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Syria – Turkey Fails In Idleb, Is Unwilling To Take The Northeast
The neoconservatives in the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton and the Syria envoy James Jeffery, are scrambling to save their plans for Syria that President Trump disposed of when he ordered a complete retreat.
Those plans were for a permanent U.S. occupation of northeast Syria, the reduction of Iranian influence within the government held parts of Syria and an eventual disposal of the Syrian government under President Assad through negotiations. These were unicorn aims that had no chance to ever be achieved.
Moreover Trump had never signed off on these ideas. Back in April he had announced that he wanted U.S. troops out of Syria. He gave his staff six month to achieve that. But instead of following those orders Pompeo and Bolton tried to implement their own plans:
Late last year, some of the president’s hawkish advisers drafted a memo committing the United States to a longer-term presence in Syria that included goals of an enduring defeat of the Islamic State, a political transition and the expulsion of Iran, officials said. The president has not signed the memo, which was presented to him weeks ago.
In fact, Trump had warned his aides for months that he wanted out of Syria in short order.
…
Bolton’s Iran plan never really took effect at the Pentagon, where officials were not officially tasked with any new mission in addition to the operation against the Islamic State. Military officials likewise viewed Iran’s expansion into Syria as problematic, but they were skeptical about the lack of a clear legal justification that would be required for offensive military action against Iranian-backed forces.
Trump recognized that those plans were nonsense and ordered to end them. In that process he came up with a likewise unicorn idea – to hand northeast Syria to Turkey to fight the already defeated Islamic State. Turkey does not want northeast Syria. It does not want to risk a bloody war against the Kurds that would be required to sustain such an occupation.
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The only appropriate solution is to hand control of northeast Syria (yellow) back to the Syrian government (red). Damascus would disarm the Kurds or integrate them within its national army. They would be under control and no longer a threat to Turkey. Everyone could live with such an easy solution.
Everyone but the neocons.
Today National Security Advisor Bolton is on his way to Israel to cook up new plans:
A Trump administration official told reporters traveling with Bolton that Bolton intended to discuss the pace of the drawdown, as well as American troop levels in the region. Bolton was expected to explain that some U.S. troops based in Syria to fight IS will shift to Iraq with the same mission and that some American forces may remain at a key military outpost in al-Tanf, in southern Syria, to counter growing Iranian activity in the region.
Bolton’s also was to convey the message that the United States will be “very supportive” of Israeli strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, …
I bet that neither of those points was signed off by Trump. The publication of these ideas is another attempt by Bolton to push his personal policies to the front.
Erdogan, asked by Trump to take northeast Syria but unwilling to do so, raised demands that the U.S. is unlikely to fulfill:
Turkey is asking the U.S. to provide substantial military support, including airstrikes, transport and logistics, to allow Turkish forces to assume the main responsibility for fighting Islamic State militants in Syria, senior U.S. officials say.
The Turkish requests are so extensive that, if fully met, the American military might be deepening its involvement in Syria instead of reducing it, the officials added.
Bolton will later fly to Ankara and discuss the Turkish plans:
Participants will include White House national security adviser John Bolton; Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and James Jeffrey, the State Department envoy for Syria.
One U.S. official said the administration is unlikely to provide all of the military support the Turks are seeking, especially on air support.
Without U.S. air support Erdogan can not attack northeast Syria. The Turkish air force is weak. Many of its experienced pilots were fired for alleged support and involvement in the coup against Erdogan. The airforce is unable to provide the necessary 24/7 support its soldiers would need. There is also strife within the Turkish army command. If he would order an attack, Erdogan would only go for the Kurdish areas along the northern border, not for the Islamic State. That again is something the U.S. does not want at all:
Many experts and officials also fear the Turks may target Kurdish fighters who have long provided the U.S. with solid support in the campaign against Islamic State militants and endured considerable loss of life.
To try to mitigate these risks, Mr. Jeffrey, the State Department envoy, is seeking to forge an arrangement with the Turks that would allow them to enter northern Syria while avoiding largely Kurdish areas, say U.S. officials familiar with the plans.
