The president is unleashing autocrats to create a Middle East apocalypse.
The White House/Flickr
Texas tornadoes are potentially caused by the “flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil,” according to the Butterfly Effect theory. Determining the ultimate cause and effects in weather is a tough call, however, given how many random physical factors ultimately come into play. But it’s fascinating to think that a distant and peacefully fluttering butterfly has so much potential power.
Easier to determine is how one man’s wanton tongue wagging and temper tweeting can not only cause a political storm but has now unleashed the four horsemen of a modern regional apocalypse: Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, Syrian President Bashir al Assad, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the ever-present Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Donald J. Trump, in his “great and unmatched wisdom,” has shown that not only can he distract a domestic electorate but that the power of his presidency can create limitless distant chaos, death and destruction with the tap of a thumb and the flip of a finger. Now that’s power.
Trump’s causal tweet-to-terror relationship reanimated the biblical fearsome four horsemen who, in their initial iteration, represented Conquest, War, Famine and Death. This is no small feat. In one feckless action, the president of the United States has whipped up the apocalyptic forces that one hoped the world’s most powerful man would instead be able to tamp down.
The first horseman rode in, chuffed and bare-chested on his nag, a vision of strength and wearing the religious symbols of a loving God. But in the form of Putin, this rider drew behind him a fierce and unmerciful flock of jet-powered birds dropping bombs on the sick and infirm, raining explosive charges on targeted Syrian hospitals both to sow fear and remind the beleaguered recipients of his desire for conquest—that he alone can decide individuals’ fate.
Turkey’s Erdoğan galloped in as the second horseman, but always saw himself as the first to plow the field that borders his earthly realm. He, too, seeks conquest, but initiates this latest war against not only Kurds, but the rest of humanity. His steed leads both mechanized infantry and coordinated shelling. Irregular troops, mercenaries and retributive forces walk the plains to find families it can force to flee. Contemptible men seek the already suffering in order to show them the real meaning of torture. They reveal their true colors and cruelty when a bound and frightened prisoner must not only face a Geneva Convention-breaking level of humiliating indignity, but is ultimately put down like a dog in a ditch. For Armenians, this is a tragically familiar story.
Horseman Assad, the “Butcher of Damascus,” initially came to his people hidden, Trojan horse-like, in the form of a healer, an ophthalmologist who presumably once took the Hippocratic Oath to “First, do no harm.” Instead, he rode his father’s coattails and despotic style to defy the healing gods and apply his brutal hand to blind a nation to the distant freedoms it could once see. His marauders now ride roughshod with Russian ravagers over territory where a few short days ago American troops balanced a relative peace. Assad enforced a famine that starved his opponents and deprived them of medical supplies. He now has civilian enemies on the run while his starved dogs of war eat from the abandoned American tables. As a result, we all taste the bitterness of Trump’s dishonorable retreat.
Let us not forget the final of the four: Iran. America’s president effectively invited the Persian potentate to come to town, enlivening his proxies and apostles of death. Ayatollah Khamenei keeps his robes clean while he deploys merciless men who seek to extend his revolution from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. They never left Assad’s side and never lost sight of completing their Shia crescent. Iraq had already entered Iran’s sphere of influence; Assad was always Tehran’s partner in crime. A policy-indifferent Trump who, willy-nilly, dumps allies and revokes treaties has created another opening to an empire-oriented Iran with great ambitions, educated people, oil reserves aplenty and a willingness to flaunt its confederates’ firepower, whether with refinery-destroying drones or ship-sinking stealth. The Ayatollah is on a roll.
Lo and behold this prophesy: The four horsemen of the regional apocalypse are revealed to be upon us now. Neither the desire to rein them in by Trump’s handwringing congressional sycophants, nor the post-American retreat media spin, nor any post-tragedy justification from he who unleashed the beasts can lasso them back into the stable.
Trump catalyzed a war “7,000 miles away” in a “land that has nothing to do with us.” He let his tweet fly. The Butterfly Effect has whipped up the winds of war that are now sweeping across the Middle East in renewed violence. Let us pray that they do not grow and gust at biblical proportions.
American military convoy stops near the town of Tel Tamr, northern Syria [Source: AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad]
The White House/Flickr
Trump shifts from ending “forever wars” to sending tanks into Syria’s oil fields
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper Friday confirmed that Washington would leave military forces in Syria to maintain control of the country’s principal oil and gas fields.
The Pentagon is “considering how we might reposition forces in the area in order to make sure that we secure the oil fields,” Esper said. His remarks came at the close of a meeting of NATO defense ministers that expressed bitter resentment within Europe over US President Donald Trump’s green lighting of a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria earlier this month along with his announcement that US troops would be pulled out of the region.
