https://socialistaction.org/2019/01/07/trumps-syria-exit-provokes-washington-panic/
Trump’s Syria exit provokes Washington panic
/ 13 hours ago
jan. 2019 u.s. troopsBY JEFF MACKLER
President Trump’s unexpected Dec. 19 Twitter announcement ordering a
30-day timetable for the withdrawal of the 2000 U.S. troops in Syria and
7000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan provoked a bipartisan
panic in Washington. Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” James Mattis, “the
butcher of Fallujah,” resigned in protest. He stated, according to The
New York Times, that leaving Syria in 30 days would jeopardize the fight
against the Islamic State, betray our Syrian Kurdish Arab allies on the
ground, and cede the eastern part of the country to the Syrian
government and its Russian and Iranian allies.”
The former commander of American-led troops in Afghanistan from 2009 to
2010, General Stanley McChrystal, warned that “Trump’s approach to
national security was reckless.” Eight years earlier, the same
McChrystal, working under the Obama administration, pilloried then Vice
President Joseph Biden for publicly revealing that Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf State monarchies had
systematically provided weapons to and trained al-Qaida and other
terrorist groups to invade Syria for the purpose of removing the Bashar
Assad government. Biden apologized for his “indiscrete” statements but
never repudiated their validity.
Brett McGurk, U.S. representative to the so-called global coalition
fighting ISIS, also resigned from Trump’s team, stating, “Fighters with
ISIS were on the run, but not yet defeated as Trump had said.”
Pressing the panic button to the hilt, New York Times reporter Vivian
Lee opened her Dec. 26 article with: “Turkey is threatening to invade
Syria to eradicate Kurdish fighters. Syrian forces are rolling toward
territory the Americans will soon abandon. Israel is bombing Iran-backed
militias deep inside Syria and Russia could soon move to crush the last
vestige of the Syrian anti-government insurgency.”
Joining the chorus of Trump naysayers was none other than former U.S.
diplomat Richard N. Hass, today president of the ruling class’s top
think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations. Hass tweeted: “Israeli
airstrikes in Syria, Saudi continuation of the war in Yemen, Turkey
preparing to attack Syrian Kurds, Assad in power and ISIS anything but
defeated, Iran expanding its regional reach, Russia the most influential
external power: welcome to the post-American Middle East.”
Ruling-class policy making
The warmongering Democrats joined their Republican counterparts along
with a host of generals, past and present, to signal Trump that in the
United States presidents really don’t make fundamental policy. This
remains the exclusive prerogative of the capitalist multi-billionaire
ruling-class elite, who own and control the nation’s wealth, resources,
dominate the government’s central institutions, and engineer major
policy decisions through their secret and private channels.
Within days of Trump’s tweet, these forces, through their myriad
connections, signaled that Trump notwithstanding, there would be no
withdrawal in 30 days, if at all. While declining to name names, The New
York Times postulated, “Some analysts said they believed Mr. Trump’s
orders would not even be carried out—at least not on the 30-day
timetable he imposed for Syria. The Pentagon has slow-walked his orders
before, and already there is talk of a more gradual withdrawal given the
complications that would probably arise from a hasty pullout” [emphasis
added].
Trump’s extreme right-wing former top policy adviser, Stephen Bannon,
chimed in, “The apparatus slow-rolled him until he just said enough and
did it himself. Not pretty, but at least done.”
But it was not really “done.” In less than a week, Trump got the word.
The Times headlined, “Trump to Allow Months for Troop Withdrawal in
Syria, Officials Say.” Their Dec. 31 article affirmed that “Mr. Trump
confirmed on Twitter that troops would ‘slowly’ be withdrawn, but
complained that he got little credit for the move after a fresh round of
criticism from retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and reports from the
departing White House House chief of staff John F. Kelly, himself a
retired Marine general, about the president’s impulsive decision-making.”
Trump tweeted, “If anybody but Donald Trump did what I did in Syria,
which was an ISIS loaded mess when I became President, they would be a
national hero. ISIS is mostly gone, we’re slowly sending our troops back
home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS
remnants.”
