President orders troops out of Syria
It's a total rewrite and cob job from my front page piece!
"Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’" by Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt | Dec. 19, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump has ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria, bringing a sudden end to a military campaign that largely vanquished the Islamic State but ceding a strategically vital country to Russia and Iran.
I know there are many people who say I am being hoodwinked; however, you must understand my position as a one issuer antiwar American. After 18 long years of endless wars and escalations, even the chimera of withdrawal and peace is welcome!
In overruling his generals and civilian advisers, Mr. Trump fulfilled his frequently expressed desire to bring home American forces from a messy foreign entanglement, but his decision, conveyed via Twitter on Wednesday, plunges the administration’s Middle East strategy into disarray, rattling allies like Britain and Israel and forsaking Syria’s ethnic Kurds, who have been faithful partners in fighting the Islamic State.
I'll get to the geopolitical ramifications later; the action itself is Kennedyesque if nothing else. The reason he did the tweet is it was the only way he could get away with it!
The abrupt, chaotic nature of the move — and the opposition it immediately provoked on Capitol Hill and beyond — raised questions about how Mr. Trump will follow through with the full withdrawal. Even after the president’s announcement, officials said, the Pentagon and State Department continued to try to talk him out of it.
“We have won against ISIS,” Mr. Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter, adding, “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.”
“We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they want it,” he said, pointing a finger skyward, referring to American troops who had been killed in battle.
He's gone rogue!
The White House did not provide a timetable or other specifics for the military departure. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. Defense Department officials said that Mr. Trump had ordered that the withdrawal be completed in 30 days.
The decision brought a storm of protest in Congress, even from Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had been “blindsided.” The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, suggested that the president had acted out of “personal or political objectives” rather than national security interests.
I'm aghast at Pelosi's reaction. Who cares what reason the wars are coming to and end and the troops coming home? She wants the wars to continue! The fact that Graham feels that way doesn't surprise me; he was once connected at the hip with John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
Like many of Mr. Trump’s most disruptive moves, the decision was jolting and yet predictable. For more than a year, and particularly since the Islamic State has been driven from most of its territory in Syria’s north, he has told advisers that he wanted to withdraw troops from the country.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national security officials argued that a withdrawal would, essentially, surrender Western influence in Syria to Russia and Iran.
The war is over. They won. Time to leave.
The Trump administration’s national security policy calls for challenging both countries, which are the chief benefactors of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and have provided him with years of financial and military support.
Abandoning the Kurdish allies, the officials argued, also would cripple future American efforts to gain the trust of local fighters for counterterrorism operations, including in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Now you know where the terrorist are coming from, and it's not the first time the Kurds have been betrayed by the United States government. Kissinger was the first to do it, and H.W. Bush kind of abandoned them before Clinton's CIA got run out of the area by Saddam Hussein.
It wasn't until W. Bush's invasion that the country was split up and Kurds gained power in Iraq. The Kurds should realize they are a tool of USrael to destabilize four crossroad countries (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran). More on deeper geopolitical motivations later.
The Russian Foreign Ministry welcomed the move, according to the TASS news agency, saying that a withdrawal created prospects for a political settlement in Syria’s civil war. It also said an initiative to form a Syrian constitutional committee would have a bright future once American troops were gone.
Most countries do.
While Mr. Trump has long cast American military involvement in Syria as narrowly focused on defeating the Islamic State, his generals and diplomats argue that the United States has broader, more complex interests there.
Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word.
Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington.
So despite all the political posturing and agenda-pushing pre$$ these last seven years, the regime change agenda was always the goal, huh?
The Pentagon said in a statement that it would “continue working with our partners and allies to defeat” the Islamic State wherever it operated.
They are now moving their paid mercenary proxies that pose as terrorists to Africa.
Mr. Trump’s decision contradicted what other top national security officials have said in recent weeks.
Two months ago, the national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States would not pull out of Syria as long as Iran was exerting influence there, either through its own troops or Iranian-backed militias.
He contradicted his warmongering, neocon PNAC national security adviser, huh?
Is it any wonder feel the way I do?
Last week, Mr. McGurk characterized the mission in Syria as one that sought the “enduring defeat” of the Islamic State. “We know that once the physical space is defeated, we can’t just pick up and leave,” he told reporters. “We want to stay on the ground and make sure that stability can be maintained in these areas.”
SIGH!
Military commanders fear that a hasty withdrawal will jeopardize the territorial gains against the Islamic State made by the United States and its coalition partners — essentially repeating what happened after Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, pulled troops from Iraq in 2011.
Only problem is, the Russians, Syrians, Turks, and Iranians didn't have a strong hand in those places then, and the Obama administration ended up working with Iranian militias to stabilize Iraq.
It's only one of many misguided analogies over the last week or so.
Mr. Graham, emerging from a lunch with Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican senators, called it “Iraq all over again.” He demanded to know why Congress was not notified of Mr. Trump’s decision.
“If Obama had done this,” Mr. Graham said, “we’d be going nuts right now: how weak, how dangerous.”
During the meeting, officials said Mr. Pence barely talked about the looming government shutdown, which he was ostensibly on Capitol Hill to discuss, because there was such strong pushback from lawmakers on Syria.
In a letter to Mr. Trump, Mr. Graham and five other senators, from both parties, implored him to reconsider his decision, warning that a withdrawal would embolden the remnants of the Islamic State, as well as the Assad government, Iran and Russia.
Congre$$ wants to fight Israel's wars, sob.
American allies were notably muted in their reactions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called it “of course, an American decision,” and said his government would study its implications, but analysts said the withdrawal would deal a blow to Israel’s efforts to curb Iranian influence in Syria.
“It’s a bad day for Israel,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Oh, yeah?
Then it was a GOOD DAY for the REST of the WORLD!!
Who or what is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy anyway?
(It's a Washington-DC-based think tank, founded by AIPAC, and part of the so-called pro-Israel Lobby. That's who my jew$paper turns to for expert analysis)
That was also where the print copy ended.
A statement released by the British government said that while the global coalition against the Islamic State had made progress, “we must not lose sight of the threat they pose.”
“Even without territory,” the statement said, the group “will remain a threat.”
For much of the day, the White House seemed paralyzed by Mr. Trump’s sudden move. By late Wednesday, it had yet to defend the consequences of the troop withdrawal, or explain what the American strategy in Syria will be once the American forces have left.
In a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official said that previous statements by Mr. Bolton and other senior officials that the United States would stay in Syria did not matter because, as president, Mr. Trump could do as he pleases.
“He gets to do that,” said the official, whom the White House said could speak only on grounds of anonymity. “That’s his prerogative.”
On constitutional grounds as commander-in-chief, God bless him.
The official referred all questions about how the withdrawal would proceed to the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, reporters asked officials for clarification, only to be told that there was none that could be given.
It was very much the image of a story spinning out of control, and a military taken by surprise by its commander in chief.
One Defense Department official suggested that Mr. Trump wanted to divert attention from his mounting legal troubles: the Russia investigation; the sentencing of his former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, in a hush money scandal to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with him; and his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who was harshly criticized by a federal judge for lying to investigators.
I'm going to keep quiet about the hu$h money and house of lies.
In a statement, Ms. Pelosi derided what she described as a “hasty announcement” and noted it was timed to the day after Mr. Flynn was in court for sentencing after admitting “he was a registered foreign agent for a country with clear interests in the Syrian conflict.”
So when do the AIPAC lobbyists have to register?
She was referring to Mr. Flynn’s lobbying efforts to expel a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has accused of plotting a failed 2016 coup.
Obama failed in Turkey where he succeeded in Ukraine.
“All Americans should be concerned,” Ms. Pelosi said.
Why?
Mueller wasn't. There was supposed to be a deal in place, and then they double crossed him.
Related:
Flynn sentencing postponed to allow for Russia probe cooperation
That front page pos was different from the printed WaComPo that was not found.
Also see:
Flynn associate arrested on illegal lobbying charges
He was rebuked by the judge, and I guess the ‘Lock her up!’ chant was bad karma.
Who ratted him out anyway?
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after a visit to the White House, where his farewell meeting with Mr. Trump was canceled, that he did not believe there was a way to persuade the president to reverse the withdrawal order.
“It’s obviously a political decision,” Mr. Corker said.
Not in the way they think, though. It's about not wanting to sacrifice the NATO alliance with Turkey on the altar of the stateless Kurds.
Not everybody faulted the president’s move.
Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria, said the United States could continue to strike terrorist targets from the air. The limited nature of the American ground presence, he said, would not force Iran out of the country, nor would it alter the battle between Mr. Assad and the remnants of the rebellion.
I don't want that, either.
Related: The Pentagon’s “Salvador Option”: The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria
Ford was in charge of them.
“The whole Syrian conflict is about Syrians’ relations with other Syrians,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Two thousand special operators and a dozen or two American diplomats can’t fix that.”
Please don't tell me the Middle East Institute is another corporate war lobby.
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I'm sure as the troops come out the mercenaries will go back in.
Looks like the Mad Dog got angry (because my front-page pos was the Washington ComPost version?):
"Mattis resigns over differences with Trump" by Paul Sonne, Josh Dawsey, Washington Post December 21, 2018
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned Thursday after a clash with President Trump over the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, saying in a parting letter that the president deserved someone atop the Pentagon who is ‘‘better aligned’’ with his views.
The retired Marine general’s surprise resignation came a day after Trump overruled his advisers, including Mattis, and shocked American allies by announcing the pullout. In the process, Trump declared victory over the Islamic State, even though the Pentagon and State Department for months have been saying the fight against the group in Syria is not over.
The discord caused Trump to lose a Cabinet official who won widespread praise at home and abroad but who experienced increasing differences with the commander in chief.
Long seen as a bulwark against Trump’s isolationist and more extreme impulses, Mattis served as a calm ‘‘reassurer-in-chief’’ as the president sent out startling and provocative tweets. Mattis’s departure adds new uncertainty about which course the administration might take on its global challenges.
Mattis pointed to some of his differences with Trump in a resignation letter he submitted to the White House on Thursday.
The defense secretary resigned during what one senior administration official described as a disagreement in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, in which Mattis sought to persuade the president to stand down on Syria but was rejected. Trump was later given a copy of the resignation letter and noted to aides that it was not positive toward him. By then, the president had shocked the Pentagon by filming a video on the White House lawn in which he claimed the Islamic State had been defeated and said US troops who had died in combat would be proud to see their fellow service members return home.
