کمربند و جاده, or "How do you say "Belt and Road" in Farsi?"

So much for "maximum pressure":

"Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate the Iranian government because of its nuclear and military ambitions.

The partnership, detailed in an 18-page proposed agreement obtained by The New York Times, would vastly expand Chinese presence in banking, telecommunications, ports, railways and dozens of other projects. In exchange, China would receive a regular — and, according to an Iranian official and an oil trader, heavily discounted — supply of Iranian oil over the next 25 years.

The document also describes deepening military cooperation, potentially giving China a foothold in a region that has been a strategic preoccupation of the United States for decades. It calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing — all to fight “the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes.”

The partnership — first proposed by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Iran in 2016 — was approved by President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet in June, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said last week."

This is an obvious move for Iran, given that it is unavoidably clear that any Republican administration - and 2016 makes clear that the US electorate cannot be counted on not to elect a Republican government, no matter how ridiculous - will treat Iran to whatever they can manage of the Ledeen Doctrine.

This is also obviously a very deep tarpit for Iran. Other "Belt and Road" nations have found that the PRC gives nothing that it cannot take, and have found themselves in hock up to their national ears.

Still...a worthwhile reminder that when your only tool is a hammer, and the tool using that tool is an utter tool, you end up with a "foreign policy" stupider than a bagful of hammers.

Oh, well. We're too busy catching the Plague to worry about any of this stuff anymore.

“...disunited, undisciplined, ambitious, faithless...”

Worth noting, as we drift unmoored through the final days of the Republic, that we're showing as many indicators of a late-stage political dissolution abroad as we are at home, one of these being an increased dependence on mercenaries to fight our cabinet wars.

I'm not going to pretend that these hired guns are going to have anything like the negative domestic effects Niccolo Machiavelli reported they had on the Italy of the Renaissance:

"Mercenaries...are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were."

The United States is not the Florence of the 1500s; we will neither be conquered nor ruined by these mercenaries.

But a putative republic should be concerned with the interests of its citizens. When it increasingly becomes, through using hired troops to further divorce its actions abroad from its people at home, more of an imperium it furthers the conditions that make all the more likely that - although the standards may still read "The Senate and People" - that the orders that move those standards do not reflect any actual intent to do good for, or further the interests of, We the People.

I wish I could, as I so often do, make this into a partisan problem. It's not; the desire to make the nation's military adventures less fraught with political consequences has been sought by the "leadership" of all factions outside the tiny genuinely Red Left (such as it is) and the equally tiny isolationist Right.

No, it's not a Democratic or Republican problem.

It's an "American" problem, and one generated by the massive indifference We the People have shown towards holding our "leaders" accountable to us for their indifference towards...I won't even say "our interests"; it's an indifference towards even trying to honestly and openly assess what those interests are.

Any truly rational evaluation of the value of spending blood and treasure to send soldiers - any soldiers - to chase the ragged aspirants of a theocratic fantasy around a disputatious and chaotic foreign region would quickly conclude that value is utterly nil. All the bullets ever cast cannot kill the notion of Islamic hegemony any more than they could kill Christian dominionism when it was the animating force of the West. It took an Enlightenment to do that, and by our part in discrediting and destroying the secular authorities in the Islamic lands we've done a hell of a fucking good job ensuring that the Islamic Enlightenment is further away than ever.

I have not desire to see my fellow soldiers thrown into this pointless abyss.

But I have even less desire to see my country continue to sow the dragon's teeth simply because I and my fellow citizens are too lazy and disengaged to bother with that sowing when it's done not by our "own" hands but by hired ploughmen tilling foreign fields with the seed my taxes have bought.

Those underneath the harrow are not too stupid to know whose money is behind the rifle, regardless of who is actually carrying it. If we do not understand that, if we do not understand the idiocy of trying to use those hired rifles to divorce ourselves from our cluelessness and geopolitical stupidity, we will never understand that we can never hire enough of those rifles to ever prevent being continually nipped by the dragons.

"...he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty." ~The Prince, Chapter XII

Springtime for Erdogan; the "Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas!" Tour

So the latest piece of geopolitical genius kicking around the collective empty heads of the Trump Administration is the notion of parking a couple of...infantry companies?...(Sciutto at CNN says "200 troops", which would be about a couple of full-strength line infantry companies) in and around "oilfields" in NE Syria to "secure" them.

I'm fascinated by the point of international law here. These are pieces of Syria. They belong to someone, or something, Syrian. Admittedly, the Syrian government is not and has not physically held possession of them. But they are, by simple definition, "Syrian". Who has given the United States the authority to "secure" shit in and around them? If "possession is nine-tenths of the law" and infantry the bailiff's men? Well, yes, but that's the ONLY possible justification. There's no possible actual legal or diplomatic standing for these guys. If the Syrian Arab Army shows up and says "GTFO or we'll shoot" and we don't GTFO we've just started a shooting war with the Syrian government for something that is purely and unequivocally our fuckup. Any GIs that will die will be dying for a mistake, or worse.

And this is more than just a weird mission. This is stupidly risky mission. The US now has no - zero - "friends" in Syria. Check out this little video of random Syrian civilians cursing and pelting GIs with spuds, rocks, and rotten fruit. Nobody will have these poor bastards' backs - indeed, they're targets for everyone; Islamic State whackaloons, Syrian Army troops, Kurds pissed off at being betrayed, random jihadi nuts. Hell, it'd be shorter to list the people who DON'T have a reason to kill GIs than those who do. For the sake of some crappy little pieces of Syrian oilpatch these poor bastards are going to be hanging out there with a huge "Shoot Me Now!" sign on them.

But, hey! No worries! These sorts of things only semi-complicated and are totally not difficult for someone as smart as the Trumpster to figure out, right!

Oh, and this? THIS is simply fucking nuts:

"President Donald Trump is prepared to use military force against Turkey over its actions in Syria if “needed,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday as U.S. troops withdrew from the region. “We prefer peace to war,” Pompeo told CNBC’s Wilfred Frost in a taped interview that aired on “Closing Bell” on Monday. “But in the event that kinetic action or military action is needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action.”

I have no words to describe the idea of starting a shooting war with a NATO member. I know Sven likes to remind us how worthless an ally the U.S. has become to the nations of Europe, but this? Attacking Turkey, a NATO partner, for military actions taken in Syria? Where the hell does that leave Article 5 Article I, which states that "The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." (corrected per Sven's reminder on the limits of Article V)

WTF?

Christ, every time I think this Administration has reached Peak Shitshow...

Update 10/23: Unlike Fake News Donnie, his BFF Vlad the Impaler is a genuine badass dictator who rides around bare-chested on a pony and knows that if you grab your enemy by the balls his heart and mind will follow.

"According to the deal announced at a joint news conference in Sochi, Ankara will control a 32km-wide (20 miles) area between the towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain, which covers 120km (75 miles) of the Turkish-Syrian border. Beginning on Wednesday at noon, Russian military police and Syrian border guards will start removing the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which spearhead the SDF, and their weapons 30km (19 miles) from the border area. Once this is complete, within 150 hours, Turkish and Russian forces will run joint patrols 10km (six miles) to the east and west of the zone."

Here's what this will look like:

This is a huge backdown for Erdogan; he announced that he was going to grab a chunk of Syria 20 miles deep and 276 miles long, about 5,500 square miles. The 20-mile-by-75-mile piece he gets under this is about 1,500 square miles. His Syrian refugees are gonna have to be reeeeeal good buddies to pack into that.

Meanwhile, the Adventures of #EndEndlessWars continues; Trumpy's SecDef Esperanto announced that the US guys who had grabbed a hat out of YPG-land were moving to western Iraq, at which point the Baghdad government slapped him upside the head with what amounts to "Fuck YOU, Yankee dog!"

Thus proving that all this region needed was a very stable genius.

Unfortunately, it was an evil genius, and he runs the former Soviet kleptocracy.

Jesus wept.

Do real men still want to go to Tehran..?