Mr. Jeffrey and his State Department team have created a color-coded map of northeastern Syria in an attempt to negotiate a power-sharing plan that could avert a costly Turkish-Kurdish fight in the area. … One former U.S. official described the map as “Sykes-Picot on acid,” …
The idea is delusional. There are no borders between Kurds, Arabs and other ethnicities in northwest Syria. The populations is mixed. Only the ethnic percentages vary from town to town. Implementing the idea would lead to ethic cleansing and an everlasting war.
The Kurds are no longer willing to follow the U.S. lead.
Mr. Jeffrey has asked Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander of Syrian fighters, to hold off on making any deals with President Bashar al-Assad’s government while the Trump administration tries to develop its strategy.
"F*ck you," said General Abdi, as the Kurds continue to negotiate:
Syrian Kurdish leaders aim to secure a Russian-mediated political deal with President Bashar Assad's government regardless of U.S. plans to withdraw from their region, a senior Kurdish official told Reuters.
The Kurdish-led administration that runs much of northern Syria presented a road map for an agreement with Assad during recent meetings in Russia and is awaiting Moscow's response, Badran Jia Kurd, who attended, said.
A deal between the Kurds and the Syrian government "is inevitable" says a senior Kurdish military official. The U.S. proved again to be unreliable and the Kurds have nowhere else to go.
None of the new plans and ideas Bolton presents make any sense. They are unlikely to have Trump's blessing. While the U.S. retreat from northeast Syria may be delayed another month or two, it will likely proceed.
The last week saw new developments in Idleb governorate. Idelb is largely ruled by the al-Qaeda organization Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), the former Jabhat al-Nusra. There are also many other groups under Turkish control. But Turkey had recently transferred many of those fighters to attack the U.S.-Kurdish held Manbij at the Euphrates. That attack was stopped when the Syrian army took control of the area.
While the Turkish supported groups in Idleb were weakened, HTS used the occasion to reinforce its control. On Monday HTS (grey) attack the areas west of Aleppo which were held by Nour al-Din al-Zenki. The once CIA supported Zenki became 'famous' when in 2016 some of its fighters published a video in which they beheaded a sick ten year old boy for no discernible reason.
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During the last five days at least 130 people were killed in the Idleb fighting. Zenki was eliminated from the area it held (stripped grey) and its remaining fighters fled to the northern Afrin canton which is under Turkish army control. HTS took control of Zenki's heavy weapons including four tanks.
HTS now controls all areas next to Turkey and the Turkish controlled Afrin. It sent ultimatums to other groups in Idleb and demanded additional control over the towns Maarat al-Nu’man and Ariha in the south of the governorate. As none of the other groups can withstand HTS it will likely soon control these towns. Taking them gives HTS full control over the M4 and M5 highways. Control of the highways can be used to generate money and as an asset in future negotiations.
The Astana agreement between Russia and Turkey over Idleb stipulated that HTS would be pushed back 15 miles from the government held areas. The M4 and M5 highways would be reopened to traffic for government traffic. Turkey was supposed to implement and guarantee those points. Not one of these points has been achieved. The Turkish soldiers stationed in six observation posts around Idleb governorate are hostages to HTS. As Turkey failed to deliver on its promises Syria and Russia have all rights to ignore the agreement, attack HTS and to liberate Idleb.
That Turkey failed in Idleb makes it more likely that it will refrain from invading northeast Syria. Its army positions in Syria are already in trouble. Why add new ones to the mess?
Thank you ADKC, ben, gepay. It is heartening that you ‘get it’.
I think it’s important to reply to those that don’t.
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juliana @20:
I agree with laguerre @ 4 that the announcement of the pullout set in motion events that now make it inevitable.