While the Syria announcement looked poised to score political points with the public, Mattis and other top advisers suspect that it will deliver a win to Russia, Iran, and Syrian leader Bashar Assad, while risking a resurgence of the Islamic State.
I don't care what is the reason, and he did!
Mattis also has argued against drawing down troops from Afghanistan, which Trump is leaning toward executing in the coming months, according to administration officials. Senior administration officials said late Thursday that Trump had ordered the military to come up with a plan to remove thousands of troops from the country, after a 17-year war, starting as early as January. The United States has about 14,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission.
It's the old one-two punch, and he still has one card to play (said he would meet with them).
The Pentagon released the resignation letter moments after Trump announced on Twitter that Mattis would be leaving, saying the already retired Marine would ‘‘retire.’’ Trump thanked him, but made no mention of his differences of opinion with Mattis.
In other words, he showed some class and grace?
During his nearly two years at the Pentagon, Mattis secured sizable increases in defense spending after years of budget caps and oversaw the development of a new strategy that orients the military toward competition with China and Russia and away from combating extremist insurgencies in the Middle East.
A staunch Russia hawk, Mattis bristled at the president’s conciliatory gestures toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and moves to undermine NATO, according to people close to him. Russia and China ‘‘want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model,’’ Mattis underscored in his resignation letter.
Moscow and Beijing were looking for ‘‘veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions,’’ he said, warning the president that the United States must ‘‘use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.’’
Like what we have now, sssshhh.
Lawmakers, ambassadors, and policy makers for two years have looked to Mattis as a source of stability in a chaotic administration. His sudden resignation on Thursday sent jitters through a Washington establishment already coping with a meltdown in the financial markets and a possible government shutdown.
Establishment = Deep State
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said she was ‘‘shaken’’ by the resignation and described it as ‘‘very serious for our country.’’
Yeah, I saw that.
Republicans were also dismayed by the decision.
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said it was ‘‘a sad day for America because Secretary Mattis was giving advice the president needs to hear.’’ Sasse said Mattis ‘‘rightly believes’’ that Russia and China are adversaries and described the isolationism that Trump sometimes promotes as a ‘‘weak strategy that will harm Americans and America’s allies.’’ Sasse added: ‘‘No, ISIS is not gone.’’
Known as the ‘‘Warrior Monk’’ from his days in uniform, Mattis developed a reputation as a cerebral thinker in the Marine Corps who liked to deliberate, read, and study all possibilities before making important decisions.
That style clashed with the most freewheeling presidential administration in the postwar era, most notably this week, when Trump decided to withdraw from Syria without first running the move through a regular policy process that would consider the options and ramifications.
Where it would have been blocked, and he is sick of that.
Mattis’s frustrations grew with the arrival of national security adviser John Bolton, who curbed decision-making meetings and interagency policy discussions that the defense secretary valued, according to people familiar with the matter.
Oh, he didn't like Bolton, huh?
Must have been a personality clash, because they both are arguing for the Jewi$h War Agenda.
The final rupture between the defense secretary and the president came after weeks of tensions over Trump’s broadsides against allies, his demands to withdraw from military entanglements in the Middle East and personnel decisions.
The defense secretary lost a crucial battle this month when the president disregarded his recommendation to make Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and instead chose Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley.
He's a Bo$ton boy and Trump watched the Army-Navy football game with him.
So Mattis wanted Goldfein and Trump went with Milley, huh?
The person close to Mattis said that choice was particularly offensive to the defense secretary.
Oh, so it was Mattis who threw the tantrum, not Trump!
‘‘It’s the one major selection the secretary of defense usually gets,’’ the person said.
That's where my print copy ended.
It wasn’t the first time Mattis was overruled. The president announced the creation of a Space Force as a separate branch of the military, even though Mattis had opposed the idea. Trump forced his defense secretary to scramble after announcing a ban on transgender individuals from serving in the military by tweet last year. Trump also foisted other initiatives on Mattis that the defense secretary didn’t see as particularly important, from a deployment to the US border with Mexico to a military parade that failed to materialize.
The Space Force sent Mattis into orbit, and the Globe hates a parade.
Mattis expressed skepticism over the prospects of nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea and bristled at the president’s decision to suspend certain military exercises with South Korea as a good-will gesture. Trump told advisers that he trusted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has led the North Korea negotiations, more than he trusted Mattis.
Now we know who was dragging his heels on North Korea, and I wonder what Tillerson would have done.
Several possible replacements for Mattis this week decried the president’s decision to pull out of Syria, and the Senate may prove unwilling to confirm a replacement who would execute such a withdrawal. Retired Army General Jack Keane called the move a ‘‘strategic mistake’’ on Twitter. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas signed a letter demanding that Trump reconsider, warning that the withdrawal bolsters Iran and Russia.
In the weeks leading up to Mattis’s dismissal, Trump publicly called the defense secretary ‘‘sort of a Democrat’’ and began referring to him as ‘‘Moderate Dog.’’ He had once hailed Mattis by his nickname “Mad Dog,’’ the secretary earned in battle.....
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Related:
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, will leave White House by end of year
The job has being taken over by Mulvaney because the military is insubordinate:
"Pentagon considers using Special Operations forces to continue mission in Syria" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt New York Times December 22, 2018
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is considering using small teams of Special Operations forces to strike the Islamic State group in Syria, one option for continuing a US military mission there despite President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw troops from the country.
The US commandos would be shifted to neighboring Iraq, where an estimated 5,000 U.S. forces are already deployed, and “surge” into Syria for specific raids, according to two military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Has anyone asked Iraq if they want them?
The strike teams are one of several options — including continued airstrikes and resupplying allied Kurdish fighters with arms and equipment — in a new strategy for Syria that the Pentagon is developing as officials follow the order Trump gave Wednesday for a military drawdown even as it tries to maintain pressure on the Islamic State.
Trump would have to sign off on all that, right?
The Pentagon will deliver the options to Trump for approval within weeks — well before Defense Secretary Jim Mattis steps down at the end of February. Mattis resigned Thursday, in part because of Trump’s decision to overrule his senior advisers and withdraw troops from Syria.
Officials at the Pentagon said the plans sought to maintain US support for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia of Arab and Kurdish soldiers who have proved to be the most successful ground fighters against the Islamic State, but the local forces and their Western allies continue to be tested around the town of Hajin in eastern Syria, where the Islamic State is holding on to a last slice of territory.
Not anymore.
See: Syrian Kurdish-led fighters take Hajin, last town held by Islamic State
Though Trump has boasted about the Islamic State’s defeat, the militant group has for months endured airstrikes and offensives by the US-backed Syrian fighters — and has even conducted deadly counterattacks into Hajin’s surrounding districts.
Under the cover of a sandstorm in October, the Islamic State nearly overran a US Special Forces team and a group of Marines outside of Hajin, wounding two US troops, a third military official said.
The group tried the same tactic again in November, waiting for a sandstorm to mask its movements, and nearly captured Gharanij, a nearby town.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the Trump administration’s progress against the Islamic State “extraordinary.”
“We’ve made the caliphate in Syria go away,” Pompeo told National Public Radio on Friday. “And we’re very proud of that,” he said.
Pompeo also spoke Friday with President Barham Salih of Iraq about continued efforts to fight the Islamic State, said Robert Palladino, a State Department spokesman.
Two military officials said that the US Central Command was planning to position a force across the border in Iraq that can return to Syria for specific missions when critical threats arise.
Derek Chollet, a former assistant defense secretary in the Obama administration, said the Pentagon could “rename these guys, and call them a counterterrorism force.”
I'm sick of the semantics as well as the violation of other nations' sovereignty.
The Pentagon did not comment Friday about the options. In an earlier statement, Dana W. White, the Defense Department spokeswoman, said the US military “will continue working with our partners and allies to defeat ISIS wherever it operates.”
“The campaign against ISIS is not over,” White said in the statement, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group.
And never will be since the USA is ISIS.
In 2014, when the United States began launching airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State controlled an area across the two countries that roughly amounted to the size of Britain. US Special Operations forces were deployed to Syria in October 2015.
By last month, the Islamic State’s territory was reduced to the small pocket around Hajin — about 1 percent of the ground it used to control.
Last week, the Syrian Democratic Forces retook the center of Hajin, forcing the militants to fall back to the town’s outskirts, but the Islamic State’s remaining hold on roughly 20 miles of territory has forced Defense Department officials to cull options for keeping what is left of the international campaign against the extremists from falling apart.
That will include weighing whether US airstrikes can remain effective without US targeting guidance from the ground, and whether they would defend Kurdish forces only from the Islamic State — and not other militants.
Officials are also discussing whether the Kurdish-led force can fight without the weapons, ammunition, and other supplies that will end once the US military leaves. Even allowing the Syrian Kurds to keep guns and heavy weapons provided by the United States would break the Pentagon’s 2017 pledge that the arms would be reclaimed once combat ended.
The decisions are being prepared over the year-end holidays and will be made in the coming weeks, officials said.
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Related: For elite US troops, a never-ending war
All of a sudden it is a big concern, but “on the flip side, what’s the alternative? It's the future of warfare.”
Anybody feel a draft?
"US envoy to coalition fighting ISIS resigns in protest of Trump’s Syria decision" by John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima Washington Post December 22, 2018
WASHINGTON — Brett McGurk, the US envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, has resigned in protest of President Trump’s decision to abruptly withdraw US troops from Syria.
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
His resignation, confirmed by a State Department official familiar with the matter, comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s announced departure earlier last week over differences with the White House over foreign policy. Mattis said he would stay on until February to ensure a smooth transition.
Both Mattis and McGurk objected to what they saw as shortsighted decision and a breach of faith with US allies including the Syrian Kurds, who fought alongside US forces in Syria and now face a dangerous and uncertain future.
For Trump, the long-serving government officials are the first high-profile departures in protest of his policy decisions.
The resignations send a negative signal to foreign partners whose support is crucial to containing Islamic State forces, said experts and former officials.
Earlier this month, McGurk said that the Islamic State was far from defeated despite its loss of territory. ‘‘Nobody working on these issues day to day is complacent. Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished,’’ McGurk said at a State Department briefing. ‘‘Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign.’’
