Hyatt Tahir al-Sham and President Trump

 According to The Moscow Times, “Russian troops have requested Turkey’s support for their safe exit from Syria.”  This tells us a great deal about what just happened in Syria and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s role in it.  The article goes on to explain that, although Russian troops are leaving, Moscow has not conceded control, of its airbases or seaport in Syria.  That is to be negotiated  with “whomever” turns out to be in control, following the ouster of Assad.

I was, quite frankly, asleep at the switch regarding the imminent removal of Bashar Assad.  I had not thought deeply enough about the implications of Ukraine and Gaza/Lebanon regarding Russian and Iranian ability/willingness to continue to prop up Assad, nor did I understand the degree to which Radical Islamists had succeeded in convincing Syrian nationalists to cooperate militarily in the removal of Assad.  I missed the timing, but I continue to believe that I have the fundamental relationships about right.  Nothing that is happening on the ground, other than timing, is surprising, and the timing would not be surprising if we could have seen into the Idlib enclave.  Turkey did a superb job, as did Hyatt Tahir al-Sham, in disguising their readiness to move on Baghdad.

Now, the question is how the new Syrian leadership will resolve their own internal differences and how that will impact regional relationships.  My assessment, from afar, is that Hyatt Tahir al-Sham has not changed its Radical Islamist spots and that the other Syrian groups are not positioned to contest its leadership.  I believe that Turkish president Erdogan will cooperate with Hyatt Tahir al-Sham’s policies inside Syria in an effort to control the political situation in the immediate region, particularly the threat that Ankara perceives from the Kurds.  Erdogan will argue that Kurds represent a threat to both Baghdad and Ankara.  An enormous question mark in my mind is what the more radical Islamists in the region can and will do and how they will relate to our various military outposts in the region.  The newly elected American president is also something of a question mark, but I believe that the president elect would dearly like to get out of the argument, seeing Syria as none of our business as long as it does not do any immediate harm to any of our interests as he understands them.  

If Baghdad agrees with Ankara to go after the Kurds, I see a very real possibility that the Kurds will have to give up their management of the rudimentary prison system housing a large number of people designated as radical Islamists that currently exists in the region.  As I now understand it, most of the people in those “prisons” are women and children, but their release will be ballyhooed as another victory for Radical Islam, even as the internecine fighting between radical Islamist factions is every bit as intense as any of the other fights that are going on anywhere in the world.  I will be surprised If the Trump Administration makes any major effort to influence the elimination of those prison camps, as long as there is no perceived immediate threat to our interests in Israel or Saudi Arabia.  Washington will, however, bemoan any decision by the Kurds to walk away from the prison camps and use it to support their own desire to reduce our support of their fighters.  I believe that the Trump Administration will basically see Syria as none of our business, even as they have serious doubts about Erdogan’s role in international affairs generally.  This policy approach will enjoy immediate benefits in that it will reduce our involvement in fire fights, but it will also result in the continued growth of Radical Islam, which is, in my view, one of the most dangerous threats to our very existence.

Syrian opposition continues to advance on Damascus.

 Syrian opposition continues to advance on Damascus and Assad’s army does not appear to be responding adequately to deter their advance.  Assad’s international allies do not appear to be assisting him adequately either, although Hezbollah is reported to still have fighters in Syria.  There are even reports that Russia is moving ships out of their base in Syria for fear they will be caught up in the fighting.  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is projecting the image of a uniter and it would appear that a majority of the domestic opposition to Assad has accepted his leadership - at least tactically.  Ankara is, of course, clearly, if clandestinely, supporting the effort to overthrow Assad.  In the past, Teheran and Moscow would have stepped in to bolster Assad, but it would appear that they are too busy elsewhere to provide adequate support.  Should Hyatt Tahir al-Sham succeed in ousting Assad and taking power in Damascus because of the support of Turkey’s Erdogan, it would represent a significant setback for the Kurds and I would not be surprised to see the radical Islamist “prisons” in the region abandoned by their Kurdish jailers as that group tries to consolidate its defensive posture.  My guess is that the people currently incarcerated in these camps will enthusiastically join in the anti-Assad movement - at least for a time.  Much as we might dislike Assad, what is happening in Syria is not in our national interest.  Al-Jolani is not a moderate and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is not a democratic organization.  What appears to be happening in Syria is a brand of Radical Islam is on the cusp of replacing the thuggery of the Assad family.  More broadly, in the immediate region, Erdogan’s brand of Islamist governance is being strengthend.  I give the Syrian opposition full credit for managing to stay alive under extremely difficult circumstances and Turkey for succeeding in supporting them in the face of opposition from both Washington and Moscow, but I do not like the political direction that they are headed, and I do not believe that anyone in power in Washington is remotely aware of the fundamental issues involved in all of this.

