Donald Trump's Syria strike looks a lot like Barack Obama's plan, despite what Rubio, others say 12APR17

(ONE has to wonder what this is going to do to the drumpf/trump-iranian revolutionary guards investment partnership in Baku, Azerbaijan).
THE drumpf/trump-pence administration's illegal war with out end Syria policy isn't any different than the Obama-Biden administration's with one exception. (NOT MY) president drumpf/trump is a megalomaniac, too unstable to be trusted to be commander-in-chief with access to our nuclear weapons arsenal. At least Obama went to congress for authorization for military action in response to assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013, though he didn't for his other military actions in the Middle East. drumpf/trump doesn't plan on asking congress for  authorization for military action in the Middle East under the war powers act because nobody is going to tell him what he can and can not do with "his military". NOTE to drumpf/trump, STOP referring to the US Military as "my military". It is not yours, it is the military of the United States of America and it's responsibility is to protect the American people, not to be used as the pawn of the war lord you (and little marco) seem to think you are. This from PolitiFact....

Donald Trump's Syria strike looks a lot like Barack Obama's plan, despite what Rubio, others say

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Marco Rubio

Republican senator from Florida

the Obama administration’s 2013 Syria airstrike proposal "had no clear objective," while Trump’s Syria strike "had a clear strategic objective."

on ABC "This Week" – Sunday, April 9, 2017

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It was "the right move" for President Donald Trump to launch airstrikes in Syria in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack, said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on CNN April 7.

But almost four years ago, Rubio opposed President Barack Obama’s plan to order airstrikes in Syria, also after dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people.

Rubio explained why 2017 is different than 2013 on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

"Here's the first thing that's changed from 2013 to now: The Russians are now there," Rubio said in an April 9 interview. "Assad was losing back in 2013. If we had armed non-jihadist elements on the ground, they could have overthrown him. That's what I thought was the better approach at the time.

"The second is that the administration, what they were proposing, had no clear objective. They wanted to blow up some things to send a message. I don't think you use the U.S. military simply to send a message. This strike was limited, but it had a clear strategic objective, which was the destruction or degrading of a key airbase installation that is used in these chemical attacks."

Rubio is one of several Republicans — including Trump — who have flipped from opposing post-chemical weapons airstrikes in 2013 to supporting them in 2017.

Rubio has a point that the geopolitical situation in Syria has changed; Russia, Iran and the Islamic State are all bigger players in the Syrian civil war than they were three and a half years ago. But we were also interested in Rubio’s assertion that the Obama administration’s proposal, compared to Trump’s actions, didn’t have a clear objective.

The argument rings hollow.

Obama and his team spent several days making the case to Congress and the public that they should support military action in Syria, and the goals and plans they laid out were quite similar to the actions Trump took in 2017.

We reached out to Rubio's staff for comment but didn't hear back.

Making the case

In August 2013, Assad’s regime killed more than 1,400 people in a chemical weapons attack on the city of Damascus. Obama wanted to strike Syria in retaliation, but he chose to ask Congress to authorize his use of military force. Obama couldn’t get enough votes to pass his proposal, so he did not order strikes fired in direct retaliation for the chemical attacks.

The 2017 chemical weapons attack was much smaller, killing about 80 people. Two days later, without advance notice or requesting congressional approval, Trump launched nearly 60 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield used to carry out the chemical weapons attacks.  

Because the Obama administration spent several days lobbying Congress and the public to support his proposed military action, there are numerous speeches, media interviews, documents and congressional hearings during which his team laid out the strategy.

For Trump, in contrast, we have to look at what members of his administration have said to justify the airstrikes after the fact.

Here are three examples each of the Obama and Trump administrations laying out their goals. Both describe sending a message to Assad that chemical weapons use is unacceptable. Both involve a targeted attack plan designed to degrade Assad’s chemical weapon capabilities by taking out related facilities and resources.

If anything, the Obama White House’s objectives, as well as the scope of the operation, were more clear than Trump’s because the Obama administration had to lobby the public instead of acting unilaterally.

Obama:

In this 2013 photo, members of former President Barack Obama’s administration — Martin Dempsey, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel — appear before the Senate to make the case for military action in Syria. (Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press)

• Obama’s proposal to Congress: "The objective of the United States' use of military force in connection with this authorization should be to deter, disrupt, prevent, and degrade the potential for, future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction."

• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey in a House hearing: "(Obama) has directed me to plan for a militarily significant strike that would do the following: deter the Assad regime's further use of chemical weapons and degrade the regime's military capability to employ chemical weapons in the future. We've assembled target packages in line with those objectives. We have both an initial target set and subsequent target sets should they become necessary. The planned strikes will disrupt those parts of Assad's forces directly related to the chemical attack of 21 August; degrade his means of chemical weapons delivery; and finally, degrade the assets that Assad uses to threaten his neighbors and to defend his regime. Collectively, such strikes will send Assad a deterrent message, demonstrating our ability to hold at risk the capabilities he values most and to strike again if necessary."