I've beat this drum before, but one of the really infuriating - and more than a little unnerving - things about the Trump Administration is that you can't be sure which of its lies are lies, which are damned lies, which are statistics, and which may, just possibly, be truths.

Case in point.

The Saudis apparently want the hell out of this to be Iran's doing. That makes geopolitical sense. The Saudis can't do anything to the Yemenis they're not doing already, they are regional power rivals to the Persians to the north, but they'll need some U.S. help to take a slap at the Iranians without getting slapped pretty hard in return.

If they can get the Yankees to buy it who sent the drone airmail doesn't really matter; they'll have their Gulf of Persia Resolution and it's Bombs Away! over Tehran.

What's less explicable is the intentions of this government as expressed by the various spokescritters within the Trump Administration.

Since the Saturday strike on the Saudi refinery at Abqaiq everybody and their dog (and Mikey Pompeo, but I repeat myself) has blamed the tricksy Iranian devils. Pompeo practically busted a nut on Twitter fulminating about the wascally Iwanian wabbits:

Thing is, there can't really be much doubt if there's physical evidence. There will be bits and pieces of the aircraft as well as the ordnance. There is likely to have been ground-to-air tracking of the UAVs in flight.

Frankly, I find it hard to believe that the U.S. doesn't 1) know where Iran's cruise missile launch sites are located, and 2) monitor the hell out of them, Iranian communications, and, especially, their aerial attack capabilities.

If this was as unequivocally an Iranian op I have to think that the U.S. intelligence services already know that.

Now...there may be an good reason to keep the intelligence sources on the downlow - tho the Boss doesn't seem to have problems with tweeting out classified reconnaissance photos - and there may be a reason (likely something to do with fire control problems at the Abqaiq facility that are delaying crater analyses and other on-the-ground intel collection that needs to be done to nail down the exact means and methods used) for playing cagey about whodunnit.

But if that's the case, why jump in with the scary ooga-booga "We Know You Did It!" stuff so soon?

I mean, in a tweet he fired off yesterday Trump appeared to say that all he needed was the go-ahead from his pal MBS to nuke those meddlesome Persians:

(As an aside, remember when Republicans used to go nuts about how Obama was just a cat's-paw of everyone who wanted him to use American force to meddle in foreign business? IIRC that was the point of denying him use of force in Syria regardless of red lines here and there; because we are Amurrikuns, gawddamnit, and we don't bow the knee to no furriners. Ah, yes, those were the days...)

However, at the latest White House presser Trump wouldn't directly say that.

"A reporter off-camera asked, "Could you clarify Mr. President? You said you think Iran is responsible for the attack, do you think --- "

"I didn't say that." "Why do you say that?" he asked. "I said we think we know who it was, but I didn't say anybody but ... Certainly it would look to most like it was Iran but I did not say it the way you said it."

So in classic Trumpenstyle the Orange One has managed to 1) make it seem like he's waffling around waiting for his Saudi pals to tell him what to do, and in so doing 2) irk the living shit out of a bunch of people in D.C. by opening his piehole before thinking about it.

Tulsi Gabbard's response “Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not ‘America First,’”may the juiciest, if not the most informative, but pretty much sums up the general enthusiasm for whatever-the-hell-the-Trumpkins-are-up-to.

But what's kind of weird about this is that if the Iranians DID blow the hell out of this Saudi refinery it's either an Iranian-Saudi problem (and only a US problem if we make it one, so why shout and make a fuss until we decide to do that?), or a "global oil supply" problem and thus an attack on everyone who depends on that supply, including the US - which means that we either take some action, or not; again, fulminating on Twitter seems a very odd way of re-envisioning the Ems Telegram.

Anyway, here's my take.

The bottom lines on this one are;

1) I have no idea who really blew up this Saudi refinery, and I could care less. The Houthis certainly had a good reason. But, frankly, with sanctions squeezing their own petroleum sales the Quds Force might well be disposed to remind their neighborhood sheiks that their own lifestyles aren't out of reach if they get too bitchy. Hell, it could have been the Saudis themselves trying to fool their Uncle Sammy and Tangerine Tiberius to launch a Operation Persian Pacification,

2) As a U.S. citizen, please tell me why I should care, or want to help the Saudis in any way? As far as petroleum goes, gas made from Iranian crude drives the ol' Subaru as far as Saudi, and as far as Islamic despotisms go I'd say the difference between the two gas-pump polities is "pick 'em". I don't have a dog in the Shia-Sunni fight, and the best thing my nation can get from Middle Eastern politics is "out", and

2) I'd be a lot less nervous about some moron starting Gulf War IV if I had a higher opinion of the grade of moron currently running things in the Fraudulency Administration, and this nonsense doesn't reassure me in any way. I think that there are still a lot of Bush Era ne'redowells in this Administration that still Want to Go To Tehran, and I don't trust the real-estate-grifter-in-chief to either recognize that or keep those damn gomers' hands off the bomb release levers.

Are WSSF?

We'll have to wait and see, unfortunately.

Update 9/18: There seems to be an increasing consensus that some Iranian organization(s) was/were involved in this attack. The only real question at this point is whether Trump will take his marching orders from his Saudi bros.

What makes this even more frustrating is that Trump's bobo, Pompeo, is straight-up confessing that this is all because his boss blew up the JCPOA:

“There is this theme that some suggest that the president’s strategy that we allowed isn’t working. I would argue just the converse of that. I would argue that what you are seeing here is a direct result of us reversing the enormous failure of the JCPOA,”

When you edit this for Trumpian Newspeak you get the gist that the problems Iran is involved in - whether caused by or not - are the direct result of some idiot blowing up the diplomatic agreement that was actually working and replacing it with nothing but Tweets-o-War and bombast.

The notion that people are going to die because Donald Trump's ego is chafed by the impudent Negro who twitted him at a dinner meeting years ago just reminds me of the scene in Shaw's Devil's Disciple where Richard Dudgeon objects to paying taxes to King George. GEN Burgoyne answers that a gentleman's part is to fulfill his obligations, regardless of their distastefulness, to which Dudgeon responds that it's not the money, it's being swindled by a pigheaded lunatic like George Hanover.

To which Burgoyne admits is another matter entirely...

What's Arabic for "C. Turner Joy"?

Here's the problem.

It may very well be possible that Iranian assets are striking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

It is definitely likely that the Trump Administration would lie about whether that is possible or probable, or both, or neither.

That's the drawback of letting your system foist an incorrigible liar and a coterie of New Gilded Age grifters into the highest executive offices; you then don't know whether you can trust them not to lie you into a shooting war.

If the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson - that were staffed with genuinely intelligent and experienced foreign policy players - lied us into Vietnam, and the Lesser Bush administration - that was crock-full of wingnuts, imperial fantasists, outright kooks, as well as the Stupidest Man on the Face of the Earth - lied us into Iraq, I sure as hell don't trust THESE gomers not to lie us into some sort of idiotic whack-a-Persian blood hunt based on some sort of moron idea that it'd take normal humans smoking a full ounce of prime weed then drinking two cans of sterno and a half-rack of Old English 800 to come up with.

I sure as hell hope the rest of my countrymen aren't stupid enough to let the Trumpkins play this game.

And goddamn if it's not time to repeal that #@!%$!#! AUMF.

Update 6/14: The lies have already begun:

"The Japanese owner of the Kokuka Courageous, one of two oil tankers targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, said Friday that sailors on board saw "flying objects" just before it was hit, suggesting the vessel wasn't damaged by mines. That account contradicts what the U.S. military said as it released a video Friday it said shows Iranian forces removing an unexploded limpet mine from one of the two ships that were hit. Company president Yutaka Katada said Friday he believes the flying objects seen by the sailors could have been bullets. He denied any possibility of mines or torpedoes because the damage was above the ship's waterline. He called reports of a mine attack "false."

As Sven points out in the comments, The U.S. hasn't been an honest player in the field of foreign policy for a long time, and this administration is a more prolific and consistent liar than most of the previous ones.

