After Mosul, Will it be Erdogan or The Kurds?

This past week President Tayyip Erdogan had a meeting with President Trump. As observed before when he met with President Obama, once again his goons took to beating up and violently attacking protestors.  But this is not important for the time being, what is pertains to the Trump administration plans for after the Mosul offensive and even ridding Syria of IS.  This is valid for my main botheration with Obama was his failure to plan for what was to occur after the implementation of any of his foreign policy escapades from Yemen to Syria to the South Sudan and especially in Libya.

Unlike the prior administration, I can note that Trump seems to be engaged with the issues but I am not so certain that he grasps the seriousness of a fallout between Erdogan and Turkey and/or the US and the Kurds.  Something must give and I am not at rest that President Trump, as Obama before him, is ready for this. And he is the one who opened this can of worms when his administration announced that the U.S. would back, arm and support the Kurds in their effort against the Islamic State and to show he was about that life, the Trump Defense Department immediately sent military vehicles with American flags to the YPG fighters engaged in combat activities on the Syrian side of the border.

As expected Erdogan was not happy and expressed such through one of his many mouth pieces this time being one of his top foreign policy advisers İlnur Çevik. Cevik expressed succinctly the differences between Washington and Ankara over the U.S. military’s partnership with Kurdish military organizations in Syria by hinting that American troops could be targeted alongside their Kurdish allies in the country since U.S. forces have teamed up with members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and since Turkish fighter’s patrol along the border region with Syria frequently bombing the YPG who they see more of an enemy than IS. Specifically, Cevik stated that if the U.S. troops would "go to far, our forces would not care if American armor is there, whether armored carriers are there" adding that “Suddenly, by accident, a few rockets can hit them.”

It was a simple choice for Trump based on all he has been talking about wiping the Islamic State off the face of the planet. Easy also because the YPG have shown themselves to be one of the most effective forces on the ground in the fight against IS next to the Syrian Defense Forces. Moreover, most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, however, they consider themselves Kurds first, and Muslims second, and don't want to be absorbed into a universal caliphate or equally any affiliation with Sharia law. Also of importance is that the Kurds are the most pro-American people in the entire Middle East and believe and acknowledge equal right for women.

The fact is northern Syria  has a large Kurdish population which for decades, Turkey has viewed a major political threat due to the mounting influence of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the region.  Erdogan was hoping the US-YPG alliance which President Barack Obama started would be discontinued under Trump. But it has not and he made this clear in an interview in which he stated that seeing US military vehicles operating close to the border with Syrian Kurdish fighters "seriously saddened" him.

The Kurdish and US soldiers who support them are during an offensive to take Raqqa, ISIS’s Syrian capital, and have recently made significant gains against the extremists in the region but recent attacks by Turkey against Kurdish areas in Syria are hampering the offensive against ISIS. Erdogan doesn’t want the YPG or the PYD to be the leading powers in Syria’s Kurdistan region and sees both as part of the PKK.

To understand this one must understand the Kurds in the region (Iraq, Syria and Turkey). Erdogan’s forces are fighting the Turkish Kurds (The PKK or Banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party led by Abdullah Ocalan who was jailed in 1999 with the help of U.S. CIA) and Erdogan is extremely hostile with the Syrian Kurds (the PYD or Democratic Unity Party) who are aligned with the PKK and have their own militia called the YPG. Last there are the Kurds in Iraq who have established a Kurdish Regional Government since the US invasion/occupation of Iraq and who have their own military forces called the Peshmerga. All three Kurdish areas are fighting IS, but all are considered problems to Erdogan. The Turks want to destroy the PKK and its affiliates, as well as the YPG.  They consider them to be the same or equal to ISIS – terrorist. This is what the U.S. and Russia equally must syphon through because Erdogan sees the possible defeat of IS in Raqqa by the Kurds and U.S. forces as major political leverage for the YPG.

When the Turkish State was founded in the aftermath of WWI, the Kurds were promised the creation of an independent state as part of the treaty of Sevres in 1920. Unfortunately for them, this part of the treaty was never ratified and Turkey has refused to recognize the existence of a separate Kurdish ethnic community within its borders.  Upon which several major Kurdish rebellions occurred in Kurdish strongholds in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s. Since then the Turkish ruling class began viewing a separate Kurdish identity as a threat to the nation-state - Turkification.

Now, Turkey has become one of the world's largest and most powerful Muslim fundamentalist states. I say this because it is well known that Erdogan’s administration (maybe with the exceptions of the Saudi’s) is the main state sponsor of ISIS. Add to this that Erdogan is an Islamist that embraces Muslim fundamentalism to the level of even destroying the last bits of democracy in Turkey to eradicate all Kurdish people so that he can establish a new Ottoman Empire for Turks and only Turks.  Now, it is estimated that around fifteen million individuals of Kurdish origin live in Turkey who under the present leadership of the Republic, have been treated worse than a second-class citizenry.

