It seems that the nasty and shameful legacy of Obama lingers yet on the US body politic. It took the Commander of Central Command to tell Turkey that unlike the spineless Obama administration, this one and the U.S. military have no intention of abandoning areas in northern Syria liberated by us and our allies to the non-existent mercies of the Turks. They may be NATO allies but they are no ally of ours.
Gen. Joseph Votel said the United States has no intention of withdrawing coalition forces from the northern Syrian town of Manbij, as Turkish leaders had demanded this weekend. As Turkish forces continued the assault on Afrin, the lead of U.S. Central Command on Monday urged Turkey and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to recognize each other’s legitimate security concerns but focus on the common enemy of ISIS.
Senior U.S. leaders across the government have been in constant talks with Turkish counterparts during the Afrin assault, saying that the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s problems with the Kurdish terrorist group known as PKK, but refusing to give up any territory liberated by the SDF, which include Kurds.
“It’s not our intention right now” to pull back from Manbij, Votel said in Jordan on Monday. He spoke with two reporters traveling with him through the region, including into Raqqa and other parts of northern Syria.I suspect that the Turkish military knows we'll destroy any attack on us with our air power and we won't give the Turks any room to launch the kind of cowardly sneak attack like they used on the Russians when they shot down a Russian Su-27 attacking ISIS. Erdogan might have to learn this at the expense of a number of Turkish military lives.
I think every military man in the West knows that we lost Turkey to islamic fanatics and won't see it reappear as a western democracy in our lifetime. President Trump knows it too and so does everyone who has been following developments in that place.
We'll know the truth when President Trump announces tonight that we are going to disengage from Turkey and shut down our operations in Incirlik air base and elsewhere in Turkey. To be honest, with the fall of Saddam and the destruction of ISIS, there isn't really any reason to continue to operate, such as we do, out of Incirlik and it's not like Turkey was ever an ally of ours. Some of us haven't forgotten that Turkey's response to our call to rally to US after 9/11 was formally met by Turkish refusal to permit us to use their territory in any way, shape, or form to attack or threaten Iraq's western and northern flanks during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
One has to wonder, just where was the Turkish military when ISIS was ruling the north of Syria and wiping out yet more Christians in yet another Turkish sanctioned holocaust of innocent people? All they had to do was cross the border back then and engage the enemy but I suspect we are all coming to understand that this conflict has become flash point for Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in the War of the West Against the Rest. Turkey hurried to line up on the anti-western side.
It's hard to blame them. They had the weak juice of Obama, Hillary, Kerry and the cowards running western Europe to serve as reminders of the danger of aligning one's country and nation with the weak and contemptible side in an existential war of civilization. However, the Turks chose poorly.
2 comments:
What's going on over there with the Turks is deeply concerning. Ataturk must be spinning in his grave.
It's fascinating the way people that close together for millenia can still not abide others who are not like them. An interesting tidbit about the Cold War is how much we and the Russians resembled each other. Our problem was never one of race, ethnicity, background, old animus, etc. Their ideology alone made them, other. Once they shed that, or we perceived that they had, they are remarkably no different from our other European friends. Turks however are not like us and never were. They were our enemies from the very beginning when their satraps were the Barbary Pirate kingdoms. They haven't changed a bit in the last 2000 years.
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