Hey la hey la my Friedman's back

Opinion

Trump Offs Iran’s Most Pathetic  Statesman- Terrorist

Suleimani thought he was an empire builder, but turned out to be a grave digger instead, and it was his own grave, har har.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 3, 2020

“Suck on this,” said Abubakr, passing me a Wadi al Taym nightshade reefer in the cold hills outside Beirut, but I had a deadline to meet, maybe the deadline I'd been waiting a lifetime for, to comment on, to illuminate, to swoon over the process that will lead one day to the renaming of Azadi Square in Tehran as Donald Square, as God is my witness.

West of Eden: The War is Over, You Read It Here First

Baghdad, Saturday, funeral procession for the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in the same bombing as the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images via Axios.

Starting to feel a lot calmer about the prospects of a US-Iran was to be fought on Iraqi soil, or anyplace else, not least thanks to Donald's belligerent tweets on the subject, offering some new light on what he might think of the distinction between "warning" and "threat" but otherwise displaying pure impotence:

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

....targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

Sure, Jan. Who exactly has targeted how many sites over the New Year holiday, and how did they come up with that interestingly symbolic number?

For the Record: Soleimani

Tomb of the great 14th-century poet Hafez in the city of Shiraz, famous until the Islamic Revolution for its wine. Photo by Ondřej Žváček, via Wikipedia.

It may not look as if my plan for Trump not to start a war with Iran is working out so far. I'm not so sure what I want to say about it, but there are a bunch of kind of short-breathed ideas I can pass on.

The first thing I thought of that other people didn't seem to be thinking about was the market movement that followed the killing of Qassem Soleimani:

Bet somebody who knows somebody did a big short today https://t.co/TYFsc53ZAD

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

More plausibly a group. Profits on some of these lurches (usually Trump talking the market up) can mount up toward $2 billion https://t.co/rLdmODxA75

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

So what did they tell their brokers? whoever went long on oil futures made a nice little bundle. https://t.co/IL1h1qHce5

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 4, 2020

And then I was answering questions:

Literary Corner: I Have Seen Numbers

Man Ray, Endgame, 1946, via Washington Post.

So the Emperor had a cabinet meeting yesterday morning, opened with a grace, though it wasn't a meal, from Secretary Carson, and a remarkable rant—somebody clocked it at 13,000 words, including the grace and the press questions—from his imperial loquacity, duly published online by the faithful whitehouse.gov. What you've mainly heard is how he revealed that he doesn't know what an "emoluments clause" is (it's one of article I, section 9, paragraph 8, or article II, section I, clause 7, of the United States Constitution) but suspects it's "phony", but the whole thing was really in top form from the bard-in-chief.

This bit, with its florid repetitions, almost like an abstract arabesque pattern, and its fantastical segue from the poet's TV contemplation of pundits talking about the Middle East to a rhapsodic view of the median household income dissolving into a kind of arithmetical plasma, is extraordinary:

Nobody Has Ever Seen Numbers

by Donald J. Trump

But I sort of have to smile to myself. I was telling
a couple of people — I’m watching these people
that I’ve been watching for 20 years. I’ve been
watching the same faces; they’re just a little bit
older and a little bit grayer. I’ve been watching them
for 20 years, saying about the Middle East. And they’ve
been wrong on everything they’ve ever said. 

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.

West of Eden: Surrender Documents

Jews and Palestinians sharing the street at the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem before World War I, via +972.

This is making it pretty explicit:

The famous Jared Kushner "peace plan", part of which the White House unveiled a sketchy picture of over the weekend, isn't a settlement but a surrender in which Palestinians are being asked to permanently abandon their claims of nationhood in return for something more than $25 billion (but much less than the $50 billion you'll see in the headlines, since almost half of that is devoted to funding projects in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) in bribe money over ten years, ponied up not by Israel or the United States but by the "wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors" who should be represented at the formal rollout in Manama, Bahrain, this week—no Palestinians, who are boycotting the conference, will be there, and no Israelis either; since they have no obligations under the proposal, why should they bother?