American military convoy stops near the town of Tel Tamr, northern Syria [Source: AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad]
While refusing to “get into details,” Esper said the oil field deployment “would include some mechanized units.”
Newsweek magazine has reported that the plan drafted by the Pentagon calls for the deployment of “half of an Army armored brigade combat team battalion that includes as many as 30 Abrams tanks” along with roughly 500 US troops.
The Pentagon’s plan makes a mockery of Trump’s demagogic claim that his administration was putting an end to Washington’s “forever wars” and pulling US forces out of Syria.
The escalation of the US military presence in oil fields located in Syria’s eastern province of Deir al-Zour will also create a situation of extreme instability and the threat of a potentially catastrophic war under conditions in which Russia is deploying forces to the Turkish-Syrian border. Syrian government troops are also moving into areas that had previously been controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces—consisting primarily of the Kurdish YPG militia—which served as the Pentagon’s proxy ground troops in the so-called war on ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).
Moscow announced on Friday that some 300 more Russian military police had arrived in northeastern Syria after having been transferred from Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya. They are to patrol most of the 273-mile Syrian-Turkish border, outside of the areas that were seized by Turkey's armed forces during the invasion carried out earlier this month in the northeast, along with the northwestern Afrin district that was occupied by Turkey during a previous invasion last year.
Under an agreement reached earlier this week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, the Russian troops are also tasked with overseeing the pullback of Kurdish YPG militia units to positions 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of Syria’s border with Turkey. Erdogan has vowed that after next Tuesday, if the Kurdish units remain in the border area, Ankara will resume its military offensive.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that if the Kurdish forces did not withdraw, they would be left “face to face with the Turkish military,” because the Russian troops “wouldn’t stand between them.”
Other Russian units, equipped with armored vehicles, have already taken up positions in the border area, as have columns of Syrian government soldiers. Moscow has declined to say precisely how many troops it has deployed in the area.
Trump signaled his shift over keeping US troops in northeast Syria after coming under a barrage of criticism directed at his pullout order by both the leadership of the Democratic Party, which is committed to continuing the Syrian intervention initiated under the Obama administration, and sections of the Republican Party. This was joined with an unprecedented wave of denunciations by retired US military commanders, whose intervention expressed a near-mutinous reaction within sections of top brass.
According to NBC news, the US president was convinced to change his decision after a briefing by Jack Keane, a right-wing retired general who served as an adviser in the US “surge” in Iraq under President George W. Bush and has since become a multimillionaire as the chairman of the company that manufactures Humvee military vehicles as well as by sitting on the boards of other arms corporations. Keane is also a paid commentator on Fox News.
Keane was one of those who denounced Trump’s withdrawal order as a “betrayal” of the Kurds and a “strategic blunder”. The principal concern is that it would weaken the offensive against Iran and Russia, the powers that constitute the main impediment to the unfettered control over the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East, sought by Washington through successive wars since 1991.
According to NBC, Keane pitched the proposal to maintain a US presence by showing Trump a map of the area being evacuated by US troops, highlighting the oil and gas fields. The US president, who previously suggested that Washington should have kept the oil fields in Iraq to “reimburse” itself for its invasion and destruction of that country, responded favorably.
Trump first signaled his about-face on Syria on Monday, when he announced at a cabinet meeting: “I always said if you’re going in, keep the oil. We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow. Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”
The idea that a major US oil company has an interest in going into Syria to illegally exploit its rather modest resources in a war zone is as absurd as the claim by Defense Secretary Esper that US troops are being deployed to the oil fields to prevent them falling into the hands of an already defeated ISIS.
The purpose of the US deployment is to deny these resources to the Syrian government and stymie any attempt to reunify and reconstruct the war-torn country. It is also aimed at confronting Russia and Iran, which have backed the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
From the outset of the CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria, Washington and its allies have sought to deny Damascus access to Syria’s domestic energy supplies. Initially, the oil and gas fields fell under control of Islamist militias led by the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, which served as the main shock troops in the drive to overthrow Assad.
While Al Nusra controlled the fields, the European Union lifted sanctions on Syrian oil, allowing the Al Qaeda affiliate to finance itself by exporting Syrian oil at rock-bottom prices.
The fields subsequently fell under the control of ISIS and then were taken by Washington’s Kurdish proxies.
The movement of US tank units into the oil fields is the clearest demonstration that the Trump administration is committed to continuing the more than eight-year-old war for regime change that has claimed the lives of over half a million people, while forcing nearly half the population, some 11 million people, from their homes.
