Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
- December 17 – How Putin's Russia Weaponizes X
One of the two companies who wrote the Senate reports was caught running a fake "Russian influence" campaign:
One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
- December 19 – Report: U.S. To Leave Syria Immediately – Updated
- December 20 – Why Trump Decided To Remove U.S. Troops From Syria
- December 21 – Fallout Of Trump's Syria Withdrawal – Why Erdogan Does Not Want To Invade
The U.S. military will retreat from the al-Tanf border area in the southeast of Syria where it was blocking the crossing between Syria and Iraq. The reopening of the border will help the economies of both countries.
As expected the Russians are taking the initiative to put the northeastern area back under Syrian government control over. A delegation of the Kurdish YPG and the SDF forces will shortly visit Moscow where they will receive new orders.
This Daily Beast piece confirms our take that Trump torpedoed the neocons' plans for Syria. He took the offer Erdogan made as a chance to escape the trap: Bolton’s Hawkish Syria Plan Backfired, Pushing Trump to Get Out – The national security adviser expanded U.S. goals in Syria to challenge Iran. But Trump wasn’t on board, senior officials say, and Turkey took an opportunity to push the U.S. out.
How long until Bolton gets fired?
A good read from Matt Taibbi on the lunacy of the domestic U.S. discussion: We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends – Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war
Unlike Taibbi I expect the discussion to die down over the coming holidays. If it does not do so, Trump will create some new outrage to divert from the issue.
Service announcement: Over the next five days your blog host will be visiting family and do a lot of cooking. Posting will be light.
Use as open thread …