generalspeaking

Well, Then -- Which Is It To Be?

"It is a truth that isn't often spoken in this part of the world, but I'm a military man by training, so I'll put it bluntly: America is a force for good in the Middle East. Period."
"What did we learn from all this [Obama's era of misjudgments]? When America retreats, chaos follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds."
"When we partner with enemies, they advance."
"Remember, it was here in this very city, another American stood before you. He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from ideology. He told you 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed 'a new beginning'."
"The results of these misjudgments have been dire."
"In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid about asserting ourselves when the times -- and our partners -- demanded it."
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

EPA

"Whenever/wherever U.S. interferes, chaos, repression and resentment follows."
"The day Iran mimics U.S. clients & @SecPompeo's 'human rights models' -- be it the Shah or current butchers -- to become a 'normal' country is the day hell freezes over."
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iranian foreign minister

"That this administration feels the need, nearly a decade later, to take potshots at an effort to identify common ground between the Arab world and the West speaks not only to the Trump administration's pettiness but also to its lack of a strategic vision for America's role in the region and its abdication of America's values."
National Security Action group [former government officials]

"Listening to Secretary Pompeo's speech is like listening to someone from a parallel universe. [That speech is] a self-congratulatory, delusional depiction of the Trump administration's Middle East policy."
Rob Malley, Obama era national security council director for the Middle East

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, center, speaks to the press during a tour of the newly inaugurated Al-Fattah Al-Alim mosque in Egypt’s new administrative capital, east of Cairo, on Jan. 10, 2019. Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, Pool/AFP/Getty Images

Speaking to invited guests at the American University in Cairo, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to a vision outlined in a speech given in Cairo in 2009 by then-President Barack Obama where he referred to "a new beginning" for American relations with Arab and Muslim countries. It was the intention of President Obama to reset relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a first order of business for the new president, who proffered the hand of friendship and got it smacked back.

In the third leg of a nine-nation mission to the Middle East whose purpose is clearly to reassure his country's Arab partners of the Trump administration's intention to remain a force for positive direction in the region, belying the impression left by President Trump's summary statement of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, no opportunity is being wasted by Mr. Pompeo in attempting to reverse that impression, as tricky a scenario as that is. Particularly since the 2,000 U.S. military personnel withdrawal has been initiated despite the promise of a second-thought holdback.

Israel has already received the good news that though Donald Trump asserted that Israel can look after itself, even though the Golan Heights is slowly being stationed with Hezbollah militias under direction of Iran and the American-allied Kurdish fighters who have been solely responsible for defeating Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in large part are now to be left unaided to face the invasion of Turkish military and Turkish-supplied Syrian forces vowing to rout the YPG and unleash a bloodbath, it all represents an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Apparently, though U.S. troop withdrawal is proceeding, gracious thoughts go with the Kurds that they need not be concerned, since Erdogan has been warned not to proceed with his plan to slaughter them. That the Turkish ruler-for-life has decreed the Kurds must suffer a final and complete bloodbath and no other country has the authority to impose restrictions on his intentions must be, according to Mr. Pompeo, yet another illusion; blink and it's gone.

Yet Mr. Pompeo, who certainly means well and has the best interests at heart of those he seeks to reassure, speaks of a policy of containing Iran's power, vowing to "expel every last Iranian boot" from Syria, it's hard to figure how that can be approached, since words alone will accomplish nothing whatever and the boots on the ground that can accomplish much are disappearing. How to reconcile the compulsive irruptions of President Trump with the reassurances of his senior security and military advisers is somewhat of a puzzle to observers, and a crisis for those intimately involved.

John Bolton, another reliable stalwart and proud American, anxious to support his country's allies dependent on the direction and strength of the U.S., as national security adviser promised his country's forces would never leave Syria until Iran has left. Syria's neighbours are realists, and the Kurds have experienced too much conflict and desperate conditions not to recognize when they are once again left in the lurch to fend for themselves.

When Obama's administration refused the kind of support required by the green protesters in Iran and their mass uprising failed, that represented the 'new beginning' of U.S. relations with the Middle East. When Hosni Mubarak was removed from power in Egypt, Obama shrugged, and looked kindly at his Muslim Brotherhood replacement, Mohammad Morsi, taking counsel from the high-level Muslim Brotherhood representatives established in Washington with regular open access to the Oval Office. Another symbol of America's 'new beginning' in the region.

Clearly, although good and decent and knowledgeable and honourable and experienced men have been placed on President Trump's national security team, they struggle with the impossibility of actually advising a man who appears to accept expert advice from no one, in the conviction that no one knows more about anything than he does, and his volatile irruptions of determined opinion have their source in intuitive genius while allies shudder.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is greeted by Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa at Manama International Airport on January 11, 2019. via Reuters

Labels: Iran, Israel, Kurds, Middle East, Syria, Turky, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 12, 2019