the theatre of operations for much of apocalyptic activity.

Muhammad himself insisted that the final wars with the Byzantines would be the one major occurrence preceding “the hour” (Ibn Masud). Although Byzantium is Islam’s main enemy, “our apocalyptic material leaves us in no doubt that the struggle over Syria would be an all-out one with the whole Christian world,” writes Islamic scholar Suliman Bashear.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/25/2000-a

Gunnar Heinsohn is an emeritus professor at the University of Bremen. Since 2010, he has taught war demography at the NATO Defense College (NDC) in Rome.

Proclaim victory and pull out!

On December 19, Donald Trump tweeted his own version of this classic military maxim as the president announced the withdrawal of America’s 2,000 soldiers from the war against the ISIS caliphate in Syria.

Allies reacted with shock. Enemies mocked and gloated. Neither reaction should come as a surprise.

The president’s defenders emphasize that America has nothing to show for the $7 trillion it has spent on this war. The United States, they say, has much greater concerns at home and in East Asia. Few analysts, regardless of how they feel about America’s withdrawal from Syria, understand why such conflicts drag on and on, despite enormous losses. Historians and journalists rarely examine the demographic data that explain why deadly wars can last for decades or centuries.

Even the killing ground of Europe from 1500 to 1945 escapes their attention. And when it comes to Syria, they are utterly clueless about the link between rapid demographic growth and the long and bloody wars that have devastated this region. Explosive population growth results in explosions on the battlefield.

Between 1900 and 2015, Islam’s global population increased by a factor of nine, from 200 million to 1.8 billion people. Christianity, though still the largest religion worldwide, only quadrupled (from 560 million to 2.3 billion). Since 1950, Islam has added nearly 1.4 billion people to its fold, despite the fact that Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey—which together have 180 million inhabitants—are now in a post-growth phase (defined as fewer than two children per woman). This lower birth rate also applies to the approximately 20 million citizens in the rich sheikdoms between Bahrain and Kuwait.

But nine Muslim countries belong to the 68 nations of the world that have what I call a “war index” that is higher than 3—that is, they have 3,000 or more youths between the ages of 15 and 19 for every 1,000 men aged 55 to 59 who are close to retirement. For four Islamic countries outside the Middle East—Afghanistan (5.99; 36 million), Sudan (4.65; 42 million), Mauritania (4.17; 5 million) and Pakistan (3.39; 200 million)—the war index is even higher.

https://freebeacon.com/blog/israelis-nervous-about-u-s-withdrawal-from-syria-fearing

The Netanyahu government is projecting calm about President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, but no one in Israel, from politicians to pundits, thinks it is good news.

Israel’s main fear is that the withdrawal of U.S. forces will create a vacuum into which Iran will expand, affording it greater freedom of action. Iran’s ultimate goal is to build its long-dreamed-of land bridge to the Mediterranean—a corridor stretching through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

That scenario is unacceptable from Israel’s point of view. Since 2017, it has launched over 200 bombing strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, mainly to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining advanced precision missile capabilities.

Noam Amir, defense commentator for Israel’s Channel 20, summed up the general feeling: “It’s a wonderful gift for Putin, a wonderful gift for Assad. And to our great sorrow, it’s a magnificent gift to the Iranians, who are themselves in complete shock that Trump is doing this at all.”

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former research division head of IDF military intelligence, similarly warned in Israel’s most widely circulated daily that the White House decision would “open the way to Iran, to transferring equipment by way of land through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. It should definitely worry Israel.”

The harshest criticisms came from Netanyahu’s own government, albeit anonymously. A senior minister in Israel’s government called the American withdrawal “a spoiled opportunity, because Russia has been demanding for a long time that the U.S. pull its forces out of Syria. It would have been possible to demand of the Russians the pullout of Iranian forces from Syria, at least partially, in exchange for American forces leaving.”

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/iranian-corridor-syria/

The surprise announcement by US President Donald Trump to pull American forces out of Syria has led to concern that Iran can now complete its “land bridge” from Tehran to Beirut.

In responding to President Trump’s surprise announcement of a withdrawal of all US forces from Syria on Wednesday, Israeli PM Netanyahu issued a brief statement that contained two messages.

“This is, of course, an American decision,” he said, emphasizing that it is not Israel’s place to tell its senior partner where to deploy troops. This is an important message to send, as it shows respect for America’s internal decisions on the use of military force.

Officially, Israel must not play a part in the argument now raging between the American defense establishment and Trump.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s statement did not contain any praise for the decision. This reflects real concern on Israel’s part over how the American exit will affect the regional balance of power.

“We will study its timetable, how it will be implemented, and, of course, its implications for us,” said the prime minister. “In any case, we will take care to maintain the security of Israel and to defend ourselves in this area.”

These comments are hardly a warm endorsement. Netanyahu’s statement reflects a veiled warning to the toxic regional actor that is set to most immediately benefit from Trump’s step: Iran.