IMO this is a patently crude attempt between the Trumpkins and their Saudi pals to gin up a casus belli. If the US public and Congress falls for it, well, as a well-known foreign policy expert once said: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...won't get fooled again!"

And Jim Wright, as he often does, is asking the question that EVERY news agency should be asking: "Cui bono?".

Who would benefit from a US-Iran dustup? Especially one that would, as it inevitably would, raise the price of petroleum?

Hmmm.

Update 6/26:

"Strategy? I don't need no steenkin' strategy? I have guns! I take YOUR strategy!"

What a fucking maroon.

You and your big mouth...

Honestly. This guy is a fucking idiot.

Why his policy people can't duct-tape HIS mouth shut to keep him saying this kind of stuff;

TRUMP: "When President Obama pulled out of Iraq in theory we had Iraq. In other words, we had Iraq. So when he did what he did in Iraq, which was a mistake. Being in Iraq was a mistake. Okay.

Being in Iraq- it was a big mistake to go- one of the greatest mistakes going into the Middle East that our country has ever made. One of the greatest mistakes that we've ever made--

BRENNAN: But you want to keep troops there now?

TRUMP: --but when it was chosen-- well, we spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.

BRENNAN: Whoa, that's news. You're keeping troops in Iraq because you want to be able to strike in Iran?

TRUMP: No, because I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable and expensive military base built in Iraq. It's perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle East rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. We're going to keep watching and we're going to keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we're going to know it before they do."

Guess what, genius?

The cover story for the continued US presence in Iraq is to mop up the Islamic State. The Iraqi leadership made it damn crystal clear back in 2011 that they had NO interest in keeping US forces around if the latter were unwilling to sign off on a conventional Status of Forces Agreement that put the Iraqis in charge. I'm not saying I blame the then-US-government for not signing; if I was a GI I'd be scared as hell of winding up in an Iraqi court after killing someone in a traffic accident. But that ship has sailed, and to keep GIs in-country we, and the Iraqis, have to pretend. This dumbass obviously missed that memo big-time.

He probably thinks that because it's a shithole country the people there spend their time telling each other stories, but Orange Foolius apparently doesn't get that the leaders of the Iraqi legislature have televisions, too. Only they don't just watch FOX. In fact, they have people watching you shoot off your big blabbermouth on CBS, and you just told them that 1) you have no intention of leaving that "incredible base"...in other words, you see it the way the British did their colonial installations and the MNF-I did theirs when the US was officially an occupying power, that 2) you intend to use it for power projection, which is something that powers can only do with the acquiescence of the host nation, and that 3) this projection is going to be directed primarily at their ally, Iran.

Jesus wept.

I get that a plurality sizeable minority of the American people wanted this joker. What I don't get is why ANYone still wants him, when he's worked overtime to show that he's a total moron about...well, pretty much everything.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSF.

Fools and their fooling?

Buried under the flaming dumpster that is the Trump Shutdown was a pretty remarkable bit of policymaking that took place in Cairo the other day. SecState Pompeo delivered a little oration that was remarkable either for its' 1) mendacity, or 2) delusion. What fascinates me is that I'm honestly not sure which it represents.

You can read the full text of the remarks at the link, but the gist of Pompeo's remarks was that:

1. The U.S. is, and always has been, a "force for good" in the Middle East,
2. That Iran, OTOH, is massively evil and stinky and bad.
3. That Obama was almost as bad and stinky as Iran because he tippy-toed around in the Middle East while "apologizing" for bad U.S. behavior,
4. Unlike Trump, who is a real Man and loves him some muscular Christian war against eeeeevil Islamist terrorism and Iran,
5. That Real Muslims like y'all love, too!

Fred Kaplan sums up the problems with this nonsense better than I can, so I can't do better than quote him:

“America is a force for good in the Middle East,” Pompeo said at the start of his speech. But to the extent he defined good, it was solely in terms of helping certain allies (mainly Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) while hurting certain enemies (ISIS, terrorists, and especially Iran). There was no recognition of complexity: Nothing was said about the Saudi bombing of Yemen (only Iran was painted as a force for bad, contrary to human-rights organizations); nothing was said about Trump’s divisions with Europe over Iran; nothing was said (one way or the other) about the role of Russia or Turkey in the Syrian conflict, or the Saudi murder of a U.S.-based journalist.

Obama may have been naïve in hoping that the pursuit of common ground and mutual interests might soothe the ancient tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims or upend the chessboard of Great Game geopolitics that have played on those tensions for centuries. But Pompeo’s speech makes clearer than ever that Trump has no interest in trying to soothe anything: He wants to take sides in the conflict, join the war—but even here, he has no idea how to do so with authority or effectiveness. He is indulging in partisan mythologies that bear little relation to the actual past and shed little insight on a fruitful way forward."

My question, though, is this - is this really "indulging in partisan mythologies"?

Or does this joker - and, by inference, his Orange Master - truly believe this nonsense?

I think the difference makes a difference, and that, in turn, goes back to the issue Andy raised in the comments several posts back about the difference between Trump and the Trumpkins words, and deeds.

If this Pompeo word salad is simply an attempt to blow more smoke up the Arab world's backside, that's one thing. Propaganda and blather can be simply the bodyguard of lies that can be re-arranged, or abandoned, as needed. A realistic Middle Eastern policy can be crafted with one hand whilst the other performs silly magic tricks to distract the rubes Arab "street".

But the precedent here is the Bushies. I truly believe that the bulk of the Bush cabal really, truly believed their neo-conservative nonsense about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and letting freedom reign. The cynics, the Cheneys, were the minority. I think the bulk of the Bush coterie were captured by their own rhetorical disinformation and air-castle fantasies.

The trouble with sussing out the difference is the long history of piss-poor U.S. geopolitical strategic thinking. It's damn deadly difficult to determine whether the mistakes are deliberate and caused by a boneheaded idee fixee' driven into the policymakers heads by some political philosophy (whether Ayn Randian free market fantasies or "liberal interventionist" fantasies really makes no nevermind...), or whether they were simply mistakes driven by poor intelligence analyses and craptacular institutional structures of the U.S. geopolitical decisionmaking apparatus.

I think it makes a big difference whether these people are the fools, or the fooled.

But I'm damned if I can figure out which.

Making Iraq Great Again

Let me start with this; regardless of the why, the simple fact that the current Chief Executive did a meet-and-greet with his subordinates in Iraq is just fine. It's goes with the job of "commander-in-chief", especially given the standards we've set for our imperial wars. You get the job, you do the work, and that includes some facetime with the people you order into harm's way. If the current idiot had to be shamed into doing it? Well, he's been shamed on a whole bunch of things, like sucking up to Nazis and not, y'know, being a racist, and those haven't worked.

So if he got shamed into going to an airbase in Iraq he's done part of what's the bare minimum for a respectable annual review. So, fine.

Of course, being who he is, he's already getting slammed. The biggest howl appears to be about OPSEC violations, specifically, releasing pictures of Himself with a USN special operations outfit which was on a classified deployment.

IMO, this is the one thing about this junket that can't be laid on the guy. I agree that this was careless (especially for a politician that made a big fat hairy deal about how Obummer was giving the "enemy" all sorts of information about who was going to deploy when and where) but despite his title the POTUS is not an actual serviceman. He's not required to understand OPSEC, neither is he responsible for it personally nor in his entourage.

Nope, the people who should be getting fried for this are the unit and installation commanders. THEY should have known that this was a photo-op and kept the guys whose presence there was supposed to be a deep, dark, secret far away from someone known for using every opportunity to fluff himself and his rep as a bad-ass deal-making shrewdie. Special operations people and Trump? They should have known he was no more likely to have resisted the impulse to show himself hanging with the tough guys than a dog can resist licking his butt.

And the MAGA hats and the Trump banners, turning this into a Trump campaign rally? That's on the commanders, too. They know the rules about using GIs as political props, or letting GIs in uniform, in a military workplace, act as political partisans. The fact that they let this stuff go is entirely on them, and entirely unacceptable. If I were their theater commander I'd be on them like the wrath of God.

