MilPub

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.

I'd love to blame this one on Donald the Dove, but, sadly, I think the upcoming betrayal of the Kurds who fought for U.S. objectives in Syria is likely to have happened under any U.S. government. There's just no compelling national interest there, and the notion that they would have gained any sort of lingering obligation from Uncle Sammy by killing and dying for him was...well, the YPG could have asked any Vietnamese highland clansman or Iraqi translator what happens when you put your faith in the Big Guy to stand by you when you're no longer of any sort of geopolitical value.

The sadly-ironic part is that we're again reminded that for all his tough-guy talk Donnie is a puff-pastry when real dictators come into view, and his "foreign policy" is entirely based on what's in it for him.

In this case at least his cupidity and political cowardice will insure that the dead are "only" dusky foreigners and not Americans. Given the wasteful spending of lives my country has indulged in since 2001 perhaps that's the best we could have hoped for.

For the Kurds, well...this must feel pretty familiar.

That said... THIS...
...is a nastily cynical bit of business. "Captured ISIS fighters"? My ass.

Look, if you want to throw your Kurdish proxies under the bus, fine. Man up and admit it. Come out and say "We no longer have compelling interests in northern Syria and will not stand in the way of Turkey's desire to crush armed Kurdish forces, wherever they may be." Or, if you have to, try and make up at least a more plausible lie. "Captured ISIS fighters" is ridiculous nonsense; Trumpkins who don't care about dusky Mooslims can't be bothered, and anyone who knows anything about this sees it as the cheap and transparent lie it is.

Or, better yet, don't say anything. Dirty deeds are always done more appropriately in the night and the fog.

Update 10/8: Perhaps Sven is the only perceptive one here in sussing out that the supposed-Commander-in-Chief doesn't really command jack shit and his words are, indeed, meaningless:
My guess, though, is that Trump did, indeed, direct the abandonment of NE Syria and that the military and whatever-is-left-of-the-diplomatic-corps is trying to slow-roll the troop movement to let adults try and talk Liddle' Donnie out of whatever caused his tantrum after getting off the phone playdate with his buddy Erdie. There is no real reason to do this other than whatever bat is in Trump's belfry; if a handful of GIs can keep Turkey and the YPG from going at each other that really is better than the alternative, regardless of how you feel about idiotic U.S. adventures in the Middle East in general.

This, on the other hand, is just TOO perfect:

Update 10/12: The "Celebrity Geopolitical Apprentice" showrunners are clearly now past just doing weed and blow and are huffing sterno straight from the can, because it would take a perfect fool to set up this ridiculous plotline; the orange-tinted frontman, having bloviated that he will #endendlesswars proceeds to feed more GIs into the meatgrinder. And, in the unintentionally comic kudo of the season, claims that the move will inaugurate a new - or, rather, a return to a very old and discredited - military tradition; renting the nation's armed forces to a client state in return for cash:

Coupla things here.

First, if I was one of those zoomies I'd be pretty chapped. First, because I'd be me, and as me I would happily tell Prince Bonesaw and his merry band of religious nuts to fuck off and die in a hole. Outside of Israel, Saudi is the most worthless "ally" the US has in the Middle East. The people who Trump says should die now because they didn't help us on D-Day are a thousand times more valuable to US interests than the most pimped-out Saudi royal.

Second, IIRC Bush the Elder got most of the costs of the '91 Second Gulf War repayed by the various oil sheikdoms, so this isn't like Trump is coming up with some brilliant stroke of foreign policy here. Like he always does, he's just slapping his brand on other people's work.

And, third, the Bush example is a good counterpoint to how you do this if you really know how to play the foreign policy game. You ostentatiously lend support to your clients, emphasizing what a great partner you are, how strong and magnanimous you are and will be...and then, quietly, you stick out a hand so your grateful pals can slap you on the palm with some Franklins. You don't blow your intention to get moo-la-la in return for your mercenaries out your piehole first before you get so much as a single rial so you don't look like a fucking chump if and when the client stiffs you.

Mexico was gonna pay for that wall, amirite? Bwa-ha-ha...

Look.

I'm as tired of these idiotic whack-a-muj exercises as anyone. There's no real point to them anymore, largely because there has never been a genuine attempt to assess what the U.S.'s interests are in these parts. It's all fear and panic and "radical Islamic terrorism" all the way down.

Trump just adds a particularly idiotic icing to this shitcake.

As he is with U.S. domestic politics; he's not the disease. He's a symptom.

But...damn if it's not a pretty nasty virus.

Update 10/14: What a fucking shitshow:

"Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team."

Stable genius!

Update 10/16: Sweet Holy Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ, get the fucking net!

"Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with."

What the...what the actual fuck..?

One thing I think is important is not to overestimate the rock-bottom level of Orange Foolius' actual understanding. I don't know much about the topography and geography of Syria, but right off the top of my head I don't think there really IS a "lot of sand over there". The deserty parts of eastern Syria are mostly rocky desert (the Hamad) or bare soil (the Homs desert).

But here's the thing; when this simple fucker hears "Arab" he probably really does think "Ahab, the A-rab, Sheik of the Burnin' Sands".

Seriously.

It's like having a really simple ten-year-old as a president.

Jesus wept.

Update 10/18: So apparently the Trump Administration and Erdogan's Turkey arrived at some sort of agreement to pause Operation Peace Spring for about five days. As the linked piece notes, it's pretty much a Munich Agreement between the US and Turkey to allow Erdogan to get his piece of Syrian Sudetenland:

"This is essentially the US validating what Turkey did and allowing them to annex a portion of Syria and displace the Kurdish population," a senior US official familiar with operations in Syria told CNN. "This is what Turkey wanted and what POTUS green lighted. I do think one reason Turkey agreed to it is because of the Kurds have put up more of resistance and they could not advance south any further as a result."

My question is "What does this operational pause (since it's NOT a ceasefire and fighting is going to continue) "mean for the U.S. on the ground in Syria?"

I mean, the only way this actually helps is if there's a massive Dunkirk of Kurds from NE Syria; lock, stock, pots, pans, cats, kids...everyone gets marshaled out of their farms, towns, and cities, trucked to the railhead or airhead, and then from there to secure locations...where? somewhere south in Syria? To refugee camps at the tender mercies of Assad's Mukhabarat? To Iraq or Jordan?

Trump sure as hell ain't gonna take million of filthy wogs here in God's Great America.

And how does the US actually facilitate this? The logistics alone are breathtaking, and would require a massive commitment from a superpower - how the hell are the Syrian Kurds themselves going to do this alone? Surrounded by enemies (or at least people who are indifferent to their survival) and without a welcoming place to go to? I'm sure they might get a grudging reception from Iraqi Kurdistan, but those provinces are not rich, and have little in the way of resources (or need) for million of displaced relatives; it's be like having my in-laws come to live in our basement.

I mean...after Trump greenlighted this atrocity it's good that his people have managed to somehow deflect some of it. But I don't see how this works as anything but a rolling goatscrew without massive, immediate, and well-organized US-supported and internationally-coordinated evacuation.

To kick back and congratulate yourself over this is pure Trumpian looney-tunes.

Lots of bloviation about the bomb assassination of a bunch of Kurdish "Manbij Military Council" militiamen and four of the U.S. liaison team meeting with them at a kebab shop in the Kurdish-held Syrian town, most of it pearl-clutching about whether "...this means the Islamic State isn't really defeated!!!"

That's not my question. No, duh, the IS isn't "defeated". They're pissed-off Sunni tribesmen. So long as the governments in Baghdad and Damascus are Shiite in some form the zero-sum politics of the Fertile Crescent means that pissed-off Sunni tribesmen are going to be killing people. You can't "defeat" that without killing ALL the Sunni tribesmen, or giving the Sunni tribesmen alternatives to killing people, and that fucking ship has sailed.

No. My question is; how the hell does some Islamic State bomb squad get the intel on where and when this meeting is being held in time to get their fall guy there in time to blow everybody to hell? Is there some sort of IS pizza-delivery bomb taxi squad sitting by the phones, vests on, ready to burn rubber to where one of their spies has just called in a big meet between the YPG and the gringos? Is Manbij that porous, that IS guys can drift in and set up bomb-making and bomb-delivery units just where-ever, and that their guys can spot juicy targets and hit them at a moment's notice?

Or is the MMC OPSEC so damn poor that the IS guys knew about this a couple of days in advance?

Frankly, IMO all this does is make the case for grabbing a hat. If the only people in Syria trusted enough to embed GIs with can't do a better job of securing their own territory then it can't be done. We got the hell out of Iraq for the simple reason that we couldn't get the place down to civil levels of violence without Roman methods. This suggests that the northeastern corner of Syria is likely to be just as impossible.

No, boys. The Islamic State is never going to "be defeated" if by that you mean that they will be unable to kill people. If that's your endstate the U.S. might as well make Syria the fifty-first goddamn state, because we're going to be there forever.

Two of the best that I am reading so far this summer, one just published this year, and one published 63 years ago.   Both have ramifications for the current conflicts in the Ukraine and Iraq.  

The new one was just published in June, Prit Buttar’s 'Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914'.  Published by Osprey it is the first in a trilogy akin to Atkinson’s three volume opus.

It has very fine reviews at goodreads and more by Amazon customers so I won’t go into any detail here.  The reason I bring it up is because of the account of the campaigns in Galicia and the Carpathian Mountains by Generals Ruzsky  and Brusilov.  It was a war of movement rather than the more familiar trenches familiar to the West.  Part of that area is now the western Ukraine where they have been trying to get out from under the Russian thumb for a century. After WW1 was the Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1919, which the Soviets won.  But the Poles under Marshal Pilsudski occupied parts of the western Ukraine during the confusion.  So many western Ukrainians joined Pilsudski and his Ukrainian ally Simon Petliura in the Polish-Soviet War, where the Poles fought and beat the Red Army in 1921 but could not hold the Ukraine. Just 20 years later some of those western Ukrainians joined with the Nazis in their war against the Soviets.  For example: Stepan Bandera who was born in Austro-Hungarian Galicia in 1909 and as a boy probably witnessed Russian troops invading his homeland.

My only initial disappointment with the book was that the WW1 incursions into Turkey and Persia by Russian and Armenian Armies were not covered.  But probably rightly so as they were in a completely different theater and 480+ pages in one book is enough.  However, there is a chapter that covers the fighting in the Serbian Theater.  One reviewer cried about the maps, but there were more than a dozen good high level ones and I wonder if even the participants at the time had good large scale maps showing the detail of terrain and troop movement.  

I await the author's future volume of the Brusilov Offensive of 1916 where a certain Lance-Sergeant Zhukov made his bones.

Buttar is a medical doctor and does not have a PhD in History.  But his work seems well researched, he speaks and reads German and Russian and has all the research facilities of Osprey behind him.  His daughter is a student at Oxford and he is quoted as saying that he has been dreadfully waiting for one of her Oxford history profs to lambaste his work as amateurish, but it has not happened yet.






The older book, which I am rereading is 'Strange Lands and Friendly People'.  Written by a Supreme Court Justice, mountaineer, conservationist, and favorite whipping boy of Wall Street, Weyerhauser, and the John Birch Society: William O. Douglas. 

Published 60+ years ago it tells of trips by Douglas and his son through Iraq, Iran, Syria and other countries in the Mid East.  The friendly people he writes about are not the Arabs and the Persians, although he does not say anything against them.  He is mainly visiting and writing about the minorities in those countries: Qashquais, Kurds, Lurs, Bakhtiaris, Armenians, Druze, Assyrians, Azeris.  During those travels he and his son backpack and horse-pack throughout the Zagros Mountains along the borders of Iraq/Iran/USSR/Turkey. They visited Bakhtiari and Armenian villages in the valley of Oregon (Boroujen?) in Iran. They also went to Lur villages where he is told the stories of Reza Shah’s 'Butcher of Luristan', Ahmad Amir-Ahmadi and massacres by Reza Shah's Persian Cossack Brigade. 
 



 
 They visited the former Republic of Mahabad, where by the way Masoud Barzani, current President of the Kurdistan Regional Government was born and where Douglas tells the story of Masoud’s father Mustafa Barzaniand his struggles against both Iraq and Iran.   And they visited Maku in what has been called the Kurdish Bermuda Triangle area bordering the Turkish-Iranian-Soviet border where absentee landlords in Tehran kept the locals starving which incited more Kurdish and Azeri militancy.  And where even in this decade Iran is executing activists for being what they call mohareeb or 'enemies of God'.  

His main purpose in these trips was to see for himself those countries just south of the Soviet Union where the West was propping up dictatorships in order to keep out communism.  His key quote sixty years old but still germane:  "...we must give up the idea that the world can or ought to be standardized to American specifications".

So what is next on the reading list?  


I'm leaning towards Robert Farley's 'Grounded' about doing away with the Air Force and reverting back to pre-1947 with just Army and Naval air arms.  

Not sure I agree with the premise but I want to hear what he has to say.  

Any tips on some good reads of yours that I can start on in August?   I need a few good books to relax with while I enjoy the El Nino weather.