The Emoluments Dog That Is Still To BarkEditors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Emoluments Dog That Is Still To Bark

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 7h

When the Trump/Ukraine scandal broke, now almost a month ago, I said that the biggest revelation wasn’t that Trump would do these things or try to do these things but that he could do them and all of his top advisors would go along with it and even participate in whatever cover-ups were necessary to conceal. Don’t call me naive. One of the biggest takeaways from the Mueller Report was while Trump committed all sorts of obstructive acts, he was actually shut down at a number of points by top advisors. Either they yessed him and then ignored his demands. Or they refused and he relented. Or in some cases they threatened to resign. Usually Trump backed down. Trump usually didn’t have the guts to make the big moves himself. It was usually trying to get someone else to do it — usually some version of shutting down the investigation or firing Bob Mueller. Frequently, they refused.

From the start, the biggest revelation in this scandal was that nothing like that seemed to apply on the foreign policy or intelligence side of the ledger. There was that remarkably notable spree of resignations or firings around the time of the crucial Trump/Zelensky phone call, as I noted here. So perhaps we’ll learn that more resistance was afoot than we know now. But this plot dated back to at least late 2018. And there’s no reason to believe we’d know about any of it unless a relatively low-level whistleblower decided to come forward.

The implication of all this is critically important to understand.

Fundamentally this wasn’t about ‘dirt’ or investigations or even election interference. It was about using the power of the American republic to enrich and advantage Donald Trump personally — and not in some vague or indirect way, but in the most crude, life-and-death exchanges. Whether it’s help winning an election or landing a hotel deal is secondary.

Also important is that such transactions would in most cases almost certainly not require the kind of merciless, naked and repeated demands that were made of the government of Ukraine. If Donald Trump or a family member simply opined, in the context of some diplomatic discussion, that some investment assistance would be greatly appreciated, it goes without saying any number of Gulf potentates would need to hear no more.

Which brings us to the question of emoluments and monetary, venal corruption. Everyone has known this was possible, even probable. The most likely countries have been pretty obvious: ones where the leaders own rather than govern the countries and where channeling money into the Trump family would be most easily managed. The Gulf monarchies are overwhelmingly the most obvious candidates but they are far from the only ones. Indeed, in the Ukraine story, while we don’t know specifically of any money into the Trump family’s hands, we already have seen concrete evidence of substantial sums being funneled to his lawyer and fixer, Rudy Giuliani.

Trump’s willingness has always been a given. That of crooked oligarchies looking for advantage is equally so. The question has been the acquiescence, if not necessarily the connivance, of high level advisors. That is clear now too.

In other words, there is every reason to think, the very strong likelihood that Donald Trump’s corruption and lawlessness has already infected relationships with numerous countries abroad. It’s now just a matter of finding out the details.

How Did Trump Let This Happen? Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

How Did Trump Let This Happen?

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo 

by Josh Marshall / 2h

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Aside from the national humiliation and breach of trust with allies, we have a remarkable development with President Trump’s sudden and still entirely unexplained decision to green-light a Turkish invasion of northeastern Turkey. President Trump had already entered the greatest crisis of his presidency to date. And yet, a few tut-tuts and misgivings notwithstanding, Republicans remained reflexive in their support. President Trump chose this moment to drive a massive wedge between himself and the overwhelming majority of his own party. At a critical moment he chose to open a second front … against himself.