Some among us are proud of having assassinated Osama bin Ladin and “destroying” ISIS, but we are currently in the position of choosing between a thug and a Radical islamist in a country where we have American personnel with guns and no clear purpose.  Al Qaida and ISIS are nothing more than the current face of the danger that we face and Syria is but one of the geographic hot spots where we are in actual contact with it.  Radical Islam is amorphous, just as it is crystal clear in its opposition to Western thought.  It does not hold sway anywhere where people are living a good life - no matter their culture.  Individuals may be infected with it, but not well-fed populations.  In countries with advanced economies and a decent standard of living, individual radicals are an irritant, not a threat.  In poor countries the reverse is true.  Wake the hell up folks.  Over-the-horizon assassination is NOT the solution to the threat.  It is, at best, a tactical tool that almost certainly results in more long term damage than short term success.  Building a strong military is a critical necessity, but it is not a fundamental solution.  Bread and rice are far more important than guns and bullets.

Turkey.

When I served in Turkey, decades ago, the Turkish government was dominated by the Turkish military and Turkey was a very reliable member of NATO.  The United States had several important military bases in Turkey and most of the Turkish military leadership had received extensive training in America.  We regarded Turkey as a reliable anti-Soviet anchor at the southern corner of NATO.  Pretty much all of that has changed.  Today, Erdogan has successfully purged the military out of all civil leadership, subordinated the Turkish military to his control, and has fundamentally changed Ankara’s relationship with Moscow, moving it from one of animosity to one of friendship.  I believe that Erdogan and Putin have a close personal relationship stemming from Putin’s having warned Erdogan of the military effort to arrest him years ago.  (Putin’s telephone call probably saved Erdogan’s life and Obama didn’t call.)  As this change progressed over the years, our own relationship with Turkey continued to deteriorate.

Erdogan correctly sees Turkey as a crossroads connecting Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, modernity and tradition.  He aspires to be a peacemaker, but few of the regional players agree with the parameters of his peace plans.  His regional critics see his machinations as being an effort to re-establish the Ottoman Empire.  He is able to craft a succession of political initiatives designed to deal with specific political issues, but he is unable to achieve any lasting solutions to any of the regional issues that plague the region.  He is bent on reversing the Europeanization of Turkey that the Ataturk Revolution initiated and he is succeeding at the same time that Europe is tiring of Turkish involvement in Europe - domestically and internationally. 

 

We tend to focus on Turkey in connection with whatever Middle Eastern political situation has our attention at the moment and we lose sight of the long term deleterious change that is taking place in our relationship.  Were I sufficiently influential, I would establish a goal of changing our relationship with Turkey to take advantage of its geopolitical position at the intellectual cross roads of Islam and Christianity.  This kind of thinking is what we will need when and if we ever attempt to deal with the challenge of Radical Islam.  Our blindness to this kind of thinking ensures that we will go to war instead, and that is way too bad, because it will eventually be nuclear war. 

The Fall of Aleppo.