Still...this IS Trump, who seems to have a kind of reverse-Midas political touch, so he did manage to turn what should have been a nice little press-the-flesh-with-Our-Troops into a goddamn goat rodeo. Specifically;

1. Somehow he and his entourage (I can't bring myself to call it a "staff", since that implies some sort of planning and organization) couldn't be arsed to check in with, y'know, the "host nation" government about what the Iraqis expected and wanted.

Turns out they expected a visiting head of state to treat the host nation head of state as, well, a head of state. Meaning a face-to-face with the Iraqi PM and all the bog-standard political niceties. Of course Trump, who could give a rat's ass about shithole countries, cut it to a phone call and blew off the locals. This pissed off the Iraqi pols who, while IMO being as much of a fairly-worthless bunch as most Arab pols, are understandably touchy about Americans treating Iraq like a conquered province. The result was an angry shout to vote the Yanquis out. Whether or not that will happen, it was ridiculously needless and a boneheaded oxygen-thief-level fuckup by the POTUS and his groupies.

Trump and his GOP pals love to complain about Iran and the supposed Iranian meddling in the Middle East. But doing dumb shit - unnecessarily dumb shit - like this is how Iran makes bank off of these dodos and gets results from their meddling. Obama's supposed foreign policy mantra was "Don't do stupid shit"; Trump's appears to be "Stupid shit? What's that? Let's do some!"

2. And - although this isn't surprising, given the source - the little speech he then blarted out to the assembled joes and mollies was ridiculously inappropriate. Instead of the "Thanks boys and girls you're the awesomest, hooah!" he gave a full-on campaign speech full of political poison about Democratic immigration treason and larded with ridiculous lies. My least-favorite was his whopper about how he, he, the Grinch, carved the 10% pay-raise-roast-beast. Seriously? What, you're now Caesar in an orange skinsuit, giving donatives to your loyal legionaries? I mean, I know the guy pretty much sees the Constitution as an asswipe, but that's ridiculous. Here's the exact quote:

"You haven’t gotten [a raise] in more than ten years. More than ten years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one."

Aside from being, well, an utter lie, Tangerinius Caesar here couldn't "get them a big one"; he doesn't have the "power of the purse". I wouldn't expect GIs to know that - I did, but I'd taken "US Government" and con law in college - so it's utterly vile for him to try and buy loyalty with that lie.

Of course, there was more of the Trumpkin usual, for example, military policy as protection racket:

"If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price and sometimes that’s also a monetary price so we’re not the suckers of the world. We’re no longer the suckers, folks. And people aren’t looking at us as suckers"

No, dummy. They're looking at you.

They're looking at us as the poor dumb bastards ruled by the sucker.

From the Department of Not Learning From Your Mistakes...

...comes the news that the cunning plan behind the U.S. government's re-imposition of economic sanctions on Iran is the notion of "regime change".

This would be fatheaded in any case, given the history of U.S. farkling about in Iran and the predictably resulting blowback.

But after the spectacular own-goal that was regime change in Iraq it would take a complete moron, or John Bolton (but I repeat myself...), to presume that whatever might succeed the mullahs in Tehran because of U.S. political and military pressure will be anything but a complete foreign policy disaster for American interests in the Middle East and a nightmare for the region that has seen too many of them.

The Trumpkins are here emulating the epigrammatic Bourbons, who supposedly "learned nothing and forgot nothing". One can only assume from this that "making America great again" is functionally indistinguishable from the effect of being repeatedly dropped in your head while a child.

WASF.

Muddle East

I get a fair amount of stick around this joint for my up-front contempt for His Fraudulency, the 45th* President of the United States and his coterie of meeching grifters, flaming morons, inchoate rage-drunk wingnuts, and just simply simpletons.

But it's hard for me not to be infuriated by the actions of this "administration". It's one thing to be a devious cabal of Iran-Contra felons trying to advance a ruthlessly avaricious agenda. I could loathe the Bushies while having a certain amount of rueful wariness for the purity of their selfish greed. They wanted everything and didn't care what they did or how they did it to get what they wanted. Their weakness was hubris; they really thought they created their own reality, and when reality refused to conform they simply bulled ahead until it shot them between the eyes.

But these idiot Trumpkins? Handing them the keys to the presidential limo was like giving a gibbering ape a live hand grenade. Anyone of us who had been familiar with the sort of gluttonously self-deluded liar and cheat the GOP picked to run in 2016 knew that it wouldn't end well. He wouldn't listen. He wouldn't learn. He would do whatever sated his capacious guts, or his tumescent penis, or his angry, aggrieved little hindbrain.

This past couple of weeks has put the reason I warned against electing this dope on painful display.

First was the Iran "deal".

Had the Bushies done this I would have immediately suspected a deep-laid plan to gin up a war in the Persian Gulf for some sort of crass geopolitical and economic gains. As the Beinart article points out, the Trumpkins didn't even have a bad rationale behind the move.

“Sr. European diplomat, on dealing with State Dept today re Iran: ‘All is a shambles there. Total incoherence between State and NSC. Plus, no one has any clue on the day after. There is no strategy.’” That same day, when asked by a reporter whether European governments would support new sanctions against Iran, an unnamed State Department official admitted that in their conversations with allies before Trump announced America’s withdrawal, “We did not talk about a Plan B.” When a reporter asked, “What makes you think that Iran is going to go along with a whole new renegotiation?” the official replied, “We don’t know if they will.”

So there's no real plan here. This isn't some sort of cunning 11th Dimension geopolitical chess. The Trumpkins, like a cranky baby, just threw their bowl of strained peas against the wall because they wanted to. They had no idea, and no plan, for what came next.

And now the final act of the "let's go full-on-Likudnik!" move to Jerusalem.

Now. You know my opinion on Israel. As a country, it is what it is. As a US "ally", it's not worth the tax dollars of an Indiana grandma. One of the single biggest impediments to a sensible US Middle Eastern policy is that it HAS to be warped to accommodate whatever the Israeli Right wants. That makes any sort of working relationship with the Muslim polities nearly impossible, because at some point someone drags the Israelis into the room like a dog into a cattery and everyone goes utterly batshit.

I'd accept this as a form of loathsome realpolitik if I thought that 1) Israel had a practical value as a US "ally", and 2) the Trumpkins had done the geopolitical analysis sufficient to make them confident that the Arab states will throw the Pals under the bus and accommodate with Likud.

I don't.

I think this is just US conservative fantasy wanking, and when one side or the other emerges from the current Shia-Sunni Thirty Years War with a headlock on the Muslim umma we will find out how shortsighted and stupid this is.

But that's "Trump"; shortsighted, unlearned, and uninterested in anything but his own profit.

One thing he DOES have in common with the Bushies, though. It's something you may remember from back in the Iraq War times;

We Are so, so, so, so, SO Fucked.

If the United States HAD a sane Syria policy...what would it be..?

I had a bit of a laugh this morning reading Matt Taibbi's rant about Trump and Syria. Taibbi writes well even when I don't agree with what he says, and it was worth the popcorn for stuff like this:

"The fate of humanity now rests in the hands of this Twitter-obsessed dingbat executive and his new national security adviser, John Bolton – one of the most deranged people to have ever served in the United States government, a man who makes Jeane Kirkpatrick look like Florence Nightingale.

With these two at the helm, we are now facing the imminent possibility of direct military conflict with a nuclear enemy. No one in the popular press is saying it, but there could easily be Russian casualties in Trump’s inevitable bombing campaign. Which will then put the onus on a third lunatic, Vladimir Putin, to respond with appropriate restraint."

But as I read Taibbi's polemic, I kept thinking...OK, very stable genius, if you were NSA and you had the chance to whisper into Orange Foolius' tangerine-hued ear, what would you advise? What would you suggest as an approach to the Syrian civil war that might be genuinely productive?