To be clear, opposing Trump on Syria is a far cry from supporting removal from office. I still see no reason to believe that impeachment in the House or removal in the Senate will get more than trivial levels of Republican support, if that. Still support and opposition tend to be unitary. Devotion or hostility in one area tends to bleed into every other. At a minimum, President Trump seems to have greatly complicated his battle to survive impeachment. It is, quite simply, difficult to be accusing the President of catastrophic failures or grand betrayals on the one hand while staking your very career on defending him against the wildest wrongdoing on the other. It’s not strategic. It’s human nature.
The initial betrayal – again, entirely unexplained – has now been compounded by a hapless and humiliating effort to undo the catastrophe he green-lighted in the first place.
Turkey is at best a regional military power. But over recent days it has menaced US troops with artillery fire and greeted US requests and demands with contempt. Erdogan barely agreed to meet the US Vice President and then agreed to do so in a setting designed to signal national humiliation. The nominal agreement reached late this afternoon in Istanbul essentially gives the US 120 hours to evacuate its former allies from the territory which will be ruled by Turkey.
Such theatrics and symbolism of national power may or may not mean a lot to you. But they do, or at least are supposed to mean a lot to rightwing Republicans. They have been happy to ignore virtually every supposed principle that conflicts with fulsome support for Donald Trump. But the calculus is at least a bit different when the underlying policy decision is one over which they’ve expressed such outrage.
In any case, as noted above, the point isn’t that Republicans are turning on Trump in the context of impeachment or general support. It’s that he has chosen the most self-undermining moment to create such a breach with his own most loyal defenders.
So just why did this happen? Why did he do this?
For the Republicans the relevant point isn’t so much ‘why’ as the fact that the rapid, hapless and total reversal makes it clear there was at least no good reason in the first place. That makes it considerably worse.
But again, why?
For the sake of conversation lets set aside the more outlandish suggestions: that venal corruption or some corrupt foreign deal was behind the decision. I don’t think we can rule out that possibility. There’s no real distinction between the way President Trump subverted US foreign policy to demand ‘deliverables’ for his political campaign and making decisions for cash payments. But again, let’s set those possibilities aside. President Trump does have substantial business interests in Turkey. It’s not hard to imagine that those could have figured into his decision.
Really though I suspect no corrupt motives per se were the immediate trigger here. They’re probably part of the backdrop to his decision, ties with Russia, Turkey, etc. But as I argued a week ago, the far more likely explanation – consistent with most of the available evidence – is this: As the President feels more embattled and menaced, unable to control the pace of events, he becomes more driven to actions that are extreme, disruptive and unilateral precisely to demonstrate his power. Perhaps as much to himself as his allies and foes. He may be losing control of events at home, losing legal rulings before the courts, but abroad he can still break things at will. No one can stop him.
I half suspect this is the reason the White House chose today to announce that the President is hosting the next G-7 Summit at his Doral golf resort, his most brazen example of taxpayer money self-dealing and emoluments abuse to date. He has to compensate for disempowerment by increasingly aggressive demonstrations of power. It’s almost as though he’s all in on corruption. Since it’s crystal clear he demanded election interference for military aid, he must not only say that’s okay but actually his highest duty as President. Refraining from wilder acts of venal corruption would almost be like putting up a white flag of surrender. The irony is that this kind of peristaltic and impulsive action appears to be eroding his wall of reflexive support more than anything else. Indeed, the process seems to be building on itself.
More than four years ago I explained that part of Trump’s political genius was akin to what the military theorist John Boyd called OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loops. Put simply, the theory is that if a player or warrior or candidate can move through the cycle of apprehending, analyzing and acting on the situation they find before them they can outpace and disrupt the same cycle for their competitor. If I can take stock of the situation and change it before you’ve even taking stock, it will be like I shoved a stick into the spokes of your wheel. You’ll be constantly wrong-footed as you try to act on the situation I’ve already changed before you got to it. The outcome is a cascading failure that builds on itself.
With his outlandishness, wild effects, tweets and constant TV show call-ins, Trump managed something like this through the Republican primaries. Candidates like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would be working through the traditional modes of communications teams, strategy sessions and press releases, a confining and linear process. By the time they had gotten around to respond to one Trump attack or outrage he would be on to something completely different, making them look clumsy and weak as he ran circles around them.
Trump now seems to be getting tangled up in his own loops. If it is not precisely the same, the cascade effect and process of self-reinforcement is similar. The greater the embattlement, the more extreme and destructive demonstrations of power, the more loss of support and demoralization of allies. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.

PragerU relies on a veneer of respectability to obscure its propagandist mission by Parker Molloy

mediamatters.org

PragerU relies on a veneer of respectability to obscure its propagandist mission

16-20 minutes

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Despite the name, Prager University is not, to quote from the disclaimer pasted on the bottom of its homepage, “an accredited academic institution” -- nor does it “offer certifications or diplomas.” 

Despite its claim that its videos are being “censored” by social media platforms, the site boasts that those same videos have racked up more than 2.45 billion views across YouTube and Facebook. 

Despite -- once again, quoting from its homepage -- being “a place where you are free to learn,” it’s liable to leave you misinformed.

And despite being built upon this absurd collection of contradictions, PragerU is arguably one of the most influential right-wing propaganda networks put into motion since Fox News. 

A 2018 BuzzFeed report told the story of one high school student whose political views did an about-face over the span of just a couple of months of watching PragerU videos. A PragerU brochure makes bold-yet-believable claims about its viewing demographics and its ability to sway their political leanings, noting that more than 60% of its YouTube viewers are under the age of 35 and 70% of surveyed viewers said a video had changed their minds. A March 2018 Mother Jones article called PragerU a “Right-Wing YouTube Empire That’s Quietly Turning Millennials Into Conservatives,” and the Los Angeles Times recently said PragerU was “having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.”

One could also argue that unlike websites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, or The Daily Wire, which have well-earned reputations as hyperpartisan cesspools of misinformation, PragerU has been able to mostly avoid such stigma -- even though it shares a number of key associations with those sites.

PragerU cloaks its extremism in a veneer of respectability, and that’s crucial to its success.

The site, founded in 2011, is known for its polished and persuasive five-minute videos. Some videos focus on history, like the legacy of Christopher Columbus (apparently he’s gotten a bad rap) or the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt (the “New Deal” actually made things worse). Others tackle ongoing issues dividing the world such as religion (the West can thank “Judeo-Christian values” for its success) or the push for a $15 minimum wage (a bad idea!).