Trump’s real intentions
In truth, Trump has no intention of ending the U.S. war against Syria,
an imperialist slaughter that has taken the lives of some 350,000 to
500,000 Syrians and led to the tragic exodus of almost half the
population. Trump stated as much during his Iran visit in late December,
when he reported that the 2000 U.S. Special Forces troops—trained
killers—would be moved across the border to neighboring Iraq.
He implied that the nearby U.S. base in Qatar would be on the ready to
bomb Syria at his command, as it has innumerable times over the past
years. He made no mention of the thousands of additional U.S. forces
stationed on the U.S. flotilla offshore Syria in the Mediterranean Sea.
Nevertheless, the hoopla over Trump’s announcement has revealed some
truths that have usually been denied by all previous U.S.
administrations as well as by significant portions of the U.S. left.
Denials aside, for example, Joseph Biden’s original statement that the
Gulf State monarchies have been systematically arming, training, and
directing al-Qaida and related terrorist groups to overthrow the Assad
government has been fully confirmed today. Further, no one denies that
the so-called Free Syrian Army, previously touted as representing
“moderate rebels,” is or has ever been anything other than the creation
of the U.S./NATO and Turkey.
In the same vein, the so-called remaining al-Qaida/Nusra Front/Free
Syrian Army imperialist “coalition” armed fighters in the northern
province of Idlib, 30,000 or more, are the same U.S./NATO/Gulf State
monarchy-financed and directed forces who exist today only at the
discretion of and under the protection of U.S. imperialism. When Syrian
Army troops in early October made some initial moves to re-take, or
better, liberate Idlib from its imperialist-backed occupiers, they were
warned by the top UN diplomats from the U.S., France, and Britain that
the full force of world imperialism would be launched against them. “How
dare the Syrians invade the land they were born in” was the united
refrain of the world’s superpowers!
Again echoing the real positions of the U.S. ruling class, The Times and
its quoted sources repeat ad nauseam that a U.S. withdrawal would “cede
the eastern part of the country to the Syrian government and its Russian
and Iranian allies.” Imagine that! The Syrian government would regain
the 30 percent of Syria now controlled by U.S. imperialism!
And what would the Syrian government do with this regained region? All
sources have concluded that the Syrians would use this oil rich and
fertile land to rebuild, with Russian and Iranian assistance, their
devastated nation! We should note here that over the past years when
ISIS controlled the same oil resources, the complicit U.S. military
consciously ignored the endless ISIS truck caravans that openly
transported Syria’s stolen oil to Turkey, where it was sold to finance
ISIS operations.
It is also noteworthy in this regard that Trump has been criticized for
his 2016 campaign advocacy that the U.S. leave Syria. Indeed, in a
one-on-one campaign debate with Hillary Clinton, who argued that the
U.S. was winning in Syria and should continue its war, Trump countered,
briefly, and without references, that the U.S. had already lost the war
in Syria. The fact that his campaign published a full-page ad in The New
York Times featuring a long list of retired generals and other top
military officers served to indicate that Trump was not without full
knowledge of the facts on the ground that informed him that only forces
the U.S. could muster in their efforts to remove the Assad government
were those bought and paid for by the U.S. “coalition.”
Today, the imperialist-promoted myth of an ongoing popular democratic
insurgency against the Syrian government has been abandoned by virtually
everyone. Yet, as in Vietnam, “knee deep in the big muddy, the big fool
presses on.” This is not the first time when ruling-class divisions over
imperialist war policy have been brought to public attention. With
regard to Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, debates over whether
to bomb the nation in question “back to the stone age,” or to consider
other options like imposing U.S. imperialist will by more subtle means,
including behind the scenes negotiations, have always been on the table.