Trump and Putin know that they NEED the YPG to continue with its fight against the Islamic State. Although the U.S. has maintained good relations for the past seven decades, the war on ISIS has led the Pentagon to decide that it is the best interest of the U.S. to work with Kurdish forces if the objective is to defeat ISIS. Thus, the conflict: the U.S. want to work with the Kurds on the ground in Syria effort to take Raqqa (the headquarters of ISIS) but Turkey doesn’t want this thinking that it with give them more clout with the current U.S. administration.

Like Obama (called Erdogan a trusted friend), Trump underestimates Erdogan's hatred of the Kurdish minority and the level of his support of ISIS.  Trump must decide if its relationship with the Kurds in Syria is a temporary relationship of opportuneness until IS is defeated or is the beginning of something new? Something new that could lead to an independent Kurdistan? Erdogan wouldn't be happy about it, but he'd accept this from the U.S. and I believe that is his main concern. After all, we saw what he did after the strong electoral might of the Kurdish party that prevented a parliamentary majority of Erdogan's AKP in June's election. 

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Is Iraq and Turkey About To Bump Heads, For Real?

While many of us on this side of the pond have either been crying and complaining, or celebrating and enthusiastic due to the election of Donald Trump, there's one thing we can all count on – the lack of mainstream media coverage on what is happening in Libya, Yemen and Iraq. I would add Syria, but the mere mention of Aleppo given the incessant repetition it is written and orally stated daily, may make me want to throw-up. 

It seems that the Iraqi security forces, elements of the Iranian Republican Guard, Shia militias and Kurdish Peshmerga, after more than three months, have ISIS jihadist on the ropes and are finally entering Eastern Mosul, closing in on ISIL/ISIS last positions. To be succinct, the battle has been more of an effort and struggle than the Obama Administration said it would be since the Mosul offensive began October 17. At one point the United Nations had reported that more than 2,000 Iraqi troops had been killed by November (a figure disputed by the Iraqi government and Iraq Joint Operation Command). According to the UN, this includes the army, police, Kurdish Peshmerga, interior ministry forces and pro-government paramilitaries.

At that time, it was reported that Iraqi troops had been the target of 630 suicide car bomb attacks in the first 45 days of the operation alone. The last report of US troop deaths was in November with 16 killed and 27 wounded. Although during that period the US Department of Defense only admitted to there being just a single casualty. Needless to say, both have ended reporting on military causalities as a result of the Mosul offensive.

It is hard to fathom that the Obama administration or the Pentagon did not conceive that recapturing Mosul would not be an easy task in particular given waiting more than two years of ISIL rule to do so and offering advanced notice of the operation. With the unexpected difficulty of uprooting ISIL/ISIS/Daesh fighters, and the more than anticipated length of time it has consumed thus far to do such, another problem has arisen that was not projected – a riff developing between Iraq and Turkey.

The Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi is firmly and openly demanding that Turkish forces leave Bashiqa camp near Mosul. Turkey on the other hand has stated that they will not withdraw its troops from its Bashiqa military camp in northern Iraq until the Mosul offensive against ISIL/ISIS/Daesh is complete. To make their intentions even more clear, Turkey's defense minister Fikri Isik, in November said that their military participation was part of its groundwork for other and more "important developments in the region." This is a moot point for the Iraqi PM who indicated that any efforts of diplomacy with Turkey could "not move forward one step" unless all Turkish forces in northern Iraq withdrew.

I am not certain but it would not surprise me that if Turkey, after the attempted Coup and still in the process of culling members of the military andgovernment, was really interested in preventing the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) from establishing a solid link in the region in which they already have large population of Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. Erdogan May also be concerned that this might result in to a stronger diplomatic relationship with the PKK and Iraqi Shia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).  This is something he cannot allow.  

The Kurdistan Workers' Party is based in Turkey and Iraq. Since 1984 the PKK has waged an armed struggle against the Turkish state for equal rights and self-determination for the purpose of forming their own independent nation state. From this point of view, if I were Erdogan, this would be a tactic that could be employed to prevent the PKK elements from gaining a foot print in Tal Afar, an invalid fear according to according to the Iraqi’s since they have guaranteed that PMF fighters will not get involved in the Mosul and Tel Afar campaigns.