If you didn’t know much about the specific presenters, their bios give the impression that many of them are relatively mainstream right-leaning media figures. For instance, PragerU has videos hosted by multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, popular TV hosts, sports journalists, current and former Washington Post columnists, a Canadian former prime minister, a five-time Emmy Award winner, a nominee to head the Labor Department, a two-time presidential candidate, a former White House press secretary, as well as current and former faculty at respected institutions such as West Point, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, and Princeton, among others.

Some of the site’s videos are … well, they’re fine. Comedian Yakov Smirnoff hosts a clip about the importance of laughter in healthy relationships. Col. Ty Seidule delivers a straightforward answer to the question of whether or not the Civil War was really about slavery (he says it was). Other clips, such as Adam Carolla’s ode to personal change, Jordan Peterson’s call to “fix yourself,” or Michele Tafoya’s “secret to success,” are just boilerplate self-help speeches we’ve all probably heard dozens of variations on in our lives. It’s the combination of respectable-sounding presenters with a handful of harmless clips that cover for the site’s hard-right ideology.

Peterson’s “Fix Yourself” video is a perfect example of PragerU’s ability to use gateway videos to pivot to something much darker.

Peterson posted “Fix Yourself” -- a standard clip about self-reflection and improvement -- in January 2018. But a few months later, he came up with a video titled “Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids,” in which he rails against professors who are “indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology.” 

These people “have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt, oppressive, and patriarchal.” This “gang of nihilists,” as Peterson puts it, is made up of “post-modern neo-Marxists” whose ideas “should be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

Peterson’s views make him an extremist, and he’s far from the only one with a PragerU platform. YouTuber Steven Crowder’s video about Columbus Day engages in wild historical revisionism and claims that criticizing Columbus is “an exercise in hating Western civilization, which is really just an exercise in hating yourself.” The site posted (and later deleted) a video by slur-slinging right-wing conspiracy theorist Owen Benjamin demonizing leftists. Author Douglas Murray appeared in a video claiming that the decision of European countries to take in refugees from the Middle East and North Africa was a form of “suicide, the self-annihilation of a culture.” Ben Shapiro’s treatise on Western superiority was built upon bad facts and bad arguments. Shapiro’s Daily Wire colleagues Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Matt Walsh railed against feminism, political correctness, and the very concept of self-esteem, respectively. 

It’s no huge surprise that PragerU’s content often mirrors the views long championed by its namesake, Dennis Prager, a radio-host-turned-digital media mogul.

No one article can truly encapsulate Prager’s decades of political commentary, but he did a pretty decent job summarizing his own worldview in a March column in the National Review. In the piece, he explained why he didn’t believe the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to disrupt the 2016 election:

But the biggest reason I never believed the Russian collusion charge was that the charge emanated from the left. And the Left lies about everything. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. People on the left say whatever advances their immediate agenda. Power is their moral lodestar; therefore, truth is always subservient to it.

…

If you always doubt a leftist claim, you will almost always be closer to the truth. I employed that rule in concluding the collusion story was a fraud, and it served me well.

There’s a big difference between critical thinking and reflexive contrarianism. A 2011 blog post shines further light on how Prager sees the world:

Ever since I attended college, I have been convinced that either “studies” confirm what common sense suggests or that they are mistaken. I realized this when I was presented with study after study showing that boys and girls were not inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only because of sexist upbringings.

To Prager, if evidence doesn’t support his existing beliefs, the evidence must be wrong. This is instructive when it comes to understanding what kind of education one might get from a diet of PragerU videos.

Like many of his PragerU presenters, Prager himself is a far-right extremist on a number of issues. He’s claimed that the Green New Deal “will lead to bloodshed, loss of liberty, loss of human rights.” He has a long history of making false claims about HIV and AIDS -- specifically that it’s not something straight people need to concern themselves with. He’s compared a wife’s “obligation” to have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not to a man’s obligation to go to work even if he’s not in the mood. He’s argued that legalizing same-sex marriage would open the door to legalized incest and polygamy, compared the Supreme Court’s Prop 8 ruling to a coup, and said that banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity would lead to “fascism.” He’s also one of several conservative commentators who were adamant that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard wasn’t motivated by anti-gay hate.

He’s stated a belief that people saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas” is a sign that “Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).” Prager also argues that discussion of campus rape culture is “a gargantuan lie” pushed by feminists “to get votes.”  In 2012, Prager equated the NCAA’s punishment of Penn State University for its role in covering for assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial sexual abuse of young boys with the act itself, writing, “The lesson the NCAA is teaching young people — that history and truth don’t matter if enough powerful people don’t want them to matter — can be as injurious to society as the cover-up was to the victims of Sandusky.” In 2006, he wrote a column arguing that Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim, should not be allowed to be sworn into Congress unless he did so with his hand on the Bible, not the Quran as he planned on doing. In that column, Prager compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.

