I read that Mattis was really upset that we’d be leaving the Kurds, who have been strong allies and much help in the region. I just saw this:
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkish forces are still planning to invade northeast Syria in the coming months and “cleanse” the region of both Kurdish militias and Islamic State forces. Turkey has long opposed the U.S. partnership with Kurdish forces in the battle against the Islamic State.
[quote=“daveminnj, post:12, topic:82313, full:true”]
Articulate and subtle are not the same. This was a vivisection.I can’t see how they co-exist until February 28th, either.
[/quote]I’d like to be in the room for their next face-to-face. Or at least see the video. I don’t think Trump has the balls to say anything to Mattis’s face He needs the distance and safety of Twitter.
Oddly, Trump is 4 years older than Mattis. Trump seems like a punk next to him.
Has done. He has already done so much damage.
And he’s also signalling that passive bureaucratic resistance to treason within the national security establishment isn’t necessarily uncalled for, subordination to civilian authority notwithstanding. Which is extremely damning and damn remarkable considering who he is.
A SHAEF general during WWII once said that the Allies best secret weapon against Germany was the incompetent meddling of Hitler with his generals.
However the big difference here is that Hitler was an insane megalomaniac listening to the voices in his head; while Trump is a failed businessman who is an agent of the Russian government under the control of Vladimir Putin.
Afraid it would be too obvious?
I have little respect for Preshitident Skanky-Manslut and the Trump Foundation waterboy-generals like Flynn, Kelly and Mattis. It was an egregious blunder by the Senate to let a general run the Department of Defense in the first place. That position should be held by a civilian for good reasons that are obvious now that Mattis has resigned. Because he is military, the circumstances of his resignation will reverberate among the rank and file in the military-mercenary complex and affect morale.
Also, withdrawal from Syrian civil war is a good thing. The war in Syria is fundamentally a religious war for the Saudis and Israelis that is thinly disguised as a national security interest. America should not be a participant in the sunni-shia genocide. It is contrary to America’s values and hurts America’s national security.
Syria was the wrong last straw for Mattis to base a resignation on. I don’t think it was a clear-eyed decision on his part. Also, there is no reason for Mattis to stay till February if he wants no part of the withdrawal.
The civil war in Syria is being wrongly conflated with the disastrous Iraq invasion as the ISIS issue for America is directly the result of the Iraq invasion. This wrong-headed invasion was a conservative war based on lies and stupidity by Bush the Dumber, who lied that al-Qaeda was in Iraq only because he wanted to steal Iraqi oil, which is the best in the world. We should not let conservative war mongers muddy the waters and conflate civil war in Syria with the Iraq war. Different issues.
As I said on a separate thread, I have no problem with Preshitident Skanky-Manslut’s Iraq decision at face value. I hope that the decision was not in exchange for the purchase of apartments in Manhattan or for pee-hookers in Moscow.
Mattis is leaving in February. More and more it seems reasonable that Trump won’t make it that long in office.
Great post. In my absence from the site I have relied on a number of people for uplift. You have been one and a person whose posts I weigh in the same vein as Khyber.
Gives a great feeling to look at the word “litigation” constructively.
My take on Mattis is that Mad Dogs bite
The letter serves as a unified message to those in control if the armed forces - an alert to question any and all radical and dangerous instructions from Trump - for at least as long as Mattis remains on the scene.
It depends on what scale you are using. Trump has dome damage, but on a military and foreign policy front only a tiny fraction of the damage that Bush wreaked during his first term in office. Afganistan and Iraq have left about 5,000 Americans dead, 10’s of thousands wounded have a long term cost of probably over 5 Trillion dollars and forced American foreign policy to center around those 2 conflicts for over 15 years.
Trump hasn’t even scratched the surface and I hope he never does.
THAT is the best word of the day. PUNK. His whole rationale (from HIS statement) was that he found it distressing to call the families of any dead service persons. (Not that he does that well anyway.) I can’t believe that his National Security Staff LET him talk to Erodogan.
Of course the fact that I even said that is proof that he is … I CANNOT THINK OF A PROPER WORD TO DESCRIBE HIM.
Spot on.
I’m not sure we’ll hear a lot from Mattis in the press, but there could very well be a great deal going on behind the scenes. I suspect that Mattis was the “safety valve” that reassured the senior military community that the political side of the house wasn’t going off the rails.
I don’t think you guys are using the same meaning for damage. You mean “damage caused by war.” Witcheekate, I think, means “damage to the entire post World War II/Post Cold War liberal world order.” No question that Bush’s lawlessness was damaging to the latter, but it wasn’t irretrievable. The almost hysterical relief and adoration of Obama came, in no small part, because our allies saw him as a restorer of that order. He managed to rebuild it at the same time he was rebuilding the economy that Bush broke just as badly.
Trump has broken that order in ways that we may never fully repair. And sneer at it though leftists may have done, for all that it was fueled in no small part by a common agreement to overlook a lot of hypocrisy, the world is already a worse place for its absence.
When one thinks about
and a number of other variables.
There has never been a human being like Drumpf
Goddamn it.
Remember how all the Republicans piled on Obama about announcing withdrawal dates?
Of course no one will point this out about Trump because the Media has bought in to IOKIYAR. Probably not deliberately but in the way a battered spouse or child buys in to all sorts of crap.
Yeah, That’s right - Daddy’s only drunk because Mommy makes him sad!
'Cause it’s sooooo much fun to own the Libs on radio and Fox- and you can see, they ALWAY win at the ‘owning’, and elect Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as President…Until is isn’t.
And here we are.