Trump could leave Syria immediately. He made a big deal about the generals not doing what he wanted. Now he delays. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to hand over US occupied Syria to … Syria. This makes Mattis’ resignation into a farce (or, more likely, a PR stunt!)? And hy did Trump disrespect Mattis for doing so (slamming his Generals on twitter and naming an interim replacement immediately)? Sorry, it’s all kayfabe.
Please, please think carefully about Israel’s Christmas attack and the possibility that they could’ve been trying to trick SAA into downing a civilian airliner. What do you think Trump’s reaction to THAT would’ve been? (hint: Trump bombed Syria the first time “for the babies”)
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dltravers @28:
Whatever Trump is up to and whomever is supporting him is not easily found.
I disagree. Just ask the classic question: qui bono?
Why would he destroy … his brand?
Obama made $70 million in his first year after office. The Clinton’s have made billions (they have full control of Clinton Foundation assets). Trump separated his brand from his Presidency but could make a great deal of money from his Presidential service.
… he has not much a choice of who to work with as they are all educated along the same lines and in the same institutions.
This is just an excuse. And a poor one at that. Didn’t Trump promise to drain the swamp? Yet Trump has brought neocons and oligarchs into his administration! He didn’t have to nominate Bolton or Pompeo or Gina Haspel (who is closely associated with his supposed nemisis Brennan!), but he did.
I truly believe he is personally driven to get out of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan … If he could make peace with Russia he would do that as well. Given the anti Russia hysteria he is extremely constrained.
You give no reason for your trust in Trump. Your hero has already failed to deliver on several campaign promises. And his unethical business record speaks for itself.
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Patient Observer @36:
a “populist” President was not needed and would only complicate the deep state agenda.
Well Obama and Trump HAVE furthered the Deep State agenda so you’re clearly wrong. Obamabot and Trumptards claimed that their hero was playing 11-dimensional chess.
The value of a “populist” to the Deep State is the implied legitimacy of a “populist”. Do you really think a true populist can be elected President in USA?
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Robert Snefjella @38:
” ‘They can do what they want’ Trump’s Iran comments defy his top aids”
The “They” in the quote in the headline is a reference to Iran in Syria.
“President Trump stuck a dagger in a major initiative advanced by his foreign policy team:
Iran’s leaders, the president said, “can do what they want” in Syria.
With a stray remark, Trump snuffed out a plan from his national security adviser, John Bolton,
I think you are exaggerating (again). “They can do whatever they want” is a lament, not an invitation.
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Glenn Brown @39:
I don’t understand why you think the US oligarchy and deep state would have thought they needed someone like Trump, or would have greatly preferred him to Hillary Clinton.
Hillary has a lot of baggage. She is not a populist nor is she a nationalist. She was the logical choice to follow Obama until started acting to protect its interests by denying the Empire victory in Syria and Ukraine.
Covert ops are no match for forces of a peer adversary. The Jihadi proxy army had to be replaced with US troops. And that’s what happened.
AZ Empire is smart about what they do. Electing Trump was a smart move. They are FAR from being defeated despite what the pro-Russian/anti-US voices at MoA say.
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 6 2019 4:53 utc | 45
bevin
“Conspiracy theories” engender thoughts of puppets and evil geniuses. I am not proposing such nonsense. Alignment of interests and coordination is quite sufficient.
Until 2013-14, MIC-IC-neocons didn’t have arguments that could overcome the imperatives (GREED) of industry groups that wanted to trade with China. But when Russia took steps to protect her interests, it was clear that the SCO alliance between China and a resurgent Russia was a threat that took precedence over any commercial interests.
Russia and China are not very threatening by themselves. Russia is a small country with an outsized (and expensive) nuclear deterrent. China is an energy-starved with an export economy (dependent on exports to the West). But together, they are formidable. And can bring other countries into their orbit.