 Syria is back in the news because “insurgents” have taken control of Aleppo.  I don’t pretend to understand what is going on in that far distant place, but I see it as an apt example of the “Radical Islamist Problem” that I try to argue is the most difficult political problem facing humanity.  My guess is that a close look at the Syrian situation would result in the conclusion that Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is the principal force behind the recent developments in Aleppo.  Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham is an outgrowth of Al Qaeda and represents one of the most viral radical Islamist organizations anywhere in the world.  The problems that we face in resolving the fighting in Ukraine pale in comparison with the problems that we face in Gaza, and those pale in comparison with the problems that we face in Syria.  Over a very long period of time, the Syrian Government, with the assistance of Russia, concentrated the most radical elements of the Opposition to Assad in a northern corner of the country.  The attack on Aleppo came out of this salient and, while it represents an enormous embarrassment for Damascus, it probably does not presently risk spreading to the rest of the country.  All it means is that a lot more people are going to die in more mindless warfare.  Turkey will keep close watch on the situation and will involve itself wherever and whenever the fighting threatens to spill over into Turkey and will take every opportunity to use the situation as cover for its campaign against Kurdish political and military machination inside Turkey.  My guess is that Russia will not be able to devote as much attention to the situation as it would like because of Ukraine, and Teheran will not because of what is happening in Lebanon and Gaza.  Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham intends to take full advantage of the situation, but I doubt that they will be able to go on and overthrow Assad as they would dearly love to do. 

I offer Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham as an example of the difficulty that we face in dealing with Radical islam, not as a significant threat in and of itself.  The particulars involved with other Radical islamist groups are different, but the challenge that arises from the world view that these Radical Islamist groups have in common is the threat that I am trying to identify.  Give them nuclear weapons and some of them will advocate using them to purify humanity.

 Designing a Christmas Card for the real world, not the one that we pretend exists.

Surprise! President Biden has pardoned his son.

 President Biden has pardoned his son for a variety of crimes that Hunter appears to have committed over a long period of time.  I never had any doubt that the father would pardon the son.  He almost certainly had to do it, given his responsibilities as a parent, but it, none-the-less, requires the subordination of his responsibilities as president and that is the rub.  The fact that the President lied repeatedly, during his recent abortive effort to get re-elected by vowing that he would not to do it, is merely the jabber of a failed politician.  The elder Biden’s more important failure was during the decades that father and son were milking the American people for riches and living high on the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.  I might excuse some of it, if either one of them had done anything that merited praise, but they have not.  Hunter is merely a drug-ridden wastrel, and his father is a failed politician who never got anything, other than crass domestic political machination, right.  I am at a loss to decide where the father’s greatest failure lies, but his pardon of Hunter is not it.  I am torn between his current policies regarding Gaza and Ukraine, but I definitely believe that he warrants much criticism for his decisions over the years that have contributed mightily to the debilitated state of the world today.

The pundits are going to have a field day for a week or so as Republicans bellow “I TOLD YOU SO,” and Democrats attempt to “turn the page.”  I doubt that there are any Americans anywhere that are actually surprised at the President’s action.  I contend that we have, deep down, all known, all along, what is what, about all of this.  Our protestations to the contrary are as artificial as most of the other commentary that attempts to pass as the national dialog.  We are, after all, the root cause of all of the problems that we face throughout society to include our acceptance of corrupt, idiot leaders.  I contend that this IS a democracy and our national government truly reflects the will of the people.  The problem being that we don’t like what we are doing to ourselves and we refuse to see our own role in the travesty.  We adamantly insist that it is “the other’s” fault.  Half of us now want Trump to take the lead and redress all of the problems created by Biden and “The Donald” is already busy changing everything that Biden tried to do just exactly the way Biden did four years ago when he took over from Trump’s first presidency.  

Our elections are a series of binary choices.  I much prefer that to the confusion that a parliamentary system offers, but our political system depends on our generating intelligent candidates for the office of president and we are failing to do that.  Instead, we are electing partisans that reflect the current mindless opinion of just over half of the citizenry and that citizenry is increasingly partisan rather than national in outlook.  We are Democrats and Republicans before we are Americans.  This is NOT a new development.  It has happened repeatedly during our several centuries of existence.  The aspect of the situation that we are now in, that is different, is the nature of war.  Always before in our history, we dilly-dallied along, pissing on each other, until an outside threat came along that made us all Americans.  We then cooperated to defeat “the other.”  Nuclear weapons on satellite guided ballistic missiles have changed the viability of that approach to the problems that we face today.  Nuclear obliteration is literally a push-button away.  The sign on the bathroom door is NOT the most important challenge that we face, and our precious feelings are nowhere near as important as we now think.

Biden pardoning his son is not as important to our longevity as is the standard of living of people living outside of our non-existent borders.  What we need to understand is that we can not have a good life unless the rest of the world manages to live a decent life.  Hunter and Good Old Joe’s transgressions are old news that we cherish because we understand them.  World peace is beyond our ability to conceive, let alone promote effectively.  Nuclear weapons makes that situation more dangerous to our longevity than Joe pardoning Hunter.

BRICS and Tarriffs.

 According to press reports, President-elect Trump is threatening tariffs if BRICS members do not support the continued use of the US dollar in international trade.  I do not know how successful his threat will be over the long haul, but I suspect that it might be useful in the short run.  The United States is still the world’s most important market and most countries depend to some extent on trade with us.  They have, in the past, also seen holding the US dollar in their treasuries as being the best way to hedge against inflation.  Both of these rationales are weakening dramatically with changes that are occurring in this country and in the world around us.  Inflation is ravaging the value of our currency, our national debt is mounting steadily, and our work force is much less competitive than it used to be in many areas of the economy.

You and I look at all of this with a jaundiced eye.  We tend to see the economic challenge that we face to be governed by policy decisions made in Washington DC.  I agree that tactical decisions made in Washington are relevant, but the root challenge is out here in the American heartland.  You and I are not the hardscrabble riff-raff that built the world’s most powerful economy.  We are the sophisticates that have gotten used to having the world’s most luxurious life-style.  We are justifiably proud of the society that we built and we are convinced that, even with all of its injustices, it is the absolute best society in the entire world.  In our eyes, the most efficient way to do anything is to mimic us and we are improving on our society every day that passes.  We are righting old wrongs committed by people long dead, ensuring equality in bathroom use, and working diligently to ensure that we are not rude to one another.  All of this, while the rest of the world stupidly fights with each other over all kinds of less etherial issues - like accumulating enough calories every day to maintain one’s existence.

I hold that America has a range of enemies that want to take us down off of our high and mighty perch, and, because of the invention of nuclear weapons, a couple of them are infinitely more dangerous than any enemy that we have ever faced before.  Russia, China and Radical Islam are, in my eyes, the three most difficult - in that order of importance.  Russia is an old fashioned threat that we understand better than the other two and we are dealing with their most recent trouble-making in traditional, if ineffective, ways.  China is the most dangerous immediate threat, not only because of its growing nuclear capability, but because of the effectiveness, repeat effectiveness of their policies - BRICS being but one of the more immediate challenges to our supremacy.  Assuming that we manage to deal adequately with Moscow and Beijing, we still face the challenge of Radical Islam, which is made far more complicated by the fact that Radical Islamists operate with an entirely different world view making it difficult to achieve true consensus on virtually any subject.

What we need is a public ethos that values all human life.  We have a better start than any society before us in the entire history of humans on earth, but we are drifting away from the principals that our forefathers attempted to instill in us.  Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran are threats, but self-indulgence is what is destroying us.  Advances in technology are not going to reverse things.  They will, in fact, accelerate the process in a multitude of ways - the technology of nuclear warfare being the easiest to understand, but advances in the art of extending individual lives may be the single most problematic.

If I were influential, I would join with Beijing to perfect our outreach to the underdeveloped world instead of threatening tariffs designed to hold their economy back and I would make it crystal clear that their only alternative to honest cooperation was nuclear war.  Very unfortunately, in order to make that threat effective, I would have to divert large amounts of money and human resources to perfecting our military capability.  No amount of wishful thinking can eliminate that requirement.