Nor will the "regional business leaders" the plan depends on, according to the Washington Post. Why wouldn't they want to invest a billion dollars in Gaza and West Bank tourism? Well, there's not going to be an airport for the West Bank, and the only internal options are buses, shared taxis, or a dicey experience with a rental car:

West of Eden: Listing Terrorists

Brian Hook, a State Department Iran policy adviser,  on NPR to propagandize for Trump's (or Prime Minister Netanyahu's, or Crown Prince Mohammad's, depending who you ask) decision to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, offered a list of terrorist things they're said to have been responsible for, including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 305 people including 241 US military,  the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 including four Israeli employees and 25 Argentines, the 1994 bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Buenos Aires, a local Jewish community center, killing 85, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US Air Force personnel and a Saudi national, and detaining US citizens—

Wait, what? Not that I approve of these cruel and unlawful imprisonments, which include four or five people still jailed at the time of writing, but is it the IRGC that did it, as opposed to other organs of the Iranian government, and is it correctly described as terrorism?

T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (US Code, via Wikipedia)

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” and anyone who questions the King or the government or supports any group, party, organization other than that of the ruling elite inside or outside the Kingdom is a terrorist (Saudi Arabia, same source) 

Also, Trump's best friend Kim Jong-un runs a government that's holding US citizen Kim Dong-chul on bogus charges with a 10-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Putin's Russia has held Paul Whelan since December.

But if you leave it out, it looks like 22 years since the IRGC was involved in any terrorist acts, by the US State Department's count, which makes listing it as a terrorist organization now seem like some peculiar timing. Especially since it's election day in Israel, whose embattled prime minister (under threat of indictment for bribe-taking) jumped in to make sure voters understood it as an example of his pull in Washington, Trump's personal favor to him:

“Thank you, my dear friend, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for having decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization,” he wrote in Hebrew on Twitter on Monday. “Thank you for responding to another of my important requests, which serves the interests of our countries and countries of the region.”

Jameh Mosque, Isfahan, via.

West of Eden: We've Captured Brooks

Tear gas at the Gaza border. Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images via Toronto Globe & Mail.

I'm in the unexpected position of being grateful for a David Brooks column, enough to want to not criticize it (very hard), on this week's Gaza demonstrations ("The Gaza Violence: How Extremism Corrupts"):

I see the situation through the “extremism corrupts everybody” narrative. My narrative starts with the idea that the creation of the state of Israel was a historic achievement involving a historic wrong — the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians.

For two generations, in what we can call the Yitzhak Rabin era, the leaders of Israel and of Palestinians tried, sometimes dysfunctionally and bloodily, to address this wrong and find two homelands around the pre-1967 borders.

But sometime in the 1990s, a mental shift occurred. Extremism grew on the Israeli side, exemplified by the ultranationalist who murdered Rabin, but it exploded on the Palestinian side. Palestinian extremism took on many of the shapes recognizable in extremism everywhere.

That's a very remarkable concession in the top paragraph, from someone of his position, and a place where a little bothsiderism is welcome for a change. His critique of the current Israeli government, sort of projected, not wrongly, from his critique of Trumpian conservatism—

By and large, Israel has taken the former path. The shift from the politics of Rabin and Shimon Peres to that of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is a move from pluralism to ethnocentrism, from relentless engagement to segregation. It’s a shift from tough realism to the magical thinking that Palestinians are somehow going to go away.

—is well founded, and more accurate (when he's talking about US Republicans, he's evading his own and his friends' responsibility for the disaster, and when he's talking about Likud he's not).

I disagree, obviously, with the specific bothsides balance Brooks finds here—I think failing to recognize the gigantic aymmetry of financial and military power between the sides spoils the analysis, and I think he's specifically wrong about what happened to Palestinians after the 1994 Oslo accord and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, which was not a march to extremism but a confused variety of reactions of despair, including the shockingly un-Palestinian growth of gloomy religiosity. They were in despair at what we might now realize was an increasing rejection on the Israeli side of the peace process altogether—the growth of Israeli extremism was exemplified not by one assassination but by the slow death of the Labor Party and the successive governments of Netanyahu, Sharon, and Netanyahu abandoning the promise of Oslo and instituting what amounts to an apartheid system, with the difference that South African whites provided jobs to black Africans, and Israeli Jews prefer importing Filipinos.

The way Brooks makes the contrast—

Yasir Arafat was once a terrorist, but at least he used terror to win practical concessions. The actions today — the knife attacks, the manipulation of protesters to rush the border fence — are of little military or strategic value. They are ventures in suicidal theater.

—is wry, but slips over the chronology in an unhelpful way: the "suicidal theater" of the Gaza border rush is an echo of the First Intifada of 1987-91, which is as close as Palestinians ever came to a Ghandian practice of nonviolent resistance, and also the most politically effective strategy they ever employed [update: and as Ten Bears notes in the comments, "manipulation" is bullshit]. What happened on Tuesday, horrible as it was because of the hysterical IDF response, was a look back to that effectiveness—it's even shaken Brooks!

West of Eden: Clueless on Gaza

What Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to refer to as Israel's "eternal, undivided capital", with a stretch of the separation wall that divides it in the foreground (photo by Haaretz/Olivier Fitoussi). It's not eternal either, obviously. It was the administrative-religious center of an Israelite polity for much though nowhere near all of the time from the 9th century BCE to the 1st century CE, most often under the patronage of Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Seleucid, and eventually Roman overlords, but frequently totally destroyed and its inhabitants banished; when Romans or Christians were in charge Jews were not allowed to live there at all, so it was better for the few remaining local Jews, after Muslims were invented in the 7th century, to have them in charge, but the only Jewish state that existed anywhere between the last total destruction in 70 CE and the founding of Israel in 1948 was the kingdom of the Khazars extending from what's now Ukraine south and east to the Caucasus, who whimsically decided to become Jews by religion in the 8th or 9th century and lingered as a power until near the end of the 10th. Let's also remember that these were the days memorialized in the oldest parts of the Arthur cycle and the Nibelungenlied of the great Völkerwanderungen when the Franks pushed the Gauls our of France and the Goths took Iberia and most of Italy and the Saxons and others got Britain and the Finns and Ugrians and Turks pushed into their modern territory and the Mongols seized China for a couple of centuries and Arabs took control of practically the whole Mediterranean and nobody ended up with the homeland they were expecting, just saying.

Praying for Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

Praying for the perhaps many Israelis and Palestinians likely to suffer as this dangerous embassy move blows up.

Furious w/both Israeli and American governments for choosing, once again, power over peace, human dignity, human rights.

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) May 14, 2018

She's a rabbi, so she has to be kind, but she's allowed to be angry. IDF soldiers have killed at least 58 Gazan demonstrators—reports keep saying they "died", as if the bullets were just hanging there to be wandered into—and shot more than 1,300, attempting to hit them in the legs so that they're merely disabled, putting the Gaza hospital system into terrible crisis, because they're just not equipped to handle that many shooting victims at once. In Washington, deputy press secretary Raj Shah suggests they're dying on purpose, just to make the Israelis look bad:

West of Eden: Deal Away

Chahar Bagh School, or School of Sultan Hossein's Mother, Isfahan, 19th-century drawing by Pascal Coste, via Wikipedia.

Money quote, for my money, from the press questions after Trump's announcement:

REPORTER: Mr. President, how does this make America safer? How does this make America safer?

TRUMP: Thank you very much. This will make America much safer. Thank you very much.

Oh, that's how. In a much kind of way. Not somewhat or a bit. It's the muchness, stupid.

I didn't listen to the speech, but the way folks were describing his delivery (somebody on Twitter said he was "reading it phonetically") made it sound clear that he'd spent even less time reading it ahead of time than he normally does, which means around zero, and had no idea what it said. Though you can see a dim understanding floating by in a couple of Trumpy interpolations, like

In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime — and it’s a regime of great terror — many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash — a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.

the reference to $1.7 billion as "many billions" and "actual cash" as if there were something particular sinister about that (cash was important to them as it would take some time for international banks to lift the sanctions), or his cute attempt to put himself in Ayatollah Khamenei's place—

West of Eden: Mission Accomplished

Mission Accomplished banner, Arrested Development, via Arrested Development Wiki.

Screenshot just in case somebody tells Trump what he just did and the thing gets deleted. 

George W, in an undisclosed location, chuckles, remembering he's not the worst president in US history any more.

Meanwhile, special thanks from most of the world to Defense Secretary James Mattis and, I think, President Emmanuel Macron for satisfying our emperor's need to display his manly firmness and compassion at so little cost, taking no lives (apparently no casualties at all among Syrian troops or civilians, though hardly anybody seems to be asking, thanks BBC), and not making the Syrian situation markedly worse than it was before. Maybe even making it a little better, if it's true that facilities for making chemical weapons have really been damaged or destroyed.

I really do think there's something brilliant about Macron and the ability he's shown to mediate the behavior of the two emperors, Putin and Trump, with whom he's cultivated something like friendship, and I'm sure he deserves some credit for talking Trump down from demanding more war.

It was a scary moment last night when Trump (or the text written for him) suggested this might be the start of something big—

Semantics: Update

Damage done to the HSV Swift, leased by United Arab Emirates, in a missile attack that the Houthi rebels admitted to the week before. Via USNI News.

There was another much more important Yemen event last week that the Times hardly seems to have covered, let alone NPR, that should have figured into the way I wrote the previous post: after the horrifying attack of October 8 when the Saudis bombed a Yemeni funeral party, killing 140 people and wounding several hundreds more, the US announced that it was going to do a big review of the policy of giving assistance to KSA.

I was aware of this for about five minutes—

US will review its policy on Saudi Arabia war against Yemeni people https://t.co/H8nF1GHQES via @sharethis late, but better than never

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2016

—but forgot it as the Trump continues to occupy larger and larger swaths of our overtaxed brains.

Juan Cole seems to have bypassed it too, but it turns out that the review is ongoing, and serious, at least according to anonymous officials quoted in Missy Ryan's story in the Washington Post:

Semantics, how does it work?

Update: I'm as annoyed with NPR as ever on this, but the US position looks a lot better to me in the light of some neglected Yemen news.

The port of Aden, 1876, via Qatar National Library.

Bizarre exchange on NPR Thursday morning in reference to the Navy attack on missile installations held by "rebels" in Yemen that (very ineptly) attacked a US ship:

TOM BOWMAN: Well, there's a civil war going on in Yemen right now. The Houthi rebels are aligned with the former president of the country, fighting the current president. And the U.S. is providing support to Saudi Arabia, who's fighting to keep the current president in power. The U.S. is providing air refueling capability, intelligence capability as well. And they've refueled as many as 5,000 bombing flights over Yemen.

And a concern here, Renee, is that there have been a lot of civilians killed here in this effort to support the Saudis, as many as 4,000 civilians killed. And there was one incident last week where 140 civilians were killed at a funeral. So this is the first time the U.S. has actually been involved militarily here.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Right. I mean, that's a key here, that the U.S. is actively supporting these Saudi airstrikes. It's not a passive sort of support. And this funeral has really kicked up a big controversy there, a lot of resistance. What is that doing to - what kind of problem is that for the U.S.?

Where Bowman says the US has never previously been militarily involved, and Montagne agrees that, yes, we have been very seriously involved. And then Bowman comes back to say that in fact with this strike we are also not involved, disagreeing not so much with Montagne as, weirdly, with himself:

West of Eden: Is Clinton pulling back?

Entrance to the Cheik et Bakr quarter, Aleppo. Postcard, ca. 1910, via Levantine Heritage.

A somewhat weird story in Britain's Independent aims to bring us up to date on Clinton's Syria policy, with the suggestion that it's almost entirely up in the air:

Hillary Clinton plans to order a full review of the United States’ strategy in Syria as one of her first priorities if elected President.