If neocons didn’t control USA foreign policy they might’ve avoided pushing Russia into Chinese arms. They might’ve heeded the warnings of people like Steve Cohen, who warned of the looming disaster by 2009 if not before (Obama’s Russia ‘Reset’: Another Lost Opportunity?”; emphasis mine):
… when President Obama took office in January 2009, relations between Washington and Moscow were so bad that some close observers, myself included, characterized them as a new cold war. Almost all cooperation, even decades-long agreements regulating nuclear weapons, had been displaced by increasingly acrimonious conflicts. Indeed, the relationship had led to a military confrontation potentially as dangerous as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The Georgian-Russian War of August 2008 was also a proxy American-Russian war, the Georgian forces having been supplied and trained by Washington.
What happened to the “strategic partnership and friendship” between post-Soviet Moscow and Washington promised by leaders on both sides after 1991? For more than a decade, the American political and media establishments have maintained that such a relationship was achieved by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s but destroyed by the “antidemocratic and neo-imperialist agenda” of Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin in 2000.
In reality, the historic opportunity for a post–cold war partnership was lost in Washington, not Moscow, when the Clinton administration, in the early 1990s, adopted an approach based on the false premise that Russia, having “lost” the cold war, could be treated as a defeated nation. (The cold war actually ended through negotiations sometime between 1988 and 1990, well before the end of Soviet Russia in December 1991, as all the leading participants—Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush—agreed.)
The result was the Clinton administration’s triumphalist, winner-take-all approach, including an intrusive crusade to dictate Russia’s internal political and economic development; broken strategic promises, most importantly Bush’s assurance to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward beyond a reunited Germany; and double-standard policies impinging on Russia (along with sermons) that presumed Moscow no longer had any legitimate security concerns abroad apart from those of the United States, even in its own neighborhood. The backlash came with Putin, but it would have come with any Kremlin leader more self-confident, more sober and less reliant on Washington than was Yeltsin.
Nor did Washington’s triumphalism end with Clinton or Yeltsin. Following the events of September 11, 2001, to take the most ramifying example, Putin’s Kremlin gave the George W. Bush administration more assistance in its anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan, including in intelligence and combat, than did any NATO ally. In return, Putin expected the long-denied US-Russian partnership. Instead, the Bush White House soon expanded NATO all the way to Russia’s borders and withdrew unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Moscow regarded as the bedrock of its nuclear security. Those “deceptions” have not been forgotten in Moscow.
. . .
When President Obama made “resetting” relations with Moscow a foreign-policy priority, he seemed to understand that a chance for a necessary partnership with post-Soviet Russia had been lost and might still be retrieved. The meaning of “reset” was, of course, what used to be called détente. And since détente had always meant replacing cold war conflicts with cooperation, the president’s initiative also suggested an understanding that he had inherited something akin to a new cold war.
. . .
The political failings of the reset may be transitory, but the fundamental fallacies of Obama’s Russia policy derive from the winner-take-all triumphalism of the 1990s. One is the enduring conceit of “selective cooperation,” or seeking Moscow’s support for America’s vital interests while disregarding Russia’s. Even though this approach had been pursued repeatedly since the 1990s, by Presidents Clinton and Bush, resulting only in failure and mounting Russian resentments, the Obama White House sought one-way concessions as the basis of the reset. As the National Security Council adviser on Russia, and reportedly the next US Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul explained, “We’re going to see if there are ways we can have Russia cooperate on those things that we define as our national interests, but we don’t want to trade with them.”
. . .
The twenty-year-long notion that Moscow will make unreciprocated concessions for the sake of partnership with the United States derives from the same illusion: that post-Soviet Russia, diminished and enfeebled by having “lost the cold war,” can play the role of a great power only on American terms. In the real world, when Obama took office, everything Russia supposedly needed from the United States, including in order to modernize, it could obtain from other partners. Today, two of its bilateral relationships—with Beijing and Berlin, and increasingly with Paris—are already much more important to Moscow, politically, economically and even militarily, than its barren relations with a Washington that for two decades has seemed chronically unreliable, even duplicitous.
