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Originally posted by wtg:
It's strategically brilliant.

I can't wait for the endgame.

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Outlining Turkey's agreement of an immediate 120-hour cease-fire in Syria on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence claimed that President Trump has delivered a great deal for America, the Kurds, and Turkey.

Cease-fire sounds like a good thing, right?

Well, yes, normally. But I'm very skeptical here. Because this deal would appear to simply involve the Kurdish YPG withdrawing from the area of northern Syria that Turkey is presently trying to conquer. In that sense, it looks like American diplomacy has simply replaced Turkish tanks as the means to Turkey's victory. The foundation of the deal would appear to rest on the United States being able to get the YPG to give up. And that raises an important question.

Namely, why, when the Trump administration has just abandoned them, would the YPG now listen to the U.S. and accept American demands that it surrender?

Yes, some YPG commanders will likely accept American inducements to withdraw but others will not. They will rightly suspect that Turkey will not hold to the territorial markers that Pence says it has. Instead, they will suspect that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will engage in a slow-rolling encroachment further into Kurdish-controlled territory. They will certainly respond skeptically to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's assertion that Turkey will credibly investigate allegations of war crimes by its forces.

Regardless, the key here is that the U.S. is now agreeing to use its diplomatic and economic pressure against the Kurds rather than against Turkey. Note that Pence on Thursday, pledged the U.S. will now withdraw planned sanctions against Turkey. That will allow Erdoğan to present this as an American submission to his grand authority.

I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect this deal makes the U.S. look chaotic and weak. Correspondingly, it also makes Russian President Vladimir Putin look strong.

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In an interview on Saturday, former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus told NPR's Michel Martin that he agrees with McConnell's strongly-worded assessment. Petraeus, the former commander of Central Command in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said the policy was unfair to Kurdish fighters who had been key U.S. allies in the fight against ISIS.

"The Kurds always used to say ... that [they] have no friends but the mountains, and I would reassure them," Petraeus said. "I would say, 'Americans are your friends.' ... And sadly, this is arguably a betrayal."

Petraeus told NPR the withdrawal of American forces has turned what was a stable area in Syria, where more than 10,000 Kurdish-led forces had been killed in the fight against ISIS, into "a scramble."

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Originally posted by CHAS:
50 nuclear bombs still in Turkey

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Alexandra Bell, a senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, said the Trump administration did not have confirmed officials in key posts that would normally be tasked with dealing with such nuclear dilemmas.

“The president is sending out angry tweets and I don’t think giving the proper amount of attention and concern to what is a potentially volatile situation,” Bell said.

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Russia agreed on Tuesday to help remove Syrian Kurdish fighters from a large swath of Turkey’s southern border, giving its blessing to a Turkish military operation against a Kurdish-led force that had allied with the United States.

The agreement, reached after an hours-long meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, addressed several of Turkey’s core security demands, including the establishment of a “safe zone” that would push the Kurdish-led force back from its frontier.

And it cemented Russia’s role as Syria’s central power broker, at a moment when the influence of the United States in the region is dissipating.

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A large convoy of U.S. military vehicles left Syria on Monday and crossed the Iraqi border. The convoy was heckled in places by Kurds who accused the United States of betrayal, and hurled rocks and vegetables at the vehicles.

On Tuesday, Iraq’s military said the newly arrived U.S. forces would have to withdraw from the country. “There is no agreement for these forces to stay in Iraq,” a military statement said.

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President Trump was persuaded to leave at least several hundred troops behind in Syria only when he was told that his decision to pull them out would risk control of oil fields in the country’s east, according to U.S. officials.

Trump had rejected arguments that withdrawing U.S. forces would benefit American adversaries, while endangering civilians and Kurdish allies, but tweeted Thursday that “we will NEVER let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields.”

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Friday confirmed that troops would remain in eastern Syria to prevent the oil fields from being retaken by the Islamic State.

Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Esper said that military planners were “considering how we might reposition forces in the areas,” and that the deployment “would include some mechanized forces” such as tanks or other armored vehicles and support personnel.

