Trump’s Syrian See-Saw: From Pullout to Pillage

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.

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (11/1/2019)

Contrary to Mainstream Media Reports, Slowdown Begins: Are We Close to Recession?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported, "The US economy cooled over the summer, growing at a 1.9 percent annualized pace from July through September, the latest sign that the slowdown is deepening. Economists anticipated slightly weaker growth following President Donald Trump’s decision to dramatically expand his trade war with China." On Friday, the Post reported, "The United States added 128,000 jobs in October as the jobless rate ticked up to 3.6 percent, outperforming analyst forecasts during a month in which one of the largest private-employer strikes in recent years weighed on the economy."

America, ISIS, and Syria: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them

Artelligence Inc.

Does it take more than one full minute of thought to see what’s going on here?

The short version:

• ISIS is the product of years of American military intervention in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. ISIS is the creature of an imperial enterprise—a global effort to bring down the Syrian state using jihadi proxies that included the U.S and its allies--Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, at least—that could only have proceeded, “at the bidding of,” and managed by, the imperial center. It was by surfing the American-directed “cataract” of weaponry and funds directed against Syria that ISIS became an international jihadi movement surpassing Al-Qaeda itself. Without that American intervention, there would be no ISIS.


• In this regard, ISIS is only the latest in a series of worst-ever takfiri groups that has been cooked up in the stew of jihadi proxy fighters the U.S. and its allies have been serving up since the its holy war in Afghanistan in 1979—the one where Zbigniew Brzezinski told Bin Laden’s jihadis, “God is on your side.”¹ As Gilbert Mercier quipped, “Just like al-Qaeda, ISIS is the secret love child of United States imperialism and the kings and sheiks of the Gulf states.”²
 
• An American (“coalition”) military attack on Syria will not destroy ISIS, and will not have the primary purpose of destroying ISIS; it will target and degrade the Syrian military, and its primary purpose will be to destroy the Syrian state’s capacity to resist the onslaught of jihadi rebels, including ISIS—a “rebellion” which hasn’t been going so well recently. The Obama administration knows, and says, that an American military attack will not defeat ISIS. It also knows, and says (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, depending on the audience), that its main objective will be to help the jihadi onslaught succeed. “A­ssad must go” is still the prime directive; the jihadis are still the most effective instrument for that. ISIS changes nothing, except to help sell military intervention to the Western publics. In a number of ways, ISIS has intervened to save the jihadi rebellion from defeat. It’s the reverse of the Vietnam rule: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them.

For those who want the details, the long version: