Why is Trump publicly threatening Assad over chemical weapons use?

Another important article by Sundance today at The Conservative Treehouse. He analyzes what Trump is up to in publicly threatening Assad over chemical weapons use.
Read the whole thing here.

Trying to understand Syria

Sundance at The Last Refuge must be the hardest working blogger. Today he gives us much more background information on Syria.

...If the Russian military and the entire Syrian military wanted to eliminate ISIS in Syria (said to be approximately 30k +/-), they could do so rather quickly. They’ve had over a year to assemble enough military personnel and military armament to defeat that enemy.

They have not done so because it doesn’t fit the current agenda: keeping Assad in power.

President Trump is breaking up the availability of Assad (Russia and Iran) to hide behind the useful foil of their opposition to ISIS.

If another chemical attack takes place, Bashir Assad runs the risk of being removed. And the entire world, sans Russia and Iran, will see the removal action as justified.

Remember, the primary goal of Russia and Iran is to keep Assad in power.

♦ If Bashir Assad did not carry out the prior chemical attack, he, and Russia, is now in a position of having to make sure that another attack doesn’t take place, ever. This means Russia and Assad need to re-engage the fight against whomever ‘might’ carry out another chemical attack. (Trump wins)

♦ If Bashir Assad did carry out the prior chemical attack, he and Russia, are now unable to use that action against Assad’s political opposition. (Trump wins)

President Trump has assigned responsibility, and given consequences. President Trump is forcing Assad (and Russia/Iran) to: #1) fight ISIS, and #2) stop targeting Assad’s political opposition; at least with chemical weapons.

And THAT is the exact response Assad gave after the 59 tomahawk missiles struck the Syrian airbase. See: “Assad promises to fight ISIS harder.” This is also one of the reasons why the targeted airbase is still operational.

Now pay attention to Secretary Tillerson:

Overall, the situation in Syria is one where our approach today and our policy today is, first, to defeat ISIS. By defeating ISIS we remove one of the disruptive elements in Syria that exists today.

That begins to clarify for us opposition forces and regime forces. In working with the coalition — as you know, there is a large coalition of international players and allies who are involved in the future resolution in Syria.

So it’s to defeat ISIS; it’s to begin to stabilize areas of Syria, stabilize areas in the south of Syria, stabilize areas around Raqqa through ceasefire agreements between the Syrian regime forces and opposition forces. Stabilize those areas; begin to restore some normalcy to them. Restore them to local governance — and there are local leaders who are ready to return, some who have left as refugees — they’re ready to return to govern these areas.

Use local forces that will be part of the liberation effort to develop the local security forces — law enforcement, police force. And then use other forces to create outer perimeters of security so that areas like Raqqa, areas in the south can begin to provide a secure environment so refugees can begin to go home and begin the rebuilding process.

In the midst of that, through the Geneva Process, we will start a political process to resolve Syria’s future in terms of its governance structure, and that ultimately, in our view, will lead to a resolution of Bashar al-Assad’s departure.

~ Secretary Tillerson during Air-Strike Debrief

And Obama and Kerry? Sundance has a video in which Kerry admits arming oppositon groups.

Read more here.

"If the bank told you they were repossessing your home just as soon as you finished the kitchen remodel, how quickly would you work in remodeling the kitchen?".

The quote is from Sundance at The Last Refuge, and it pertains to the fact of

Assad’s 2017 motive NOT TO remove ISIS with any excessive urgency.

Currently, there are two sides in the six-year Syrian civil war: Assad and “the rebels”.

If you take out ISIS (‘the rebels’), you are left with Assad – a terrorist state. If you take out Assad you are left with ISIS – a terrorist state. The regional goal is to eliminate extremism. Both sides of the current Syrian coin are extremist.

Similarly, by actions and deeds the international community, and the regional community have essentially told Assad he must step down from power as soon as he eliminates ISIS. Do you see any grand motivation for Assad to remove ISIS in that equation? This is the basis for the quagmire. Syria is FUBAR.

Wikipedia says

FUBAR is a military acronym for "fucked up beyond all/any recognition/ repair/ reason/ redemption."

