Tales of the Resistance

There's this telling moment in the Ross Douthat interview of Senator J.D. Vance ("What J.D. Vance Believes"), where Vance is asked when he decided he "liked" Donald Trump, and he cites his first personal meeting with Trump, in 2021, and Trump telling him the story of how the generals tried to fool him into thinking they were obeying his orders to draw down US troops in northern Syria, in 2018-19, by shuffling them around instead:

The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.” And I was like, OK, this guy’s deeper than I’d given him credit for. And also I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop redeployment.

Actually, it was probably not a general but a civilian, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in the first place and then Mark Esper. It was a matter of maybe 200 troops out of a total of 2500 US troops in the region, with an extremely specific function: protecting our Kurdish allies (guarding the detained remnants of the Islamic State so it couldn't reestablish itself in the region) from our Turkish allies, who didn't care about the Islamic State, but were eager to get all the Kurds, who President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan regarded as anti-Turkish terrorists, away from the Turkish border; he'd been calling Trump all year, demanding the removal of the US troops so he could conquer all the Kurd-held territory without crossing any Americans, and Trump obediently tried to make it happen, but then the troops didn't actually go away.

Why was Trump so determined to obey Erdoğan's orders and throw the Kurds under the Turkish bus, against the urgent advice of every single member of the national security and foreign policy staff? Perhaps because he so valued his "very good relationships" with authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS, and Erdoğan too? He'd rather have the secretary of defense get mad at him than the president of Turkey. He could fire the secretary of defense (and eventually did, of course, over Esper's refusal to contemplate putting down American protestors with American troops).

But then there's another aspect to Trump-Turkish relations, the "conflict of interest" he mentioned to Stephen Bannon in a 2015 interview:

Turkey Trot

 

Illustration via Quartz, April 2017.

I'll get to Trump in a minute, but first: imagine you're Vice President Joe Biden, August 2016, on an official visit to Turkey five or so weeks after the coup attempt in Turkey that July, and President Erdoğan gets you under a tree at some point and starts complaining about this state-owned bank, Halkbank, that the New York Southern District is investigating for evading US law by smuggling billions of dollars' worth of gold and other commodities into the sanctioned Islamic Republican of Iran—they've already indicted a guy, Reza Zarrab, and Erdoğan claims the whole thing is a hoax invented by his enemy the cult leader in Pennsylvania, and can Biden please get Obama to make it go away by firing the US attorney in the case, Preet Bharara, and the judge, and extradite the cult leader because he's the one who did the coup as well?

(It's also widely believed in a variety of places that the cleric in question, Fethullah Gulén, had in fact nothing to do with the coup, which Erdoğan has been using in the four years since as a kind of personal Reichstag Fire enabling him to move against all sorts of perceived enemies, depriving them of their livelihoods and public voices and jailing tens of thousands, and Erdoğan's regime has been credibly accused of a practice not at all distant from Vladimir Putin's or Donald Trump's of "post-truth politics".)

We know how Joe responded to the last bit, thanks to this big Times report by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, and also because the answer is publicly available: with a courteous, but firm no: Sorry man, but no can do:

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.

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

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.