Tel Afar, is a city and district in the Nineveh Governorate of northwestern Iraq. The leadership in Baghdad has vowed to defeat all “foreign troops” in and around Sinjar, PKK and ISIL included. However, a senior representative of one of the many the Shia militias fighting ISIL in concert with the Iraqi government has warned that they are willing to use force against Turkish troops in Nineveh if the Turkish government refuses to withdraw from the area. Jawadal-Tleibawi, a high-ranking leader of the al-Hashd al-Shaabi militia said in press statements said that if diplomacy fail, his fighters are “capable of forcing out the Turkish occupiers” and called the actions of Ankara as “a flagrant intervention in Iraq’s domestic affairs”.

Baghdad has described Turkish military presence in Iraq as a violation of its sovereignty, yet both openly indicate they a committed to meeting in the future to discuss a yet to come withdrawal plan pertaining to Turkish troops in the country. Although Turkey has retained the importance of their troop deployment in the area, they equally prioritize both the importance of training local militias to combat Islamic State militants and reducing the influence of Kurdish PKK militia operating in Iraq. Moreover, Ankara is openly precarious of al-Hashd al-Shaabi’s involvement in Mosul battles, worrying that the predominantly-Shia forces could commit human rights violations against Sunni inhabitants (a concern that has been documented by Amnesty International and Human RightsWatch).

What has been made clear by Baghdad is that the Bashiqa camp is an Iraqi camp has to and will be run and controlled by Iraqi administrative authorities. However a recent visit by a visit to meet Turkish troops by Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdağ and Energy Minister Berat Albayrak to Bashiqa has stirred the pot even more and has troubled the Iraqi government. Iraq and Turkey have agreed that the Turkish military will withdraw from the Bashiqa camp when the Mosul offensive is complete, but until then, Baghdad wants the camp to immediately be turned over to Iraq control. Then there is Turkey’s ultimatum that Baghdad end any and all financial support to local groups in the Sinjar region which they state are affiliated with the PKK.

Whatever the case is, even if ISIL is defeated and removed from Mosul, there will remain a major issue to be settled between the leadership in Ankara and Baghdad.  Will it be settled peacefully with diplomacy or violently taking these two nations to the precipice of war is the query.

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The Elephant Grass of the Democratic Party

The hissy fits of the Democratic Party over the election victory of Donald Trump continue. If one pays strict attention to their whining, it all seems to be a cloak for inherent and clandestine fears based on emotion more so than pragmatism and reason.  It reminds me of how one of my uncle friends described being in Vietnam when I was between 11 and 12 years old (1973-74). He told me about how what he would never forget outside of the sounds of war, were the marshy fields he and his company would be dropped off in, feet tall above the head of Elephant grass.  He said these fields were packed with booby traps but what scared him most was not being able to see around him.  The tall grass in addition to the grown-man high ant mounds, concealed the unexpected, seeing that the Elephant grass was tall enough to hide an entire military detail ready for ambush.

I suspect that this is how the democrats feel.  As if they were dropped off in a field of Elephant grass, not know what the future holds in store for them.  Could it be they expect to be invalidated by Trump and the GOP? Could it be that they fear Trump will make good on his campaign promises and lead to the destruction of the Democratic Party for years to come? Or could it be it will show the US citizenry how democratic policy has placed America in its current predicament?

All are possibilities.  Let’s face it, no matter how democrats and the media try to paint Obama’s eight years as a success, math shows the opposite. The math, as pure science reveals the truth that politically the democrats are powerless and stuck in a destitute defensive posture. Thus their primary weapon is crying and/or attacking the incoming administration through mere emotional displacement. Jamil Smith attacks Trump on his “intellectual laziness” suggesting that this “may be the most dangerous thing about him,” and that “Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to be presidentof the United States, and the Russian government deliberately tried to help him win the election.” Jamile Bouie suggest that “Trump is defined by his shameless disregard, and even disdain, for the bonds that hold political life together.” Or in the case of some, they simply stick to praise of Putin as being evidence of incompetence and dishonesty.  All unfounded and groundless allegations pure in rhetoric singularly.

All of these are just emotional invective.  These writers will never back up their words with tangible accomplishments of President Obama to compare these statements of rhetorical grandiose to purport the accuracy of their assertions. Never will they objectively examine real life measure of American success and economic improvement like the Housing Affordability Index for example. The Housing Affordability Index measures whether or not a typical U.S. family makes enough money to just to qualify for a mortgage loan on a typical home let alone buy one. But this will never be included in their writings because data indicates that US housing affordability is at its lowest point since the fourth quarter of 2008. This most likely is a consequence of stagnate wage growth that cannot keep up with increasing home prices.  

They may cite job creation as an indicator of Obama’s success but will go no further than the Whitehouse press statement to examine the fine details of the data, for if they did, as a new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton note, nearly 95%of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were part-time or temporary positions. I won’t even include that additional analysis of liberal media pundits will not note or question how many of these new jobs are being taken by people that already have a job or even two. In all accuracy, since Obama took office, there remains 1 million fewer workers, overall, working than before he took office (Another actor to consider when attempting to comprehend why US housing affordability is so low and wage growth so paralyzed).

