Crime, it’s not just for breakfast in the White House anymore.
6 Likes
Fuck this guy. I hope the Kurds carve out a Kurdistan out of Turkey.
7 Likes
Trump has always been against U.S. involvement in Syria
at least, that was his position during the 2016 campaign
2 Likes
Right; this is a foolish decision that goes against the advice of the entire intelligence, military, and executive branches, but it’s not really the “impulsive surprise” that the news is making it out to be, given that he’s been talking about doing this exact thing for over two years and that his view on any military operation is “America first, allies not at all”.
7 Likes
Watching Lindsey Graham positively get the vapors from this is an interesting morality play:
6 Likes
Pretty decent analysis
9 Likes
when I was a kid it was the left that wanted to bring all the troops home from everywhere
all you people off my lawn
4 Likes
I think people still want that, overall. But once you sit down and look at it, you realize that just randomly pulling out would leave a power vacuum, and we know who would fill that void.
4 Likes
There world be two Kurdistans, because the KCK parties dominate in Turkish,Syrian and Iranian occupied Kurdistan but are illegal in Iraqi Kurdistan.
I don’t know what will happen after that.
4 Likes
spoke directly with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on the issue
and I’m sure about other batshit conspiracy theories important issues.
2 Likes
Well, to a degree, it is always true. Look what happened when we pulled out of Vietnam.
The era of nations declaring war on each other, duking it out, and then shaking hands for a good show and redrawing some lines on a map are over. It’s all asymmetrical warfare with multiple independent factions. Even if you got two groups to agree to a ceasefire, you have two more that don’t.
The reason these wars last so long is because we are no longer fighting nations but ideologies. They don’t exist as lines on a map we can just bomb and take over. It’s trying to fight an ant colony - you destroy one hill, but their are a half dozen connected hills all around you that you don’t see. And they are Argentine ants, with multiple queens, so you can’t just kill a leader and win, there are multiple independent leaders.
So what is the moral answer? Let the people fight it out among themselves, even if war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed? Are we ok the likelihood that the eventual controller of the area is going to be a dictator? We continually support dictators if they are able to have a stable government. Is this acceptable because the alternative may be a never ending civil war with multiple factions?
Should we help, but just in arms and money? Help with air support, special forces on the ground? Training? Actual soldiers, tanks and artillery? Are we going to see that support through to the end? Which faction(s) should we be supporting? Are they going to be any better than the current rules in the end? Is the cost on materials and lives acceptable? How does that cost compare if we do nothing? Is it OK if our inaction makes the cost of others so much higher?
See there is no easy answer for all of this because war is hell.
1 Like
After all of the bizarre bootlicking from Lindsey, I’m genuinely pleasantly surprised that this was apparently the breaking point for the guy.
4 Likes
I think the important takeaway from this is that all the kompramat & blackmail talk is silly on one level because Graham supports and fawns over Trump because he agrees with Trump on the vast majority of things he does and Graham is a hyperpartisan bootlicker by nature. When he disagrees with Trump, he speaks up (ineffectually and to no purpose, but…)
We’ll see what happens with this, but would anyone be surprised if the Senate backpedaling started by the end of the day and they end up with a watered down resolution expressing the mildest displeasure with no consequences at all for Trump?
There’s something to be said for that, BUT when you make a specific deal for the Kurds to dismantle their defensive positions with a promise that Turkey won’t be coming, and you then go back on that deal in a spur-of the moment decision that has not been thought through at all, it might be more complicated than “bring 'em home!” can encompass.
8 Likes
I guess each party is against the other party’s wars
Syria is an Obama war, so we better keep it going until Biden gets back in
Yes. The case of Saddam Hussein is particularly egregious: he was proud of sharing his birthplace of Tikrit with Saladin (who was Kurdish), but nonetheless used poison gas against the Kurds (with the West turning a blind eye because he was our friend back then).
That said, my sympathy for the Kurds does have limits. They were responsible for the bulk of the massacres during the Armenian genocide, eagerly following the orders of their Turkish masters.
4 Likes
Or, as I indicated, perhaps this situation is a teensy bit more complicated than tossed-off slogans can do justice. I happen to think that the best course of action would be to withdraw from Syria, and I also believe that doing it this way is disastrous and the worst of all worlds.
By making the deal with the Kurds and then exposing them like this, we’ve done ourselves a lot of damage. There are ways it could have been accomplished that would have minimized that damage and wouldn’t continue the trend of whipsaw foreign policy dictated by the last phone call Trump takes.
5 Likes
Trump is still overwhelmingly popular with the Republican base. Any Republican senator who dares lift his hand against Trump will be primaried out of office at the next election, which is why they supinely enable him.
2 Likes
Not going to happen. The Turks have perfected the use of drones against the AKP:
1 Like
Don’t worry:
US President Donald Trump threatens to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Turkey does “anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits” in Syria.
I am not making this up.
5 Likes
It must have been back in the 19A0’s (hence the memory loss)
1 Like