Option 1: A Grand Concert of the Middle East In which Trump is Metternich (which would make Pompeo Tallyrand or something I hesitate to speculate about) and through a combination of persuasion, bribery, discrete threats, and veiled force manages to pull all the stakeholders in the Levant region to a conference where the issues behind the current wave of instability are wrestled to the mat and choked out. This is something Pat Lang used to promote a lot (although even he seems to have given up on the idea more recently). The intended result would be some sort of "Treaty of Beirut" in which everybody agrees to some things they don't like - like co-existing with groups of people they'd rather exterminate - in return for a Great-Power-backed enforcement of some things they DO like, like peace and economic well-being.

Is it sane? Would it work? It's eminently sane. Making it work would would be fiendishly difficult for the REAL Metternich, let alone the sort of mooks and bozos that infest the Trump Administration. I think the single biggest problems would be that 1) SO many Middle Eastern wells are poisoned; just trying to get the Muslim residents of Gaza and the West Bank to forgive and forget 40 years of violent apartheid, or trying to get Israel to pony up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to expose and condemn the architects of that apartheid fills me with existential dread, and 2) SO many groups and polities in the Middle East are unwilling to abandon their hopes of maximal outcomes. Just in Syria alone can you imagine the difficulty of trying to get a former Assad government, a former congeries of salafi jihadis, and former Kurdish YPP fighters to trust each other enough to work out a functional government? The whole point of the civil war was they they couldn't, and they all wanted to either defeat the others outright or, in the case of the Kurds, win independence.

In particular, to be seen as an honest broker of this concert, the United States would have to renounce its unreserved support for the State of Israel and treat it was just another party to the conflict, and I don't see that as possible domestically. This is one of those ideas that would seem possible but that founders on too much reality. I'd love to see a U.S. Administration actually commit to trying this, but I can't see a way this overcomes the structural issues now embedded in the Middle East as well as global geopolitical conflicts. I'd love for someone to argue me wrong.

Option 2: Operation Desert Stormy Working off the premise that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is not the definition of insanity, the U.S. gins up a coalition of the willing-ish, invades Syria and occupies the place, installs a pliant government, and hangs about bashing wogs until the new "government" is firmly in the saddle.

Is it sane? Would it work? Hell, no. Ohfuckno. What didn't work in Afghanistan (due to social and political dysfunction largely produced by a generation of war, as well as choosing proxies poorly that included smaller tribes like the Hazaras that were traditionally booted around by the Pashtun that included a lot of the Talibs) and Iraq (due to a failure to understand the toxicity of the Sunni-Shia divide that had been suppressed by Tikriti despotism as well as a series of boneheaded mistakes like deBaathification and the disbanding of the Army) would work worse in Syria, where the sectarian and tribal toxicity is already an order of magnitude worse and the existing government rules only by a combination of brute force and the loathing of much of the Syrian population for the fanaticism of the jihadi rebels.

An invasion would probably work militarily - although likely with more losses than the 2003 invasion of Iraq simply because of the already-treacherously-chaotic environment in Syria - but an occupation would be horrific militarily, politically, and socially. Any "occupation" that had any hope of working - i.e. one that included a massively-larger-then-post-WW2-European-level infusion of civil government, economic, social, and political rebuilding, and straightforward cash injection - would inevitably founder on the damage inflicted on Syrian society. Post WW2 Europe was, at least, socially and politically intact. Syria is hopelessly shattered. As Lord Chesterfield is supposed to said about keeping a mistress, the pleasure would be transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

So, no. This one is right out.

Option 3: Same Shit Different Day Keep on doing what the U.S. has been doing; inject small troop units and airpower, use proxies like the Syrian or Iraqi Kurds as footsoldiers, use political pressure on regional and local powers whenever possible. Attempt to "influence" events with aerial high explosive.

Is it sane? Would it work? Fuck, it's not working now.

Option 4: Just Walk Away, Renee Conclude that there are no national interests in the Middle East worth spilling blood - American or anyone else's - and treasure on. Pull the military missions out, cut off the arms supplies, reduce the American footprint to a minimal scattering of embassies and consulates, and let the occupants of the region go their own way to the degree that they don't directly impinge on the U.S. or U.S. allies.

Is it sane? Would it work? This seems to me to be eminently sane, largely because I don't think that the U.S. has a ton of "national interests" in the Middle East. I've said this before, but IMO the U.S. has three major "interests" in that troubled region; a regular supply of petroleum products, passage through the Suez/Red Sea chokepoint, and a relative degree of regional calm that will dampen the production of violent people with a grudge against the United States.

With the current prognosis for anthropogenic global warming I'd even kick loose the first "interest". I think that the United States should be committed to reducing, not securing, its need for petroleum. Let the Iraqis and Saudis sell the stuff to the Philippines. The sooner the U.S. becomes independent of the need for fossil fuels, the better.

But would it work? I'm not sure it would "work" completely. For one thing, the United States has spent much of the last half-century fucking up and pissing people off in the Middle East - see the timeline at the top of the page - going back to the Mossadegh coup in the Fifties. There's a lot of deeply-ingrained hatred (and a lot of that pretty well justified, I'm ashamed to admit...) there.

But old grudges do eventually die, and I think there's a hope that a United States that transitions to a genuinely neutrally disinterested party might eventually benefit from a lack of animus in the region.

I think the real problem with this would be U.S. domestic politics. For one thing, the American "conservative" (i.e. radical reactionary) movement is entirely committed to an unquestioning embrace of Israel and a reflexive hate and fear of political Islam. No contemporary Republican, and even some right-leaning Democrats, would forego Islamophobia, and tongue-bathing Israel is a bipartisan reflex. I don't think there is a Republican that could convince his or her party to abandon the former, and both parties seem incapable of releasing the latter.

One 9/11-type incident and the rage and fear that created the current disasters that are Afghanistan and the Fertile Crescent would come roaring back.

Add to that all but the furthest fringes of the U.S. political Left retain a Cold War sort of fear of Great Power insignificance in the global hustings. To put it bluntly, few Americans - politicians or ordinary citizens - would be able to sit back and accept "We're NOT Number One!" in the less-paved parts of the globe. Were Russian or Chinese - or both - influence begin to grow in a post-U.S.-involved Middle East I find it highly likely that the cries to return to the region in force would be irresistible. I think the instincts of American hegemony are too strong; otherwise the PNAC "New American Century" nonsense would have collapsed from pure derision and scorn, instead of, as it has, finding one of the most strident America-Firsters elevated to the point of advising on "national security".

My unfortunate conclusion is that the domestically-do-able policies for Syria - and, by inference, the greater Middle East - are neither sane nor workable, and the sane-and-workable policies are not politically do-able...without a massive and thoroughgoing reconstruction of the United States political order.

In other words, the problem here isn't the Middle East, as troubled as that region may be. The problem is that the current political (and social) tenor of the United States won't allow a U.S. government to make a sensibly sane and workable policy towards the Middle East.

To change our skies, then, we would have to change ourselves. Are We the People capable of doing that?

I'd like to believe so. But having observed American political life for forty years...I am not optimistic.

Doing the Right Thing the Wrong Way, or the Wrong Thing the Right Way, or Something - (Now With More Explosions!!)

So the latest foreign policy surprise from the Fraudulency Administration - if you can call anything a "surprise" when it emerges as some sort of mouth- or brain-fart from a man whose cognitive functions appear to work in a similar fashion to the human colon - is the supposedly-soon and supposedly-total withdrawal of all U.S. armed forces from within the Syrian borders.

Now...you know my opinion on the whole "Hillary the Hawk, Donald the Dove" nonsense. So I think the thing to look at isn't the "why". The "why" is the same "why" Trump does anything; because he heard it on "Fox and Friends", because he thinks it'll bump the audience share (if you haven't figured out that this is the first Reality Show Presidency, hello), because it has to do with smelly foreigners and Trump hates smelly foreigners. I doubt very much whether Trump knows, or cares, about anything in Syria, including the GIs there.

No. The thing to look at is the "what happens now" and "how is this a potentially positive development?"