In simple terms, although Obama did inherit an economic mess, his policies have led to deteriorating affordability in home ownership, a segment of the U.S. economy that traditionally has proffered parents with the best opportunity to safeguard a better future for their children. Instead, his Keynesian economic approach has added another obstacle for lower-income Americans regardless of race. I mean, the housing market bubble burst almost 10 years ago, yet sales and construction in this sector are well below their peaks in the early 2000s meaning the housing sector is stagnate along with wage growth.

Thus to abrogate the use of data, anything is not only open to vapid complaints by democrats but is also the fault of the man who has not even been sworn in as president yet.    This is the ultimate profile of the traumatized individual. This can be made even worse for progressive peace-loving democrats when we include Obama’s foreign policy record.

When Obama took office he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan.  This too has not happened and to use the same language pundits use to describe the statements of Trump, was a lie.  Not only has he increased military operations in Afghanistan, he has dropped more bombs, employed more drone killings than Bush, and has killed inordinate more innocent civilian in the country when compared to his predecessor. Then there is Libya and Yemen. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winning PresidentAdministration has sold more weapons than any other American president since World War II, totaling plus $200 billion from 2008 to 2015. Sales to Saudi Arabia alone has swollen to $115 billion. Now he has sent US Special Forces to Lithuania to saber rattle on the Russian border.

Democrats and in particular Obama, really do see Donald Trump’s election victory as a personal repudiation of his pluralistic and globalist agenda and legacy. Add to this that democrats need to not only figure out how to have policy messages that include all instead of dividing the nation in to mutually exclusive voting blocs based on labels and message of race, gender and sexuality, they also have to figure out how to formulate new integrative domestic policies with how to communicates those policies with a single unified message for all (and this can’t be done by just speaking at colleges, universities, unions and big cities).

The democrats understand that what they have to stand on are Obama’s past eight years and the political agenda of the democratic elite.  While murder rates in traditionally democratic cities like Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore and DC are out of the atmosphere, they are doubling down. By some estimates, the Obama Administration and sanctuary cities and their mayor including in NYC, San Francisco and Chicago spend around $113 billion on illegal aliens annually but they ignore that there are U.S. citizens that can use these funds including but not limited to homeless veterans, our inner cities, our youth and/or rural areas, all being poor black and white folk alike.

Yes the Democrats have their own battle of Ia Drang Valley and they cannot see for the Elephant grass and are taking fire from all sides yet responding by shooting in all directions and at anything that moves from a Simon & Schuster book deal for Milo Yiannopoulos, to theHBCU band from Talladega College performing at the inauguration to GM CEO Mary Barra being appointed to Trump’s business Advisory council (yet don't mention how Obama pimped US tax payers for GM), to Putin, WikiLeaks and so-called ‘fake news’. They have been dropped off in the middle of their own Landing Zone (LZ) X-ray and do not know what to do. They never look at themselves to determine if their battle plan was defective yet instead blame everything else. But now they have run out of replacement parts for the Iroquois “Huey” helicopters that carried them into battle and are running out of ammunition and have few if any reinforcements arriving for some time. The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley was one of the most noteworthy battles of the Vietnam war, likewise, the battle the Democrats have on their hands after the 2016 presidential election loss, will be just as significant.

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The Aleppo Misdirection

The mess in Syria has been going on for the past six years.  There still is no clarity on the events there with the exception of the facts and the main fact that the US Nobel prize winning president is true to the play book of his predecessor George H.W. Bush. I wanted to write in detail about this a while ago but it was difficult to extract my attention from the humor of liberals whining because their loss to Trump and the sore loseritus was a gift I could not avoid writing about.  But since the U.K., France and U.S. convened this special meeting of the UN Security Council, I had to go in, and I will explain.

I think since Obama announced months ago his plan to attack Mosul (as if he was telegraphing’ to the terrorist, I mean moderates he supports in Iraq and Syria to get ready), he had not perceived that there was even the possibility that Aleppo would be liberated. Given this major lapse in judgement and reasoning, coalition forces have been back peddling ever since. It seems that the manipulation of language (Newspeak) was the first sign that things were all over the place regarding a standard approach on how to deal with Syria.  I say Syria because Aleppo is really a misnomer. They say they just want to help and offer humanitarian aid for the more than a million residents of Aleppo although there is no equal concern for the civilians in Mosul or cities in Yemen. So to try and support their position that Assad must go, the Obama Administration created the term “Moderate Syrian Rebels.”