At the same time, the US deployment is directed at escalating US military aggression against Iran, pushing the Middle East further toward the brink of a region-wide war.
The threat of a direct confrontation with Russia under the conditions of destabilization created by the Turkish invasion and partial US withdrawal, along with the strengthened Russian presence in northeast Syria, will now be greater than ever.
In February of last year, an attempt by a column of Syrian government forces supported by Russian military contractors to move into the area of the oil fields was meant by devastating US air strikes in which at least 100 were killed. Under the present conditions, a similar action could provoke a direct military conflict between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
Trump Breaks His Pattern and Retreats on All Fronts
The White House/Flickr
When acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney stepped to the mic on Thursday to address the press corps, he thought he’d be creating controversy by announcing that the 2020 G-7 conference would be held in one of the president’s own resorts. He was correct about that, but he did far more damage by his admission that there had been a quid pro quo of dirt on the Democrats in exchange for military aid to Ukraine, and that we should all just “get over it.”
White House ally Sean Hannity was unimpressed:
“What is Mulvaney even talking about?” Sean Hannity, a Fox News host and confidant of the president’s, said on his radio show Thursday afternoon, referring to what he called the acting chief of staff’s “idiotic interpretation of things.”“I just think he’s dumb, I really do. I don’t even think he knows what he’s talking about,” Mr. Hannity said.
It won’t be possible to undo the damage from the Ukraine admission, although Mulvaney made a very unsuccessful attempt to reverse his position during a Sunday appearance on Fox News. Yet, as the New York Times reports, the decision on the G-7 conference proved even more immediately untenable.
The president first heard the criticism of his choice of the Doral watching TV, where even some Fox News personalities were disapproving. By Saturday afternoon, his concerns had deepened when he put in a call to Camp David, where Mr. Mulvaney was hosting moderate congressional Republicans for a discussion of issues facing them, including impeachment, and was told the consensus was he should reverse himself. Those moderates are among the votes Mr. Trump would need to stick with him during an impeachment.
By Saturday night, the president was convinced they he couldn’t stick by his decision on the G-7 and reversed himself on Twitter. He blamed the media and the Democrats, of course, but it was Republican pushback that forced his hand. The same can be said of his decision to leave some troops in Syria, where his announced withdrawal had caused immediate humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophes.
These three reversals, on Syria, Ukraine and his Doral resort are significant because they represent a break from the crisis management style Trump learned from his old friend Roy Cohn.
Beneath the surface, though, Trump had connections that help explain how he came to launch a demagogic political career based on the racist and transparently inane theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as our president.First among them was Trump’s long relationship with the lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn is most famous for his role as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In that role, he led the aggressive and unethical red-baiting Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations until the U.S. Army pushed back and he was forced to resign in August 1954. In private practice, Cohn represented prominent New Yorkers like la cosa nostra crime boss Carlo Gambino, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, but was frequently at odds with the law. Over the years, he won four separate acquittals on charges varying from conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery, and obstruction of justice before finally being disbarred in 1986 as he was dying of HIV. What Cohn learned from McCarthy was the value of being dramatic and the utility of exaggerated claims and accusations. He passed these lessons along to Donald Trump.According to Trump, he first met Roy Cohn in a members-only Midtown establishment called Le Club. It was 1973, and the government was accusing the Trumps of discriminatory housing practices. He asked Cohn, “The government has just filed suit against our company saying that we discriminated against blacks. What do you think I should do?” Cohn advised him to “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated.”The Trumps retained Cohn to represent them and Donald became his student. According to author Sam Roberts, it was from Cohn that Trump learned his now familiar three-part strategy for handling litigation which he has now transferred to political combat: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.
If nothing else, it’s fair to say that Donald Trump doesn’t like to reverse decisions or admit mistakes. It goes against his training and he considers it a losing strategy. Even when he is convinced that surrender is the best option, he resents the advice and eventually turns on the advisers.
Yet, the president finds himself in a very vulnerable position now, and he can’t afford to ignore the opinions of congressional Republicans if he hopes to win an acquittal in his inevitable trial in the Senate. Already, he’s almost certain to see some defections from House Republicans during the vote on impeachment. The more bipartisan the impeachment vote is, the harder it will be for Republican senators to paint the whole things as a partisan witch-hunt.
This is why Trump has been in full retreat over the last week. Congressional Republicans did not consider his positions on Syria, Ukraine and the G-7 defensible and so the lines were abandoned and mitigation efforts were attempted.
It’s not a promising place to begin what will probably prove to be the worst week yet for Trump and his horrid presidency.
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