In Afghanistan, for example, U.S. troop withdrawals have been
accompanied by the sending of the largest privatized army in U.S.
history—50,000 troops—to accomplish the same imperialist ends. In
Nicaragua, it was the U.S.-organized and funded Contras, operating out
of Honduras; in Cuba it was a U.S.-trained army in the Dominican
Republic that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The blustering
bully warmaker Donald Trump, whose military budget exceeds all others in
world history, and who is fully is aware that U.S. death squads,
sanctions, drone wars, embargo wars, and never-ending real wars wreak
death and destruction across the globe, was stupid enough to believe,
for a moment at least, that he could tweet U.S. war policy on his own
authority. No doubt he has now been convinced otherwise.
Kurds open talks with Assad
A few days after Trump’s 30-day pullout announcement, The New York Times
headlined: “Syria’s Kurds Feeling Betrayed by the U.S., Ask Assad
Government for Protection.” The article read, “American-backed Kurdish
People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G., said the Syrian government, should
send troops to the city of Manbij, near the Turkish border.
“The request amounted to a United States ally calling on an enemy of the
United States to protect it from another American ally, Turkey.”
To the horror of U.S. officials, the Y.P.G. invited President Assad to
visit areas under their control and to discuss a resolution of Kurdish
demands for a form of federated participation in Syria wherein Kurdish
majority regions would be granted greater autonomy and local control.
This was not the first time that Kurds have called on the Syrian
government for aid against Turkish onslaughts in areas in the northern
border regions where Kurds predominate. In the recent past, whenever the
joint forces of the Syrian Army and the Kurdish militias approached
areas to defend Kurds who were under siege by Turkish forces, the U.S.
backed the Turkish slaughter. U.S. forces have been repeatedly deployed
against the Syrian Army when it sought to re-take regions held by ISIS
in the northeast and by other U.S.-backed terrorist forces.
The Kurds, for their part, have always rejected participation in the
U.S./NATO-orchestrated conferences in Riyadh, Geneva, and elsewhere when
U.S. imperialism sought to unite its divergent coalition stooges for the
purpose of partitioning Syria in accord with U.S. “interests.”
Today, the Zionist colonial, settler state of Israel, backed to the hilt
by the U.S., has, according to the Dec. 26 New York Times, “made clear
it will not tolerate an increased threat from Syria, which the Israelis
demonstrated on Tuesday [Dec. 25] with airstrikes near Damascus.” Israel
too, with U.S. support, occupies a portion of Syria that it conquered in
the Golan Heights region in the 1967 war. Israel’s periodic and numerous
bombing attacks on Syria in support of various terrorist forces have
been painfully ignored by the Syrian government to avoid providing a
pretext for a full-scale Israeli attack.
Trump’s tweeted withdrawal has proved to be a mere episode in the
ongoing U.S. war and occupation of Syria. But it served well to reveal
much of the truth about this eight-year savage assault on Syria’s
fundamental right to self-determination and the U.S.-led mass
destruction of Syria itself
It also revealed that despite the abject failure of overall U.S. war
policy in Syria, and its not too dissimilar failures in Afghanistan over
the past 18 years, the imperialist beast presses on with impunity and
with a cynicism stemming from a belief that there are still “benefits”
to be gained, whether in the form of countless billions in profits to be
registered by the military-industrial complex or in the cynical
supposition that “victory” can or will eventually be achieved by
reducing Syria to ashes and demoralizing its government to the point
that it will, in time, accept virtually any settlement offered by its
would-be conquerors. Such are the exigencies of the U.S. warmakers.
U.S. out now!
In the U.S., challenging the U.S. war machine in Syria and the world
over requires the construction of an independent, massive and united
antiwar movement capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands and more in
the streets to unequivocally demand: U.S. Out Now! Self-determination
for Syria and all oppressed peoples and nations! No to all U.S. wars at
home and abroad!
The nationwide antiwar protests initiated by the United National Antiwar
Coalition (UNAC) and joined by hundreds of antiwar and social justice
organizations for a March 30 march and rally in Washington, D.C., and
other cities is an excellent starting point. Contact UNAC at:
unacpeace@xxxxxxxxx.
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January 7, 2019 in Anti-War, Middle East. Tags: Syria
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Jules Verne
“ Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add
nothing to them. ”
― Jules Verne