Three key questions about Syria no one seems to be asking or answering:
1. Are the Turks lying about the security threat from Syrian Kurds?
2. Were the Turks going to attack even if U.S. troops remained?
3. Was the U.S. expected to garrison that part of Syria forever?
1. Are the Turks lying about the security threat from Syrian Kurds?
2. Were the Turks going to attack even if U.S. troops remained?
3. Was the U.S. expected to garrison that part of Syria forever?
A great deal hinges on question 1. If the Turks are lying about the Syrian Kurdish YPG working with the terrorist PKK, then they've perpetrated a massive fraud to justify invading another country and ethnically cleansing part of its territory.
If that's the case, Turkey has committed one of the worst crimes against the international community in recent memory. NATO membership should be revoked and regime change in Ankara should be on the table. Turkey should be removed from every U.N. committee.
NATO absolutely cannot countenance one of its members conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign and killing a large number of people, including civilians, in an aggressive war on foreign soil launched under false pretenses. It's an attack on the charter purpose of the organization.
The United Nations should view Recep Erdogan on the same level as Slobodan Milosevic in that scenario. His actions would be a clear violation of numerous U.N. charters. He would have jeopardized the international fight against ISIS over a paranoid delusion.
No one in the international community is taking any of those steps. NATO just repeated that Turkey's membership is not in jeopardy. The U.N. is not holding emergency sessions to condemn Erdogan and begin war crimes prosecutions.
I have not heard any U.S. critic of President Trump's withdrawal of troops accuse the Turks of lying about the YPG. That should be Item Number One in their critique of Trump's policy, but it isn't. Some of those critics sit on congressional intel committees.
If the Turks are NOT lying about the YPG, then keeping U.S. troops in place to prevent Turkish action against a real security threat would be tantamount to America shielding terrorists while they conduct operations against a NATO ally.
Turkish accusations against the YPG predate the Syrian civil war. The Turks have been loudly warning for years that they would take action to secure the Syrian border region if an agreement could not be reached with U.S. assistance to resolve the security threat.
There was plenty of time to thoroughly investigate Turkey's allegations and come up with a solution short of war if they were true. That effort should have involved all parties invested in northeastern Syria - NATO, UN, EU. It should have involved U.S. agencies and Congress.
If the determination was reached that Turkey's accusations were invalid, all of those entities should have warned Turkey in unison that an invasion would be met with combined military force plus expulsion from NATO. What matter on NATO's table is more serious at the moment?
The Democrats should have stopped wasting America's time with their impeachment role playing game and actually DONE THEIR DAMN JOBS by authorizing military force against Turkey. That signal to Erdogan would have been unmistakable.
And if thorough investigation proved the Turkish allegations against the YPG were not without merit, then in what sane world was the solution to keep a handful of American troops standing in the way forever, without any formal accusations against Turkey for slandering the YPG?
That's not a coherent policy - it's sheer laziness. It's every international organization abandoning its duties, its very PURPOSE, and settling back for a nice long nap because the Americans will take care of everything.
The U.N. fritters away vast sums of money on trivia, spends days fooling around with teenage climate activists, blasts out globalist propaganda, and finds 20 reasons a day to condemn Israel. It couldn't be bothered to condemn Turkey for lying about the YPG and gearing up for war?
Question 2 is also important. If Turkey could no longer be dissuaded from carrying out the invasion they warned they were ready to undertake, then either our people in NE Syria would have been risking their lives for nothing, or they'd be the tripwire for war with Turkey.
The U.S. was not ready to fight that war, not without grueling casualties. We have a lot of people based in Turkey, and we heavily depend on one of their airbases, which has U.S. nuclear weapons. What happens to the people and equipment if we're suddenly shooting at Turks?
The Turks are sending every conceivable signal that they were absolutely determined to launch their operation and are loudly stating nothing will stop them from completing it. Sure, actions don't always match words, but every bit of data we have suggests they meant business.
People are laughing at Trump for sending that "don't be tough guy" letter to Erodgan and him throwing it away and launching the invasion that afternoon. Erdogan's behavior suggests he was determined to move, whether or not 20 or 50 U.S. soldiers stood in his way.
The U.S. tried to work out a safe zone deal with Turkey and the Syrian Kurds for a long time. The negotiations fell apart. Nothing satisfying to Turkey could be arranged. The Turks loudly and clearly signaled they would take matters into their own hands. The clock ran out.
Question 3 is important because if U.S. troops weren't going to garrison that part of Syria forever, the Kurds were eventually going to have to make their peace with Bashar Assad, who is firmly seated in Damascus for the rest of his life thanks to Russia.
Like it or not, the Assad regime is the government of Syria. The U.S., EU, and NATO did not go to war in Syria to prevent it. Russia DID go to war in Syria to make it happen. It is a fact on the ground. The last pockets of rebellion are being brutally exterminated.
The U.S. cannot be expected to carve out a chunk of Syria and keep it independent in perpetuity as a de facto Kurdish state, ESPECIALLY if that state is also threatened with attack from Turkey, even more especially if that pseudo-state really is a threat to Turkey.
I'm on the record as saying the Kurds should have a REAL, internationally-recognized state of their own. U.S. policy should support their effort to get one. But we can't just give it to them, redrawing national borders with a handful of troops on perpetual deployment.
If the international community deems the Turkish border region of Syria should be beyond the influence of either Ankara or Damascus, then the international community should have its international boots on the damn ground alongside American soldiers.
The U.N. could have declared a permanent peacekeeping mission in the protectorate of northeast Syria, formally declared Assad's control over the area invalid, formally notified Erdogan that he would go to war with the Western world by crossing that border.
I don't much care for Erdogan and Turkish elections are a joke, but by every standard of the U.N. and NATO, he is the legitimate head of a legitimate state. He should be dealt with as such, with clear and unambiguous measures, not left for the U.S. to manage like a tumor.
The situation in Syria at the moment Trump withdrew U.S. troops was the worst of all possible worlds, a comprehensive failure of our arrogant and expensive international community. The three questions I asked are the questions EVERYONE should have been asking out loud.
The problem is not that Trump wrote that odd letter to Erdogan. The problem is that NOBODY ELSE WROTE ANY LETTERS TO ERDOGAN. This should not have been Trump's decision to make. Where was Congress, NATO, the UN? They were nowhere, doing nothing of importance. /end