And I think the linked articles cover the possibilities pretty well.

First, the single "positive" thing I can think of off the top of my head is that the guys in the special operations outfits can un-ass that chaotic AO. That is good thing, in that if they don't, sooner or later the American guys in Manbij are going to have to fight Turks, our supposed NATO allies, and that won't be good for anyone. Add to that the simple reality that Syria is a dog's breakfast right now. Nothing, including the nonsensical plan to form some sort of Kurdish "Ever Victorious Army" to keep a boot on the neck of the Sunni salafis who signed up for the Islamic State, probably for the retirement benefits, is going to make the place logical and comprehensible. It's a goddamn mess, a Hobbsean war of all against all, and the only thing a GI is going to get out of it, if he's unlucky enough, is dead.

Adnd from there everything pretty much goes downhill.

The Kurds, poor suffering bastards, get hung out to dry like they have by every foreign (and most domestic) adventurers since Saladin. Between the Assad regime and the Turks and the Saudi-bankrolled salafi jihadis the Kurds are going to be tossed into the shark tank. That sucks, to me, anyway, because the Kurds seems like a decent bunch in general, and I have a soft sport for the underdogs. But, like most underdogs, they're gonna find what the smallest dog in the dog pound always finds out; if you stand still they fuck you, and if you run they bite you on the ass.

The other thing I see is that this is unlikely to do anything to lessen the troubles that the Middle East is likely to bring to the United States. That well has been so long and so deeply poisoned that it is too late for the US to simply pull every swinging richard out and hope that the locals will forget the ferenghi and start killing each other. Well, they WILL kill each other, but they will also have time and energy to figure out how to kill the Yankees, if they can. The legacy of the US in the Middle East is a long and disastrous one, going back well into the Fifties. If you're interested, I wrote a lighthearted summation over at Graphic Firing Table in four parts; here, here, here, and here (with a rumination on the potentially ruinous consequence of prolonged war with the Muslim peoples of the Middle East here).

Cole points out that the worst possible outcome of this will be the Saudis' move into the power vacuum with more support for their loathsome fundamentalist proxies. Ugh. Just what the Middle East needs; MORE religious nuts.

The bottom line is that the Middle East is a nearly impossible problem for a U.S. government to solve due to a number of fixed points in history that constrain the government's actions today. To change that would mean trying to change both history and an inertial mass of special interests that are completely unwilling to allow that change to happen.

For my Army brothers I hope Trump's government does manage to yank them out of Syria.

For the rest of us? Let's not kid ourselves. That won't help the cesspit of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that is the modern Middle East. And it doesn't mean that the Orange King thinks of himself as a Prince of Peace. Greg Jaffe at the Post has a good piece that limns the sort of viciousness that is at the heart of Trump's character. He's a bully. He likes to hurt and kill people if it doesn't mean he has to risk himself. When he talks about ending wars he's talking about a Roman ending; making a wasteland.

So if Trump is "getting out" of Syria, don't fool yourself; this simply means that he will take his vicious egotism somewhere else.

We are so, so, SO fucked.

Update 4/12: Maybe more fucked that we thought. Here's Fred Kaplan on what now appears to be an inescapable attack on Syria:

"...Russia and Iran, not wanting to lose their most valued ally and foothold in the region, would come to Assad’s rescue, repairing the damage, replacing the planes, and possibly escalating the conflict. (Trump) can’t launch an all-out attack on Syria’s air force without also attacking Russia, and he can’t do that without risking a very dangerous new war."

Will Le Roi L'Orange be willing to begin that war? Are We the People willing to do nothing if he does?

It seems that we are about to find out.

Update 4/14: And so we have.

The "Western allies" - the U.S., Great Britain, and France - delivered some munitions to Syria late Friday night. The attack was described as "limited", and is supposed to have been directed specifically at Assad's checmical munitions capabilities.

Fred Kaplan claims the the bombing was primarily a "win" for SecDef Mattis and CJCS Dunford, whose main concern was to 1) not get the U.S. mired deeper in yet another hopeless Middle Eastern civil war, while 2) not gin up a shooting war with Russia.

Supposedly Carpenter Trump and his Walrus pal Bolton wanted to go in chocks-away and take those chances.

The frustrating thing about this - for me, anyway - is the degree to which it shows how hopeless the United States "national security" edifice has become at actually thinking about "national security".

Technically you can "make a case" for using lethal force against the Assad regime in Syria on the grounds of its use of chemical munitions. Chemicals are in the group of especially "horrible weapons" that are routinely banned by treaty and condemned in public. And the Assad regime is certainly among the genuinely loathsome of the Earth, a pure semi-Stalinist dictatorship that has long lost any pretension of governing rather than simply reigning.

But this reality-show violence is worthless, and shows the degree to which the U.S. government, in particular, has lost any genuine capacity to think outside the narrow range of kinetic action it has limited itself.

The Assad regime is playing the Game of Thrones, where to lose is to die. It will happily absorb whatever death and destruction this attack will cause in return for successfully using chemicals to crush the Army of Islam rebels in East Ghouta. The cost is well worth it, for Assad, and that the Trump Administration can't think of a better way to get him to reconsider that calculation...well, it will be no surprise to know that the Trumpkins aren't the nicest, newest, or smartest cruise missile in the launcher.

But in the broader view, how much more handless are the minions of Orange Foolius than those of Obama, who was likewise unable to "solve" the problem of sending U.S. armed force haring off across the globe chasing raggedy local rebels and wannabe jihadi franchisees? Or Dubya, who broke the despotic bottle that contained Iraq and was unable to deal with the chaos? Or Clinton, whose random spasms of intervention ranged from laughable to - as in the case of Somalia - tragic? Or Poppy Bush, who sent his military careering around Eurasia and Central America "solving" problems his predecessor Reagan had largely created? Or Reagan himself, whose Charley Wilsons helped create the mujaheddin monster that struck it's creator decades later?

Our friend seydlitz, when he forayed here, used to complain bitterly about the United States' utter inability to think strategically, to define clear national geopolitical interests and then make rational choices about how to address them.

What ultimately so pathetic about this latest round of let's-bomb-something-because-we-have-to-"send-a-message" is how it starkly illustrates how right seydlitz is; how completely and utterly captive to its own incapacity, delusion, sterility, and hubris the American political and military establishment is.

As one of my former recruit privates would have described it, "That's fuckin' magically delicious, man!"

Blind Man's Bluff

Fred Kaplan at Slate has a fairly decent summary of the problems facing the current U.S. administration's conduct of the legacy wars in the Middle East and southwest Asia. The tl:dr is that 1) for all his bluster about "dealmaking" Trump has no geopolitical knowledge or understanding, and 2) the flag officers that comprise his geopolitical team are deeply sunk in the sunk-cost views of those wars.

The black hole at the center of this mess is that the U.S. policy- and decision-making apparatus has been and remains exceptionally poor at analyzing strategic situations, teasing out what the U.S.'s actual "vital interests" are in them, and then formulating approaches to those situations that have a genuine potential for succeeding in advancing those vital interests.

Instead, that apparatus seems to latch onto whatever short-term enthusiasm dominates the U.S. domestic political scene. In the Middle East it started with enthusiasm for Israel in the Forties, graduated to suppression of what looked like local "Communist" impulses in the Fifties and Sixties (that led to steps like the Iran coup in 1953), then to support of local dictators like Saddam in the Seventies and Eighties to counter the "Iranian menace", then to a fixation on Saddam's Iraq in the 90's and Oughts. Since then, of course, it has been the "War on Terror" with the sort of nonsensical geopolitical decisions that a conflict based on "fighting" a tactic implies.

One thing I should note from the Kaplan piece is that when he asks "...one wonders what happened to the Donald Trump who decried the former war as a “total disaster” and bellowed over and over “It’s time to come home”—and who pledged to do nothing in the latter war but “bomb the shit out of ISIS.” Kaplan, like an unfortunately large group of other citizens, is taking the Tangerine Toddler's mouth noises seriously, which is always a mistake.