PragerU's funding largely comes from extremely religious GOP mega-donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Thanks in large part to the backing of fracking billionaires and Daily Wire funders Dan and Farris Wilks, Prager was able to fund PragerU, creating an outsized platform for his extremist views.

An April 2015 report in Rewire put a spotlight on the organization and its plan to get its videos incorporated into public school lessons. At that time, according to Rewire, the Wilks family had given more than $6.5 million to PragerU. A brief look at some of their beliefs shows why they made for such a perfect fit for Prager:

In 2013, at a Pastors and Pews event sponsored by the American Family Association, Dan Wilks had this to say about education: “I just think we have to make people aware, you know, and bring the Bible back into the school, and start teaching our kids at a younger age, and, uh, you know, and focus on the younger generation.”

His brother Farris went on to add: “They’re being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda, every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right.”

A Reuters report about the brothers’ support of Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign helped further illustrate their extreme positions on things like LGBTQ rights and climate change:

In sermons, recordings of which were reviewed by Reuters, Farris Wilks has called homosexuality “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia and incest.” “It’s a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children, and straight people having kids, to fulfill their sexual habits,” he said.

Climate change, he says, is God’s will. “If (God) wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” he told congregants at a service in July 2013.

With large chunks of money coming in from these extremely religious GOP mega-donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry, it’s not exactly shocking that the site would have videos with titles like “Climate Change: What’s So Alarming?” “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?” “The Paris Climate Agreement Won’t Change the Climate,” “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” and “The Truth about CO2.” PragerU also has an entire series about the Ten Commandments, which Dennis Prager describes as “all that is necessary to make a good world.” And George Will, Kimberley Strassel, and David French all have videos explaining why campaign finance reform and/or public disclosure laws are actually tyrannical, anti-democratic, and/or a way for progressives to ruin the lives of people they disagree with.

PragerU’s extremist, factually inaccurate propaganda has even drawn criticism from some on the right.

Whether it’s gaslighting viewers about President Donald Trump’s “very fine people” comments after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally or engaging in some truly bizarre Vietnam War revisionism, PragerU has no apparent problem with blatant misinformation in its videos. Some of these distortions are too much for allies (and occasional allies) to handle.

Writing in The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried slammed a PragerU video by Dinesh D’Souza for labeling fascism a leftist worldview based on a factually bereft understanding of Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s belief system:

[Prager and D’Souza] zoom to the heart of Gentile’s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a “leftist.” We have to assume that Prager, D’Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile’s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism. Their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile’s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.

According to our two stars in what has been laughably named “Prager University,” Gentile proves that “fascism bears a deep kinship to today’s Left.” After all, “Democrat progressives, in full agreement with Gentile, love and push for a centralized state, which manifests itself in stuff like recent state expansion into the private sector.” Among the questions that are left begging are these: “Do the modern Left and Gentile agree on the purpose and functions of the state?” “Would Gentile and Mussolini, who glorified Roman manliness, have rallied to the present Left in its support of feminism and gay marriage?” Did Gentile back in the 1920s favor the kind of “the stuff’ the administrative state is pushing right now?” The answer to all these questions, which of course wouldn’t be acceptable at Prager University, is an emphatic “no.” Control of the national economy by the Italian fascist state, down until its German-puppet version was established as the Italian Social Republic in September 1943, was about the equivalent of that of New Deal America. 

In a blog post for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, Alex Nowrasteh picked apart a PragerU video narrated by Michelle Malkin titled “A Nation of Immigration,” saying it is “poorly framed, rife with errors and half-truths, leaves out a lot of relevant information, and comes to an anti-legal immigration conclusion that is unsupported by the evidence presented in the rest of the video.” While it’s unsurprising that the pro-immigration Cato Institute would disagree with Malkin’s conclusions on ideological grounds, Nowrasteh’s dissection of Malkin’s factual errors is illustrative of PragerU’s reliance on omission to advance its narrative.

Reason’s Billy Binion has obliterated PragerU’s claims of censorship on multiple occasions. In one article, he rebutted Prager’s argument that “YouTube's decision to restrict approximately 20 percent of his online 5-minute video shorts on the grounds that they contain mature content -- thus hiding those videos from the approximately 1.5 percent of users who elect for restricted control” was evidence that PragerU was being punished for hosting “a conservative perspective”:

Unfortunately for this argument, Google records show that the Huffington Post, Vox, Buzzfeed, NowThis, and The Daily Show all have much larger swaths of content restricted under YouTube's policy. Seventy-one percent of videos from The Young Turks -- a leftist channel -- are blocked, dwarfing PragerU's share.

In a separate piece, Binion debunked Prager’s claims that Google search’s autofill suggestions were evidence of bias against PragerU.

It’s not enough to just say that PragerU isn’t an actual university. It’s outright propaganda, and those appearing on the channel are propagandists. 

As an institution, PragerU has proved to be toxic, and it should be best understood as -- as its “About Us” page notes -- a “digital marketing campaign.” If one of Prager University’s goals really is to “[make] the world a better place, five minutes at a time,” it deserves a failing grade for its current output.