To be truthful, there is no such thing as a moderate terrorist no more as there is a such thing as a moderate Crip or Blood, in particular with the fluid nature of all of the groups, the alliances they form and assorted reasons for fighting including but not limited to [1] forming a Sunni state run under Sharia law, [2] those who are fighting for autonomous rule (Kurds), and/or [3] the few that want to violently over throw the democratically elected Assad who won a sizable majority last election with more than 70% voter turnout. What has been documented is that militants who are integrated with terror groups like Jaysh al Fatah, Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham and Nour al din al Zenki - all of them affiliated with the Al Qaeda terrorist network – are what Western coalition governments consider to be portions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and at the same time claim to be at war with.

Now before I dive into these so-called moderate rebels, I have to go back to the earlier supposition regarding Mosul and the Obama Administration.  In all fairness, the operation to retake Mosul was not about destroying ISIS but rather to push ISIS back into Syria so they could focus all of their efforts on taking down Assad.  Why do I say this? Well if one reads Carl von Clausewitz, typically the military objective is to close all escape routes and incessantly enclose the enemy and crush them.  The Obama administration had planned operations from all sides with the exception of routes towards the Iraq-Syria border. Thus the objects would have to be removing these terrorist from Iraq and into Syria resulting in the PR circus of claiming a speedy victory in Mosul.  But after three months this is not the case.

Mosul and Raqqa are the two major cities in the self-proclaimed IS caliphate. To destroy IS these must be destroyed. However, when Russia and Iran got involved, the Obama Administration never calculated that they would be able to sway so much influence with the present Iraqi government and subsequently were able to modify the U.S. battle plan to one that would encircle and attempt to destroy all ISIS/ Al Qaeda affiliates in Mosul. This threw a wrench in the Administration’s goal to engender a “Salafist principality” designed to break up or “Balkanize” Syria. It was the same play book used in Libya with the exception of a no-fly zone. So without a no-fly zone, the coalition had to result to other means – namely trying to protect the Salafist in Aleppo they had been funding and arming since they began this proxy war. This is why reports from Aleppo by the West are all over the place.

The information, if any we are getting from Aleppo is really no different than a Hollywood screen play. First the Obama Administration threatened the Russians saying that their planes would be shot down and their troops would be coming home in body bags while at the same time shipping tons of anti-aircraft weaponry to rebels in and around Aleppo when the Obama Administration were supposedly trying to achieve a cease fire. This was at the same time SOS John Kerry was saying he was going to suspend discussions with the Russians regarding Syria, just after US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, vilified the Russian’s for convening a special security council meaning to discuss coalition airstrikes that targeted Syrian government forces, killing more than 80 soldiers. The same US ambassador to the UN would weeks later confront the Russians again, using unverified reports accusing them in concert with Assad of murdering innocent civilians. Now all of this is hard for me to keep track of so I’m guessing it is the same for a lot of people. The reason why is because there never was or has been a civil war in Syria.

The Syrian revolution is a myth. Western Aleppo is being targeted because they resisted these U.S backed Salafist foreign terrorist and the record indicates that clearly more than a half a million civilians left the eastern portion of the city for the west for the same reason. The majority left in Eastern Aleppo are being held hostage by the terrorist or are terrorist and their families. Thus the remaining civilians in this area are being used as human shields and the query remains, if the US narrative of Assad murdering and bombing his own people is accurate, then why would they flee Eastern Aleppo and go to the part held by Assad forces? Makes no sense. Seven million have fled to government held sections over the past four plus years. But the media call these folk Assad supporters when in fact they may or may not be - they just don’t support terrorist or believe that killing and destroying Syria is the best approach for improving their government.

We never check with organizations on the ground like the Aleppo Medical Association about the number of physicians working there because if we did we would see that there are more than 4000 working there and many are being paid by the Assad government (opposite of the narrative of western media). Unfortunately the rebels or opposition which are really terrorist prevent them from coming in and even giving their services. Add to this that Eastern Aleppo is under the control by the Al Nusura front (Al Qaeda in Syria), yet the Obama administration wants to protect these folk. The Free Idlib army are terrorist too. So given the US media isn’t even on the ground in Aleppo, how can they verify their information? Verification isn’t required when it is all for show bearing in mind the main goal has been and remains regime change in Syria. Just like in Iraq the goal is to create a shadow state in Syria to be controlled by and for the benefit of the West.

The more logical and truthful depiction is that Syrian civilians are at last able to flee from terror gangs that have held them under siege. But this is in contradiction to the reporting by Western media on Syria and Aleppo especially since the US and Western narrative about what has been going on in Aleppo and Syria, Assad and Syrian civilians is far removed from the facts. One has to wonder why they are never in Aleppo or even Syria, if so they are there rarely or else they would have been able to at least interview any one of the tens of thousands of civilians who have left areas once controlled by the motley collection terrorist groups.  They preclude they hate the Assad government but never ask them if they do or fail to query as to how life was living under these terrorist groups – journalism 101. We see US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power refer to unverified reports of civilians being executed in Aleppo while asking at the same time if Syria, Iran or Russia have any shame. But they never seem to compare the devastation US coalition forces are delivering in Yemen or Mosul.