McGurk, who was appointed to the job in 2015 by Barack Obama and retained by Trump, had long maintained that the US mission in Syria should retain a disciplined focus on countering the Islamic State rather than wider regional ambitions such as the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said diplomats who worked with him over the years.
In theory, his preference for a modest US role was aligned with Trump’s view, but McGurk disagreed with the president’s assessment that the threat posed by Islamic State had been eliminated.
In recent months, McGurk’s preference for a limited US mission was overruled by other Trump advisers, in particular, national security adviser John Bolton, who vowed in September that the United States now had a new goal in Syria aimed at countering Iran’s influence. ‘‘We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,’’ he told reporters at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
I guess he was not speaking for the president.
However, Trump this week ordered the withdrawal of all 2,000 or so US troops from Syria and declared the Islamic State defeated. The move blindsided senior officials and ran counter to his own top aides’ advice, including that of Mattis.
‘‘With the departures of folks like Secretary Mattis and Brett McGurk, you see indications that the experts felt so cut out of the process and so appalled by the decision that they simply couldn’t implement whatever the president’s vision is in a way that they could stomach, and so they chose to get out instead — in Brett’s case sooner than anticipated,’’ said Joshua Geltzer, who was White House counterterrorism senior director under Obama and is now a visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
The United States began airstrikes in 2014 against Islamic State strongholds in Syria, a country riven by civil war since 2011. US ground troops entered the country in 2015 to provide support to local forces fighting the militant group.
That's right, the troops illegally entered Syria under the Obama regime.
In addition to the Kurds, McGurk also valued US partnerships with the British and the French, opposing a rapid withdrawal that left America’s commitment to those partners in limbo, said one diplomat, who was not authorized to speak about US personnel.
At the time, Bolton and the new US special representative for Syria, Jim Jeffrey, said the president was committed to a mission in Syria that kept US forces there to ensure that the Islamic State doesn’t reemerge, but were never able to cite any memos or meetings in which the president expressed this view.
Because he never wanted to, was talked into continuing the wars, and then lost the House.
McGurk, who negotiated the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq for Obama, sought ways to forge alliances in a region rife with sectarian and other rivalries. He was, for instance, the driving force behind the creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces as a Kurdish-led force that also included Arabs — a move that he hoped would assuage Turkish concerns. The Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, is closely affiliated with the PKK, which is regarded as a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States.
The move, though, never fully satisfied any of the parties, and with the pending US withdrawal from Syria, Turkey has sent signals it will move against the Kurds.
That is where my print copy ended.
Nonetheless it was his tenacity and his personal touch in building relationships that served the counter-ISIS effort well, colleagues said. He met face-to-face with Kurdish and Arab leaders of the SDF, and was a constant presence in Baghdad and Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, becoming the most recognizable American official in the country at a time when an Islamic State blitz threatened both capitals.
‘‘At the end of the day he was focused on defeating ISIS,’’ said one former official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. ‘‘All of his engagements make this [Syria decision] untenable because there’s a betrayal to foreign partners.’’
Then mission accomplished!
As for betraying foreign partners, is it worth fracturing NATO for them?
McGurk’s departure in protest of the president’s Syria decision likely will complicate the counter-ISIS effort, said former officials.
‘‘Anybody coming into this role will have a very difficult time being credible with our foreign partners,’’ said Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents Obama and Trump. ‘‘Obviously our diplomats are only as credible as the willingness of their country to live up to their commitments, and that has been undermined significantly in this case.’’
Yeah, right. Trump lives up to his campaign promises and he's undermining the country.
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"Trump, angry over Mattis’s rebuke, removes him 2 months early" by Helene Cooper and Katie Rogers December 23, 2018
WASHINGTON — Less than two hours after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis went to the White House on Thursday to hand a resignation letter to President Trump, the president stood in the Oval Office and dictated a glowing tweet announcing that Mattis was retiring “with distinction” at the end of February, but Trump had not read the letter.
I'm told he doesn't read.
As became apparent to the president only after days of news coverage, a senior administration official said, Mattis had issued a stinging rebuke of Trump over his neglect of allies and tolerance of authoritarians. The president grew increasingly angry as he watched a parade of defense analysts go on television to extol Mattis’s bravery, another aide said, until he decided Sunday that he had had enough.
In a tweet later that morning, the president announced he was removing Mattis from his post by Jan. 1, two months before the defense secretary had planned to depart. Trump said that Patrick M. Shanahan, Mattis’s deputy and a former Boeing executive, would serve as the acting defense secretary, praising him as “very talented” and adding that “he will be great!”
Trump’s sudden announcement that he was firing a man who had already quit was the exclamation point to a tumultuous week at the Pentagon, where officials have been reeling from day after day of presidential tweets announcing changes in US military policy.
Mattis had wanted to stay through a NATO defense ministers meeting scheduled for February, hoping to enshrine recent moves by the alliance to bulk up its security compact as a bulwark against Russia, but his resignation letter did him no favors on that count: It had become hard to envision how he could continue for two months to represent a president whose own views toward Russia are far more benign.
As it became clear that the two men’s ideas of how to treat both friends and adversaries were so publicly at odds, the White House decided there would be no reason for Mattis to stay during what two officials called his “lame duck” period.
Officials in allied nations, who had already expressed unease over Mattis’ resignation, voiced exasperation over his hastened departure. “And now Trump gets rid of SecDef Mattis almost immediately,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, wrote on Twitter. “No smooth transition. No effort at reassurance to allies. Just vindictive.”
Even as he accelerated Mattis’s exit, Trump seemed to suggest a slower one for the 2,000 troops in Syria — a drawdown he announced last week over Mattis’s objection. On Twitter, Trump said that he had spoken with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey that morning to discuss “the slow and highly coordinated pullout of US troops from the area.”
The New York Times makes it sound like he is already backtracking.
Just days ago, Trump declared victory over the Islamic State group and said that troops would be pulled out immediately. “They’re all coming back,” Trump said in a video broadcast Wednesday, “and they’re coming back now.”
On Sunday, a senior administration official would not say what that ultimately meant for the timetable for troops in Syria but said the president had reiterated to Erdogan that the United States would remain there long enough to ensure an orderly handover and “help out logistically” to eradicate any territory still held by the Islamic State group.
The official spoke amid reports that Turkey was moving troops near a town in northern Syria held by Kurdish allies of the United States, even though Turkey had said it would put off a promised offensive after Trump’s hasty decision to leave Syria.
That is all part of this. It's either take the side of the weaker, stateless, Kurds and risk fracturing NATO while turning a key crossroads country against us or work with regional powers to settle the situation.
Mattis resigned Thursday in large part over that pullout order. The defense secretary was also upset about Trump’s decision to bring home half of the 14,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan and his order to deploy US troops to the border with Mexico.
Trump's gift came in two parts!
The president has grown increasingly angry as commentators have described Mattis in near heroic terms for standing up to Trump,
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and John Bolton, the president’s third national security adviser, are left to direct policy while the president considers a long-term replacement for Mattis.
Oh, yeah?
Looks to me like Trump is doing his own thing, and he's the decider!
In a call with reporters, a White House official framed Shanahan’s tenure as one that could keep daily operations stable in the interim.
Brett H. McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State group, is also stepping down over Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria, telling colleagues this weekend that he could not in good conscience carry out Trump’s new policy.
McGurk, a seasoned diplomat who was considered by many to be the glue holding together the sprawling international coalition fighting the terrorist group, was supposed to retire in February, but according to an email he sent to his staff, he decided to move his departure forward to Dec. 31 after Trump did not heed his own commanders and blindsided America’s allies in the region by abruptly ordering the pullout.
He certainly got me to open my eyes wide!
Shanahan, who, like Mattis, is from Washington state, was at Boeing for 30 years, in a number of jobs including general manager of the 787 Dreamliner and senior vice president of supply chain and operations. Aides say that Trump likes him in part because he often tells the president that he is correct to complain about the expense of defense systems.
He's a yes man?
“Patrick has a long list of accomplishments while serving as Deputy, & previously Boeing,” Trump tweeted.
At the Defense Department last year, Shanahan scuttled a pledge to destroy the military’s existing stockpile of cluster munitions, allowing the military to once again arm itself with a type of weapon that has been banned by 102 countries largely because of concerns that they disproportionately harm civilians.
Kids pick up the duds and ones that didn't explode because they look like colorful toys, and then the things explode.
Asked about the decision at a conference in October, Shanahan attributed the move to what he said was the threat posed by North Korea.
PFFFFT!
On Sunday, in N’Djamena, Chad, President Emmanuel Macron of France criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, saying that “an ally must be reliable.” French forces are part of a coalition led by the United States aimed at destroying the Islamic State group, but it is unclear what will happen to the coalition now.
Where is your European army, monsieur?
Macron also praised Mattis, seeming to contrast him to Trump. “I want here to pay tribute to General Mattis,” Macron said. “For a year we have seen how he was a reliable partner.”
Looks at that groveling toady! Maybe he should be more worried about the Yellow Vests in France.
--more--"
"‘Sails clipped,’ Pentagon heads into uncharted waters" by Paul Sonne and Missy Ryan Washington Post December 24, 2018
WASHINGTON — An unspoken mantra has guided how senior military officials have navigated the Trump era: ‘‘Keep your head down.’’
Faced with an impulsive president who has upended bedrock alliances and delivered policy bombshells by tweet, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other Pentagon leaders have responded by confining themselves to executing orders, rebuilding military strength, and trying to shelter their institution from the upheaval and drama.
For nearly two years, the approach produced dividends. The Pentagon strengthened the war effort in Afghanistan, winning an increase in troops against President Trump’s initial instincts. The fight against the Islamic State continued apace in Syria and Iraq, and the military won extra leeway to make decisions on the battlefield. Funding from Congress, long crimped by budget caps, began flowing anew.
He should have followed his instincts.
Last week, much of that came crumbling down, opening a period of uncertainty about how and when Trump will choose to employ force.
Hopefully never.
Against the advice of his generals, the president ordered an immediate withdrawal from Syria. Military and civilian leaders from across the government had spent months making the case for continued involvement, as partner forces struggled to fully extinguish the Islamic State.
In the same meeting in which Trump issued his order on Syria, he decided to remove nearly half of the US troops in Afghanistan. General Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wasn’t even there, according to people familiar with the situation.