Remember, Trump remains what he always was; a real estate grifter and Ponzi schemer whose "brand" depended on distracting the rubes while he mulcted his cut out of whatever enterprise he was running into the ground. I mean, the guy went bankrupt running a fucking casino, a "business" where people give you their money. It takes a special breed of schmuck to do that.

So Trump's blather about "coming home" and those wars being "total disasters" were the distraction, simply his usual bullying towards his Democratic opponents and especially Obama and Clinton whom he loathed personally. He had no particular geopolitical conviction on the subject; he just wanted to mulct domestic political advantage by convincing the rubes he did. How could he? He barely knew enough to find the places on a map. He believed that thousands of Muslims had danced on rooftops as the Twin Towers fell. He hated and feared all foreigners outside of nice white Norwegians as he is supposed to hate and fear sharks and germs. He was, and remains, a bloviating fool.

So on the subject of Middle Eastern wars he is a toddler, being fed and diapered by the same sort of people who ran with the Bushies when they went into Iraq thinking that they could create their own reality. Trump, for all his bluster, is monstrously ignorant of the world outside his Twitter feed. His mind, as we have seen over the past year, is rutted into a handful of vindictive, white-nationalist, egotistical tracks that make it nearly impossible for him to gain the sort of knowledge, let alone the wisdom, that would allow him to climb out of those tracks and assist in remaking the U.S. foreign policy apparatus into something less shortsighted.

How can a blind man teach blind men to see?

These mess-o-potamias are not of Trump's making. But it is long past the time to abandon the idea that somehow Trump will "tell it like it is", will "shake things up".

He can no more see his way out of these disasters than a child blind since birth. In this sting he's not just the con man; he's the mark. He's conning us as he's getting conned by both his generals and his enemies. He's hustling us while he's being hustled, by the East and by his own people.

So, nope. Unless We the People stop kidding ourselves about electing these sorts of people - and by that I mean not just Trump but the sorts of people who think that fighting a "war on terror" is an actual good idea - we will remain as we are now; so, so, so, SO fucked.

What's Kurdish for "under the bus"?

The Turkish Army appears to be preparing to throw some additional complexity into the already-eleventh-dimension-chess-game that is post-IS Syria by threatening portions of northwest Syria currently controlled by the Kurdish PYD Party "People's Protection Units" (YPG) armed forces.

The Erdogan government, much like the governments preceding it, sees the YPG as functionally indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, and clearly now that the Islamic State is off the table and the endgame for Syria appears to be closing has decided to take action against the perennial bogeymen of the states of the Anatolian and the Fertile Crescent, the Kurds. Or, at least, one faction of that beleaguered people.

The YPG was central to the US drive to reduce the physical "state" of the Islamic State, providing the only really effective infantry for that campaign. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the "US-led anti-ISIS coalition" tossed the YPG in the Afrin region under the Turkish bus, noting that the YPG in northwest Syria were not within the coalition AO.

I'm not sure how this will work, given that the same article linked above claims that the Trump Administration's cunning Syria plan includes supporting some 30,000 "Syrian Democratic Forces" along the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly to continue to hunt IS fugitives but strategically to interdict Iraqi and Iranian support for proxies inside Syria such as Hizbullah.

The SDF, however, is pretty much the YPG with ash-and-trash. The YPG fielded something like 50,000 troops, while the Arab portions of the SDF consist of two main groups, the Jaysh al-Thuwar that includes some Turkmen and Kurds but seldom put together more than 2-3,000 fighters, and the Jaysh al-Sanadid militia of the Shammar tribe centered in northeastern Syria and Anbar province in western Iraq. The Shammar could assemble 8-10,000 troops. If the YPG decide to grab their A-bags and beat cheeks there won't be enough "SDF" to provide an interior guard on a porta-potty.

And this is beside the whole "The Kurds get screwed again" meme which seems to be a Middle Eastern thing and one in which the U.S. plays it's own shameful part.

Leaving the YPG units in the northwest to be smashed by Turkish tanks after coopting them to help fight for U.S. political objectives would be in the great tradition of American expeditionary war; maybe the Kurds can find some surviving Vietnamese mountain tribe Mike Force guys who can teach them the Nung term for "buddyfucker".

Once again we're reminded, not so much of Trump Administration incompetence (although that certainly plays a role here), but of the fact that describing the United States' Middle Eastern policy as an actual "policy" - that is, as something developed with a thoughtful consideration of regional realities and American national interests - remains somewhere between risible and tragic.

Your daily "hmmm..." (Middle East edition)

Fred Kaplan over at Slate has a take on the endgame playing out in Mosul, and how a lot of it revolves around not military strategy but political strategy:

"This is the biggest thing that Trump doesn’t understand and that few Western leaders grasp until they look at this conflict up close. “To everybody but us,” one senior military officer told me, “the defeat of ISIS is the least important goal.”

This is why, as the defeat of ISIS draws near, the lack of a coherent U.S. strategy — or, more precisely, Trump’s hesitation or refusal to accept, adapt, or do something with Mattis’ plan — is such a source of anxiety."

I wish I thought that this was another Tangerine-Toddler-specific problem. But IMO the entire history of the U.S. involvement in the Middle East, going practically all the way back to the hasty recognition of Israel in '48, is a litany of "what the fuck are we doing and why..?"

Back when he used to post and comment here Seydlitz used to insist that the U.S. political establishment doesn't really "do" geopolitical strategy, that there's no actual strategy or strategic thinking involved. This seems to be just a piece with everything else we've seen, all the way back to 2002 and beyond.

Mind you...given the unique incompetence of the Trump Griftministration I wouldn't be surprised to see things get MORE effed up!

But I see this not so much as a Trump Bug but as a U.S. Middle East Policy Feature.

Some ideas cannot be killed and yet are too stupid to die.

Apparently there's a nutty little cluster of fuck buried in the U.S. State Department (from CNN via Pierce):

"More than 50 State Department officials signed an internal memo protesting U.S. policy in Syria, calling for targeted U.S. military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and urging regime change as the only way to defeat ISIS.
The cable says that U.S. policy in the Middle East has been "overwhelmed" by the continuing violence in Syria. It calls for a "judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process."

The memo calls on the U.S. to create a stronger partnership with moderate rebel forces to battle both Assad's forces and ISIS, which would change the tide of the conflict against the regime and "increase the chances for peace by sending a clear signal to the regime and its backers that there will be no military solution to the conflict."

It also warns that as the regime "continues to bomb and starve" Syria's Sunni population, the U.S. will lose potential allies among Syria's Sunni population to fight ISIS. Moreover, it says, U.S. failure to stop the regime's abuses "undermines both morally and materially the unity of the anti-Daesh coalition" and "will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh, even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield."

It's...it's hard to tell where to start with this ridiculous level of horseshit.

Maybe here: "judicious use of standoff and air weapons"..? Judicious? How the holy fuck do you use a cruise missile "judiciously"? Tack a get-well card to the nose? Ensure that it has a jihadi-seeking sensor in the guidance package? Who the hell thinks this? State has seen a damn sight of war since 2001. It's been fifteen years of nonstop bombing and shelling and killing-wogs-in-kinetic-ways in the Middle East. Have these people learned nothing from all that so-far-prodigiously-unproductive bombing, shelling, and killing..?

Judicious?

If you can show me a "judicious" way of throwing high explosive long distances I will carry your rucksack from here to the Halls ofMontezuma and kiss your ass when we get there.

Or...how about this one; "moderate rebel forces"? Moderate based on what metric? 50% less headcutting? 100% How many of their raggedy-ass "fighters" have read Atlas Shrugged? Where are these paragons of virtue? Can anybody find me someone, anyone, who is "moderate" in the damn cesspit of ruin and merciless hatred that used to be "Syria"? Can anybody tell me why I should trust ANYone there to tell the truth about their "moderation"? I mean, any State Middle East hand to believes any local between the strandline of the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf who boasts of their "moderate" credentials should have their fucking head examined.

