Well, I was half prepared to do a post on General Flynn this week, but with the advent of Trump’s apparently unilateral decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria and the nearly apoplectic response, it seems more appropriate to concentrate on the broader matter of our foreign policy and how it plays out in what passes for our national conversation.
I think it’s worth saying at the outset that I have no idea of what our military’s mission is in Syria. I keep hearing that it’s essentially the same as the one we’re pursuing in Afghanistan – training and equipping a local force to fight the war for us – but that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. It is, in fact, a formula for another unending deployment, one that has the support of most of the foreign policy voices in the media. Much of the criticism of Trump’s abrupt decision has been from a right militarist perspective, though one that is broadly shared, much like the criticism of his Korea policy. The only argument that has merit, in my view, is that we will be leaving the Syrian Kurds twisting in the wind – something we have done to the Kurds in past decades as well (ask Kissinger). Maybe that is worth keeping 2,000 plus U.S. troops in Syria, if protecting Kurdish fighters is in fact what they’re doing, but as always, we are pondering policy stacked on top of bad policy decades in the making.
The foreign policy talking heads that populate Morning Joe and other shows see this withdrawal as great news for Russia (aka Putin) and emboldening ISIS, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. No mention of the fact that the government we stood up in Iraq is now busily executing thousands Sunnis they breezily accuse of being in league with the Islamic State. That is next-generation ISIS in the making, folks, as that is the process the produced the first generation. These movements do not come out of nowhere. Al Qaeda was spawned by our intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as was the Taliban. Hezbollah was the product of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. ISIS grew out of Sunni Iraqis who found themselves on the wrong side of the U.S. occupation and subsequent Shia-dominated central government. On and on.
The fact is, we need to change the political calculus around getting out of conflicts. We can discuss the best way to do that – by applying more diplomatic and economic pressure on actors like Turkey, etc., but we need to be able to end these wars. Trump is doing it for all the wrong reasons, in a haphazard and asinine way, but he’s doing it. That after helping to wreck Syria beyond repair. We just should never have been there in the first place … and we need to stop doing this shit.
luv u,
jp
Second, this dumb ass election. The corporate media is obsessing over vice presidential picks this week, for some strange reason (guys …. they are going to announce the names in just a few days – re the fuck lax). Clinton and Sanders did their event together, Bernie burning the house down as usual. It’s not a hard argument to make that, whatever else we do politically, we all need to make certain the wrong person out of the two possible presidential winners never reaches the White House. If the only thing you gain is exponentially better Supreme Court appointments, that in itself is enough reason to mark the ballot for Clinton, at least in swing states. A more reactionary court can do enormous amounts of damage – this we have seen.
Much as the press is obsessing over the terrorism / not-terrorism question, this is in essence another story of the proverbial three-foot creep with a four-foot gun. That these people were prepared for some kind of attack seems clear, but what they had was not all that exotic except in the respect that there was an awful lot of it – something like 4,500 rounds of ammunition. The guns were legally acquired by someone. They’re not very hard to get, frankly, even military-style assault weapons. And as far as ammo is concerned, I am reminded of a kid I knew in my late teens, a musician, whose family maintained a sizable ammunition factory in the basement of their suburban home. I remember rehearsing some songs down there, in a small clearing between the casings, as siblings continued to add to the arsenal. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that my friend and his family had filled 4,500 rounds down there. They never shot up their workplace, but if they had, the basement armory would have been part of the news story.