Two days later, Mattis had tendered his resignation, citing irreconcilable differences between Trump’s worldview and his own.
Peter Feaver, an expert on civilian-military relations at Duke University, said any president would have struggled to win over the Pentagon after years of budget cuts and what military officials had seen as micromanagement under President Obama.
‘‘Then you had Trump, who brought in a whole other dynamic of friction-generating behavior,’’ Feaver said.
He's thrown billions at them.
Some of it has been about style. For many senior officers brought up in an organization that stresses discipline and honor, it has been jarring to see a commander in chief insulting allied leaders or wading into personal feuds.
Aren't they supposed to follow orders and not care about personality?
It has also been about substance.
Oh.
But not primarily, huh?
Current Pentagon leaders rose through the ranks in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, when NATO nations sent thousands of troops to fight alongside the United States. Trump, meanwhile, voiced doubts about the value of the alliance, threatened to abandon the partnership with South Korea and questioned whether the military should stay in the Middle East.
For a while, Mattis was able to reconcile his own internationalism with Trump’s ‘‘America First’’ beliefs. As the president endorsed the Pentagon’s shift toward Russia and China and filled military coffers, Mattis likened the president’s worldview to traveling on a plane and putting on your oxygen mask before helping others, several people recounted.
Defense officials have also grappled with a lack of predictable decision-making. They have repeatedly been blindsided by the president’s Twitter pronouncements: ending military aid to Pakistan, banning transgender troops, creating a Space Force.
Most worrisome for some military leaders, however, is the fear that their tradition of partisan neutrality - fundamental to maintaining public support - could be under threat.
Look at that. Trump threatens the war machine!
That was where my print copy ended.
As the Pentagon prepared to strike Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military in 2017 in response to his chemical weapons use, Trump began asking, ‘‘Who is my military guy who is going to sell this on the Sunday shows?’’ according to a person familiar with the discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. When Mattis and other Pentagon leaders demurred, then-national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster appeared on ‘‘Fox News Sunday.’’ He wore a suit instead of his Army uniform.
Well, it is a civilian position.
Btw, Trump's one-offs over the Syrian lies is like throwing red meat to appease the neocon war crowd.
When Trump pulled the military into other politically divisive initiatives, including plans for a massive military parade and the deployment of active duty troops to the southern U.S. border ahead of the midterm elections, Pentagon officials got in line despite their private reservations.
If they hadn't, it would have been treason.
Asked about the border mission, Dunford said he was duty-bound to execute any lawful order, no matter his personal beliefs.
‘‘The American people would not want generals to be making policy decisions and wouldn’t want generals to determine when we should use force,’’ Dunford said at a Washington Post event this month. ‘‘I think it would be problematic were generals to start to make decisions based on one political party or another being in office and say, ‘No I don’t really like that so I’m not going to do that.’ ‘‘
Unlike the officials over at the DoJ.
Crystallizing the view of many uniformed leaders, Dunford said he would be unlikely to resign out of principle. ‘‘My code tells me that lance corporals and (privates) and seamen can’t resign when they’re told what to do,’’ he said.
Kori Schake, deputy director general of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and co-editor of a book with Mattis, said research shows that, despite such efforts, public attitudes about the military are growing more politicized.
Who are what is the International Institute of Strategic Studies?
‘‘The president is rapidly corroding the norms of civil-military relations that create the public respect for our military,’’ Schake said.
Those are fighting words to this president!
--more--"
Meanwhile, over in Syria:
"Turkey masses troops near Kurdish-held Syrian town" by Sarah El Deeb and Zeynep Bilginsoy Associated Press December 24, 2018
BEIRUT — Turkey is massing troops near a town in northern Syria held by a US-backed and Kurdish-led force, a war monitor said as Turkish media reported Sunday new reinforcements crossing the borders.
The Turkish buildup comes even though Turkey said it would delay a promised offensive in eastern Syria following President Trump’s decision this week to withdraw US troops.
Trump tweeted on Sunday that he had a ‘‘long and productive’’ call with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which they discussed ‘‘the slow & highly coordinated’’ pullout of US troops from the area. This is the two leaders’ second phone conversation in 10 days. US military officials are scrambling to come up with a schedule for the withdrawal of an estimated 2,000 troops.
Dragging their feet, are they?
A statement from the Turkish presidency said the two leaders agreed to coordinate militarily and diplomatically to ensure the US pullout from Syria does not lead to an ‘‘authority vacuum.’’
Trump’s decision, announced last week after a call with Erdogan, surprised his allies and own experts, sparking the resignation of two of his top aides. He had asked for an immediate withdrawal, but experts convinced him that they needed time to work out a timetable.
The Turkish IHA news agency reported that a convoy of Turkish troops — a commando unit — had been sent into Syria overnight.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the reinforcements were sent to the front line with Manbij, where US troops have been based. The Observatory said 50 vehicles crossed into Syria — carrying troops and equipment.
A Turkish military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government protocol, said the military reinforcements were dispatched to the areas administered by Turkey in northern Syria, without elaborating.
The spokesman for the Kurdish-led Manbij Military Council, Sharfan Darwish, said Turkish reinforcements have arrived in the area. ‘‘We are taking necessary measures to defend ourselves if we are attacked,’’ he said without elaborating.
US troops based around Manbij patrolled the town and surrounding area on Sunday and were photographed speaking with the residents.
Turkey has welcomed Trump’s decision. Ankara views the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as an extension of the insurgency within its borders. Erdogan has vowed to dislodge the Kurdish fighters from along its border with Syria.
The United States has since 2014 partnered with the Syrian Kurdish militia to drive out the Islamic State group, a partnership that soured relations between Ankara and Washington.
So did Obama's attempted coup of Erdogan.
Allaying some of Turkey’s fears was a deal reached in June over Manbij. According to the deal, the Kurdish militia would withdraw from Manbij and US and Turkish troops would patrol the area as a new administration for the mixed Arab-Kurdish town is elected, but Ankara says that the United States and the Kurds didn’t live up to their end of the deal and that it would start an offensive in eastern Syria to drive out the militia. Turkey already has troops in northwestern Syria and has backed Syrian fighters there to clear towns and villages of Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters.
We never do!
After Trump’s decision, Erdogan said he would delay the eastern Syria offensive and would work on plans to clear out the Islamic State from the region.
A spokesman for the Turkey-backed Syrian opposition fighting group said the continued Turkish and allied forces buildup is to prevent Syrian government troops from taking advantage of the tension in the area to seize territory.
Youssef Hammoud, spokesman for the Syrian opposition fighters, accused the Kurdish militia of reaching out to the Syrian government to replace US troops if they withdraw.
Sounds good to me. It's their country!
Darwish dismissed the claims as ‘‘untrue,’’ calling them ‘‘old accusations’’ from the rival Syrian groups.
That is where my print copy ended it.
Also Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he ‘‘deeply regrets’’ Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of Syria and warned it could have dangerous consequences.
So when is the false flag attack to make him look bad and once again advance the war agenda?
Macron showered praise on US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who quit after Trump’s unexpected move. ‘‘An ally should be reliable, coordinate with other allies. Mattis understood this,’’ Macron said during a trip to Chad.
I think he just blew the bromance with Trump, and what is he doing in Chad when his people are in the streets of Paris?
Macron said that the troop withdrawal endangers Kurdish fighters, who were instrumental in the US-led coalition’s fight against Islamic State militants.
‘‘We should not forget . . . what we owe to those who died on the ground fighting terrorism,’’ he said, referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces. ‘‘The SDF is fighting against the terrorism that fomented attacks against Paris and elsewhere . . . I call on everyone not to forget what they have done.’’
Macron did not say what France’s military will do next in Syria. Kurdish officials met with a French presidential adviser Friday, and one asked France to play a larger role in Syria following the American withdrawal.
How much is that going to cost French taxpayers?
Is this why they raised taxes, cut benefits, and are seeking to scale back hard-won workers' rights ?
--more--"
"Turkey-backed Syrian fighters prepare to replace US forces" by Sarah El Deeb Associated Press December 25, 2018
BEIRUT — Turkish-backed Syrian fighters said Monday that they are preparing to move into eastern Syria alongside Turkish troops once American forces withdraw and that they are already massing on the front line of a town held by Kurdish-led forces.
It won't be taking that long if Turkish troops are already massing on the border.
The US pullout will leave the oil-rich eastern third of Syria, currently controlled by Kurdish-led forces that the Americans have backed over the past four years, up for grabs with multiple parties seeking to move in.
A Syrian Kurdish official said the Kurdish militia is now reaching out for potential new allies following the US withdrawal, underscoring the dire situation the group now finds itself in.
‘‘We will deal with whoever can protect the . . . stability of this country,’’ said Ilham Ahmed.
The Kurdish militia partnered with the US-led coalition since 2014 to fight Islamic State militants. Now, they are left to face a triple threat from Turkey, the Syrian government, and the Islamic State. Turkey views the Kurdish fighters as terrorists because of their links to a Kurdish insurgent group inside Turkey.
The poor, abandoned Kurds.
Ahmed said her group is talking with the Russians and the Syrian government — both rivals of the United States — as well as European countries about ways to deal with the US withdrawal. She didn’t elaborate.
The Kurds now face the dilemma of whether to try to hold on to the 30 percent of Syria they wrested from militants. The territory includes some of the richest oil fields in north and east Syria but also is home to large Arab populations.
The Kurds could pull back to the Kurdish-majority region in the far northeast but that would leave resources and Kurdish-majority pockets in the east isolated and vulnerable.
They may have no choice.
The militia could also negotiate with Damascus, allowing a return of government forces back into the east in hopes of gaining a level of self-rule for Kurds. The government has so far rejected the notion of such autonomy.
I like the idea! A political settlement!
Syrian government forces have reportedly been massing troops in Deir el-Zour province, across the Euphrates River from Kurdish-held territory.
On Monday, Iraq said it could consider deploying troops inside Syria to protect Iraq from threats across its borders. Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said his government is ‘‘considering all the options.’’
One could consider that an invasion, no?
President Trump has said the withdrawal from Syria will be slow and coordinated with Turkey, without providing a timetable. Turkey said the two countries will ensure there is no ‘‘authority vacuum’’ once the US troops leave.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Commander Sean Robertson, said the execute order for withdrawal has been signed but provided no further details.
Turkish Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said a US military delegation is expected in Turkey this week.