The actuality is Aleppo was invaded by Western-backed mercenary terrorist proxies, or fake moderate rebels, whom the Western governments have sponsored in an attempt to overthrow the government of Syria since July 2012.  These same Western-backed mercenary terrorist proxies, or fake moderate rebels have turned the eastern side of the city into terror haven for a caliphate of manic Wahhabi jihadists that take more pleasure in chopping off heads than secular democratic rule. From Jeish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) to Jabha Fatah al-Sham (Front for the Conquest of the Levant) and Fatah Halab (Conquest of Aleppo)  they are all terrorist the U.S. supports and arms and would never engage in a ceasefire being implemented of any kind and the Obama administration knows this.

They understand that these groups must keep fighting if the breakup of Syria and the take-down of Assad is ever to be achieved. Otherwise, the Syrian national bank will remain free of western influence and will never be brought under the Bank of International Settlements and thus continue to operate without loans from the IMF which means they can decide their own foreign policy and that dream of a natural gas pipeline from Qatar to Turkey will never come to fruition. Moreover, Syria will not be made to submit to using GMO seeds. Recall one of the first things US did after the conquering of Iraq was to outlaw seeds stores and force Iraqi farmers to buy international GMO seeds (see order 81 Iraq).

Regardless of what comes out of Washington from the Administration or the media, Syria as Libya before it will be remembered as just another war crime committed by President Obama in the name of humanitarian intervention by the West when the real geopolitical aim was regime change for the fact remains that US or western security interests were never involved or at risk.  Just as with Gaddafi, who never really ever threaten to massacre civilians, the same is true for Assad.  Gaddafi, just as Assad currently, only went after rebels and similarly, offered them amnesty and free passage out if they would drop their weapons. In both cases, the “responsibility to protect”, is just a fancy way to say it is okay to violate the sovereignty of another nation state.

As the Obama era comes to a close, what can be noted is that he will be remembered as the man who destroyed Libya (at the time Africa's most thriving nation) and will have nothing to show for his foreign policy in Syria with the exception of more than a half a million deaths and a Europe in consternation due to a colossal refugee and migrant crisis. So expect for the amplification of anti-Syrian and anti-Russian newspeak in the US mainstream media to continue because the Syrian Army are continuously advancing through Aleppo and routing the US funded terrorist.  

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The Forgotten South of Sudan

As we continuously hear from the Obama Administration about Aleppo, among the other international events laid at the feet of President Obama’s foreign policy we do not hear of inclusive of Yemen is South Sudan. Established after a referendum vote to secede from the northern part of Sudan and the Khartoum government, and once touted as a way to formalize peace to Sudan’s long-running civil war, this small oil rich nation has dissolved into pure blood stained disorder. Even famous actors the likes of George Clooney and Don Cheadle advocated for its existence as being a humanitarian necessity to show the people we in the west cared.

For years prior to its formulation (not formation), the US supported rebels in the south of Sudan. After the nation of South Sudan was formed, the U.S. continued to provide billions of dollars in military and security assistance to the fledgling country under the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton’s State Department. In 2011 then Secretary of State Clinton, at a major conference onSouth Sudan in 2011, spoke of her visions for the future of South Sudan. Ironically, in the same year in which President Obama employed a technicality to get a Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) exemption for South Sudan.

The logic was feculent and two fold. First being that the law could not be applied to a newly formed nation that recently became independent and second, the administration wanted the country to get on firm ground before the US made any statutory request of its military. Meaning that since the countries subjected to CSPA were already in existence, they could not add the South Sudan to thelist. The Obama administration also openly advocated their support for the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).  The SPLA according to human rights group worldwide have been documented to have engaged in numerous human rights violations, including but not limited to rape and extrajudicial killings (nice UN saying for murder).

However since the celebration of South Sudan as the world’s newest member state in 2011, a political rivalry between the Dinka President Salva Kiir and the then Nuer Vice President Riek Machar erruptrd dissolving the nation into a civil war along ethnic lines. Since then more than 1 million South Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries like Uganda and many thousands more have been slaughtered, tortured or raped. One UN report noted that South Sudanese army soldiers had raped thousands of women and girls as a reward for their service instead of being paid salaries. Others had been used as part of ritual cannibalistic activities or burned alive.

