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    Margo - more on US withdrawal from Syria.. Archived Message

    Posted by David Macilwain on December 27, 2018, 8:37 am

    Following your post on this down the page, I looked to see where it was that Trump had gone in Iraq - Ayn al Asad airbase!
    What this says to me is that the whole "withdrawal from Syria" business was not just some tweet from Trump, but actually Plan B from the Pentagon. The NYT makes it all clear.
    I'll copy what I wrote in an email earlier, focused partly on the Australian presence in Iraq:

    An Iraqi political analyst and strategic expert, Ahmed al Sharifi says that the US withdrawal from Syria is a strategic manoeuvre, relocating troops to Iraq:

    "According to available data, [the] Americans are already expanding their base in Erbil. Part of the troops will be sent to the Ayn al-Asad Airbase, west of Anbar province between Baghdad and the Iraq-Syria border. In that way, the White House will be able to keep abreast of the developments in Syria. The legal rationale for this operation is a cooperation agreement between Baghdad and Washington. Moreover, the USA has a mandate from the UN, which it received [at] the beginning of the operation against the Daesh*", Ahmed al-Sharifi said.

    http://sputniknews.com/analysis/201812261070998585-usa-iraq-withdrawal-troops/

    It so happens that President Trump just visited the Ayn al Asad airbase, with the details described nicely by the NYT. I’ve highlighted the critical points in this deception, but copied most of the article for interest. It seems we can interpret the “Trump announces defeat of IS and withdrawal of troops from Syria on Twitter” as “fake news” – to which even Trump himself seems to be party. With all the fuss about leaving Syria, and drawing down in Afghanistan, most people haven’t noticed that nothing was said about staying in Iraq, where apparently at least some of the troops and most of the weaponry will be relocated.

    We might also ask whether Australia was party to this agreement and redeployment, given both Morrison’s “surprise” visit to Iraq only last week, as well as the supposed reason for our deployment against Syria “to prevent IS raids on Iraq from “uncontrolled space” across the border. This appears to be what the US envisions as its pretext for military action, though not of course the reason!

    That Trump “was supposed to” meet the Iraqi PM, but didn’t, also seems significant; not only has the new Iraqi leadership been engaging with Damascus, but the Iraqi army says it will now operate with the SAA in the real fight against IS, without US interference.



    http://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-iraq-troops-visit.html

    Dec 26 2018 by Annie Karni, Mark Landler and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

    President Trump visited American military forces on Wednesday in Iraq, making his first trip to troops stationed in a combat zone only days after announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from foreign wars in Syria and Afghanistan.

    The trip, shrouded in secrecy, came during a partial government shutdown and less than a week after Mr. Trump disrupted the military status quo and infuriated even some of his political allies by announcing plans to withdraw all troops from Syria and about half from Afghanistan. The president’s decision on Syria led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

    Speaking to troops at Al Asad Air Base, Mr. Trump defended his move in Syria.

    “We’re no longer the suckers, folks,” the president said. “Our presence in Syria was not open-ended and was never intended to be permanent. Eight years ago, we went there for three months and we never left.” (eight years? Is he talking about Robert Ford in Damascus?)

    Mr. Trump, who visited the air base with his wife, Melania, said he had rejected requests from military commanders to remain in Syria for another six months.

    “I said, ‘Nope.’ I gave you a lot of six months,” the president said. “And now we’re doing it a different way.”

    Mr. Trump told reporters that the United States might base American commandos on the border in Iraq to launch raids and other missions into Syria. Such a move would reflect one of the strategies proposed by the Pentagon after he announced his decision to withdraw troops from that country.

    ..............................

    But the United States still has 14,000 troops in Afghanistan and about 2,000 in Syria. While the number of casualties in these conflicts is a fraction of what it was during the two previous administrations, the fact that American troops are still on the ground — in the case of Afghanistan, 17 years after they were first deployed — attests to the difficulty of extracting the United States from these entanglements.

    Mr. Trump, who was also accompanied to Iraq by his national security adviser, John R. Bolton, and a small group of reporters, said that “the United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world.”

    “We are spread out all over the world,” the president said. “We are in countries most people haven’t even heard about. Frankly, it’s ridiculous.”

    Iraq is the one theater of war where Mr. Trump has not promised a rapid drawdown of forces — and it is where he claims his greatest military victory: the defeat of the Islamic State in Mosul, the Iraqi city where the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the beginning of its so-called caliphate. The assault on Mosul by Iraqi forces, backed by Americans, began under Mr. Obama but culminated in the summer of 2017 under Mr. Trump.

    Mr. Trump’s trip came at a moment of tension with some of his top military officials. Over the weekend, Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, accelerated his resignation, telling colleagues that he could not in good conscience carry out Mr. Trump’s newly declared policy of withdrawing American troops from Syria.

    The president’s announcements on Syria and Afghanistan have left a trail of confusion, with White House officials unable to explain the timetable for the withdrawals or a strategy to prevent a return of radical extremism in either country.

    Mr. Trump tried to dismiss those concerns while in Iraq, saying that “there will be a strong, deliberate and orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria” and that having troops in Iraq would “prevent over any potential reformation of ISIS.”

    “We can hit them so fast and so hard, they really won’t know what the hell happened,” he said. (he’s right of course, given that the US hasn’t been hitting them fast and hard before!)

    The president’s trip also came in the midst of a partial government shutdown, which does not affect active-duty military but had led Mr. Trump to cancel his holiday visit to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and remain sequestered in the White House. Mr. Trump, who had been scheduled to leave last Friday for a 16-day vacation in Palm Beach, Fla., instead has complained on Twitter in recent days that he is “all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security.”

    While he was in Iraq, Mr. Trump spoke on the phone with the country’s prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary.

    The two leaders had been scheduled to meet in person at the air base, but the meeting was canceled for security and logistical reasons, Ms. Sanders said. During the call, Mr. Trump invited the prime minister to visit the White House and the prime minister accepted, she said.

    A senior administration official said the trip to Iraq had been in the works for weeks. The White House had tried to keep Mr. Trump’s travel plans under wraps for security reasons, but hiding a president’s whereabouts can prove to be difficult.

    Falih Hassan contributed reporting.

    Perhaps this explains that of all the comment and opposition we have heard from various sources and government, Pompeo and Bolton have been notably absent. While the article says that the Pentagon came up with the option of relocating to Ayn al Asad base after Trump’s decision to withdraw, it’s fairly clear from this that the fallback plan was developed in the Pentagon much earlier – perhaps following the siege of Hajin.

    This relocation of US occupation and intrusion does however seem to improve the situation for the Syrian government and cooperation with the Kurds, even though the “SDF” are saying they will go on fighting the phantom IS presence, and presumably protect the Syrian oilfields until the last.

    all regards David.

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