Turkey says it and its Syrian Arab allies can replace the United States in preventing a resurgence of the Islamic State group.
Kalin said there will be no ‘‘step back, weakness, halting or a slowing down’’ of the fight against the Islamic State, but Turkey has made it clear it will not tolerate a contiguous Kurdish-held enclave along its border with Syria.
Turkey-backed Syria opposition groups said they have up to 15,000 trained fighters ready to deploy, alongside Turkish forces, in eastern Syria to replace US troops.
Staying would have required a war against them?
Would it have been worth bit?
Youssef Hammoud, spokesman for the Turkey-backed Syrian opposition forces, said their fighters and weapons have been deploying on the front line near Manbij, a Kurdish-administered town in northern Syria where US troops are based. They are preparing to first take Manbij, he said.
Manbij was at the center of an agreement the United States and Turkey reached in June under which Kurdish forces were to withdraw. In recent weeks Turkey said the United States was dragging its feet in implementing the deal and vowed to launch a new offensive against the Kurds.
Those threats and a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week appear to have triggered Trump’s decision to withdraw all 2,000 US forces based in Syria.
As if, and that is what happened.
You want a war with Turkey and the fracturing of NATO?
Hammoud said there is ‘‘no alternative’’ to Turkish forces and their allies replacing U.S troops.
‘‘We are ready to fight Daesh,’’ said Hammoud, using the Arabic acronym for IS. The extremists are largely confined to a remote desert enclave hundreds of miles to the southeast of Manbij.
Kurdish forces in Manbij ‘‘have taken measures to fend off any attack,’’ said the spokesman for the Kurdish-led Manbij Military Council, Sharfan Darwish.
Turkey’s armed forces have led two offensives into Syria since 2016 to push Islamic State militants and Kurdish forces back from the border.
Trump has claimed to have defeated IS, but the Kurdish fighters are still battling the extremists in the remote town of Hajin near the Iraqi border. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighting displaced nearly 1,000 civilians on Sunday alone.
Ahmed, the senior Syrian Kurdish official, had just returned from a trip to France in which she called on Paris to play a larger role in Syria following the U.S. withdrawal.
‘‘I urge Trump to go back on his decision inciting Erdogan against the Syrian people in general and the Kurdish people in specific and I call on him to return the favor,’’ she said. Hundreds of Kurdish fighters died in the fight against IS.
I urge him to not.
--more--"
And look who decided to pick up the slack as we all celebrated Christmas:
"Report: Israeli attack near Syrian capital wounds 3 soldiers" by Bassem Mroue Associated Press December 26, 2018
BEIRUT — Israeli warplanes flying over Lebanon fired missiles toward areas near the Syrian capital of Damascus late Tuesday, hitting an arms depot and wounding three soldiers, Syrian state media reported, saying that most of the missiles were shot down by air defense units.
So they violated Lebanese airspace to illegally attack Syria, great!
The TV, quoting an unnamed military official, identified the warplanes as Israeli. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency earlier reported that Israeli warplanes were flying at low altitude over parts of southern Lebanon.
So they couldn't be detected by radar!
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said Israeli airstrikes targeted three positions south of Damascus that are arms depots for Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group and Iranian forces.
The reported attack near Damascus is the first since US President Trump announced last week that the United States will withdraw all of its 2,000 forces in Syria, a move that will leave control of the oil-rich eastern third of Syria up for grabs.
I wonder if the Israelis coordinated it with him.
Following Trump’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel would ‘‘continue to act against Iran’s attempts to entrench itself militarily in Syria, and to the extent necessary, we will even expand our actions there.’’
Just leave the United States out of this one, 'kay?
Nearly an hour after the attacks began, Damascus residents could still hear the air defense units firing toward targets in the air.
‘‘The aggression is still ongoing,’’ said a presenter on state TV, which interrupted its programs to air patriotic songs.
Later the TV quoted an unnamed military official as saying that Syrian air defenses ‘‘shot down most of the missiles before reaching their targets and the aggression damaged an arms depot and wounded three soldiers.’’ It added that the Israeli warplanes fired the missiles from Lebanese airspace.
Israel’s military spokesman’s unit did not confirm the raids, but said in a statement that ‘‘an aerial defense system was activated against an anti-aircraft missile launched from Syria.’’ No damage or injuries were reported by the Israeli military.
Israel is widely believed to have been behind a series of airstrikes in the past that mainly targeted Iranian and Hezbollah forces fighting alongside the government in Syria. Tuesday’s attack is the first since a missile assault on the southern outskirts of Damascus on Nov. 29.
Russia announced it had delivered the S-300 air defense system to Syria in October.
Has it been deployed yet?
In eastern Syria, Turkey-backed opposition fighters have been moving to the outskirts of Manbij, and the Turkish army continued to dispatch tanks, artillery, and other equipment to the border and an area administered by Turkey in northern Syria, Turkish media reported.
Turkey said it’s working with the United States to coordinate the withdrawal of American forces but remains determined to clear US-allied Kurdish fighters from northeastern Syria.
For weeks, Turkey has been threatening to launch a new offensive against the Kurds, who partnered with the United States to drive the Islamic State group out of much of northern and eastern Syria. Ankara views the Kurdish forces as terrorists because of their links to an insurgent group in Turkey.
President Trump announced the withdrawal of US forces after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier this month.....
--more--"
It's all about leadership:
"Trump tweets away, as allies question his leadership" by Katie Rogers December 24, 2018
WASHINGTON — As lawmakers and foreign allies alike braced for the potentially destabilizing effects of his policy decisions on national security, President Trump said Saudi Arabia would “spend the necessary money needed to help rebuild Syria, instead of the United States.” It was not immediately clear how or when that would happen, or whether it was in addition to the $100 million that Saudi Arabia sent the United States in October for Syria reconstruction.
“Saudi Arabia has now agreed to spend the necessary money needed to help rebuild Syria, instead of the United States,” Trump wrote. “See? Isn’t it nice when immensely wealthy countries help rebuild their neighbors rather than a Great Country, the U.S., that is 5000 miles away. Thanks to Saudi A!”
Ensconced in the White House with no official Christmas Eve plans but to host a meeting on border security and track Santa Claus on military radar, Trump showed no sign of slowing a Twitter storm amid a government shutdown, a departing defense secretary, and cratering stock market. He even lamented, “I am all alone (poor me).”
I know the guy is self-centered and narcissistic, but so what?
That doesn't mean he isn't human or capable.
His posts were replete with grievances about funds for border security, the Federal Reserve chairman, Democrats critical of his relationship with US allies, and Brett McGurk, the departing special envoy for the coalition fighting the Islamic State group.
Trump’s abrupt decisions last week to pull troops from Syria and Afghanistan have plunged some of the United States’ longest allied partners into uncertainty as they grapple with an American leader who largely treats those relationships as bottom-line business transactions, but the bulk of his ire was directed at foreign policy critics and fallout over his “America First” approach.
He described McGurk as an Obama-era appointee, and accused him of “loading up airplanes with 1.8 Billion Dollars in CASH & sending it to Iran” as part of the nuclear deal that world powers struck with Tehran — an agreement from which Trump has withdrawn the United States.
Trump has repeatedly made this misleading claim about money the United States transferred to Iran in 2016. The Obama administration did not directly give money to Iran as part of the 2015 nuclear deal; instead, the United States unfroze billions in assets as part of a decadeslong debt dispute, $1.7 billion of which was transferred in cash in 2016. The payment was indirectly tied to the nuclear deal.
McGurk, who worked under the administration of President George W. Bush as well as President Barack Obama, led the delicate, 14-month negotiations with Iran that prompted the release of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist. This summer, McGurk was the target of assassination threats from Iranian-backed militias and demonstrators in Iraq.
It's times like these when I would be worried about assassination of the president.
It doesn't make me feel any better that the Nostradamus predicted it, either:
The great shameless, audacious bawler,
He will be elected governor of the army:
The price of his removal will be small,
Nary a sixPence paid for the deed.
That is Century III, Quatrain 81.
Over the weekend, Trump suggested on Twitter that McGurk was a grandstander. The envoy resigned in protest over the Syria decision, which he said had blindsided US officials and allies in the Middle East, including US-backed Kurdish soldiers who are fighting the Islamic State.....
--more--"
"Trump’s dangerous blunder in Syria endangers US ally" December 26, 2018
With two phone calls and a tweet, President Trump has engineered the exit of US troops from Syria, appeased not one but at least two autocrats, and made the world a more dangerous place.
The charged language is to draw up certain images in your mind regarding a couple of fellows named Chamberlain and Hitler.
This is what passes for US foreign policy today, and in the process, Trump has lost Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one of the few grown-ups in the Neverland that the White House has become, and Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, both of whom resigned after the president’s decision.
All of this began following a call between Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey last week, after which Trump announced to a surprised military that ISIS had been “defeated” and he was bringing home the 2,000 US troops now on the ground in Syria.
US forces, in conjunction with the 72-nation coalition and Kurdish forces within Syria, have indeed succeeded in reducing the territory once held by the would-be caliphate, and with it much of the Islamic State threat, but reducing the threat is not eradicating it, and to think otherwise is hopelessly naive, and even those who support a withdrawal would agree that it should be done carefully: You can’t have an exit strategy without a strategy.
IRAQ!
Enter our hopelessly naive president, who ignores the advice of his entire national security team, thumbs his nose at longtime allies, but wins the praise of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Only the last-minute pleas of US military leaders, who insisted on an orderly timetable for withdrawal, have kept this exit from looking like the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
First of all, that's the wrong analogy. Kabul is the 21st-century Saigon, and if you go by the Globe's logic, they are saying we should have stayed in Vietnam!
The danger is that not only could ISIS flare back up, but also that the sudden void created by the withdrawal could threaten US allies. Turkish troops are massing in northern Syria, with more crossing the border daily as they eye a possible offensive against Kurdish forces — yes, the same forces which have fought so bravely side by side with Americans against ISIS. It is one thing to give up the hope of regime change in Syria and know that the detested Bashar al-Assad — he who has gassed his own citizens — remains in charge. It is quite another to betray the Kurds and leave them vulnerable to an assault by Erdogan’s Turkey, which considers the militia a terrorist organization.
There the Globe goes with the "he gassed his own people" bullshit!