One of her foreign policy advisers, Jeremy Bash, said she would seek to end Bashar al-Assad’s “murderous” regime despite waning political will to oust the autocratic Syrian President.

He said dealing with Syria would be Ms Clinton’s “first key task” if elected and she would work to get President Assad “out of there”.

While she holds to the theoretical aim of getting rid of Assad, that is, or rather "working" to get rid of him, she seems to have dropped the specifics, such as they were (efforts to pursue the Obama policy a little more energetically, plus that "limited no-fly zone" for the protection of civilians), or put them off pending some large-scale rethink to start after the election. And at the same time the international situation becomes less and less favorable to the project as the "political will" diminishes among the possible coalition partners like Britain and Germany.

And then there is the ongoing Aleppo campaign, in which the US and Russia are finally collaborating to hit the Qa'eda-linked Nusra Front troops holding the eastern part of the city under brutal Salafi rule, and possibly to help the hundreds of thousands of civilians stuck in the sieges there and in Manbij to escape. This plays toward Obama's preferred scenario, in which Syrian constituencies other than the ISIS and Qa'eda groups come together to negotiate a new government under the patronage of the US and Russia, and Assad's fate is a secondary issue.

Syria seems to be kind of disappearing from the campaign; Clinton didn't mention it during her acceptance speech in Philadelphia, and the Democratic platform (whether under the influence of Sanders or the president) leaves her old position out:

West of Eden: Lede, exhumed

The Fallujah caravanserai, ca. 1914. Via Wikipedia.

Maybe I just wasn't reading carefully enough, but when the Iraqi government forces were reconquering the Anbar city of Fallujah from Da'esh, culminating over the weekend, I never saw the news that interested me most until I got to Professor Cole's wrapup of the operation: namely, who those government forces were, and whether they included any Sunni soldiers, which it turns out they did, in the form of tribal levies from the

clans of the Dulaym in al-Anbar Province who opposed Daesh just as many of them had opposed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the predecessor of Daesh that was organized to fight the US military occupation of the country. Tribes are kinship units in rural Iraq, and while they are religiously conservative they typically are not fundamentalists, and they dislike Daesh for condemning their Muslim traditionalism in favor of a hyper-fundamentalism.

They also included Shi'ite militias including some, such as the Badr Corps, that are directly backed by Iran, and Cole seems to think that the actual Iraqi regular army, a mess, was probably the least useful element. There are allegations of bad behavior among the militias, that they have been razing buildings in the city to punish the Sunni residents. But the fact that the Sunni tribal levies participated and played an important part is a really good sign that Prime Minister al-Abadi may finally be beginning to work effectively towards integration, and that Obama's policy of handing out US assistance in a way that encourages it is finally starting to pay off. Cole is dubious, but not hopeless:

West of Eden: Dissent in the State Department

12th-century Ayyubid Syrian baluster pottery jars in the Raqqa style, via Christies.

I more or less support President Obama's Syria policy as it is (with a reservation I'll get to below), but there's something I want to say about its critics, including the 50-odd US diplomats who have been circulating the internal cable that was leaked to the WSJ and the Times for today's papers,

urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war.

I want to say that I may disagree with them, they're not bad people. I mean, some of the critics are bad people (hi, Senator McCain, hi, Ron Fournier), whose aims are not to help the suffering people of Syria, about whom they understand nothing, but to further their own misbegotten careers by picking at the president's perceived weakness in any way they can, to make themselves look larger, but some of them, possibly most, are good people responding to a terrible situation in a totally understandable way. (Including candidate Hillary Clinton, who I think is at least somewhat on the State rebels' side.)

West of Eden: Green Zone update

Sadrists invading the legislature. Photo via Al-Jazeera.

Faithful readers had a chance to learn about this weekend's startling news from Baghdad a month before it happened (as blogfriend MBouffant showed up to notice in comments there), or sort of, when I reported the beginnings of a mass joint Sunni-Shi'a protest movement threatening to break into the Iraqi capital's high-security Green Zone, where foreign VIPs and local politicians are normally able to cut their deals without fear of getting blown up or kidnaped. Or contemplating the faces of thousands of victims of their corruption and irresponsibility.