Sundance continues,

Syria is FUBAR and ordinary Syrians are being destroyed between the pendulum. Syria is FUBAR and despite the Russian and Iranian propaganda to the contrary, Bashir Assad is a terrorist and a dictator. Bashir Assad is to 2017 Syria what 1980’s Kaddaffi was to Libya.

Take ISIS, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda out of the equation, which is almost impossible because those affiliates are people -tens of thousands of people- and you still have terrorist Bashir Assad and the terrorist group Hezbollah and the terrorist network of the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is FUBAR because it is full of violent extremists.

Don’t kid yourself into believing that Bashir Assad is some grand magnanimous figure just because he is currently killing Sunni extremists (ISIS). Take away the “extremists” from the equation and Assad kills Sunni moderates. Either way you look at Syria one extremist element ends up killing ordinary Syrians. Syria is FUBAR.

There’s no going back to the time of Zookeepers Hussein (Iraq), Bin Ali (Tunisia), Mubarak (Egypt), Kaddaffi (Libya) and Abdullah Salah (Yemen), being able to contain the rabid cats.

...The entire region understands this; Assad has no allies in proximity. Assad is the only Zookeeper remaining amid a land that has moved away from Zoo-keeping. It’s only Assad, Russia and Iran who are trying to deny the reality of the inevitable.

...No-one in the media has been assembling all of the dots of the direct talks that have been taking place between President Trump and the Regional Partners.

♦ Immediately following his inauguration, President Trump spoke to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and gained his ideological and financial support for building a safe zone for Syrian’s as they rebuild.

♦ A week later, President Trump spoke at length to Egypt’s Fattah al-Sisi about their efforts.

♦ At the beginning of February – King Abdullah III of Jordan traveled to Washington to meet with Vice-President Mike Pence and discuss aide and assistance for regional security. Previously, in November 2016, King Abdullah spoke to President-elect Trump

♦ A week later – Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington DC for a very warm and optimistic meeting with President Trump for talks on regional security.

♦ At the beginning of March – Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry visited Washington, met with members of Congress and held a long discussion with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,

♦ Mid-March Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with an envoy from President Trump and told him that a peace deal is possible under the new president.

♦ Last Week (Monday) – Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to the White House for an official state visit, and a very warm greeting by President Trump.

♦ Last Week (Wednesday) – Jordan’s King Abdullah II follows al-Sisi with a visit to the White House and receives another very warm greeting by the U.S. President

Read more here.

And the Oscar goes to...a terrorist group!

"You are president of the Syrian Republic. At the same time you are a loving husband and the father of three. How do you balance those responsibilities?"

Assad: "If you cannot succeed in your small duties, you cannot succeed in your larger duties"

Interviewer: "Have you ever thought of leaving your country for the sake of your family?"

"Never! Whenever you have any kind of reluctance, you will lose. You will lose not with your enemies; you will lose with your supporters!"

At The Last RefugeAssad, Sundance emphasizes these points:

CNN has intentionally broadcast a filtered version of this interview focusing on the “foreign invaders” perspective. However, pay close attention to the 06:15 point of the video above where Assad discusses President Trump and his policy, and how Assad (correctly) views Turkey as facilitating ISIS.

“We have hopes that this administration in the United States is going to implement what we have heard, taking into consideration that talking about ISIS doesn’t mean talking about the whole terrorism; ISIS is one of the products, al-Nusra is one of the products, you have so many groups in Syria but they are not ISIS – but they are al-Qaeda. They have the same background of the Wahhabi extremist ideology”. [ie. The Muslim Brotherhood]

Asked about cooperation with President Trump specifically, President Assad expands:

“In theory, yes. But practically not yet. Because there is no link between Syria and the United States on a formal level. Even their raids against ISIS which I have just mentioned, which are only a few raids, have been without the cooperation or consultation with the Syrian Army, or the Syrian government – which is illegal as we always say. So theoretically we share those goals, but practically – not yet.”

Do you have personal contact with the United States, direct or indirect:

“No. Not at all. Indirect we have so many channels but you cannot bet on private channels. It should be formal, that way we can talk about direct discussion with another government.”

How the UN helps keep Assad in power

UN money is effectively helping to prop up a regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Nick Hopkins and Emma Beals report for The Guardian,

The UN has awarded contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to people closely associated with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, as part of an aid programme that critics fear is increasingly at the whim of the government in Damascus, a Guardian investigation has found.

The UN has paid more than $13m to the Syrian government to boost farming and agriculture, yet the EU has banned trade with the departments in question for fear of how the money will be used.

The UN has paid at least $4m to the state-owned fuel supplier, which is also on the EU sanctions list.

The World Health Organisation has spent more than $5m to support Syria’s national blood bank – but this is being controlled by Assad’s defence department.

Two UN agencies have partnered with the Syria Trust charity, an organisation started and chaired by President Assad’s wife, Asma, spending a total of $8.5m. The first lady is under both US and EU sanctions.

Read much more here.

Chicago?

Ynetnews reports: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry informed several Arab countries that the U.S. and Russia have reached an understanding that Syrian President Bashar Assad will leave to another country as part of the future peace process aiming to put an end to the bloody civil war, reported the London-based Al-Hayat Thursday.

Detached from reality

Here is the statement of Arkansas senator Tom Cotton re: Obama's speech tonight:

“President Obama is a wartime president who doesn't seem to realize it. Fourteen Americans were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists, but the President is dangerously detached from reality, lecturing us about political correctness and ineffective gun control. Radical Islamic jihadists are not contained and are advancing on every front—killing innocent civilians from California to Paris to Mali, blowing an airplane out of the sky in Egypt, and inflaming the entire Middle East from Tehran. Imagine if these terrorists get their hands on uranium instead of gunpowder. Radical Islam is at war with America; our only choice is to win or lose, and the longer we debate whether we’re at war, the closer we come to losing it. One cannot help but wonder how many more Americans will die before President Obama recognizes this fundamental truth. He must implement a real strategy to defeat the Islamic State and remove Bashar al-Assad, take the handcuffs off our military in Iraq and Syria, and restore and strengthen vital intelligence programs. We needed to hear from the president tonight how to win this war. But we only heard how we will continue losing it.”

Re Putin, we now know the answer

Mark Steyn and Thomas Wolfe share one thing in common, their unique ability to comment on the culture. Steyn writes in a 2013 Vogue piece,

From Afghanistan to Egypt, a debt-ridden America bankrolls its own eclipse, betraying friends, promoting enemies, despised by both.

If you're Bashar Assad, you must be as befuddled as that Zurich handbag clerk: Hillary hailed you as a "reformer"; no senatorial frequent flyer courted you more assiduously than John Kerry; the guys trying to depose you hate the Great Satan far more than you do, and are the local branch office of the fellows who turned lower Manhattan into a big smoking hole. Yet Washington is readying to take you out — or at any rate, in George W. Bush's unimprovable summation of desultory Clinton-style warmongering, readying to fire a $2 million cruise missile through a tent and hit a camel in the butt. The only novelty with this latest of ineptly rattled sabers is whether Tsar Putin will stand by and let Obama knock off a Russian client.*

*I wrote this piece for National Review. Re Putin, we now know the answer.

Read more here.

What should we do?

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

...Obama, however, is different. He was going to befriend the Islamists by paying homage to the Islamists . . . and then leaving them to their savagery and dysfunction without American interference. This would be fine if (a) the United States had no vital interests at stake, and (b) Obama had not executed this strategy by materially supporting the ascendance of Iran, the jihadist revolutionary state that is America’s mortal enemy.

Obama’s fantasy world, in which Iran is a potential ally and Russia a potentially stabilizing influence, created the opportunity for Putin to move in. He loves to humiliate Obama, so he is having his moment now. It should be remembered, however, that the Soviet Union, though far mightier than the pale imitation that is Putin’s basket-case, was devastated by its failed invasion of Afghanistan. That was a less ambitious project than the one today’s Russia appears to have set upon.

Clearly, there is some real upside for Putin in this. It is an object lesson to the Baltic states that Putin covets: The United States is unwilling to fight so take no comfort in NATO’s empty security guarantee. But for Putin, propping up Assad by making his bed with the snakes in Tehran is no sure thing. If the Kremlin found Afghan jihadists to be a problem, wait until it experiences the pain the more formidable al-Qaeda and ISIS can inflict.

...the backbone of Assad’s opposition has always been Islamist: the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more extreme jihadists with whom they seamlessly make common cause. They are not moderates; they want to overthrow Iran’s despicable cat’s paw, Assad, in order to do to Syria what the Brotherhood tried to do to Egypt — and what Islamists have done to Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

It is not true that Obama failed to back the Syrian “rebels.” In fact, after the mutual Obama-Beltway GOP strategy of siding with Islamists against Qaddafi blew up on us in Libya, a reprise was attempted in Syria. Alas, the “rebels” we backed kept aligning with the jihadists (just as they did in Libya); the weapons we gave them kept ending up in jihadist hands. That was not just because the “rebels” were insufficiently “vetted”; it was because there was no way to overthrow Assad without the Islamists’ playing a major role — and, probably, a leading role.

This contributed to the ascendancy of ISIS, but was not the cause of that ascendancy. The cause is the dominant regional culture — Islamic supremacism. If Washington won’t face up to that fact, then it will of course continue strengthening our enemies in the delusional hope that they will someday become our friends.

Then, to make matters worse, Washington forgot that it had gotten enmeshed in Syria in order to oust Assad. Obama desperately wanted his deal with Iran, which wanted Assad left alone. So the Syria misadventure turned on a dime from targeting Assad on behalf of Sunni Islamists and jihadists to targeting Sunni jihadists — ISIS — to the benefit of Assad. Does anyone wonder why the U.S. has no credibility in the region?

Our interests in the region are to defeat both Russia/Iran/Assad and ISIS/al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood.

...Our vital interest in Syria (and Iraq and elsewhere, for that matter) is to prevent its being used as a platform for the launching of attacks against the United States, our allies, and our interests. Moreover, this, it is crucial to remember, is an American problem.

That means it is going to take a large commitment of American forces on the ground as well as in the air to achieve our vital interests. But there is no political support for that in our country at the moment. That, no doubt, is why a candidate like Marco Rubio, who is smart enough to see the writing on the wall, seems reluctant to come out and say it.

Even if there were political support for using American force, it would be a losing cause to take up unless and until we finally start seeing Iran the way Iran sees us: as the enemy.

There are not good guys and bad guys in this equation. There are bad guys and other bad guys. And quelling the threat these bad guys collectively pose to the United States is our responsibility — not something we should do out of humanitarian concern for Middle Easterners, or because we are somehow obliged to slake their purported thirst for freedom.

Make no mistake, though: This challenge is not going away. The threat to our national security posed by radical Islam — both the Sunni and the Shiite varieties, plus their state sponsors — is intensifying. It will have to be dealt with, hopefully before it deals with us in a catastrophic way.

Read more here.

Having made his pronouncement, the ostrich buries his head back in the sand.

Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review,

This is the Obama doctrine in a nutshell. The president’s favorite rhetorical trope is to justify withdrawing from the world on the grounds that the “international community” will fill the vacuum created by our abdication. But the international community’s troops always stay in their barracks. Meanwhile, bad actors — Russia, China, Iran, et al. — seize the opening. Our president responds with mournful words that doing so is not in the villains’ interests. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s bombing of his own people demonstrate, according to Obama, that they are on “the wrong side of history.”

Having made his pronouncement, the ostrich buries his head back in the sand.

Read more here.

The arsonist plays fireman

In the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer analyzes what Putin and Obama are doing in the Middle East.

Once again, President Obama and his foreign policy team are stumped. Why is Vladimir Putin pouring troops and weaponry into Syria? ...Putin’s objectives in Syria are blindingly obvious:

1. To assert Russia’s influence in the Middle East and make it the dominant outside power. Putin’s highest ambition is to avenge and reverse Russia’s humiliating loss of superpower status a quarter-century ago. Understanding this does not come easily to an American president who for seven years has been assiduously curating America’s decline abroad.

2. To sustain Russia’s major and long-standing Arab ally. Ever since Anwar Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt in 1972, Syria’s Assads have been Russia’s principal asset in the Middle East.

3. To expand the reach of Russia’s own military. It has a naval base at Tartus, its only such outside of Russia. It has an airfield near Latakia, now being expanded with an infusion of battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, howitzers and housing for 1,500 — strongly suggesting ground forces to follow.

4. To push out the Americans. For Putin, geopolitics is a zero-sum game: Russia up, America down. He is demonstrating whom you can rely on in this very tough neighborhood. Obama has given short shrift to the Kurds, shafted U.S. allies with the Iran deal and abandoned the Anbar Sunnis who helped us win the surge. Meanwhile, Putin risks putting Russian boots on the ground to rescue his Syrian allies.

5. To re-legitimize post-Crimea Russia by making it indispensable in Syria. It’s a neat two-cushion shot. At the United Nations next week, Putin will offer Russia as a core member of a new anti-Islamic State coalition. Obama’s Potemkin war — with its phantom local troops (our $500 million training program has yielded five fighters so far) and flaccid air campaign — is flailing badly. What Putin is proposing is that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah spearhead the anti-jihadist fight.

Putin’s offer is clear: Stop fighting Assad, accept Russia as a major player and acquiesce to a Russia-Iran-Hezbollah regional hegemony — and we will lead the drive against the Islamic State from in front.

And there is a bonus. The cleverest part of the Putin gambit is its unstated cure for Europe’s refugee crisis.

Wracked by guilt and fear, the Europeans have no idea what to do. Putin offers a way out: No war, no refugees. Stop the Syrian civil war and not only do they stop flooding into Europe, those already there go back home to Syria.

Putin says, settle the war with my client in place — the Assad regime joined by a few “healthy” opposition forces — and I solve your refugee nightmare.

...You almost have to admire the cynicism. After all, what’s driving the refugees is the war and what’s driving the war is Iran and Russia. They provide the materiel, the funds and now, increasingly, the troops that fuel the fighting. The arsonist plays fireman.

After all, most of the refugees are not fleeing the Islamic State. Its depravity is more ostentatious, but it is mostly visited upon minorities, Christian and Yazidi — and they have already been largely ethnically cleansed from Islamic State territory. The European detention camps are overflowing with Syrians fleeing Assad’s barbarism, especially his attacks on civilians, using artillery, chlorine gas and nail-filled barrel bombs.

Putin to the rescue. As with the chemical weapons debacle, he steps in to save the day. If we acquiesce, Russia becomes an indispensable partner. It begins military and diplomatic coordination with us. (We’ve just agreed to negotiations over Russia’s Syrian buildup.) Its post-Ukraine isolation is lifted and, with Iran, it becomes the regional arbiter.

In the end, the Putin strategy may not work, but it’s deadly serious and not at all obscure. The White House can stop scratching its collective head whenever another Condor transport unloads its tanks and marines at Latakia.

Read more here.

Bombs away!

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The problem with Obama in the Middle East is that he still does not know exactly whom he is hurting and whom he is helping with his bombing — and cannot know under a policy of blowing things up from the air and after a while leaving. He has no intention of cleaning up or sorting out the mess on the ground that such bombing aggravates, and he has no worry that either a popular or a media audit will ensue. Libya has already become ancient history. No one remembers our once strong support for the terrorist-minded Muslim Brotherhood or our schizophrenia about the present junta in Egypt. No one remembers that we once were on the verge of bombing Assad and now are de facto empowering him. No one recalls that Obama currently has some strategic latitude in his decisions because the fracking and horizontal drilling inside America — which he once strongly opposed, and currently mostly forbids in new leases for federal lands — have given the United States some immunity from the usual oil fallout from Middle East wartime chaos.

In sum, the only legitimate critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War is that the lives and treasure lost in the chaotic occupation of 2003–06 were not worth the removal of the monstrous Saddam Hussein and the ensuing establishment of a stable, consensual state in Iraq. And the only legitimate defense of Obama’s subsequent policy in the region is that, while he is bombing all sorts of groups in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, has abdicated leadership in a way that has led to mass killing and destruction in the region, has no plans to help craft postwar consensual governments, and does not quite know who his enemies are or what they are planning, he so far has not lost American lives in the process — at least until the ascendant Islamic State flexes its global muscles.

Read more here.