But none of this mattered to the Obama Administration.  Although in his formal recognition statement for the Republic of South Sudan as a sovereign and independent state he described it as a “historic achievement” after “the darkness of war,” his policy has proven the opposite and has resulted in more bloodshed and insecurity by not ending the use of child soldiers on the one hand and by turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the nation he pushed to establish on the other. What the president once hailed as one of his foreign policy success stories, is now merely a failed state in reality - unless it is the desire for Nobel Peace prize winning presidents to leave nations in the ruinous aftermath of war (Yemen, Libya and Syria also included).

Obama in concert with his National Security Advisor Susan Rice vehemently led the crusade for the creation of South Sudan, but since then, we have only seen daily tribal hostilities continuing to fester. Add to this that the economic condition is following a similar descending path and that state sponsored repression remains a major impediment to any form of democratic government, what we get from the President is silence or troops. Nor does he address how the ongoing violence rests as a massive obstacle to peace which on its own serves as a catalyst for the continuing genocide in Darfur and a growing militarization of the party’s involved. In particular since the present administration continues to honor the authorization of more than $120 million in U.S. military assistance and over $20 million in arms sales since FY2013 and an addition request for $30 million in military assistance for South Sudan for FY2017.

Now it would be insincere to place all of this at the feet of President Obama since a sizable amount of his foreign policy was advocated for and proposed by Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, Clinton consistently presented her  foreign policy experience as a major justification for her being president, although she never spoke openly about her desire to intervene in Libya or her role in the failed Russian “reset.” More importantly, there was no mention of the outcome of her efforts in South Sudan. True in 2012 she openly stated her disparagement of the use and recruitment of children as soldiers, however it was a position in dire contrast to her part in allowing South Sudan  receive US military support via her approval of waivers to the nation while it used children as fighters.  Still Clinton’s handling of South Sudan and how the new nation descended into a calamitous civil war that involved the use of thousands of child soldiers is rarely reported.

When President Obama leaves the White House next January, people worldwide will question his foreign policy. This will likely be partisan but the objective individual will note from Yemen to Libya and Syria to South Sudan – he was afailure. Moreover, he managed to make social and economic situations in these places worse. But in Sudan he will be remembered for creating a state and leaving it to rot; a place where he waived to the prohibition on the use of child soldiers  in an untried country that is acknowledged as being one of the most corrupt in the world and the home of a 4-year-old civil war where US installed leaders have used their positions to rob the country of its wealth, while at the same time creating one of the greatest humanitarian disasters today – in essence an embarrassment for the Obama administration. As a newly formed country, the future looked bright for South Sudan and its vast oil reserves. But realty has shown us otherwise, that effective foreign policy demands more than words and dumping huge sums of money in the hands of installed puppets.

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How Obama Fcked Up Yemen

Hard to believe that on October 9, 2009 it was announced that the recipient of that year’s Nobel Peace prize would be President Barack Obama for of all things, his promotion of a "new climate" in international relations, especially in reaching out to the Middle east and Muslim world.  In December he accepted the award and gave the world a lecture on war and peace with introducing what he referred to as the concept of “just war.”

This was in my perception a glance into the future, one in which Obama’s peace prize was more a portent of the actions the likes of Henry Kissinger, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles G. Dawes, and Woodrow Wilson than Linus Pauling, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr.  What has been observed is that since this date, President Obama has been as bellicose if not more so than any president we have had in the modern era. Personally between he, Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson it is likely a tie.

Since then, the Obama Administration has re-introduced a U.S. foreign policy of manifest destiny under the guise of humanitarian intervention. His foreign policy of the “Just war” has put us in and/or extended us in to too many nations to count including but not limited to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Mali, Egypt and Yemen. The last is his most recent and newly deadly war game activity. The war in Yemen (what the Saudi and U.S. call a military intervention) started in 2015, when Saudi Arabia with the support and assistance of leading a coalition of the United Sates, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain decided to play with the civilian population of Yemen in an effort to influence the outcome of a new civil war in the small once divide nation. 

Obama’s policy in Yemen is par for the course.  Not only is it directionless and incoherent, it does not have any impact on securing or protecting the interest of the U.S. In 2008, the then senator from Illinois was incessantly complaining about how prior administrations were always messing and sticking their nose in the affairs of other nations, in particular those in the Middle East. It was a period in which Mr. Obama openly indicated his disdain for war, especially proxy wars. Now something has altered and what has arisen is what may be called an Obama Doctrine (the doctrine of Just war). It must be recalled that the current effort in Yemen is the direct result of the people of Yemen overthrowing a U.S. and Saudi-backed and established puppet government in 2014. 

InYemen, as elsewhere Obama has made use of U.S. military, might, hardware or personnel for reasons that have no political or pragmatic objective. The President is using his bully pulpit either via advising, troops on the ground, special forces, drones, airstrikes and/or arming select nations as a part of a tool box to fix things he considers broken which in fact were never broken to begin with.