And now they're in the Green Zone, after I'd more or less thought the whole thing must have fizzled out already, and they're attracting the attention of the New York Times. They've busted in in the hundreds and perhaps thousands, mostly nonviolently and perhaps with the collusion of sympathetic security forces, and rioted inside the Parliament itself, breaking some furniture. So you can say you heard about it here first, if you did.

I seem to be virtually alone in regarding this as a positive development. Atrios and BooMan are sadly rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, and with good reason, over this new evidence of the endless chaos caused by George W. Bush and his companions. I agree it's that, but I think it's something more, as I've been trying to say...

West of Eden: Green Zone

Tent in the background. Photo by Karim Kadim/AP via Salt Lake Tribune.

Meanwhile, as Tom Friedman was moping in Sulaimaniya waiting for the lithium to kick in, something was, believe it or not, happening in Baghdad, though generally unreported as far as Dr. Google noticed by my usual sources at the New York Times and the Guardian and NPR (I heard about it on BBC), getting going in a big way last Friday, when

Thousands of supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held what they billed as a “joint” Sunni-Shi'ite prayer service Friday outside the main entrances to the government-controlled “Green Zone.”  Sadr has given Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi a Saturday deadline to carry out governmental “reform” and install a new Cabinet composed of technocrats instead of political loyalists. (Voice of America)

Yes, it's the Orson Welles–resembling "renegade cleric", in the Homeric (Simpson?) epithet beloved of the US press of ten or twelve years ago, and the mass Sunni-Shi'a cooperation without which there will be no change for the better in Iraq (as I've been saying for a while now), in a huge effort to force the Abadi government to purge itself. When Abadi failed to meet his deadline on Saturday, Muqtada made his way into the Green Zone, with the assistance of the security forces, to begin a sit-in, ensconced in a tent:

West of Eden: Twilight at the end of the tunnel?

Putin Said to Order Start of Withdrawal From Syria https://t.co/nhB1IaUNIZ Thanks Obama, Kerry, and De Mistura

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 14, 2016

That was my first reaction, really excited. On the eve of the serious talks on Syria in Geneva starting today, enabled by the UN cessation of hostilities three weeks ago, Vladimir Vladimirovich has found the moment for a face-saving exit before the "quagmire" begins. Or, as the experts were saying at BBC this morning, the territorial division has got to some kind of point where the situation can be stabilized into some kind of confederal arrangement. They're not moving out all their stuff, but operations have ceased, and pilots are showing up in Russia.

Either way, I believe this move and the talks are connected, and it's really possible that some part of the war is starting to come to an end.

Professor Cole notes that Hezbollah troops are withdrawing too, heading home to Beirut.

Tombs of the Caliphs, Baghdad, 19th century. Via Eon Images.

In a phone call with Putin,

President Obama welcomed the much-needed reduction in violence since the beginning of the cessation, but stressed that continuing offensive actions by Syrian regime forces risk undermining both the Cessation of Hostilities and the UN-led political process.  The President also noted some progress on humanitarian assistance efforts in Syria but emphasized the need for regime forces to allow unimpeded access for humanitarian assistance delivery to the agreed-upon locations, notably Daraya.  The President underscored that a political transition is required to end the violence in Syria.

West of Eden: The Washington Playbook

Recess at an Aleppo elementary school, 19th century. Halep'de Bir Sıbyan Mektebi, Oyun Saati, Ottoman Archives.

Early on in the big Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic on the "Obama doctrine" (as I said, it's got a lot more than David Brooks thinks it does):

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

Mr. President, thanks!

I also loved learning that the phrase "stupid shit caucus", which I thought I invented in October 2014, was actually common currency in the White House around the same time, after the newly departed ex–Secretary of State Clinton gave Goldberg that interview in the August 2014 Atlantic complaining about Obama's failure to build up a "credible fighting force" out of the students and professionals who had led the peaceful protests against Assad in the beginning of the Arab Spring: