thegrayzone.com
To
withdraw, or not to withdraw? That is the question Donald Trump, in his own
inimitable way, has answered both ways.
First
came the withdrawal. It was real, and had a significant effect. Trump ordered
the removal of US troops from Kurdish areas, putting an end to the prospect of
an independent Kurdish statelet, split off from Syria. Such a partition was
always implausible, given the general balance of forces in the region and the
specific refusal of NATO-member Turkey to accept any such thing. (Turkey had already invaded Syria in 2016, and the Obama-Biden
administration ordered the Kurds to accept it.) It was also a lynchpin of the
longstanding Plan B for dismembering the Syrian state. As I argued in a previous article, agreeing with ”the entire spectrum of US-imperialist politics and
media,” Trump’s withdrawal decision “marked ‘a major turning point in Syria’s long
war’ and has, indeed,
‘upended decades’ of imperialist and Zionist plans for
the Middle East.”
But,
as I also noted, Trump is impulsive, shallow, and weak, and “surrounds himself
with neocon deep-state actors on whom he depends and who often ignore or
actively oppose…his non-interventionist instincts,” and who “may yet get him to
reverse that [decision] or over-compensate for it.”
We
quickly saw what Philip Giraldi calls an “all too characteristic Trumpean
flip-flop.” Under “pressure from congress and the media”—including powerful
Republican senators like Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, and
especially Lindsay Graham—"who were bleating over how the departure of
U.S. troops was a grave mistake,” Trump turned “the greatly ballyhooed ‘withdrawal’
from Syria” into something “more like a relocation of existing military assets.”
US troops ended up moving from Kurdish areas to “secure” the oil fields in eastern
Syria. As Giraldi says, “the number of American soldiers in Syria may have
actually been increased with armor units being transferred from their base in
Iraq.”
Of
course, the notion that the US military presence is there to protect the oil
from ISIS, or to seize it for the financial benefit of the US, is a pitch that
was crafted for the one-man gullible enough to believe it: Donald Trump. It was
crafted by those whom Foreign Policy (FP) reporter Lara Seligman calls the “Iran hawks” who have “repeatedly
sought to reverse Trump’s Syria withdrawal over nearly two years,” and “are
still trying to persuade Trump to keep a residual presence in Syria.”
Joshua
Landis, Director of the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of
Oklahoma, speaking to NPR, calls them the “many elements of our
foreign policy establishment that want to roll back Iran and want to stay in
Syria for the long haul," and who knew that "Throwing the oil wells
in front of President Trump was a way … they could reanimate his interest in
staying in Syria."
The
Washington Post (WaPo) cites a “US official” to the effect that:
“Trump’s interest in the oil provided an opportunity for the Pentagon… to
temper his insistence on a full withdrawal and allow counterterrorism
operations and airspace control to continue. ‘This is like feeding a baby its
medicine in yogurt or applesauce.’” In other words, per another “official” in FP,
oil was an effective way “to play POTUS,” a phony pretext to get a weak and
shallow Donald Trump, again, to undermine his own decision at the direction of
the Deep State he defines as his own worst enemy.
Because,
whatever sweet sauce Trump (or the US media) is inclined to swallow, the US
military is not staying in eastern Syria to profit from the oil. The cost of
keeping US forces in the area will far outweigh any possible profit.
Syria
never produced more than about 380,000 barrels of low-quality oil per day. That
quantity was trivial in the world market, but was crucial for Syria, providing about a quarter of the state’s
revenue in 2010. But eight years of devastating war have reduced production by
90%. So, it’s now at 38,000/day, and the Syrian Army, alone and jointly with the
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), actually controls two areas accounting for 25% of that
output. So, the US armed forces will control areas accounting for a meager 28,500/day
of output (areas, by the way, which have nothing to do with fighting ISIS or protecting the
Kurds). Furthermore, according to Michael Webber, a professor of energy
resources, “it would require a lot of political stability and investment to
bring [the oilfields] back” to their full productive potential.
To
that must be added the cost of maintaining and supplying about a thousand
troops in three different locations. (The Pentagon is saying somewhat fewer, and
it’s lying. Special Operations Forces and contractors are never included.)
These forces will now include “half of an Army armored brigade combat
team battalion that includes as many as 30 Abrams tanks.” Foreign Policy
notes that “experts” think maintaining such
a contingent “when facing a multitude of threats is “incredibly risky” and “likely
to be ineffective.” Land access to the “scattered and relatively small U.S.
outposts” near the Omar oil field “remains insecure and difficult along desert
tracks and dirt roads.” As Brett McGurk, a point man on Syria for both Obama
and Trump, puts it: “It’s going to be a Fort Apache
scenario.”
So
there’s already talk of building one or two new US bases and “expand[ing] a small airfield” in the
Deir Ezzor area, which is “remote and inaccessible except by three border
crossings from Iraq, two of which are controlled by Iranian-backed Shiite
militias” on the Iraqi side.
It’s
an expensive proposition.
The
revenue from oil production would not be enough to pay for such a deployment,
and it is not intended for that anyway. The economic objective is not, as Trump
imagines, to get a windfall profit for the US, but to deny the Syrian
government a significant part of the crucial funds it needs to rebuild its
country.
In
the doubtful case there is any significant production and revenue, none of it
will be going to the US Treasury; it will be used to pay off whatever proxy Kurdish or jihadi
fighting forces the US can keep stringing along, and whatever “contractors” and
corrupt distributors they use to smuggle the oil. See the Russian Ministry of
Defense report of how Syrian crude oil has been “massively
smuggled outside of the country ‘under the strong protection of the US,’” with
“the revenue from the illegal oil trade …ultimately land[ing] in the hands of
the ‘American private military contractors and the US security agencies.’”
Indeed,
“smuggling” it is. As McGurk acknowledges: “It’s not really possible for us to
exploit those oil resources unless we want to be oil smugglers.” Because the
other little problem for Trump’s new “We’re keeping the oil” mantra is that the oil he’s talking
about belongs to the Syrian government, and, succinctly, per law professor Laurie Blank: “International law seeks to protect
against exactly this sort of exploitation.”
That’s
not the dispensable objection Trump thinks (and his neocon advisors pretend to
think) it is. As John Kiriakou and even “senior U.S. service leaders,
administrators and politicians”
acknowledge, Trump’s plan is “pillage”—a black-letter war crime. And everybody outside
of the US media bubble knows that the Russian Foreign Ministry is absolutely
correct in stating that "Any actions whatsoever…
that the United States undertake to keep themselves militarily present in Syria
are unacceptable and illegal from our point of view and under international
law."
Especially
as embodied in the personality and rhetoric of Donald Trump, ignoring that truth
introduces a severe weakness in the US position.
First
of all, it means that Trump is not going to “make a deal with an ExxonMobil or
one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.” Adding the legal
issues deriving from such blatant imperial theft to the “the modest size of the resource [and]
risk of conflict”
makes it a very unattractive “deal” for any major oil compangy. As Giraldi says: “The petroleum production is not enough to pay for the
occupation, even if the oil is successfully stolen and sold, by no means a
certainty as the rest of the world minus Israel regards it as the property of
Damascus.”
Trump’s
flat-out declaration that the Syrian military mission is “an oil grab…what many in the Middle East have long suspected
is the purpose of U.S. wars” devastates any pretense of US imperialism’s
ethical and legal legitimacy. Even Hillary’s sidekick, Senator Tim Kaine, knows that it’s “not only reckless, it’s
not legally authorized.”
(Of
course, though the Democrats will snipe at Trump in these terms, they would
never actually do anything to prevent this crime or punish Trump for it,
preferring instead to pass a bipartisan resolution condemning the withdrawal of
US troops from an illegal presence of foreign territory. Remind me again how
progressive the impeachment inquiry is.)
His
crass oil-grabbing rhetoric is another example of what I’ve called the salutary Trump-effect we should
all welcome—his inability to coat US imperialism with the patina of a
“humanitarian mission,” which undermines the possibility of widespread domestic
or international support that was possible with a smooth-talker like Obama.
As
the man says below, Trump is a transparent imperialist. What undermines
US imperialism more than the whole world listening to this and knowing that it is irrefutable?
"I say that he is the best American President, not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president. All American presidents perpetrate all kinds of political atrocities and all crimes and yet still win the Nobel Prize and project themselves as defenders of human rights and noble and unique American values, or Western values in general. The reality is that they are a group of criminals who represent the interests of American lobbies, i.e. the large oil and arms companies, and others. Trump talks transparently, saying that what we want is oil… This is the reality of American policy. What more do we need than a transparent opponent?"But Trump’s “oil grab” rhetoric also demonstrates his childish simplification about what the US imperial project in the Middle East is about. The US military is not staying in Syria to grab the oil, any more than it is, or ever was, in Syria to protect the Kurds or to defeat ISIS.
-Bashar al-Assad
It’s
about continuing the regime-change, state-destroying program the US has been pursuing in the region since at least 2003, on behalf of Israel and with the
support of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and other Gulf monarchies.
Donald
Trump, the President of the United States—who, like most Americans, does not
understand the rigorous logic driving these “ridiculous endless
wars”—made a decision to finally get out of one, and he was prevented from
carrying through on that decision by massive neocon pressure. That pressure
came essentially from “Israel and its friends in Congress and the media [who] will,
to say the least, be disappointed if the war is now truly ended and the U.S.
military is withdrawn.” That pressure was successful because Trump—like most
Americans—shares too many of the unexamined premises of US (and Israeli)
exceptionalism, and because he has repeatedly brandished a silly “transactional”
urge to “take the oil,” which the neocons played like a fiddle.
These
neocons—the “Iran hawks in the upper echelon of the
administration”—don’t
give a damn about the oil; it means nothing, and they know it. For them, the
issue is Israel and Iran: “The real reasons for maintaining a U.S. military
presence in Syria all have to do with Israel, which has long supported a
fracturing of that country into its constituent parts …to weaken it as an
adversary”—and to hobble any strategic alliance between Syria and Iran that might
support the effective resistance of groups like Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon
or impede the constantly threatened military attack on Iran itself. US military
intervention in Syria, like all the “ridiculous endless” wars in the Middle
East since 2003, only, and do, make sense in the context of the
US-Israeli strategy revealed by Wesley Clark to “take out seven
countries… starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.”
That’s
why “Iran is the reason most often cited by both Washington and Tel Aviv for
American interference in Syria.” “Iran” is practically every other word from
Lindsey Graham’s mouth when talking about Syria. It’s why “the Democrats, having denounced Trump with one voice,
were joined by Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and
the ever-versatile Lindsay Graham, all dedicated to the continuation of an
interventionist foreign policy.” And
it’s why Trump’s “original announcement that he was removing ALL U.S. troops
from Syria made powerful new enemies in the Israel Lobby…which has never really
liked or trusted him,” despite all he’s done for them.
Though
Trump has been an enthusiastic enabler of Zionist colonialism—moving the US
embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights—and
though he absolutely shares the Israeli-neocon antipathy to Iran, the fear is that
he, like most Americans, doesn’t understand how the war in Syria fits into the
transcendentally virtuous and important unified imperialist-Zionist mission.
Trump sees his withdrawal ending Obama’s “Assad must go!” war, which he doesn’t
care much about. The neocons see it, more correctly, as a retreat in the larger
project that’s central to “our”—Israel and America’s (indistinguishable to them)—“national
security.”
The
fear is that fantastically self-absorbed Trump is too inclined to see Syria,
Iran, et. al.., as discrete counterparts with whom he can pull off some
transactional deals via his “great and unmatched” wisdom, and that he really
does have a strong instinct to avoid “ridiculous endless wars.”
Indeed,
the Israeli paper Haaretz proclaimed that “Netanyahu’s Iran Policy Has Collapsed” (his policy to “to bring down the
Iranian regime,” that is) because of Trump’s decisions not to attack Iran and
to withdraw from Syria, which “are warning signs to Israel, that it cannot
count on Netanyahu’s friend in the White House.” In other words, from the
perspective of Zionist warmongering, as another Israeli journalist says, "Trump has become unreliable for Israel."
I
say again: Before his Syrian withdrawal decision Trump forewent three golden
opportunities to attack Iran, including one in which he actually cancelled the military strike he had ordered with
“10 minutes to go,” “flabbergasting” and outraging his closest advisers and key
Republican allies. There has not been a presidential decision more radically anti-interventionist
and more blatantly in defiance of imperialist doctrine since JFK refused to provide
air support at the Bay of Pigs. Look where that got him.
And
I’ll say again: This, and only this, is why Trump is more vulnerable to
impeachment than parsing Ukrainegate and counting Republican senators might
lead one to believe. There are now powerful, permanent-state, supra-partisan
lobbies and interests who find him unacceptably unreliable, and who can change
votes with a snap. Wasn’t it amazing how Ambassador Sondland suddenly revised
his testimony? Watch what John Bolton does when his turn comes, which it will. He’s
the bellwether. He’s got the knife.
So
the neocon Borg went to work on Trump over Syria, led by James Jeffrey—the other John Bolton, who has worked
in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, but has stayed in the shadows
and stays on as Special Representative for Syria Engagement. Jeffery, who has “floated
the idea of a counter-Iran presence in Deir ez-Zor for some time now” and has
promised that “we will not leave Syria before we kick Iran out of Syria,,”
managed, with his colleagues, to “un-collapse” the US-Israel policy as much
as possible, using Trump’s childish ignorance to “sneak in a long-term U.S.
military presence in southeast Syria.”
Thus,
to be sure, Donald Trump’s “decision” to withdraw US troops from Syria turned
out not to do that at all.
The
war in Syria continues; we cannot say it has ended until and unless
every US soldier and piece of military hardware leave Syria. The residual
military presence that the neocons have persuaded Trump to keep in Syria continues
to deny the Syria government full control of its own sovereign territory and
maintains redoubts from which the rump US and proxy forces threaten the Syrian
government—economically for certain, and potentially militarily.
And
the war in which Syria is embedded—the ongoing state-destroying war
across the Middle East, aimed ultimately at Iran—certainly continues, with
Donald Trump enabling it, however fitfully. Any US forces that remain in Syria are also there to act
forcefully in the region-wide military conflict that will erupt if and when the
decision to pull the trigger on a military strike on Iran comes.
But
Trump’s sudden rearrangement of US forces in Syria has weakened the US
position in that country, both militarily and politically, which is why it was
so hated by staunch imperialists and Zionists—i.e., nearly every major US
politician and news media personality.
As
National Interest reporter Matthew Petti recognizes, for all the reasons
mentioned above, “the U.S. presence in southeastern Syria may not be
sustainable in the long run.” And, as a senior Pentagon and White House
official under Obama sums it up: “This is a sensitive gunpowder
barrel of a mission… U.S. forces are being sent with only the shakiest possible
legal authorization, knowing their commander-in-chief may change his mind as he
has multiple times in the past.”
Unsustainable,
but being sustained. The US remains as a kind of zombie aggressor in Syria—not
wanting to accept how badly it has been defeated (Even Robert Ford, an “architect of the Islamist
insurgency,” knows it!), and capable of doing enormous damage in refusing to accept
that.
How is it that Robert Ford, one of the architects of the Islamist insurgency in #Syria and a man who tirelessly campaigned for the Al-Qaeda tied Ahrar Al-Sham to replace the Assad government, is now being so realistic and actually talking sense? (Interview Oct 10, 2019) pic.twitter.com/0ZWrndjbWK
— Walid (@walid970721) November 6, 2019
So,
the neocons are restaging the US armed forces in a precarious “Fort Apache” from
which they can’t regime-change Syria but will continually threaten to. They are
not giving up on their program for the Middle East, but they do now have to
account for the fact that the US military in Syria is a rump force.
We
might see this as part of the welcome yet worrisome evolution in the balance of
forces in the world—in which the US is losing what seemed to be its uncontested
prerogative to use military force, while being tempted to reverse that process
with dramatic military action that re-asserts its absolute hegemony.
But,
for the moment, it’s also important to see and resist how US imperialism is adapting,
by shifting its focus to economic aggression, where it still holds key levers
of power. The most devastating attacks on independent countries like Syria,
Iran, and Venezuela come through the US’s control of international banking and
payments systems, which allows the US to mount an economic siege designed to
deprive people of the necessities of life. Even Human Rights Watch has denounced the US’s “maximum pressure” sanctions
against Iran as “pos[ing] a serious threat to the Iranian people’s right to
health and access to essential medicine.”
Regarding
Syria, a report from Ben Norton reveals the testimony of Dana Stroul, the Democratic
co-chair of the bipartisan Syria Study Group, Senior Professional Staff on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, and longtime permanent-state operative who’s spent
years formulating Middle East policy—another other, less conspicuous, John
Bolton.
Stroul
insists that “the conflict is not over; it’s entering a new phase.” That’s the
phase of “holding the line on diplomatic isolation, preventing embassies from
going back into Damascus,” intensifying the “economic sanctions architecture,”
and “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into
Syria.” She wants to revive an alliance with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF) by channeling all aid and “stabilization assistance” to it, while “keep[ing]
the rest of the country in ruins until it achieved its goal of regime change.”
All this will be accomplished by using US control of “the international
financial institutions and our cooperation with the Europeans.”
As
Norton says: “It is beyond debate that this approach will lead to massive
suffering, privation and even the deaths of masses of Syrians.”
That’s
true, and it’s also true that this project will not go as planned. It betrays
the same American hubris about the ability to fix and control outcomes that
succeeded so well in the Syria war as a whole, and which Robert Ford pegged in
the tweet above. In her fevered imperialist imagination, Stroul seems to think
that the US can start the same Syrian regime-change operation all over again
from the Deir Ezzor oilfields. Ain’t gonna happen. There is no possibility that
the SDF will overthrow the Syrian government. That could only happen at this
point via a direct attack by US forces against the Syrian Arab Army and its
Russian and Iranian allies—a walk in the proverbial park for which even Stroul reticently
acknowledges “there’s limited [!] appetite domestically.”
There
is another, and potentially very effective, tactic the US will use to continue
the war in which Syria is embedded, to maintain the pressure on Syria and ultimately
Iran, and to reinvigorate the US-Israeli-Saudi state-destroying project. That is
to infiltrate, co-opt, selectively finance, and eventually arm, favored sectors
of the mass movements that are now in the streets in Iraq and Lebanon.
In
both countries, masses of angry people have come into the streets with
absolutely legitimate grievances about the lack of jobs and services and about
rampant corruption and clientelism—exacerbated in Lebanon by the
"confessional" political system that is itself the product of Western
imperialism. In both countries, it is also absolutely the case that the US has
strong resources, and will try—no, is trying—to turn these movements
into "color revolutions" directed against Iran.