Trump said he beat ISIS. Instead, he’s giving it new life. by Brett McGurk


Trump said he beat ISIS. Instead, he’s giving it new life.
by Brett McGurk, washingtonpost.com
January 18, 2019
On Dec. 17, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked for an important call with me and a few other senior State Department officials; I took the call from the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, where I traveled often to help manage America’s fight against the Islamic State. I was there to walk through plans with Iraq’s new government to ensure that our gains in that fight would endure. We’d come a long way from only four years earlier, when the Islamic State was at the gates of Baghdad: Today, according to the United Nations, Iraq is safer than at any time since the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq began keeping track six years ago.

These achievements came thanks to the dedication of America’s fighting partners on the ground — Iraqi security forces, Kurdish peshmerga, Syrian opposition fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) — all of whom have paid a dear price in blood.

Key to these gains has been the small and highly effective American military presence in Syria. This mission began in 2015 and has helped deny the Islamic State’s ability to plan and launch attacks from Syria or resurge back into Iraq. It is sustainable without an over-commitment of U.S. resources or Americans directly engaged in day-to-day fighting. They are enabling a local force, the SDF, now a diverse group of roughly 60,000 fighters, including Arabs, Kurds and Christians, to reclaim Syrian cities and towns from the Islamic State. The SDF has suffered thousands of casualties. Until this past week, two Americans had died in combat in Syria. (Four were killed Wednesday in a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State — the first of its kind against our forces in Syria — coinciding with uncertainty in Washington about the mission.)

During the December call, Pompeo informed us that there had been a sudden change in plans: President Trump, after a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart, planned to declare victory over the Islamic State and direct our forces to withdraw from Syria.

I returned to Washington immediately to help mitigate the fallout from this decision, particularly among our coalition partners, all of whom we had just assured — on instructions from the White House — that we had no intent to leave Syria anytime soon: National security adviser John Bolton had declared that we would stay in Syria “as long as the Iranian menace continues throughout the Middle East.” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and I had just met coalition partners to confirm commitments into 2020.

My counterparts in coalition capitals were bewildered. Our fighting partners in the SDF, whom I had visited regularly on the ground in Syria, expressed shock and then denial, hoping Trump would change his mind. They also insisted on continuing their fight against the Islamic State and were advancing at that time on terrorist strongholds in eastern Syria.

I soon concluded that I could not effectively implement these new instructions and, on Dec. 22, submitted my resignation.

The president’s decision to leave Syria was made without deliberation, consultation with allies or Congress, assessment of risk, or appreciation of facts. Two days after Pompeo’s call, Trump tweeted, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria.” But that was not true, and we have continued to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State. Days later, he claimed that Saudi Arabia had “now agreed to spend the necessary money needed to help rebuild Syria.” But that wasn’t true, either, as the Saudis later confirmed. Trump also suggested that U.S. military forces could leave Syria within 30 days, which was logistically impossible.

[The brittle foundation of Trump’s Middle East policy]

Worse, Trump made this snap decision after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He bought Erdogan’s proposal that Turkey take on the fight against the Islamic State deep inside Syria. In fact, Turkey can’t operate hundreds of miles from its border in hostile territory without substantial U.S. military support. And many of the Syrian opposition groups backed by Turkey include extremists who have openly declared their intent to fight the Kurds, not the Islamic State.

Trump’s latest proposal, issued via tweet, for a 20-mile safe zone — which Erdogan says Turkey will establish — similarly seems to have been made with no process or analysis. This area would encompass all Kurdish areas of eastern Syria. There is no force ready to take over, nor time to build one, as American troops prepare to leave. And entry of Turkish-backed opposition forces would likely displace thousands of Kurds, as well as threaten vulnerable Christian communities interspersed in these areas.

The strategic consequences of Trump’s decision are already playing out: The more Turkey expands its reach in Syria, the faster our Arab partners in the region move toward Damascus. It’s not a coincidence that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates reopened embassies there shortly after Trump said we were leaving. These countries, as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, believe that engaging Damascus can help dilute Russian, Iranian and Turkish influence in Syria, and they are discounting contrary views from Washington. The SDF, recognizing that it may soon be on its own and surrounded by hostile forces, has accelerated its talks with Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Turkey, a NATO ally, turned to Russia within days of Trump’s decision, dispatching senior officials to Moscow to work out next steps in Syria. Israel, our closest ally in the region, confronted a new reality with America soon absent from the field in Syria. Only Russia and Iran hailed Trump’s decision. Whatever leverage we may have had with these two adversaries in Syria diminished once Trump said we would leave.

These trends will worsen if the president does not reverse course: Our partners will stop listening and make decisions that run contrary to our interests. Our adversaries will play for time, knowing the United States is on its way out. The Islamic State and other extremist groups will fill the void opened by our departure, regenerating their capacity to threaten our friends in Europe — as they did throughout 2016 — and ultimately our own homeland.

