Mick Hartley

Worth a read, this angry opinion piece by Robert Hockett and Anna-Sara Malmgren in Haaretz – Backing Trump on Syria, America's So-called 'Progressives' Are Enabling a Kurdish Genocide:

Donald Trump recently announced by tweet that he would pull the last remaining US troops from northern Syria. This "decision," if anything so unpremeditated can be called that, came with no prior warning to Mr. Trump’s cabinet, to his foreign policy or military teams, to Congress, to other nations’ governments, to our allies in Syria – the Kurdish-led SDF – or even, it seems, to himself.

As best as we can tell from the news accounts, Mr. Trump simply "gave" northern Syria, as if he owned it, to Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan on a whim, as the two discussed Syria and other matters by telephone Thursday. He did this against the explicit advice of his Defense Secretary James Mattis, who then resigned, and in full knowledge of Erdogan’s plans to launch a large-scale military operation against SDF’s Kurdish contingent (the YPG and YPJ) east of the Euphrates.

It is a reckless and irresponsible move, that is almost certain to reinvigorate what remains of ISIS, enable Erdogan to take his brutal persecution of the Kurds further into Syria, and lead to chaos and destruction in what has for years been the most stable part of the country and a safe haven for refugees: the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, better known as Rojava.

To our astonishment, many self-styled "progressives" in the U.S. have applauded Mr. Trump’s move.

Through their post-9/11 filter, it apparently represents a long-awaited rollback of American imperial involvements that grew especially pronounced during the Obama, Bush and late Clinton years (and that our less recent history is full of). More "moderately" left-leaning Americans, for their part, have joined traditional conservatives in criticizing Trump for announcing that we will, in effect, be handing Syria to Russia and Iran.

Neither reply to Mr. Trump’s volte face is responsive to its real significance. This is not about neoliberal adventurism or imperial retrenchment on the U.S.’s part, nor is it about renewed cold war with Moscow or Tehran.

It is about the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria – Rojava – and the obstacle that this quite remarkable, ethnically and religiously pluralist, environmentalist and feminist, decentralized democratic polity poses to Mr. Erdogan’s aims: to strengthen his own, increasingly theocratic and tyrannical rule, and expand it across the Near East. It is, moreover, about Mr. Trump’s personal-financial reasons for aiding and abetting Erdogan in his pursuit of this agenda. […]

When you hear sundry ersatz progressives, moderates, and conservatives applauding or decrying Trump’s move through their "world-historical" and ideological filters in the coming days, ask only one thing: What about Rojava? What about the genocide and democracide now being planned over in Ankara? That is what matters right now. All else is distraction and sophistry.

Among those "progressives" mentioned in the article, to nobody's surprise surely – Glenn Greenwald.