Thread by @sfrantzman

Thread: The Jeffrey and Rayburn doctrine in action...?

The US had partners in Syria. They did a huge job defeating ISIS, sacrificed many. US officials, working against US CENTCOM and the SDF...backed Turkey and extremists, enabling an attack on the SDF. Russia swooped in.

https://twitter.com/mutludc/status/1341068199249539075

Now the SDF have to go to Russia to stop Ankara's extremists from attacking...and this was all part of a quiet plan to break the SDF-CENTCOM success and force the SDF to go to Russians so the pro-Ankara lobby could say "see they are pro-Russia"

They weren't working with Russia before. But the US withdrew, enabled a brutal invasion...and purposely enabled Russia to move in as a buffer...this insanity...all of design from the US State Dept...created this ridiculous situation. The US could have helped its partners.

The amazing thing is the US encouraged the creation of the US...encouraged them to fight ISIS and re-take these areas...then enabled Ankara to use extremists to attack them...and never bothered to say "no...extremists you don't get to attack our partners"

US officials would rather have Russia, Iran and Turkey run Syria than US-backed SDF...all because some of them want to "defeat" CENTCOM...because they think that an "Obama era" policy was wrong...and because of their obsessive adoration of totalitarian Ankara.

You know that things have gone awfully bad when America's partners know that they will be ethnically-cleansed and attacked without US support and go to Russia to stop the shelling. Remember when the US was the one who would stop the shelling...but look at Armenia also. Afrin, etc

Again and again and again the message from the US in the region was "we don't stop wars, we don't do ceasefires, we don't care"...and one by one the region understands "you are on your own" when the invasion comes...there is no international community or the US coming to help.

I've seen a lot of bad policies, but the policies in Syria, in which one part of the US government actively told its friends in Ankara they opposed other parts of the US government...and ended up with partners fighting extremists and allies...was one of the worst.

It was designed to answer a question: "How do we get rid of the SDF?" And "we need to make them appear pro-Iran/Russia". How do we do that? "We enable Turkey to attack them, tell them our relationship is temporary and they will be forced to go to Russia." Then we win.

Imagine having officials whose sole goal is to jettison allies and partners to get other "allies" who are BUYING Russia's S-400 to attack the other partners...to make them appear pro-Russia...so as to work with the "ally" that is literally buying Russian equipment.

Imagine in an alternate universe US policymakers who coordinate with their own military officials and work to support allies and partners and create de-confliction and don't fuel extremists? Sounds odd.....

Imagine US policymakers who would fly in and say "no, Ankara your extremists will stop shelling civilians and our partners or we will do X, Y and Z"...but no...instead it is treated like some fun game "how much suffering can we get this week in Syria..."

Poor Armenia for instance had a leader who wanted to move slightly away from Russia...but the DC Ankara lobby was like "we have to stop that, let's help get Baku to attack with Turkey's backing and then label Armenia 'pro-Iran' to excuse the attack." And again another war...

The "let's help Turkey attack this and that" as an excuse that "Ankara is against Russia and Iran" is the big nonsense of the last years...invading Afrin, Serekaniya, Nagorna-Karabakh...didn't hurt Iran...it did hurt civilians who were forced to be unwanted stand-ins for "Iran"

The list of places destroyed in the Middle East as part of some bizarre obsessive "let's enable totalitarian Ankara to invade everything and then pretend it is against Russia/Iran" has been a destructive, horrid policy.

And who pays the price? Civilians, civilians, civilians. For nothing but some "strategy" game of some people who relax in the US or Ankara and talk "strategy" while hundreds of thousands driven into refugee and IDP camps. Awful.