According to CNN, "The 51 officials who signed the memo are mostly from the rank and file of the department, many of them career officers in the foreign service who have been involved in Syria policy over the past several years either in Washington or overseas." which, frankly, tells me a hell of a lot about why our "Syria policy" has been as fucked up as a football bat.

One thing I will give the last Adminstration credit for; in general it has resisted sticking this country's head further into the Middle Eastern tarbaby. I have often wondered why it has insisted in sticking to the ones it is already attached to. But this idiotic memo is perhaps a good reminder of why it's so hard to stop being stupid.

Because there's always people in critical positions who think that their contrarian idea is contrary because it's too clever for everyone else to recognize how clever it is and not because everyone else realizes it's completely moronic.

Collateral Damage

Back in October our barkeep P.F. Khans asked: "...Who is Responsible for the Hospital Bombing?" about the then-current speculation over the U.S. armed forces actions during a bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders (Medicins san Frontiers, or MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

One of the persistent questions was how could the U.S. and U.S.-advised Afghan forces have targeted what was a very distinctive hospital compound, one that should have been recognizable even from the air as a no-fire zone.

The U.S. higher responsible for the area of operations, Central Command (CENTCOM) released its report in April, and it contains some information on how this could have happened. From the blog Lawfare:

"Two mishaps that were clearly not criminal in nature occurred early on in the night mission, and those mistakes paved the way for the tragedy to follow in Kunduz. First, the attacking aircraft—an AC-130U with extensive firepower on board—took off early because of a report of U.S. troops being attacked. Due to the haste of the aircraft’s departure, there was no time to upload the “No-Strike List” (NSL) to the aircraft’s computers.

This question came up repeatedly in the original discussion. In his post, PF said:

"There's a Fire Direction Chief (sorry FDChief) that's got an AFATDS computer which should have had all hospitals/other sensitive areas restricted, so that you are warned if you are shooting there. Someone has to manually enter that data, was that data input into the system? Was the hospital in this AFATDS computer?

I don't see a reason that it wouldn't/shouldn't have been. I get that an AC-130 gunship may have to cover a lot of territory, but it's the 14th year of the war. Someone has managed this data. Someone spent a boring deployment porting this data to all the systems. This should have been done by now, that hospital didn't spring up when the Taliban attacked.

So if that wasn't there, the FDC is in trouble.
If it was there and the FDC overruled it without higher approval, the FDC is in trouble."

In the comments section I noted that the USAF didn't use the U.S. Army FA fire direction system, but that while

"...(a)ir fires are neither controlled nor coordinated thru the FA direct support elements. That includes the firing battery and battalion FDCs as well as both the FO elements attached to the maneuver platoons and the FSEs at the maneuver company and battalion HQs. The FSEs may liase w USAF control teams to clear potential CAS target areas of friendly forces but have no role in CAS missions beyond that. So the responsibility for CAS mission direction would be on the USAF FACP (forward air control party - at least that was the term when I was still in ten years ago...). The FAC should have, as has been noted above, been advised of NFAs ("no fire areas") as well as RFZs ("restricted fire zones") established by the maneuver commander."

Well, it turns out that the control party - which consisted of U.S. Army Special Forces troops - had more problems than just missing overlays. The Lawfare article goes on to report:

"Second, well before the attack on the MSF facility began, the U.S. aircraft’s satellite radio—its data link—failed. While the aircraft still had radio contact with ground forces, it could not send or receive emails or upload data, such as the NSL. Special Operations forces on the ground wanted to target a prison overrun by the Taliban, formerly run by the Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security (NDS). However, because of the lack of a data upload capacity and imprecise descriptions at both ends of communications, the aircraft crew mistook the MSF facility for the former NDS prison."

To make matters worse, the commander of the maneuver forces was working with a combat controller - or, more specifically, a "joint terminal attack controller" or JTAC (since a combat controller is a USAF-specific occupational specialty and the JTAC may be from any service branch...). The report says that the aggressive maneuver commander and the cherry JTAC turned out to be a combination lethal for the patients and staff of the MSF hospital:

"...ground forces informed the crew that the intended target had an “arch-shaped gate.” While this description matched many buildings in the area, the crew took it as a match for the MSF facility. The ground force commander (GFC) did not seek clarification, and had no independent visual ability to confirm the crew’s judgment. In other words, the GFC and the aircraft crew were actually labeling entirely different structures as being one and the same. (T)he (air)crew repeatedly asked the GFC to confirm that the intended target was a “large t-shape building.” The GFC (or his inexperienced subordinate, the...JTAC...confirmed this description, which matched many buildings in the vicinity. Unfortunately, the crew and the GFC were still unknowingly talking about two different buildings: the crew “had eyes” on the MSF facility, which was marked with MSF emblems but not the more familiar red cross or red crescent symbols used globally to label medical sites, while the GFC believed that the crew was describing the intended target: the NDS prison held by the Taliban. The JTAC did not help matters with instructions such as “soften the target,” which did not correspond to the situation the crew was viewing in real time."

And the maneuver commander seems to have been a real wild man:

"This communications failure was compounded by the inappropriately aggressive posture of the GFC, whom the military report described as having “willfully violated” the ROE. The US ROE restricted the use of air power, except in response to a hostile act by the Taliban directed at U.S. forces. However, the GFC ordered the attack on the MSF facility although the GFC “could not have reasonably believed” that the attack was justified by an ongoing hostile act. While the GFC asserted to military investigators that he saw what he believed to be an attack on a friendly military convoy, the Centcom report viewed that assertion as inconsistent with other sources, including aircraft video, radio transcripts, and tracking data. Moreover, the military’s report indicated that the GFC, because of distance from the convoy, could not have had the line of sight that he claimed. In sum, even an attack on the “right” target—the NDS facility—would not have been a response to hostile fires, as the ROE required. Because of the GFC’s aggressive posture and the mutual misidentification of the MSF facility as the “right” NDS target, the attack commenced."

Once the bombardment started the commo problems interfered again;

"Shortly after the attack started, MSF representatives contacted U.S. commands, imploring them to stop the fires. However, the communications failure and the ground-air misunderstandings severely impeded a timely U.S. response. About 12 minutes into the attack, personnel at the U.S. Special Operations Task Force inquired about the coordinates of the target being engaged. Two minutes later, U.S. personnel contacted the crew and sought to confirm that the attack had not harmed the MSF facility. The crew stated that the MSF facility hadn’t been touched, reporting that the only structures affected were the “T-shaped building” or adjacent structures, which the GFC had earlier mistakenly identified as the NDS prison, although in reality the crew was still describing the MSF hospital. It took several more minutes to ascertain that the building being attacked was in fact the MSF facility. Once that awful realization took hold, the attack ceased."

The military’s report details the errors that dogged each step in this appalling episode. Not unlike the critical moments of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, missteps and misunderstandings at several junctures paved the way for an unspeakable tragedy.

In other words; war.

The usual suspects are saying the usual things. "Conservatives" are draping themselves in yellow ribbons, "liberals" in loathing of the licentious soldiery and distrust of the "official story". Regardless of opinion, the business is done, now, except for in the grave, or the twisted bodies of the injured, or the anger of the survivors and families.

My original point in the comments stands; that regardless of whether this was a deliberate attack or a mistake, the failure of the U.S. command authority in Afghanistan to quickly and publicly discipline the individuals involved sent a clear message that Afghan lives didn't matter, not as much as American servicepeople's lives, or even of their careers.

When suppressing rebellions there is a tried and true method. Unfortunately, it is also unspeakably savage, the Roman Way - make a silence and call it peace.

The West wants and hopes that hearts and minds can be won, that the "Afridis where they run" can be wooed rather than butchered, that there is a kinder, gentler way to suppress revolts. Unfortunately, to do that the suppressor's troops have to be held to a standard that admits no such lethal errors as these, and that every drop of blood spilled with the sword is payed for with a drop of blood drawn by the lash.

We choose not to lash ourselves, and therefore should not be surprised that our means and methods are not embraced by those we slash.