US forces have successfully prevented such Turkish “mission creep” in the region, but no longer.
Another big “winner” in this foreign policy debacle is, of course, Iran which has tens of thousands of “proxies” in the region fully prepared to fill the vacuum being created by this precipitous withdrawal of American forces. Iran’s alliance with the Assad regime and Russia could shift the balance of power permanently in the region.
That must mean Israel is the big loser, and how discouraging to see the Globe editorial board support Wars for the Jews because of their hatred of Trump.
Such is the power of one seemingly small exercise of presidential power — not to mention presidential peevishness.
And an even smaller pre$$.
There are few ways to curb the powers of the commander in chief, however poorly executed, but 2019 will be the year when Congress can and must reassert its own foreign policy role — a role it abdicated nearly a decade ago when it failed to exercise its right to approve American involvement in Syria. The consequences of that failure of courage have now come home to roost.
They abdicated long before Syria. Try since 2001.
The next Congress must make clear that a Turkish attack on our allies the Kurds will result in sanctions. That human rights violations by any of the parties involved — and that would include the Assad regime, which is reportedly murdering thousands of political prisoners — will be punished.
For the United States and its pre$$ to be lecturing the world about human rights is the height of hypocrisy.
There was a time when America stood for something on the world stage, when allies could count on this country to keep its word and its commitments. It will fall to Congress in the year ahead to help pick up the foreign policy slack until there is a change of occupant in the White House.....
What a sickening and totally gross editorial!
--more--"
Now I want you to consider what would have happened had Trump gone the other way and stuck with the Kurds.
In that case, the Globe editorial would have excoriated him for losing Turkey and causing a fracture in NATO! He couldn't have won with them no matter what he did!
Also see:
Trump move to pull US troops from Syria opens way to turmoil
Yeah, whole region is going to blow up because we are leaving -- as opposed to it blowing up after we invaded Iraq.
US must thwart Turkish aggression in Syria
Looks like Egypt is also falling back into line, too.
The Kurds are also going to help by releasing 3,200 ISIS prisoners, who will be sent to Africa.
Somalia blast kills at least 16 near presidential palace The Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabab extremist group, which often targets Mogadishu, claimed responsibility for the attack.
It's pronounce Al-CIA-Bob, folks.
US self-defense airstrikes in Somalia kill 11 al-Shabab
It was the AP that decided they were in self defense (I didn't know Somalia terrorists can shoot down airplanes, did you?)!
"The United States military’s Africa Command says that it has carried out six airstrikes in the Gandarshe area of Somalia which killed a total of 62 extremists from the al-Shabab rebel group. In a statement issued Monday, the U.S. military said it carried out four strikes on Dec. 15 in which 34 people were killed and two more on Dec. 16 which killed 28. It said all strikes were in the Gandarshe coast area south of the capital. The U.S. military statement said all six strikes were carried out in close coordination with Somalia’s government. It said the airstrikes were conducted to prevent al-Shabab from using remote areas as a safe haven to plot, direct, inspire, and recruit for future attacks. It said that no civilians were injured or killed."
How the f*** would they know?
As for Korea:
"The North’s all-or-nothing position means that the negotiations will be far more complicated than Washington had hoped....."
So says the Jew York Times, and it simply means that the North Korean negotiating style is exactly the same as Israel's -- and we talk to them all the time.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Trump better be careful:
"Walking a fine line between being overly optimistic and too pessimistic, the Federal Reserve bumped up its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday and said the US economy remained strong, but the Fed’s decision also demonstrated Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s determination to pursue an independent course based on economic analysis rather than bow to critics like the president — and many investors — who argued that the recent stock market sell-off and mixed signals about the durability of the nation’s long expansion warranted a pause in any more hikes. In other words, he tried to tell the world, the Fed would be flexible as it tries to keep the economy humming without risking a surge in inflation, but like anyone seeking a compromise, Powell ended up making few people happy. Investors registered their displeasure with the Fed’s tightrope-walking by sending stocks sharply lower. The Dow Jones industrial average swung from a gain of 380 points just before the 2 p.m. Fed statement was issued to a loss at the close of nearly 352 points, or 1.49 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index shed 1.54 percent, while the Nasdaq dropped 2.17 percent. All three indexes are in the red for the year. The stock market’s fall from record highs is worrisome to anyone saving for college or retirement, with many remembering the painful losses their 401(k) balances sustained during the financial crisis. There was a lot of information released by the Fed for investors to digest. The Fed has come under sustained criticism from President Trump, who has not followed the practice of his many predecessors of not commenting publicly on the central bank’s actions....."
That is the kind of thing that gets a guy's head taken off in Dallas (although in this case, I suspect a heart attack is more in order).
Notice how they never make the list of the usual (Cubans and the MIC) suspects despite the motive?
Of course, you need to keep it all in perspective:
"Stocks tumbled on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve, citing the strength of the economy, signaled that it planned to keep raising interest rates and shrinking the extraordinary amount of support it has provided to financial markets in the decade since the financial crisis. The central bank raised its benchmark interest rate another quarter percentage point. That increase had been widely predicted, but in the financial markets, hopes had been high that the Fed would simultaneously signal its growing concern about the outlook for economic growth. They were disappointed. Of course, this year’s losses have to be put in perspective. Since the market bottomed in March 2009, the S&P is up 270 percent....."
"Mnuchin denies Trump is seeking to oust Fed chief" December 22, 2018
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin issued an emphatic statement saying President Trump denied he’d suggested firing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and declaring the president doesn’t believe he has legal authority to dismiss the central bank chief.
Also see:
"President Trump said he now understands he lacks the authority to do so. Trump previously told advisers that Powell will “turn me into Hoover,” a reference to Great Depression-era President Herbert Hoover. Trump has also repeatedly criticized the Fed for increasing interest rates....."
The President of the United States is so prescient!
He's nothing like what the pre$$ reports, and think of this for a moment: the hardest person to fire in the United States is the Federal Reserve chairman -- not the President of the United States!
That tells where the REAL POWER LIES!
You want to know who rules over you?
Then simply see who you are not allowed to criticize or fire!
Mnuchin said in a pair of tweets Saturday evening that he’d spoken with the president about the matter and included a statement he said came from Trump.
Trump has discussed firing Powell many times in the past few days as his frustration with the central banker intensified following this week’s interest rate increase and intensifying stock market losses, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg reported Friday that advisers close to Trump aren’t convinced he would move against Powell, and are hoping the president’s bout of anger will dissipate over the holidays, and some of Trump’s advisers have warned him that firing Powell would be disastrous.
Former Senate Banking chairman Richard Shelby publicly cautioned Trump against the move on Saturday. “I’d be very careful about doing that,” the Alabama Republican said. “The independence of the Fed is the foundation of our banking system.”
!!!!!!
Somehow, the Constitutional mandate regarding the government regulating the money supply has been turned over to private central bankers who print the money and then loan it with interest to the U.S. taxpayers in the form of its government.
Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement that “Given the Fed’s consensus on monetary policy, any effort to remove Powell would hit the trifecta: unlawful, ineffective, and damaging to the economy.”
A member of the House Financial Services Committee, Ross predicted the panel’s incoming Democratic chairwoman, Maxine Waters of California, would launch a “significant oversight investigation” if Trump ousted Powell.
Any attempt by Trump to push out Powell would have potentially devastating ripple effects across financial markets, undermining investors’ confidence in the central bank’s ability to shepherd the economy without political interference.
It would come as markets have plummeted in recent weeks, with the major stock indexes already down sharply for the year.....
They thankfully went up today.
--more--"
"Trump took credit for a growing economy. Now what?" by Victoria McGrane Globe Staff December 24, 2018
Taking credit for the expanding economy and the booming stock market has ranked high among President Trump’s favorite pastimes, but the commander in chief has had a lot less to crow about lately, and many economists and business-watchers say some of this is his own fault.
The Globe reporter seems almost happy the stock market is taking a bath.
The Dow Jones industrial average took another nose dive Friday, marking its worst week since the 2008 financial crisis — a plunge exacerbated by the impending government shutdown sparked by Trump’s demands for a Southern border wall, along with broader fears of a recession.
I get the feeling some are rooting for one. Anything to make this president look bad, and one can't help but wonder if the banker's will drive it into the ditch over his troop withdrawals.
News reports over the weekend that Trump wants to fire his Federal Reserve chairman, and an unexpected and strange Sunday statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that there’s nothing to panic about, set the stage for further stock market drama Monday, and before all this, markets and CEOs were already rattled by Trump’s ongoing trade war with China, inconsistent messaging, and public browbeating of the Fed — all possibly raising the risks of an economic slowdown.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the wars this time.
“I don’t think if Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush had won their presidential races that we would be instituting tariffs on our allies. We probably would not be instituting tariffs on China, and there certainly wouldn’t be considerable concern about a damaging trade war,” said Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank, ticking through many of the concerns driving the worries of economic slowdown and the stock market’s recent roller-coaster ride.
The Globe first turns to the AEI for expert analysis, great!
Of course, I don't think we would be withdrawing troops if Hillary, Marco, or Jeb won.
It’s difficult to parse just how much credit or blame any president deserves when it comes to the economy, he added, but in this case, “I think there’s a good amount of blame here that you can put on President Trump.”
They would blame him for curing cancer if he did it.
At the least, Trump “is costing himself the upside that he promised,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who advised the late Senator John McCain’s Republican presidential campaign in 2008.
Look at experts they talk to!
No Trump lover there!
The stock market is on track this month to record its worst December performance since 1931 — which, students of history may recall, was not a particularly auspicious time in US economic history.
There goes the Globe again, talking down to us all!
And they wonder why the American people despise the elite pre$$?
CEO confidence soared in the early days of Trump’s tenure, thanks to regulation rollbacks and tax cuts, but now it has plummeted to a two-year low, according to a survey released last Monday. It found the administration’s trade policy among the top reasons for growing pessimism.
That's another reason to have him removed: trade policy.
In a separate survey, close to half of chief financial officers said they think the US economy will enter a recession by the end of next year.
Of course we will.
They are bringing one about to destroy this president.
Trump’s frustration with the recent market exploded into cyberspace last week with tweets haranguing the Fed to stop raising interest rates.
By many measures, the US economy continues to look strong. Unemployment is at a 49-year low. Wages are up. Holiday spending is strong. Even his critics say Trump cannot be blamed for all of the recent stock market volatility.
But the pre$$ will blame him anyway.
Some was to be expected as the Fed at long last normalized monetary policy following the 2008 financial crisis. International tumult surrounding issues such as Brexit are among the factors weighing on global growth, and in the midst of the second-longest expansion in the record books, economists say, the US economy would naturally slow eventually, but Trump isn’t making matters easier on himself.
Yeah, right, he is bringing it all on himself.
Talk about blaming the victim!
Take his very public frustration with the Fed. The irony is that while there’s enough uncertainty in the global economy to mount a strong argument that the Fed should pause — and many economists like Paul Krugman, along with Wall Street investors, have quite loudly advocated for that — Trump’s public outbursts pressure central bank officials to press on, lest they look like they are caving in to political pressure, Fed-watchers say.
On the one hand they tell us they are supposed to above the political pressure, then to prove it they do the opposite?
In recent decades, most presidents have largely avoided expressing any public thoughts about monetary policy, so that investors do not start doubting the Fed is doing what is best for the economy.
Pffft!
Thank God we have a President Trump then!
Trump’s various trade disputes, particularly the smoldering trade war with China, rank high on the list of reasons Wall Street is worried about a recession.
There are two in$titutions you do not antagonize in AmeriKa: the War Machine and Wall Street.
Among other antagonistic trade moves, the president slapped tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods in September and threatened to go further at the start of next year.
China retaliated. Earlier this month, Trump and President Xi Jinping of China agreed to a 90-day cease-fire, but Wall Street’s initial relief evaporated when news reports revealed the two sides still appeared further from a resolution than Trump initially indicated.
Nothing about the arrest of the telecom executive that was meant to embarrass Trump?
Tariffs spark worries about slower growth because they raise prices for US consumers, who drive 70 percent of the nation’s economy. They also make it more expensive for businesses to buy the goods and services they need, and the uncertainty surrounding the unresolved trade picture takes its own toll as companies scramble to figure out where to source their widgets or where they should build that new factory.
Looks like an argument against globali$m, doesn't it?
Businesses are saying “we don’t know where to invest because we don’t know who we’re going to trade with . . . and we need to know the rules of the road and where there might be potholes. We don’t know how to move forward — we’ll hesitate, we’ll delay investment,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton.
Stock-market losses alone are unlikely to hurt Trump with his base, since few of them are wrapped up in the daily movements, said Jon McHenry, a Republican pollster and strategist, but if the recent turmoil is a leading indicator for the larger economy, it poses a real danger, as it would for any incumbent president, he said.
It won't hurt him with me. I see the forces he is at war with.
That’s likely more so for Trump, who has logged hundreds of tweets essentially declaring himself the mastermind of “the best Economy in the history of our country!” as he described it in mid-September.
“If the economy goes down, that is a huge deal for any president,” McHenry said, “but certainly for one who has taken credit for so much of what’s going on with the economy.”
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"Stocks hit 20-month low as D.C. turmoil weighs on markets" by Alex Veiga Associated Press December 24, 2018
President Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve spooked the stock market on Christmas Eve, and efforts by his Treasury secretary to calm investors’ fears only seemed to make matters worse, contributing to another day of heavy losses on Wall Street.
The major stock indexes fell more than 2 percent Monday, nudging the market closer to its worst year since 2008. Stocks are also on track for their worst December since 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression.....
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That's odd because my printed front page carried this report:
"Stocks fall as Trump tweets that Fed is the economy’s only problem" by Alan Rappeport New York Times December 25, 2018
NEW YORK — A 48-hour effort by the Trump administration to soothe jittery financial markets did little to reverse the free fall in stocks Monday, as the president’s renewed attack on the Federal Reserve and the specter of a prolonged government shutdown further rattled investors already worried about a global economic slowdown.
Falling like a WTC tower on 9/11, huh?
With a single tweet Monday, President Trump undercut his top economic advisers’ efforts to reassure the markets that he did not intend to fire Jerome Powell as Fed chairman, but Trump, who blames the Fed’s recent interest rate increases for the market gyrations, said “the only problem our economy has is the Fed,” an assertion that exacerbated the worst sell-off on Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis.
If the $hoe fits, take the money and run, right?
Stocks continued marching toward their largest December declines since the 1930s, with the S&P 500 closing down 2.7 percent Monday after a shortened trading session before the Christmas holiday.
The markets are trying to digest the confusing signals from Washington.
For the markets, the Fed is a complicated player at the moment. Investors have been disappointed by rising interest rates, concerned that they could sap growth, but the speculation about firing Powell, a move that could turn the independent central bank into a political tool, has undermined confidence in a pivotal institution essential to economic policy.
It's an unconstitutional in$titution with an inordinate amount of power.
Markets had already been on edge in recent weeks because of uncertainty surrounding trade negotiations between the United States and China, signs of slowing global growth, and the prospect of a prolonged US government shutdown. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin added to the jitters by announcing Sunday that he had called bank executives to ensure the markets were functioning properly, the type of discussions usually reserved for moments of crisis.
“It signaled a sense of panic and anxiety that didn’t need to be there,” said Brian Gardner, an analyst at the investment banking firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. “My first reaction when I heard it was, what has happened over the last couple of days that the market does not understand or realize? Is there something that Treasury knows that the rest of us don’t?,” and while Mnuchin and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, tried to reassure markets on the Fed’s leadership, there is still an effort within the White House to discern whether any legal rationale exists for removing Powell from the chairman’s spot, said two people familiar with the discussions.
I'm sure Treasury got a heads-up (pun intended, sorry) and they haven't given up on regime change!
Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, has been openly critical of the Fed’s decision to raise interest rates and blamed the central bank for the market volatility. Mnuchin, meanwhile, has said the recent stock swings are the result of high-speed electronic trading and post-crisis financial rules that he says make it harder for banks to play their traditional market-stabilization role.
Trump on Monday made clear he is still not happy with Powell, and Wall Street is bracing for more intervention from a president who views the stock market as a report card on his presidency.
Henrietta Treyz, director of economic policy research at the investment advisory firm Veda Partners, spent her weekend studying the 1935 Banking Act to determine whether Trump could unseat Powell as chairman but keep him on the Fed board without violating the law. She has yet to determine whether that could pass legal muster.
The President of the United States can be removed, members of Congre$$ can be removed, and anyone else can be fired from a job -- except the Fed chairman.
Treasury officials tried to brush away criticism of Mnuchin’s public statement and his calls to bank executives, saying he was trying to ensure that banks had ample liquidity for lending, but the conversations were described by several on the receiving end as more routine than the striking statement suggested.
The Treasury secretary asked for updates on how markets were functioning and inquired about any stresses in the system, according to one bank chief executive. Another bank CEO was so unconcerned about the recent fall in stocks that he used his time with Mnuchin to discuss new capital requirements and how they could affect the bank’s balance sheet in the long term as the Fed continues selling government securities it amassed during the financial crisis, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion.
That is another reason behind the drop: The Fed is dumping all the $hit it bought to prop up the stock market.
Policy makers who participated in the President’s Working Group call Monday also described it as routine, with no market problems reported and nothing to warrant an official statement after the discussion. The call was described by a person familiar with the conversation as a “check-in” scheduled at the Treasury’s request for officials so they could plan for a prolonged government shutdown.
Former Treasury officials said Mnuchin had probably amplified concerns about the markets by publicizing his efforts to calm them.
“I never heard anyone in any venue in the last two months voice any concerns about liquidity,” said Paul H. O’Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush, noting that Mnuchin had injected more uncertainty into the calculations of investors.
OMFG!
He wrote that book and was banished!
O’Neill also suggested that Mnuchin was in a difficult position in trying to assuage a mercurial boss and could be overcompensating to please him.
If anyone should know, he should (considering who he served).
“The president apparently is blaming Mnuchin for the markets going south, which is a fairly strange thing,” he said.....
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"Global growth looks to be slowing; White House denies US economy has peaked" by David J. Lynch Washington Post December 26, 2018
WASHINGTON — A global economy that until recently was humming has broken down, a sharp contrast to the picture just a year ago.
The sudden slowing has fed into a global financial sell-off that has driven several US stock indexes into or near ‘‘bear market’’ territory with losses of more than 20 percent. Stocks fell sharply Monday near the end of what is shaping up to be Wall Street’s worst December since 1931.
The turmoil was on President Trump’s mind Christmas Day, when he cast fresh doubt on the record of the Federal Reserve’s chairman, Jerome Powell, whom he has increasingly blamed for the market weakness.
‘‘Well, we’ll see,’’ the president said when asked whether he had confidence in Powell. ‘‘They’re raising interest rates too fast; that’s my opinion. But I certainly have confidence . . . I think that they will get it pretty soon. I really do.’’
Efforts by Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to allay fears seem only to have inflamed them. Political turmoil at the highest level in the United States and other advanced economies — epitomized by the partial shutdown of the US government and protests in France — is further feeding investor anxiety.
?????
Additional forces threaten to turn what had been a gradual global slowing into something more serious. Central banks that went to extraordinary lengths to boost growth after the 2008 global financial crisis have become less supportive — with the Fed announcing another increase in its benchmark interest rate last week, and tensions over Trump’s ‘‘America First’’ trade offensive are sapping business confidence on multiple continents.
‘‘The theme coming into this year was everything was synchronized, everything was good everywhere,’’ said Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank Securities. ‘‘Now everything is not good everywhere.’’
That is only a slight exaggeration. The adverse signs are enough for economists such as Megan Greene of Manulife Mutual Funds to warn of a ‘‘synchronized slowdown.’’ Few economists expect an outright recession in the United States or a ‘‘hard landing’’ in China, where the authorities are trying to manage a gradual deceleration, but anemic performances by the global economy’s main engines could shake already stressed political systems in several countries, including the United States. ‘‘The political risk in a slowdown or even recession in 2019 is of stirring up already worrisome levels of nationalism,’’ said George Magnus, author of ‘‘Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy.’’
In the United States, despite nearly a decade of uninterrupted economic growth, nearly 55 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A sharp slowdown could short-circuit belated rewards for workers who are receiving average annual wage increases of 3.1 percent, the highest mark in nine years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That means it was less during the entire Obama regime.
Also see: Employers are raising the minimum wage
Trump gets zero credit!
