A National Embarrassment

On Wednesday, the President of the United States defended his decision to abandon the Kurds in northern Syria as “strategically brilliant.”  With scores of Kurdish fighters and civilians killed and approximately 200,000 people fleeing the fighting as refugees, he went on to say of the situation, “It’s a problem we have very nicely under control.  It’s not our problem.  They’ve got a lot of sand over there… There’s a lot of sand they can play with.”

Brilliant indeed.

Yesterday the president sent Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo to confer with Turkish President Recep Erdogan to stop the slaughter of the Kurds.  Mr. Trump congratulated himself for solving a crisis that he started by giving a “green light” to Turkish plans to conduct an operation perilously close to ethnic cleansing.  In reality, Mr. Trump gave away the farm and tried to make it sound like it was the cows’ fault.

If this is Mr. Trump’s idea of a “great deal” I want to sit down with him because I will walk away with everything that I want.  Our negotiation with the Turks was totally one sided — theirs.  Turkey got everything they set out to achieve when they crossed the border last week and the Kurds got nothing — maybe not even their lives.  Fighting continues today during the supposed “pause” — and the Turks emphasized that it was not a cease fire, merely a pause in an ongoing operation.

In exchange for the Turks’ five day pause in the fighting, the Kurds got a directive to leave their homes and flee or surrender to their fate at the hands of the Turks.  And the United States looks weak and foolish.

The Russians got everything they wanted in Syria.  And we look weak and foolish.

The Syrians got everything they wanted.  And we look weak and foolish.

The Iranians got everything they wanted.  And we look weak and foolish.

Last night this is what the President of the United States said about the abandonment of our Kurdish allies.

“Sometimes you have to let ’em fight.  Like two kids in a lot, you gotta let ’em fight and then you pull them apart.”

It is clear that Mr. Trump has no appreciation for human life or respect for anyone not named Donald Trump Sr.  These callous remarks reflect so much about his outlook on, well, everything.  He even seemed to endorse ethnic cleansing when he said of the Turkish attack on the Kurds that Turkey had to do it, because the Turks “had to clean it out.”

It is a national embarrassment, except that Mr. Trump knows nothing about shame.

Turkey got their “safe zone” in the former autonomous Kurdish region of Syria.  In return, the United States promised to lift all sanctions imposed or threatened.  Syria re-occupied parts of northern Syria without firing a shot after years of not having the ability to go there.  Iran increased their influence in the Middle East and now has an uninterrupted supply line from Tehran to their surrogate Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as access to the Israeli border.  Russia is now the primary power broker in the Middle East.  ISIS is taking advantage of the chaos to make attacks in the region and coming dangerously close to freeing their thousands of fighters from prison camps. (Several hundred are known to have already escaped.  Mr. Trump said that the Kurds released them just to embarrass him.)

Here is what the world saw of some of our country’s best fighters.  Abandoned camps left so hastily that food was left out and personal items forgotten.  Russian television loved showing the videos of their troops surveying that scene.  U.S. troops are holed up waiting to be airlifted out.  U.S. aircraft attacked our own former anti-ISIS headquarters after the troops left so quickly that officials feared useful ammunition, equipment and other assets would fall into the hands of other armed groups.

I am sure Russian President Vladimir Putin is tired of winning.  He certainly is getting a fabulous return on his investment in the 2016 election.

Reasonable people could make a case for a U.S. withdrawal from Syria. It could have been done in a disciplined, methodical and diplomatically sensible way over time that protected the interests of the Kurds as well as our NATO ally Turkey.  It could have included a viable resolution to the fate of thousands of hardened ISIS fighters imprisoned in the region.  Instead we just bugged out and left the world the worse for it.

Other countries certainly took note.  Allies, friends and enemies now know that the United States no longer stands by its word and that the president could wake up any day and undo decades of diplomacy on a whim.

Strategically brilliant?  About as brilliant as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938 and declaring “peace for our time.”