Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the YPG backed down on their anti-Assad stance as of late and now say they’re willing to work with him in exchange for regional autonomy? I think Brace himself has said this and said he thinks it’s a good thing.
I have no idea, but that would be cool and good.
They seem like they're trying to build a pretty decent society over there, and it's a shame their survival came with them fighting a proxy war for us.
I think it should be noted, the Kurds were divided into a lot of factions and almost all those factions were playing different sides of the conflict. For example the YPG took almost as much aid from Russia as they did the US, Russia had their own airbase in Rojava. The PKK has hostile relations with Turkey which means the US won’t work with them, but they and the YPG cooperate, and Assad hates Turkey so he probably kinda likes the PKK. Syria is a cluster fuck and I don’t really think even the smartest western leftist can get a good read on it.
Exactly, There is no "thing good" or "thing bad" for most of this stuff. If you are helping the US by helping the YPG then you are by that measure helping Russia, and if this is transitive then you are thus helping Assad. We should be hesitant on applying a transitive property to combat zones
The US pulled out of Syria (or at least pulled out its largest and most visible forces) in 2019, you might remember the news coverage of this event being "we're abandoning the Kurds to be killed by ISIS!" This basically forced the Kurdish militias to adapt or die, and most including the YPG ended up signing an agreement with Assad to maintain some autonomy but give up on total independence.
Yeah which I honestly thought was probably the best outcome for everyone. So idk, I guess if he was an op he didn’t do a very good job furthering Americas interests in the region.
That withdraw never really happened, Defence One or one of those weird military blogs has a good interview with Trump's former Syrian envoy about what happened. The Kurds are the singular instance of US support for violence that I'm pretty much alright with. I have a personal connection to it but I don't think that affects my judgment.
EDIT:
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
TIL, it's also not worrying at all that a military official could just straight up say "we lied to the president in order to pursue a war he didn't sign off on" and nobody really cared.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the YPG backed down on their anti-Assad stance as of late and now say they’re willing to work with him in exchange for regional autonomy? I think Brace himself has said this and said he thinks it’s a good thing.
I have no idea, but that would be cool and good. They seem like they're trying to build a pretty decent society over there, and it's a shame their survival came with them fighting a proxy war for us.
I think it should be noted, the Kurds were divided into a lot of factions and almost all those factions were playing different sides of the conflict. For example the YPG took almost as much aid from Russia as they did the US, Russia had their own airbase in Rojava. The PKK has hostile relations with Turkey which means the US won’t work with them, but they and the YPG cooperate, and Assad hates Turkey so he probably kinda likes the PKK. Syria is a cluster fuck and I don’t really think even the smartest western leftist can get a good read on it.
Exactly, There is no "thing good" or "thing bad" for most of this stuff. If you are helping the US by helping the YPG then you are by that measure helping Russia, and if this is transitive then you are thus helping Assad. We should be hesitant on applying a transitive property to combat zones
The US pulled out of Syria (or at least pulled out its largest and most visible forces) in 2019, you might remember the news coverage of this event being "we're abandoning the Kurds to be killed by ISIS!" This basically forced the Kurdish militias to adapt or die, and most including the YPG ended up signing an agreement with Assad to maintain some autonomy but give up on total independence.
Yeah which I honestly thought was probably the best outcome for everyone. So idk, I guess if he was an op he didn’t do a very good job furthering Americas interests in the region.
deleted by creator
That withdraw never really happened, Defence One or one of those weird military blogs has a good interview with Trump's former Syrian envoy about what happened. The Kurds are the singular instance of US support for violence that I'm pretty much alright with. I have a personal connection to it but I don't think that affects my judgment.
EDIT:
www defenseone com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/
TIL, it's also not worrying at all that a military official could just straight up say "we lied to the president in order to pursue a war he didn't sign off on" and nobody really cared.
Liberals bragged about this when this interview came out, actually.
Yeah, it's basically their only chance of survival now that Turkey is coming down hard on them.