Literary Corner: Today Donald Trump Didn't Become President

Image by Adam/Know Your Meme.

I'm seeing a lot of skepticism on today's big story of the operation to kill the former Caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,  that it was a wag-the-dog operation to distract the public from the horrible testimony of the last couple of weeks demonstrating that Trump really did attempt to extort cooperation with his personal political agenda from the Ukrainian government. Or even that it killed not Baghdadi but some innocent set extra, or was entirely staged.

But I still like the view I held immediately after hearing the news this morning, that not only did it really happen, but Trump himself was the one getting bamboozled: by the Kurdish-led Syria Democratic Forces and the US military, who kept him more or less in the dark until he got back from the golf course, when they informed him that he had just won the formerly endless war. They were in the right:

Armed with that initial tip, the C.I.A. worked closely with Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officials in Iraq and Syria to identify more precisely Mr. al-Baghdadi’s whereabouts and to put spies in place to monitor his periodic movements. American officials said the Kurds continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi’s location even after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the American troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone.

The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.

That is, I think the Kurds and US may have been working together to defeat Trump's ill-timed move to remove American troops from Syria and allow Turkish troops to begin seizing a huge strip of Syrian land along their border. Using Trump's well-known desire to "take the oil" wherever there's a war in the Middle East, they've talked him into reversing the decision (rather late, as Turkish forces are already there) and maintaining an American force in the region, starting with the move of Senator Lindsey Graham and General Jack Keane, on 14 October, to accomplish something he believes Bush and Obama failed to accomplish:

Literary Corner: Recep, Don't Be a Tough Guy

President Trump being castigated by the Speaker of the House, enlarged from the picture in his Twitter feed.

Letter to his Excellency the President of Turkey

by Donald J. Trump

I

Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out
a good deal!

II 

You don't want to be responsible
for slaughtering thousands of people,
and I don't want to be responsible
for destroying the Turkish economy —
and I will.

He sure as hell misjudged Lindsey-Woolsey

Funeral Monday for five Syrian Democratic Forces fighters killed in battles against Turkish-led forces. Photo by Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, via The New York Times.

When I was trolling the trolls yesterday with my apocalyptic prediction

It's too late. It's going to take a lot more than that to stop a raging war and house 130,000 refugees (so far). What will happen presumably is Kurds make an accommodation with Assad regime-Iran-Russia now they know US cannot be trusted, Turkey will ally with Qaeda-ISIS.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 13, 2019

I wasn't expected it to be fulfilled before nightfall (I mean nightfall in New York, not Syria), but that's what happened, more or less.

For the Record: Some Troll

Syrian Arab and Kurdish civilians reaching safety in Hakassah. Photo by Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images via The Guardian.

This sequence covers mainly two bases: the fecklessness of Trump's failure in northern Syria and some of the details of his financial peculations. Some of it's new, or at least new sources, so I'm posting it here:

Will Trump implement them or stonewall as he has with Russia sanctions?

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 13, 2019

Nobody is asking for war with Turkey. Don't be stupid. But it's also too late to restore the stable situation of before Trump's idiot mistake, if it was a mistake. Trump's money interests in Turkey, Saudi Arabia etc. are the problem. He's afraid of Erdogan harming his business.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 13, 2019

A Yarn Ball as Big as China

Junior, unnamed friend, Parnas, and Fruman at some Trump property in May 2018, Facebook screenshot via Financial Times.

So I was having the craziest dream, all bound up, naturally, with the impeachment inquiries, and the House Intelligence Committee attempt to get witnesses and Trump and Barr trying to make then all refuse, and there were these two respectively Ukrainian- and Belarus-born Florida business guys, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who had worked in some capacity for the president's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, in the Ukraine matter, refusing to testify or provide documents, only they did it by mail, in the form of a letter from their lawyer, John Dowd, who used to be Trump's personal lawyer, only the letter was in Comic Sans

Springtime for Erdoğan

Kurdish fighters on the Syria-Iraq border, September 2013. Photo by James Gordon/Flickr via Foreign Policy in Focus.

So I was at least partly wrong and Operation Peace Spring (Barış Pınarı Harekatı; the "spring", pınar, is a spring of water, it's not that they don't realize it's October) has begun, against what the announcement refers to as "the PKK/YPG and Daesh terror organizations" (slipping in the false assertion that PKK, the militant Kurdish group in Turkey, and YPG, the Syrian Kurdish army that has been fighting the Da'esh in Syria for years with US support, are the same thing) and aiming, says BBC, to establish a "safe zone" on the Turkish-Syrian border and eventually repatriate about two million of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees now living in camps in Turkey.

Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA should never have been in Middle East. Moved our 50 soldiers out. Turkey MUST take over captured ISIS fighters that Europe refused to have returned. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending! https://t.co/Fbcem9i55Z

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 9, 2019

The old "ancient hatreds" argument used, as it so often is, to evade the responsibility the US bears for the fighting of recent years launched by the senseless invasion of Iraq, not to mention the other powers allied with Trump (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia) and not (Iran).

Trump seems to have the idea that all the Da'esh soldiers in Kurdish custody in the area are recruits from Europe, but in fact it's about 2,000 out of 10,000, according to BBC, and not, as he believes, mostly from Belgium, Britain, and France, but Chechens from Russia. He's become obsessed with them in recent months, apparently feeling that they are costing the US a lot of money, which is nonsensical, as Brett McGurk has explained, and sometimes suggests he's just going to bus them all from northern Syria to Belgium and let them out:

Great and Unmatched Wisdom

Democratic Underground, using art by Sal Buscema & Mike Esposito from Captain America #227 (1978).

Funny bit of a buried lede in NPR's story on Trump and Erdoğan and the Syrian Kurds this morning, the angle of which was Pentagon sources telling Tom Bowman how entirely blindsided the Defense Department was by the development: they said that the Trump-Erdoğan call on Sunday had been what White House staff refers to as a "bad call", which I immediately took to mean the kind of call where Trump loses his temper, screams, and makes a rash decision in the hope of punishing everybody (as right at the beginning of the presidency, when he had those crazy interactions with Malcolm Turner of Australia and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico).

It startled me because I'd been imagining something quite different—like so many of us I've got Leader calls and quids pro quo on the brain at the moment, and just assumed Trump was greenlighting a Turkish attack on the Syrian Kurds in return for something from Turkey, or somebody else who had something he wanted, like "dirt" on an opponent or maybe just cash, and spent much of the day speculating on what it might be. When I should have been reading down to the bottom of the stories we already had, like this in The Times from Peter Baker and Lara Jakes:

In this case, Mr. Trump seemed to be responding instinctively to an unexpected comment by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey near the end of a telephone call on Sunday that otherwise focused on trade and defense assistance. Mr. Erdogan, who has long threatened to send troops over the border against Kurdish fighters allied with the United States, told Mr. Trump that he was finally moving forward.

Christmas Turkey

Trump Towers Istanbul, via Hürriyet Daily News.

What provoked Trump to decide to pull the 2,200 US troops out of Syria by tweet wasn't a Fox story or a hallucination, or anything to do with Vladimir Putin either, contrary to what you may be hearing over the Internet, but apparently a phone call last Friday from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as Karen DeYoung reports at the Washington Post:

Officials familiar with the Friday call said that Erdogan, among other things, had stressed to Trump that the Syrian Kurds were terrorists — allied with Kurdish separatists in his own country — and asked why the United States was supporting them rather than its NATO ally. He noted that the Islamic State had been vanquished and questioned the need for an ongoing U.S. troop presence, saying that Turkish troops already massed on the Syrian border could handle any problem there.

The Erdogan call, many concluded as they tried to understand the reasoning behind a decision widely considered rash and unwise, was the only thing that could have provoked Trump. A senior congressional aide speculated that the call, and the withdrawal, were “definitely related.”

Erdoğan's call must have been a response to something else that happened on Friday, which I found out about in an article by Michael Jansen/Irish Times: the Pentagon issuing a warning to Turkey over Erdoğan's planned expedition to Syrian Kurdistan:

Dancing in the hurricane

Image via.

That's Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Archmustache of Cloudberry, taking a new provisional book title out for a test drive, perhaps.

He was in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, guest-of-honoring the annual Sulaimani Forum at the American University of Iraq (he doesn't mention it, but it's not hidden, and Dr. Google and I got there in under a minute), and offering them some Friedmaniacal gnomic advice:

he pointed out how the world is changing ever faster, mainly as a result of the dominance of The Internet in all aspects of life, comparing this rapid change to a hurricane. “You can dance in a hurricane when you stand in the eye,” he told his audience, “but then you need an anchor of good governance and good communities” -- then wishing his “good friend Barham Salih [MP and former prime minister in the Kurdistan regional government, founder of the American University of Iraq in 2006] good luck in building an eye to the hurricane.” (via rudaw.net)

I think part of the problem is that if the hurricane is Internet-driven socioeconomic change, then the eye is either where you can't get online or change isn't occurring or both, so if you focus on dancing in it, you're going to be missing a lot. Also, you need to be aware that the eye of a hurricane is moving, and if you just stand there dancing, you'll be back in the wind in a couple of hours.