Thread about Syria

Thread 1

Director of nonstate actors program, Center for Global Policy. NYT Bestselling Author 
Contributing writer, @TheAtlantic @ForeignPolicy @Guardian.

The narratives about @realDonaldTrump's decision to allow Turkey to invade Syria have many serious flaws. A false dichotomy between bad guys & good guys.

Here is the full picture of what is going on. I say this not just as an analyst but also as someone from that area.

mentions The most serious factual error first.

Turkey's operation is very limited geographically, to the areas near the Turkish borders.

The Kurds still have almost the entirety of three Syrian provinces under their control. And I'm convinced this will make the US stay even longer now.

mentions From the get go, the Kurds in Syria played it smart. They managed to protect their areas from being fully destroyed during the Syrian conflict. They defended and protected their areas from ISIS when professional armies trained by the US and others dropped everything and ran away.

mentions They then started to build arguably the best governance model in Syria; yes there were many flaws, but it was work in progress.

The local population generally preferred them over areas controlled by Assad, or the rebels in the north.

mentions Importantly, their ability to garner international support was admired by their own enemies. Their rivals started realizing that fighting jihadists actually pays off. ‘Oops we missed a chance; next time we’ll fight jihadists at every chance.’

mentions Then the US pulled the plug, at the worst time possible, since recovery and stabilization after the collapse of the ISIS caliphate are still in the early stages & since the chance to use the governance model as a political leverage to reach a future settlement in Syria is high.

mentions The Turkish invasion disrupts the process, and opens the door for ISIS to re-emerge, but much more than ISIS.

Even the areas under rebel control might be a price that Turkey will eventually pay for Russia’s support; and igniting the largely/temporarily-abated civil war in Syria.

mentions For example, Turkey did this before but it’s doing it again: fights from eastern Syria are allowed to circulate videos of themselves making sectarian/racist statements & announcing their towns. An attempt at ethnic cleansing is also involving a way to stoke Arab-Kurdish tensions.

mentions On the other hand, Turkey wasn’t the 1st country to intervene to protect a top national security interest. Almost all foreign actors did horrible things; it’s important to not let anti-Trumpism and politics/propaganda by stooges of the Arab Gulf states shape your whole judgments.

mentions For Turkey, building a statelet of any kind to the south of its borders by a group they see as an extension of the PKK insurgency that's been fighting for 4 decades eclipses any other consideration.

That forced it to reverse stance against Assad in 2016 & to align with Russia. 

mentions Many of the former generals & politicians barking at Trump are the cause of this mess. They ignored reality, and repeated warnings, and relied completely on the YPG; they also had years to fix the SDF & make it less of a YPG entity but they were too much in love.

mentions These officials messed up several times in the past, but are still being given platforms by similarly clueless idiots to re-write history. Many of us told them they were planting the seeds of future disasters. It's all documented in writing, predicted play by play.

mentions That should be the starting point of any debate about what to do next.

The rest is just noise, and those have no desire to engage in discussions to push things forward or prevent the worst from happening.

END

Thread 2

Worthy read. I disagree on some of the criticism but otherwise a good summary of how we got to this point with the Kurds/Turks in Syria. Spoiler: @POTUS didn’t start the fire. (1/5) 

Our alliance with Kurds in Syria was never going to end well. @BarackObamamade a mistake bumbling in, leaving President Trump to correct Obama’s mistake. Also true: Turkish forces are making a huge mistake of their own threatening US troops and giving ISIS space to regroup (2/5) 

All of the crocodile tears on the left blaming President Trump for Turkey’s Syrian incursion are so immensely hypocritical. We must, and @POTUS will, hold Turkey to account for its actions, but President Trump knows permanent US occupation is not the answer. (3/5)

What’s clear is the left only cares about civilian deaths if they can invent a way to blame @realDonaldTrump. This year US/Afghan forces killed more civilians than the Taliban, but the left saved their outrage for when the President worked to *negotiate peace* at Camp David (4/5) 

mentions will need strong allies to see this goal through and check the bipartisan lust for forever war. I’m running for Congress to help President Trump end the endless wars and bring our troops home. (5/5)