In
Lebanon, the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia (the main financial patron of the Hariri
family and the Sunni elite) are determined to destroy Hezbollah—because
Hezbollah is allied with Iran, because it has proved itself as an effective
fighting force against both jihadis in Syria and against the Israeli Army, and
because it has built great political legitimacy for itself in Lebanon across
sectarian lines. It will be impossible to sideline or break the power of
Hezbollah without igniting a new civil war.
And
that is exactly what the US/Israel/KSA are willing to do. Do not forget: For
them, chaos is preferable to tolerating any resistance to Zionism, US
imperialism, or Saudi control of Sunni Lebanon (and the greater Middle East).
A
truly progressive movement that can replace the confessional balancing system in
Lebanon with a fully secular, universal system must be built very carefully. It
needs to be done with the participation of all the social and religious groups,
and with the socio-economic needs of the working-class and poor Lebanese given
primacy. It needs to be done in a way that’s not beholden to Saudi or US purse-strings.
It needs to be done independent of paradigms being peddled by arrogant,
hypocritical US-embassy-NGO "humanitarians" and "democrats"
(neo-liberals and Zionists, every one). It’s very difficult to see how that can
happen. And it’s impossible—It’s civil war!—without Hezbollah.
It’s
even more difficult because it needs to be done under the explicit and imminent threat of attack from Israel, which is
absolutely determined—with the support of the US and at the risk of a “Middle East conflagration,” to enforce its own definition of
what Lebanon can be, which must exclude Hezbollah.
Lebanon
is historically and politically, as well as geographically, close to Syria.
They were formed out of the French Mandate after the First World War. Syria was
pulled into the Lebanese civil war from the 1970s to the 90s. Under any
circumstances, chaos in Lebanon would inevitably and seriously affect the
Syrian state.
Furthermore,
Hezbollah and Iran have been formidable allies in Syria’s fight over the last
eight years, and will continue to provide crucial support for Syria’s
territorial integrity and social reconstruction. They cannot be abandoned.
Syria cannot survive their destruction. Thus, the machinations of the US,
Israel, and KSA in Lebanon are potentially much more damaging to Syria than the
sale of Deir Ezzor oil.
Iraq
is a big and important neighbor of Syria. The social problems that are driving
angry young people into the streets now, and the government that has killed at least 100 of them are all products of the US
invasion, which destroyed Ba’athist socialism and privatized the economy,
creating a new class of corrupt elites. The US invasion also, as everyone knew
it would, increased the influence of Iraq’s large and powerful neighbor, Iran. After
all, the US claimed to be acting on behalf of Iraq’s Shiites, who had close
ties to Iran.
The
rise of Shiite militias in Iraq was also predictable, and they became crucial
both in resisting the US military presence and in the fight against ISIS. But
now the US is trying to turn popular discontent about the lack of jobs and
services into a revolt against “Iranian influence,” and will stoke any
sectarianism and chaos to achieve that. This also would be enormously damaging
to Syria.
So,
as he does not seem to, we must understand the impact of Trump’s see-sawing in
Syria in the context of the larger Israeli-American-Saudi project to break the increasing
political and military power of, and alliances among, Iranian-supported countries
and groups—a goal which, the neocons know, can only be achieved by breaking the
power of Iran itself. Trump’s “withdrawal” from Syria, half-assed as it turned
out to be, did weaken that project—and earned him a new level of bipartisan contempt
and mistrust that weakens him in the face of the impeachment assault.
But
the state-destroying project continues against Syria and any other recalcitrant
actor in the region, a project whose necessary requirement and ultimate goal is
destroying Iran. At this point, economic siege, financial sanctions, and the
hijacking of mass movements of popular discontent are emerging as weapons much
more dangerous than any oil revenue from Deir Ezzor.
In
the melee of punches thrown and missed, you gotta know where the deadly knives
are.
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Related articles: The Empire Steps Back: Trump Withdraws From Syria – Impeachment Now Possible; Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit
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Related articles: The Empire Steps Back: Trump Withdraws From Syria – Impeachment Now Possible; Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit
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