Ideally, Trump will halt any withdrawal until he receives accurate appraisals of risks, the status of the Islamic State and the feasibility of Turkey, or anyone else, replacing us. To ask the Pentagon to design and execute a withdrawal plan absent such an assessment is folly. It is not enough for senior officials to walk back or place conditions on the decision. That must come from the president.

Absent this wiser but unlikely alternative, U.S. officials will try to suggest that the decision doesn’t matter. In recent weeks, they have argued that all our goals in Syria — including the ejection of Iran and political change in Damascus — can still be met, despite Trump saying that Syria is worth but “sand” and “death” and that Iran’s leaders “can do what they want” there. This disconnect between ambitious objectives stated by senior U.S. officials and Trump’s own views to the contrary is further undermining American credibility.

[Trump is making the same mistakes in Syria that Obama did in the Middle East]

A more realistic Syria policy must account for the following hard truths:

First, we are leaving. It may be in six months, four months or less, but Trump has made clear repeatedly that he wants out. The longer this fact is resisted or described as but a difference in tactics, with our strategy unchanged, the worse the risk of an embarrassing exit, attacks against U.S. forces and wholesale abandonment of the SDF with no realistic planning for the aftermath. The focus now must be on protecting our military and getting out safely; asking our small force to do more than that will increase risk as we withdraw.

Second, Assad is staying. This fact is now priced into the thinking of our regional partners, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, which are as hard-line on Iran as anyone in Washington but understand that without us, any chance of upending this mass-murdering dictator, propped up by Iran and Russia, is a pipe dream.

Third, only the SDF provides stability in the areas that once made up the Islamic State in northeast Syria. Its forces cannot be replaced. And with America leaving, it will need a new benefactor, or else risk fracturing and opening a vacuum into which the Islamic State can resurge. To maintain stability, the SDF may have no choice but to reach accommodation with Damascus to come under the umbrella of the Syrian state. This unfortunate outcome may be necessary to avoid a strategic and humanitarian debacle.

Fourth, on Syria, Turkey is not a reliable partner. The Syrian opposition forces it backs are marbled with extremists and number too few to constitute an effective challenge to Assad or a plausible alternative to the SDF. The areas of Syria that Turkey ostensibly controls, such as Idlib province in the northwest, are increasingly dominated by al-Qaeda. The United States can help Turkey protect its border, but entry of the Turkish military and Turkish-supported opposition fighters into SDF areas of northeast Syria — as is now being discussed — would precipitate chaos and an environment for extremists to thrive.

[Troops coming home? That’s more likely to mean a war is lost than won.]

So U.S. objectives in Syria should be narrowed to mitigating the risk of an Islamic State resurgence and preventing Iran from fortifying a military presence that threatens Israel. The former is best achieved by ensuring that the SDF remains intact and obtaining ongoing access to airspace through deconfliction with Russia; the latter by supporting Israel in what it has recently acknowledged to be a precise air campaign against Iranian threats in Syria.

These narrow objectives would be unsatisfying for those with greater hopes for Syria. But those hopes are dead. With the clock ticking on an American departure, we must salvage what we can to protect only the most important American interests — and even that may be a tall order.

The irony is that defeating the Islamic State is what the president identified as his goal from the beginning. In 2016, he vowed to “knock the hell out of ISIS.” His recent choices, unfortunately, are already giving the Islamic State — and other American adversaries — new life.

Two women, caught in the vortex of Syria’s police state

The limits of the executive branch

The Trump foreign policy legacy

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Trump/Russia, Trump/Ukraine, Same As It Ever Was Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Trump/Russia, Trump/Ukraine, Same As It Ever Was

Editors’ Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h

Contemporary Ukraine and Russia are filled with multiple layers of corruption and political intrigue. The totality of their porous and entangled relationship with each other and with the United States over the last 5 years is difficult to summarize or convey simply. But there are broad outlines that are critical to understand and take account of. To put it simply, soon after the 2016 campaign ended, Trump and Co went back into business with the same cast of characters from the former Soviet Union they’d been working with on election assistance and business deals through 2015 and 2016. Only now the goal wasn’t election interference. It was trying to prove the election interference campaign they’d both been part of had actually never happened. Perhaps ‘going back into business’ misstates the matter. It never ended.

The whole 2016 Russian election interference campaign was tightly connected to the events of 2014 in Ukraine – the overthrow of the Russia-aligned Yanukovych government, the Russian seizure of Crimea and the Western sanctions that came in their wake. The campaign was run by Russia but in large part carried out by Russian and Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs who had lost out in the events of 2014 because they were allied with the Russian government and the business interests around it. Fast forward to today and we have a new scandal over the Trump White House using extortion to get the current Ukraine government to intervene on President Trump’s behalf in the 2020 election.

But today and 2016 aren’t two things. They are the same story. Trump and Giuliani and Trump’s entourage teamed up with the people behind the 2016 campaign or their associates to disprove the 2016 campaign had ever happened. If gaslighting is the leitmotif of Trumpism this is the Ur-example. Indeed, the core Trump conspiracy theory – that he and Russia were framed for the 2016 interference campaign by Ukraine and the DNC – was itself first concocted and propagated by Russian propaganda outlets in late 2016 as the outlines of their effort were being reported in the US media.

As is so often the case, the story goes back to Paul Manafort, Trump’s life-on-the-skids 2016 campaign manager. Recent reporting has shown the effort to tar the Bidens went along with and actually originated in an effort to discredit the prosecution of Paul Manafort. Why this was so important and why Trump & Co were so committed to it must remain a topic of speculation – was it to upend the Mueller probe or lay the groundwork for a pardon? But it began with an effort to exonerate Manafort and it quickly enlisted Manafort’s former associates and business partners in Ukraine for the effort. Manafort maintained contact with Trump through the first half of 2017 and his and the President’s legal team had a joint defense agreement with the President’s lawyers that, unbelievably, continued through the period when he was nominally cooperating with the Mueller probe. Whatever the motivation for exonerating Manafort and Russia, it is highly likely he was the person who put Giuliani and Trump with the cast of characters we’re now seeing in headlines each day.

A key example here is Dmitry Firtash, perhaps Ukraine’s most notorious and powerful oligarch, who was a big loser in the overthrow of the Yanukovych government. Firtash was reportedly instrumental in getting Manafort his job working for Yanukovych in the first place back in 2005. They were also business partners in a billion dollar real estate deal that came apart in 2008 because it coincided with the financial crisis. Firtash had to flee Ukraine after the 2014 revolution and he was indicted in the US on corruption charges soon after. He has been living in Austria ever since, fighting extradition to the United States.

The steady stream of affidavits and interviews and other documents which have been hyped by Rudy Giuliani and published in reports by John Solomon mostly or all seem to go back to people working for Firtash or importuned by him. For instance, the affidavit sworn out by the former state prosecutor claiming he was fired for investigating the Bidens was done at the behest of Firtash. Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, Trump’s on-again, off-again lawyers who routinely appear on Fox News to push these conspiracy theories recently signed on to represent Firtash. The two hustler-pals of Rudy Giuliani who were arrested last week, Lev Parnas and Igor Frumin, happened to be on Firtash’s payroll while also working as part of Trump’s legal defense team and also working for DiGenova and Toensing.

As you can see, the swirl of connections and alliances at work here are byzantine and hard to follow. Certainly everyone has a range of motives. With Firtash himself I assume his primary motive is to curry favor with President Trump in order to get out of under the US criminal charges and extradition proceedings. Many of the other players – like the fired prosecutor Shokin – are simply hustlers and crooks, with no fixed allegiances, who know what Trump wants and are eager to give it to him. But the gist of it all is that from early on in the Mueller probe Trump and Co got into bed with the same swirl of people who were behind the 2016 interference campaign, or their allies and business partners, with a new goal: to prove the interference campaign had never happened, that Trump and Russia had been framed by Ukraine and the DNC. Or to put it another way, that the interference campaign had actually been the handiwork of the campaign’s primary victims. That has continued down until today. Everything that is now driving the White House toward impeachment is just an outgrowth of that continuing effort. It never ended.

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Shep Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News His exit shows Fox for what it really is WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

Shep Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News
His exit shows Fox for what it really is

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 10/11/19 4:59 PM EDT

Fox News chief news anchor Shepard Smith’s shocking on-air resignation sends a clear and dismaying message: Fox’s vaunted “news” division has been routed. Its right-wing opinion hosts, loyal allies of President Donald Trump, stand unchallenged. And truth and accuracy have no place on the network’s airwaves.

Smith announced at the end of his Friday afternoon broadcast that he had asked management to allow him to leave the network where he had worked for more than two decades. Moments before, a Fox press release detailing his resignation sent shockwaves through Twitter. His on-air statement noticeably rattled his colleagues, apparently taking them entirely by surprise.

Smith was willing to report the news honestly, even when it conflicted with the conspiracy theories and lies of Fox’s prime-time hosts. That gave him mainstream credibility and respect, even as it earned him the contempt of the network’s conservative fanbase, his right-wing colleagues, and Trump himself. 

The burgeoning impeachment inquiry into Trump’s abuses of power triggered a new urgency in the conflict between Fox’s “news” and “opinion” divisions, one that centered around Smith. An intense on-air feud erupted between Smith and Fox host and sometime Trump adviser Tucker Carlson over whether Trump had broken the law by asking the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponent. The argument was capped off by Carlson’s suggestion that Smith was providing his audience with partisan opinion, not news (with Smith reportedly told by Fox executives that he would be terminated if he extended the conflict). And just yesterday, the president mentioned Smith while lashing out at Fox for being insufficiently supportive of his administration.

Counterintuitively, Smith’s willingness to push back against the misinformation rampant elsewhere on the network had made him extremely valuable to Fox. It provided the network’s executives with a fig leaf they could wave whenever critics argued that Fox was nothing more than a propaganda apparatus on behalf of the president and his allies.