Behind that perception lies a more fundamental weakness of the reset: conflicting American and Russian understandings of why it was needed. Each side continues to blame the other for the deterioration of relations after 1991. Neither Obama nor the Clinton-era officials advising him have conceded there were any mistakes in US policy toward post-Soviet Russia. Instead, virtually the entire US political class persists in blaming Russia and in particular Putin, even though he came to power only in 2000. In effect, this exculpatory history deletes the historic opportunities lost in Washington in the 1990s and later. It also means that the success or failure of the reset is “up to the Russians” and that “Moscow’s thinking must change,” not Washington’s.
. . .
… in addition to triumphalist fallacies about the end of the cold war, three new tenets of neo–cold war US policy have become axiomatic. First, that present-day Russia is as brutally antidemocratic as its Soviet predecessor. Evidence cited usually includes the Kremlin’s alleged radioactive poisoning of a KGB defector, Alexander Litvinenko, in London, in 2006, and its ongoing persecution of the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on whom the New York Times and Washington Post have bestowed the mantle of the great Soviet-era dissenters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Second, that Russia’s nature makes it a growing threat abroad, especially to former Soviet republics, as demonstrated by its “invasion and occupation of Georgia” in August 2008. And third, that more NATO expansion is therefore necessary to protect both Georgia and Ukraine.
. . .
The Obama administration has done nothing to discourage such anti-Russian axioms and too much to encourage them. [In addition, Obama has revised] … the reset to include so-called democracy-promotion policies—intrusions into Russia’s domestic politics …
Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 6 2019 5:37 utc | 50
@ Posted by: Glenn Brown | Jan 6, 2019 7:46:28 AM | 71
It was most probably option B.
In her 2016 book Dark Money (published just a few months before the November election), Jane Meyer investigates the Republican propaganda machine and its many innovations after Obama’s first victory (2008), in order to explain how they successfully stifled him and made him a lame duck after just two years.
But, in the same book, there are some passages which make clear that the Democrats, albeit late, caught up with the Republican’s innovative electoral tactics (astroturf, advanced computer software to redraw the maps, NGOs, big donors etc. etc.). She never states in the book the Democrats didn’t use the same dirty tricks — only that they didn’t use them until some point after 2012. That would explain why the Democrats jumped so eagerly to the minorities narrative in detriment to class struggle: many of the Republican 2012 success in its “State strategy” came thanks to the new maps softwares, which estimated likely votes by race.
Trump is only mentioned twice in this book — the first, when menitioning Romney used his private jet (so, not about him the person) and, the second time, ironically, as an outsider, in the end of the book:
Donald Trump, the New York real estate and casino magnate whose unorthodox bid for the Republican nomination flummoxed party regulars, was also left off the Kochs’ invitation list. In August 2015, as his rivals flocked to meet the Koch donors, he tweeted, “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?” Trump’s popularity suggested that voters were hungry for independent candidates who wouldn’t spout the donors’ lines. His call to close the carried-interest tax loophole, and talk of the ultrarich not paying its share, as well as his anti-immigrant rants, made his opponents appear robotically subservient, and out of touch. But few other Republican candidates could afford to ignore the Kochs.
Jane Meyer would latter fall for the Russophobe trap, by publishing a lamentable article about Russia and the “election manipulation”, but her pre-Trump book is legit, very well documented.
Also, Hillary Clinton was senator for NY when she disputed in 2016. Senators for NY are historically in the pockets (i.e. they can only be in the race to begin with) of Wall Street. During the campaign, many people asked Hillary to make the speeches the made for Goldman Sachs in exchange for money public. She still didn’t do it and it’s probable she never will. But we all know the contents: it’s in the air, and the post-2008 atmosphere is heavy.
During the campaign, she also painted herself as a “proud Goldwater girl”. Her husband and future POTUS, Willian “Bill” Clinton, is also what they called a “Southern Democrat” (from Arkansas), i.e. a neoliberal and, most importantly, anti-unionist in the Democratic Party.
In other words, there’s nothing in Hillary’s biography that indicates she’s some kind of leftwing or even a feminist hero.
Posted by: vk | Jan 6 2019 14:30 utc | 79
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