‘‘If that doesn’t continue, you’ll see continued domestic political polarization,’’ said Peter Harrell, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. ‘‘Clearly, a slowing economy is a huge concern to the Trump administration.’’
What is the Center for a New American Security?
At least the Globe makes you think.
An economic slowdown — coupled with tumbling stock prices — could also make the president more amenable to a quick deal with China in the monthslong tariff war, Harrell said. ‘‘They are getting nervous about the markets and nervous about the slowing in the economy, and there’s a similar reaction in Beijing.’’
There are also problems in Europe with Germany, Italy, and Britain.
One major economic shift — the 41 percent decline in oil prices since early October — will produce winners and losers. Every penny of decline in the pump price of a gallon of gas leaves American consumers with an additional $1 billion to spend on other goods and services, according to Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, but lower prices will sap investment spending by oil and gas companies in the United States and elsewhere. The loss of income for major oil-producing nations that carry heavy foreign-debt loads will outweigh the consumer gain, Carl Weinberg, chief international economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note.
Related:
"Crude fell to the lowest level in a year and a half as concerns over the global economy and turbulence in Washington overshadowed signals from OPEC that it may deepen output cuts....."
And we know who is controlling supply!
"Oil has been very good to university endowments in Texas. It was so good in the year through June 30 that the University of Texas saw the value of its endowment reach $31 billion, surpassing Yale to become the second-largest endowment in US higher education, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The endowment was fueled by mineral rights from land it controls in the Permian Basin. It’s an area bigger than Delaware that has emerged in the past decade as the world’s fastest growing oil-producing region due to advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The state system shares the mineral rights revenue with Texas A&M University, which saw its endowment value surge to $13.5 billion. The boom may recede as the price of a barrel of oil has tumbled by 40 percent from a high this year of $76 in October."
"The company that has failed to end a 14-year-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is suing to challenge a Coast Guard official’s order to design and install a new containment system to capture and remove the crude before it forms slicks that often stretch for miles. The federal lawsuit that Taylor Energy Co. filed Thursday in New Orleans asks the court to throw out Coast Guard Captain Kristi Luttrell’s Oct. 23 administrative order. The company faces daily civil penalties of up to $40,000 if it fails to comply with the order. Luttrell issued it one day after the Washington Post published a front-page story about the leak off Louisiana’s coast. The story included a new estimate that approximately 10,500 to 29,400 gallons of oil is leaking daily from the site where a Taylor Energy-owned platform toppled during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. That estimate, contained in a report that the federal government commissioned from a Florida State University researcher, is much higher than previous government estimates and dwarfs the company’s own assessment of the leak’s volume."
It's the Gulf Gusher you never heard about, and Taylor Energy has argued that performing more work out at the leak site could be dangerous and cause more environmental harm than good.
Sounds suspicious to me.
‘‘The global economy — its financial and economic stability and its growth path — will be riskier on this redistribution of income,’’ he wrote, citing upheaval in Venezuela and Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia’s growing debt burden.
Is that why Nigeria is falling out of favor?
You rarely ever read about the ongoing destabilization and coup effort in Venezuela in my pos pre$$, and one wonders if this has anything to do with Khashoggi.
The Trump administration goal of 3 percent annual US economic growth for several years appears to be fading, with the Federal Reserve lowering its 2019 forecast to 2.3 percent, down from this year’s expected 3 percent. The Fed also has backed away from plans to raise interest rates three times next year.
So there isn't that much difference between Trump and them.
I'm glad they weren't pressured by politics!
Though almost all economists expect the economy to continue growing through 2019, there is now a roughly 1-in-6 chance of a recession over the next 12 months, the highest likelihood since the recovery began in mid-2009, according to the New York Fed.
Kevin Hassett, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, disputed the consensus view that the US economy has peaked.....
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Time to retire:
"With retirement, many are making it up as they go" by Robert Weisman Globe Staff December 26, 2018
Roslindale social worker Edy Rees said she and her husband, software engineer Mark Katz, “had this great plan” for retirement: She would garden and volunteer. He’d build furniture at his woodworking bench. They’d travel to visit friends in the British Isles, but outside forces intervened. Katz, now 70, took early retirement when his company was sold, becoming an on-and-off consultant. Budget cuts forced Rees, 76, to leave her job at a charity, though she continued for a time as an unpaid volunteer. After her daughter had a baby girl, Rees was pressed into grandmother duties. Katz jumped into helping on political campaigns. There’s been little time for travel.
I'm sick of the self-centered $upremacism, sorry.
For many older people today, a make-it-up-as-you-go approach to retirement has supplanted the old notion of an orderly passage from the office to the golf links. Jobs are less secure than they were in the past, pension plans less generous or nonexistent. Market convulsions throw retirement agendas into flux, punishing those who haven’t saved enough and are scrambling to catch up. Many in their 60s and 70s who need or want to keep working are taking part-time jobs, or stints in the gig economy that blur the line between work and retirement.
This month’s stock market plunge, which erased billions in market value from Americans’ retirement accounts, has buttressed the case for staying in the workforce.
“This is shaping up to be one of the worst Decembers of the past 50 or 60 years,” said Doug Butler, senior vice president and research director at Rockland Trust’s investment management group. “When the market’s down, people are asking, ‘Do I still have enough to retire?’ If they can delay their retirement, there’s a lot of positive benefits. They can also change their spending habits — maybe take a two-week vacation rather than a three-week vacation.”
How eliti$t!
The old ideal of a career culminating with a handshake and a gold watch mostly applied to buttoned-down professionals in the post-World War II era. Some in the baby boomer generation, many of whom expect to live longer than their parents, question the very term retirement because it connotes stepping aside and disengaging.
“It suggests that you’re relaxing and laying back, and you deserve that, because you put in a lot of work,” said Sarah Lamb, professor of anthropology at Brandeis University. “Old age was seen as a time of stepping away from society and getting ready to die. Now that view’s fallen out of fashion, and the culture emphasizes ongoing extended adulthood.
He talked to jwho?
“The new ideal is you want to be healthy and stay productive,” she said. “Many people want to keep working, if they’re not volunteering or skydiving, because it’s a sign that they’re not really getting old.”
Skydiving?
Like that blood-soaked war criminal they just planted?
Retirement seldom figures in pillow talk between significant others. A recent study by Fidelity Investments, the Boston financial services giant, found more than four in 10 of the couples it surveyed disagreed about what age each partner planned to retire. That included a third of baby boomers nearing retirement or already in some phase of downshifting, unplugging, or cutting their ties with their employers.
The study also found that more than half weren’t aligned on how much they should save before they retired.....
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It's all, once again, about leadership:
"Strong economy vs. shaky leadership: What does that mean for 2019?" by Neil Irwin New York Times December 25, 2018
NEW YORK — Sometime in the last couple of months, predictions of a major economic downturn or recession in 2019 went from being a crank view to the conventional wisdom.
That's what happens with us truth bloggers. Takes months, sometimes years, before the propagandists in the pre$$ concede we were right all along!
It is true that the global economy is sputtering and that the stock market is in its worst pullback in a decade, but this sense of gloom and pessimism has gotten ahead of the facts on the ground, especially concerning the US economy.
Like the New York Times has anything to do with facts!
The real risk is not that insurmountable challenges knock the economy off course. It is that poor leadership converts moderate economic shocks into a crisis.
The combination of erratic behavior from the president and a thinly staffed government in the United States, the potential crises facing other major economies, and the lack of trust amid allies and major trade partners could make routine economic challenges turn into something worse.
The Downfall of President Donald J. Trump.
Surveys show rising pessimism among top corporate executives, and over the weekend Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called bank CEOs to seek assurances that their institutions were sufficiently liquid to keep lending to consumers and businesses, according to a Treasury announcement.
They were unconcerned not too long ago -- like two articles up!
What changed in a day?
It was the kind of disclosure that risked causing more damage than it was intended to prevent. If a top health official announced that he had convened conversations with top pharmaceutical CEOs and was pleased to learn there were no drug shortages, your first response would not be relief. It would be to ask, “Wait, we need to worry about drug shortages?”
Speak for yourself, NYT shitter.
The level of arrogant elitism is astonishing, presuming to tell us what we should think!
Then there are the president’s repeated attacks on a Federal Reserve. It all raises the possibility that if things do get worse, the US government will be an agent of chaos rather than the source of steadiness and calm it is normally known for during crises.
OMFG!
What does that mean, Trump won't bail them out?
It is a lack of confidence in global leadership that explains this paradox: an economy that is doing this well and yet widespread conviction that things are about to turn bad. The unemployment rate is near a five-decade low, as is the rate at which people are filing new jobless claims. The American consumer appears strong; this is looking to have been one of the strongest holiday sales seasons in many years.
Appearances can be deceiving!
Surveys of supply managers, which act as an early warning system for slowdowns in business activity, are in strongly positive territory.
The most concrete warning signal is coming from financial markets, but the bond market is generally more closely tethered to economic ups and downs than the stock market, and while it is suggesting slower growth ahead, it is not at recessionary levels.
Most economic and financial indicators are not pointing toward some economic collapse in 2019, but rather to a return to the kind of moderate economic growth that was completely normal from 2010 to 2017.
Oh, we will be returning to Obama's stagflation. Great!
In this story, 2018 has been the aberration — fueled by a commodity boom and the temporary effects of tax cuts. To the degree there is a market correction and adjustment in business sentiment, it is about realizing that we are returning to the old new normal.
OMFG, WTF does that mean!
The OLD NEW NORMAL, huh?
As opposed to the NEW NEW NORMAL?
That, dear readers, is not only poorly written PROPAGANDA but COMPLETE NONSENSE!
There are some rumblings of things that could go wrong in the financial system. Companies that loaded up during the era of ultralow interest rates are facing high debt burdens. Some may find themselves in bankruptcy. Oil prices have fallen enough that it seems it will be a tough 2019 in energy-producing areas, but the biggest worry for 2019 is not so much that any of these disruptions proves so large as to cause a recession. The real fear is that shaky policy allows small shocks to create a broader crisis of confidence.
The boom year of 2018 may be unlikely to repeat itself, but if leaders in the United States and overseas keep their wits about them — far from a guarantee given recent events — there is no reason 2019 needs to be a bad year.....
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At least we now know who is under the suit. It's the President of the United States, not his Deep State shadow.
It gives one hope even when one feels down in the count and wants to shutdown.