That fig leaf is gone. Fox belongs to the Seans Hannity and Lous Dobbs. And now, everyone knows it.

Trump has opened the door for an Islamic State resurgence in Syria by David Ignatius


Trump has opened the door for an Islamic State resurgence in Syria
by David Ignatius, washingtonpost.com
October 9, 2019 02:12 PM
October 9, 2019 at 3:12 PM EDT
By acquiescing to Turkey’s invasion of northeastern Syria on Wednesday, President Trump has opened the door to what could become a genuine nightmare for the United States and its allies: the revival of the deadly terrorist organization that called itself the Islamic State.

The danger lies not simply in the group’s sleeper cells that are still active — and that detonated three suicide bombs in the terrorists’ former capital of Raqqa on Wednesday. The larger risk comes from about 11,000 Islamic State fighters who have been detained by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led militia that Trump is abandoning, and who may now try to flee.

As the SDF mobilizes to combat the Turks, security at nearly 20 makeshift prisons is likely to deteriorate, U.S. officials said. The U.S. military has said that it won’t take control, nor will European allies. Turkey’s claim that it can police the camps is hollow, given that many of these terrorists arrived in Syria after passing through Turkey.

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The cascade of bad events could get worse if action isn’t taken quickly. U.S. officials fear that as security deteriorates, U.N. relief agencies may abandon control of a camp called al-Hol, which holds more than 70,000 refugees, more than 25 percent of whom are relatives of killed or captured Islamic State fighters. Riots have rocked al-Hol in recent days, and visitors say that some areas are too dangerous to enter.

Here’s the appalling scenario that U.S. officials fear could unfold if the Turkish invasion isn’t a quick, limited operation, as Trump apparently hopes: As security collapses in northeastern Syria, hardened Islamic State fighters could escape the prisons, storm the al-Hol camp to reunite with their families and then renew the terrorist assault against the West that they began in 2014.

A revived Islamic State would pose a threat to the U.S. homeland — but probably a greater one to Europe, Russia and regions where the “foreign fighters” originated. Though these places are all threatened by what’s ahead, none has taken significant steps to ease the impending crisis.

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This frightening risk of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” against the Islamic State is a result of the Trump administration’s chronic policy breakdown. This begins with Trump himself, whose erratic swings on Syria have appalled some of his closest political allies. But it extends to an interagency process so enfeebled under Trump that it has failed for months to generate clear plans for dealing with a possible Islamic State resurgence if U.S. troops should leave, as Trump demanded in December.

European nations have been nearly as guilty as the Trump administration. As I explained in May, they have refused U.S. and Kurdish pleas to repatriate some of their nationals held in the SDF-controlled prisons, or even to pay the SDF for holding them. “The European Union is in denial,” one official told me then, noting that the refugee issue was so toxic politically that no European government dared touch it.

How large is the Islamic State army-in-waiting, if the prisoners escape the camps? Gen. Mazloum Abdi, the SDF commander, gave me some numbers in an interview in Kobani in July. He said that the SDF was guarding 12,000 Islamic State fighters who were captured when the caliphate was defeated. In addition to about 9,000 Syrian and Iraqi radical Islamists, this group included 2,500 foreign fighters, Mazloum said, with about 1,000 Europeans. U.S. estimates are slightly lower, counting about 2,200 foreign fighters among 11,000 prisoners.

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The prisons are rough, makeshift facilities, mostly improvised in old schoolhouses and municipal buildings. There’s one actual prison in Hasakah, which was built by the Syrian regime and commandeered by the SDF. The prisoners themselves are said to be ragged and lice-ridden, according to an American who has visited one of the sites. Two prisons have already seen riots and attempted breakouts, including one in April at a facility in Dayrik that was holding British prisoners, according to a U.S. official.

Some foreign fighters have been questioned by FBI and U.S. military interrogators, or by representatives of France, Britain and other countries from which the detainees originally traveled. In recent weeks, U.S. and other coalition officials have begun discussing what they might do if security collapsed. But there has been little coordination.

The United States has identified 50 of the most dangerous detainees and may seek to transfer them to neighboring countries, perhaps Iraq. Trump has also requested that the United States take control of two notorious prisoners, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh (known in Britain as the “Beatles”), who are believed to have killed Western hostages.

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For Trump, what’s unfolding now in Syria is largely a self-inflicted wound. It will be politically costly for him, but there’s a deeper problem. U.S. successes in the Middle East are too rare and precious to be squandered. But that’s what appears to be happening now in this grotesque coda to the war against the Islamic State.

Josh Rogin: How Trump just destroyed his own Syria strategy

Henry Olsen: Trump is wrong to pull troops from Syria. He’s right that the United States is overextended.

The Post’s View: Trump’s Syria decision reflects his stunning ignorance of the situation

Jeanne Shaheen and Diane Foley: Don’t let Islamic State monsters get away with murder

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