A U.S. official with knowledge of operations in Syria said that Trump’s interest in the oil provided an opportunity for the Pentagon, unhappy with the initial decision, to temper his insistence on a full withdrawal and allow counterterrorism operations and airspace control to continue.

“This is like feeding a baby its medicine in yogurt or applesauce,” said the official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal U.S. deliberations.

One senior NATO diplomat said Esper offered few details about the new deployment during the NATO meeting.

“He’s trying to elaborate on Trump’s intuitions,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door discussions. “It’s hard.”

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally who had called the withdrawal decision a major blunder, pressed the case for controlling the oil fields during a Thursday lunch with the president.

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Turkey is demanding that U.S. officials call off plans to meet with Mazloum Abdi, the Kurdish commander-in-chief of the Syrian Democratic Forces which fought alongside American troops to dislodge Islamic State insurgents from northeastern Syria.

"Our allies' dialogue with a terrorist wanted with a red notice is unacceptable," Turkish foreign minister Mevut Cavusoglu told Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency Friday.

Turkish officials label Abdi, whose given name is Ferhat Abdi Şahin, a terrorist and link him to a separatist insurgency in Turkey known as the PKK, or Kurdish Workers Party. The U.S. State Department lists the PKK as a foreign terrorist organization.

"He is wanted for multiple terror attacks targeting the Turkish security forces, a NATO army, as well as civilians," Fahrettin Altun, Turkey's Director of Communications, told the Anadolu agency.

President Trump spoke with SDF commander by telephone on Wednesday and afterward praised the Kurdish general's "courage" in a tweet and addressed him directly, writing, "I look forward to seeing you soon."

Abdi, for his part, tweeted on Thursday that Trump had invited him to visit the U.S. "According to the circumstances on the ground," he added, "I will decide what to do in coming days."

A bipartisan group of senators that includes Democrats Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Wednesday urging him to expedite a visa and any applicable waiver should Abdi seek to enter the U.S.

A visit from the SDF commander to the U.S. would likely trigger demands from Ankara that he be extradited to Turkey.

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Trump has argued for years that the U.S. should seize Middle Eastern oil fields to recoup some of the cost of its military operations in the region — an idea that experts say violates international law and would only fuel criticism of American intentions.

"In the old days, you when you had a war, to the victors belong the spoils," Trump told ABC news in 2011.

Emory law professor Laurie Blank says that notion is outdated. "International law seeks to protect against exactly this sort of exploitation," Blank told Reuters.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — who bitterly criticized the president's abrupt decision earlier this month to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria — seized on the oil fields as an argument for a continued American presence in the region.

"By continuing to maintain control of the oil fields in Syria, we will deny Assad and Iran a monetary windfall," Graham said in a statement last week that echoed Trump's own language. "We can also use some of the revenues from future oil sales to pay for our military commitment in Syria."

That position appears to have struck a nerve with Trump.

"I spoke with Lindsey Graham just a little while ago," Trump said Sunday. "Where Lindsey and I totally agree is the oil."

For Graham and others, the oil fields may be a way to appeal to the president's transactional instincts and overcome Trump's aversion to an open-ended deployment in Syria.

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President Trump is renewing his push for U.S. control of Syrian oil. But experts say there's not much oil there, and what there is belongs to the Syrian government.

Still, the idea of controlling the oil fields is one that has long appealed to Trump. And it may provide a rationale for maintaining a U.S. military presence in Syria, reversing the president's promise of a full withdrawal.

"We are leaving soldiers to secure the oil," Trump told reporters on Sunday, while announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "And we may have to fight for the oil. It's OK. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there's massive amounts of oil."

In fact, in the best of times Syria produced only about 380,000 barrels of low-quality oil per day. And production has fallen more than 90% during the country's long civil war. Last year, Syria ranked 75th among countries in the world in oil production, with a daily output comparable to that of the state of Illinois.

"Syrian oil was never important to the world market because production was so small," said energy expert Daniel Yergin of IHS Markit. "But it was very important to the Assad regime before the civil war because it produced 25% of the total government revenues."

Trump on Sunday floated the idea of modernizing Syria's productive capacity with help from a major oil company.

"What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly," he said.