thegrayzone.com
To
withdraw, or not to withdraw? That is the question Donald Trump, in his own
inimitable way, has answered both ways.
First
came the withdrawal. It was real, and had a significant effect. Trump ordered
the removal of US troops from Kurdish areas, putting an end to the prospect of
an independent Kurdish statelet, split off from Syria. Such a partition was
always implausible, given the general balance of forces in the region and the
specific refusal of NATO-member Turkey to accept any such thing. (Turkey had already invaded Syria in 2016, and the Obama-Biden
administration ordered the Kurds to accept it.) It was also a lynchpin of the
longstanding Plan B for dismembering the Syrian state. As I argued in a previous article, agreeing with ”the entire spectrum of US-imperialist politics and
media,” Trump’s withdrawal decision “marked ‘a major turning point in Syria’s long
war’ and has, indeed,
‘upended decades’ of imperialist and Zionist plans for
the Middle East.”
But,
as I also noted, Trump is impulsive, shallow, and weak, and “surrounds himself
with neocon deep-state actors on whom he depends and who often ignore or
actively oppose…his non-interventionist instincts,” and who “may yet get him to
reverse that [decision] or over-compensate for it.”
And
thus it came to be. Kinda-sorta.