His administration (and the United Kingdom) started its upkeep for the Saudi-led war just to show that they had the backs of the Royal House of Saud by basically giving carte blanc to do whatever they want even war crimes.  And if this was not bad enough, he just approved a $1.5 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, of which includes giving the Saudi’s more than 150 M1A2 Abrams battle tanks. Moreover, Obama’s backing has not waivered since it began in March 2015. What has come about since then has been the brutal bombing and slaughter of tens of thousands on Yemeni civilians, mostly women and children in what has long been considered the poorest country in the Middle East.

Although Washington relies mostly on Saudi Arabia to do its dirty work, it has its hands equally as deep in the muck. Not only do we continue to  supply the Saudi with weapons, we also play a significant role in providing intelligence and aerial refueling even while knowing the Saudi’s continue (in spite of international law) to unlawfully committee war crimes by bombing hospitals, schools, mosque,weddings and funerals among other sites. Now it has been determined the Obama administration is also supplying SaudiArabia with white phosphorus which can maim and kill by burning to the bone.  It is estimated that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded thus far and national infrastructure critically damaged or destroyed completely We have even employed special operations teams on the ground. What I find peculiar is that here we are fighting through direct assistance or proxies, against Houthis from the North, who practice a type of Shia Islam called Zaydi, who we know are at odds and been battling our KNOWN enemy - Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).  And why, well to install a President who ran unopposed, yet still considered legitimate by the Saudi’s and Obama administration when Obama personally said that the Burundi elections were"not credible" when President Pierre Nkurunziza won a third term unopposed.

What makes this entire even stranger is that the Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi is a known affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood were instrumental in starting the protests that demanded an end to Ali Abdullah Saleh’s three decade rule which in December 2011 resulted in a unelected national unity cabinet which eventually ended up via phony election placing Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi as president. So in essence we have the Houthis whom the Saudi’s hate, for taking over Sanaa and running a unelected Presidentout of the country, a president aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood whose leadership is closely linked with Yemen’s Salafists, who together with al-Qaeda, have been in open confrontation with the revivalist Zaidy group we call the Houthis. Taking it one step further, if I know that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian offshoot in Gaza is Hamas, then what does that make the Muslim Brotherhood’s President Obama and Saudi Salafists are trying to install? I will tell you - a terrorist by definition of the U.S. State Department.

It is a very strange situation President Obama has gotten the U.S. involved in, specifically as he expands on our involvement in the undeclared war in Yemen. If it continues to manifest as it appears, this may be forever a dark cloud over Obama’s legacy especially when we compare it to how he admonishes the Russians for their operations in concert with Syria in their fight against ISIS. Inordinate human rights organizations including the U.N. and Human Rights Watch has been very critical of the Obama administration and Saudi Arabia for the carnage occurring in Yemen. President Obama is basically allowing for the destruction and murder of tens of thousands of civilians in Yemen and if this is so, the query remains if the broader U.S. policy goal in the country is really stability? For even the novice this cannot be the objective seeing present wide-ranging support for the Saudi’s is a clear incongruity with his rhetoric when he suggested it was the U.S. and world’s role to stop proxy wars in the Middle East.

For the pragmatic, Yemen cannot be considered as one of Obama’s foreign policy success stories, unless his foreign policy legacy is that his actions (or lack of action) has caused millions of Yemenis to exist on the brink of starvation and disease while we assisted their Yemen’s more affluent Saudi neighbors smashup a nation just because they wanted to pick on someone.

Does anyone else find this comical and sickening? Just a two years Obama was all out everywhere giving speeches and making statements to the effect that the war on terror in Yemen was proving to be a great success, with here a drone, there a drone, and everywhere a drone-drone. Yemen is not success and rather an example of feckless foreign policy and mission creep in the form of “I’m just gone do some shit and don’t have any idea or don’t give a fck about what happens after I start some shit foreign policy. What do I care, I’m just gone give the Saudi’s cluster bombs and out the other side of my neck complain that Syria is using cluster (barrel) bombs too.  So what if they have been banned under the guidance of international war, I got no problems if the Saudi’s commit war crimes with more than 40% of their air strikes in Yemen since the bombing campaign began targeting civilians – just as long as it isn’t Assad or Putin it is all good. Just this past week Sunni-dominated government (if you can call it that) in Yemen suspended peace talks with the Houthi rebels, because the Houthi demanded a new government that would include them in the governance of the country in which they live. However this was unacceptable to both Saudi Arabia and the United States. So far, the UN says that upwards of 7 million Yemeni are on the verge of starvation with more than 70 percent existing without access to safe drinking water. This folk is the Obama Doctrine, the doctrine of the just war and this is in my purview, why I say Obama done fcked up Yemen.

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