The View from Right Field

Gaffes, Red Lines, and Credibility

[This is a follow up and elaboration on my post of March 26, 2022.¹ ]

In the 2020 presidential election, I didn’t vote for Joe Biden even though I wanted Donald Trump to lose.  I couldn’t bring myself to vote for President Biden because, as Robert Gates said in 2014, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”^2,3  Fortunately, I live in Illinois, so my vote was not necessary for President Biden to win Illinois’s electoral votes. 

Which brings me to President Biden’s recent “gaffe tour” of Europe.  Michel Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."  President Biden gave us two great examples of this on his trip.  First, he said, apparently unscripted, that Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”  That is probably true, but how is it helpful?  We need to get the war in Ukraine over.  How does making Vladimir Putin think he might be prosecuted as a war criminal help do that?⁴

Nancy Pelosi Criticizes Representatives’ Trip to Kabul While Apparently Forgetting Her Trip to Damascus in 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been very critical of House members Seth Moulton, a Democrat, and Peter Meijer, a Republican, for their visit on Tuesday to the airport in Kabul.  Representatives Moulton and Meijer said they flew in “crew-only” seats on a plane with empty seats.  Among other things, Speaker Pelosi said, "It's not just about them to Afghanistan, going into the region, there's a cost on our resources as well.  This is deadly serious."

I don’t know if Representatives Moulton and Meijer should have gone, though I do understand their desire to see what was going on for themselves.  In any case, I find Speaker Pelosi’s criticism of the visit a bit funny.  She may not remember 2007 when she led a group to Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, even though President George W. Bush said she should not do so.  Because of Syrian support for Hezbollah and interference in Iraq, among other things, the United States had a policy of not meeting with President Assad.  But Speaker Pelosi felt she could decide for herself what was right and the heck with President Bush’s policy.  

Where Are the Syrian Refugees Going to Go?

While Joe Biden’s comeback on Super Tuesday and Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) take up all of the available media space in the United States,¹ a serious problem is developing in Syria/Turkey/Greece.  As Syria, with Russia’s help, tries to regain the territory around Idlib (the last bit of Syria that the Syrian government doesn’t control), Syrians who have been displaced by the civil war in Syria and who have taken refuge in Idlib province have no place to go except Turkey.  But Turkey already has upwards of four million Syrian refugees, and they don’t want any more. 

I realize that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish government are not nice people and that democracy/freedom is slowly disappearing in Turkey, but it’s hard not to appreciate, at least to some extent, Turkey’s position. Turkey already has millions of Syrian refugees.  How many more are they supposed to take?  In 2016, after the flood of Middle Eastern and other refugees into Europe, Turkey and the EU entered into an agreement whereby Turkey would limit the number of irregular immigrants and asylum seekers going into Greece and the EU would provide funding to care for the refugees.  In other words, the EU has been paying (bribing-?) Turkey to keep Syrian refugees in Turkey, instead of allowing them to pass through to Europe.

Trump, Kurds, and Political Principles: Another Question

While I think the U.S. effort in Syria is/was¹ a really good idea, I have wondered what the legal basis for it is.  My best guess is that, if people who understand that kind of question in the Trump administration were asked, they would point to the resolution adopted by Congress right after 9/11.  In other words, the resolution adopted eighteen years ago to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  While the resolution was obviously not worded that narrowly, the question still arises whether it really covers what the U.S. troops are/were doing in Syria.

Which got me to thinking.  Given the resounding vote in House of Representatives last week in favor of the resolution criticizing President Trump for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, maybe now is an appropriate time for Congress to pass a resolution authorizing and approving what we are/were doing in Syria.  And given the unanimous support among House Democrats for the resolution criticizing President Trump last week, I would expect no problem passing such a resolution this week or next.
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¹ I’m not really sure if it is over or not.  See here.
PS  I assume my sarcasm was obvious, but, in case it wasn’t, I wanted to make it clear.

Is Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Going to Turn Out Good?

No, I don’t really think that President Trump’s foreign policy is going to work – or that it will turn out well.  Janan Ganesh, in the Financial Times, however, comes up with one way President Trump’s foreign policy may work out:

“The world resented American omnipresence before it complained about American dereliction.  Inadvertently, Donald Trump is forcing the end of this ambivalence.  The more the US president unwinds his country’s external commitments, the more other nations see the resultant damage to the global commons. … Countries with historic qualms about US power are going through a chastening education in life without it.

The perverse result: an America First president could bequeath his successor a world that is keener on US leadership than it was before. …

Trump, Kurds, and Political Principles

The House of Representatives voted 354 to 60 on Wednesday to oppose President Trump’s withdrawal from Syria and to call on the Administration to, I don’t know, do something about it (whatever that would involve).  The Democrats voted 225 to 0 to support the resolution, not surprisingly.  More interesting, perhaps, was the 129 to 60 vote among House Republicans in favor of the resolution.  (At least on this, Democrats will find it hard to complain that Republicans are not standing up to President Trump, though I am sure some will try.)

The most interesting question, however, is what would have happened in a reverse situation.  What if a President Warren (or Obama) abandoned allies in Syria (or elsewhere)?  Republicans would, I am sure, vote near-unanimously to criticize a Democratic president.  But how many Democrats would do the same?  Would they vote unanimously in favor of our abandoned allies, as they did with Donald Trump as president?  Would even 68% of the Democrats vote against a Democratic president, as House Republicans did here against a Republican president?

Principle is always easy to stand up for when you get to rip on your political opponents at the same time.  It is harder when it’s the other way around.

Why Should Anybody Trust Us? – Again

Donald Trump has announced, again, that the U.S. troops will leaving northeastern Syria (or at least parts of it) – and, in effect, we will basically give Turkey a free hand to do whatever they want to the Kurdish forces there.  And this time he may actually mean it.  He previously announced such a withdrawal in December of last year.  Then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned because of the decision, as did Brett McGurk, who was Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS.  Last December/January, President Trump was apparently talked out of a complete withdrawal, and approximately 1,000 U.S. troops stayed.  But he now is saying, once again, that he is going to do it, so maybe we will.  Several comments (out of the many that could be made).

The Kurds helped have been a key ally in the fight against ISIS in Syria.  They lost thousands killed.  I realize it was to their benefit to do so, but it was to our benefit, too.  We were fighting together.  We were allies.  And now we have left them in the lurch.  That’s just wrong.  Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said it well: “We must always have the backs of our allies, if we expect them to have our back.”

Is Anybody Surprised We Can’t Get Other Countries to Back Our Plan for Syria?

The Wall Street Journal reports the United States is having trouble getting other countries to provide troops and logistical support for an effort to stop an ISIS resurgence in Syria.  Hmm.  I wonder why.  Could it be that the request was initially made in January, after President Trump had tweeted that we were going to withdraw all of our troops from Syria?  The Administration has seen backtracked on the President’s tweet and is now planning on keeping some troops in Syria.  But who knows when the President might tweet another withdrawal.  Why should anybody commit to help when President Trump could change his mind at any time?

It’s not unlike President Obama and his last minute, 180-degree turn on bombing Syria for violating President Obama’s redline on use of chemical weapons.  Why should anybody believe us or cooperate with us when they could be left hanging at any time?

Donald Trump. Barack Obama. James Mattis. Syria and Afghanistan.

Donald Trump has unilaterally, and apparently without consultation with our local allies, decided to pull all of our forces out of Syria, where they were helping local Kurdish forces fight ISIS.  And to do so almost immediately.  We are doing this, President Trump says, because ISIS has been defeated in Syria, but then people say lots of things 

There are also reports that President Trump has decided to cut our presence in Afghanistan by up to half and, once again, to do so quickly.  This will take a little longer because Afghanistan is a NATO fight and we have to do some consultation with our NATO allies before pulling our troops out – unlike Syria where we can leave our Kurdish allies high and dry and tough luck on them.

Syria – Again. And Beyond.

It looks like more hell is coming to one of the places that has had so much of it over the last seven or eight years: Syria.  Bashar al-Assad, along with his Russian and Iranian allies, is ready to attack Idlib, the last major rebel-held enclave in Syria.  With three million civilians and tens of thousands rebel fighters, and nowhere to escape to, the outlook is almost beyond imagination.  While many seem to like to blame Donald Trump for just about everything that goes wrong in the world, this is not one to blame on President Trump.  Also, at this point, unfortunately, I am not sure there is much the United States can, or is at least willing to, do in Syria.

If the United States had wanted to do anything about Syria, we would have had to do it five years ago (or more).  But back then, Barack Obama decided it was better for the United States to not do anything.  After giving the world the impression he was going to do something about Syria’s use of chemical weapons (he had drawn a red-line against it), he did a 180-degree backward somersault, saying he had accomplished all he needed to do by getting Russia to agree that Syria would dispose of its chemical weapons.  Oops.  Oh well, not every decision works.  This one certainly didn’t.  I don’t know if President Obama is still defending this decision, but in 2016, when he was doing farewell interviews, he seemed proud of it.  I guess the decision worked in theory; it just didn’t work in the real world.  Ask the Syrians.  For that matter, ask the countries of Europe, who had to deal with the tide of Syrian and other refugees that started coming in 2015.¹