•  Secretary of State John Kerry in a Huffington Post article: "It would be a tailored action to make clear that the world will not stand by and allow the international norm against the use of chemical weapons to be violated with impunity by a brutal dictator willing to gas hundreds of children to death while they sleep. Our action would be a limited and targeted military action, against military targets in Syria, designed to deter Syria's use of chemical weapons and degrade the Assad regime's capabilities to use or transfer such weapons in the future."

Trump:

In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, a guided-missile destroyer launches a missile in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017. (via Associated Press)

•  Trump in a statement to Congress two days after the strikes: "United States intelligence indicates that Syrian military forces operating from this airfield were responsible for the chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians in southern Idlib Province, Syria, that occurred on April 4. I directed this action in order to degrade the Syrian military's ability to conduct further chemical weapons attacks and to dissuade the Syrian regime from using or proliferating chemical weapons, thereby promoting the stability of the region and averting a worsening of the region's current humanitarian catastrophe."

• National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in a press briefing: "Obviously, the regime will maintain the certain capacity to commit mass murder with chemical weapons, we think, beyond this particular airfield. But it was aimed at this particular airfield for a reason because we could trace this murderous attack back to that facility. And this was not a small strike."

• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on This Week: "The president was very clear in his message to the American people that this strike was related solely to the most recent horrific use of chemical weapons against women, children and, as the president said, even small babies. And so the strike was a message to Bashar al-Assad that your multiple violations of your agreements at the U.N., your agreements under the Chemical Weapons Charter back in 2013, that those would not go without a response in the future."

Rubio himself had the opportunity to question Obama administration officials about Syria in a September 2013 Senate hearing. There, he said he was concerned that Obama’s proposed operation was too narrow to degrade Assad’s chemical weapons abilities and deter future attacks — a position that conflicts with his current stance that Obama administration’s plans weren’t focused enough.

"Quite frankly, I'm a bit skeptical that the act, that what the president is asking for will provide the support needed to achieve these objectives and that these objectives are even realistic at this point," Rubio said. "It leads me to my second question: How confident are you, and how confident can you express to this committee, you are that we can, in fact, put in place a military plan that's limited in scope and duration, that can effectively degrade Assad's capability to carry out future chemical attacks?"

Dempsey replied, "I'm confident in the capabilities we can bring to bear to deter and degrade. And it won't surprise you to know that we will have not only an initial target set, but subsequent target sets should they become necessary."

Philip Gordon, who was the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region from 2013 to 2015, told PolitiFact that he doesn’t see any material difference between the Trump administration’s actions in 2017 and Obama’s proposed actions in 2013 that could lead a politician to change their position, other than political calculation.

Yes, the dynamics of the Syrian civil war have changed, in that Russia, Iran and ISIS now play larger roles, Gordon said, "But none of those are relevant to the core question at hand: Is this strike capable of deterring chemical weapons? That’s the stated goal of both presidents."

Our ruling

Rubio said the Obama administration’s 2013 Syria airstrike proposal "had no clear objective," while Trump’s Syria strike "had a clear strategic objective."

In 2013 Obama’s team made their goals clear through a days-long lobbying effort: to degrade Assad’s chemical weapons abilities and deter future attacks through targeted military strikes on facilities and resources related to the attack.

Trump in 2017, conversely, didn’t lobby Congress and the public because he launched his strike unilaterally. After the strike, his team said the action was designed to degrade a facility related to the chemical weapons attack and send a message that the United States doesn’t tolerate chemical weapons use.

There is little material difference between what Obama planned to do and what Trump actually did, in terms of goals and scope. We rate Rubio’s claim False.

About this statement:

Published: Wednesday, April 12th, 2017 at 11:22 a.m.

Researched by: Lauren Carroll

Edited by: Katie Sanders

Subjects: Foreign Policy

Sources:

ABC News, This Week transcript, April 9, 2017

FactCheck.org, "McConnell Revises History on Syria," April 7, 2017

Rubio website, "Rubio Statement on U.S. Airstrikes in Syria," April 6, 2017

New York Times, "Obama Seeks Approval by Congress for Strike in Syria," Aug. 31, 2013

New York Times, "Draft Resolution for Use of U.S. Military in Syria," Sept. 1, 2013

Huffington Post, "A Yes Vote of Conscience for the World’s Red Line," Sept. 6, 2013

White House, "A Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate," April 8, 2017

State Department, Remarks With National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, April 6, 2017

CQ, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Holds Hearing on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Syria, Sept. 3, 2013

CQ, House Foreign Affairs Committee Holds Hearing on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Syria, Sept. 4, 2013

CQ, House Armed Services Committee Holds Hearing on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Syria, Sept. 10, 2013

CQ, archive search, conducted April 11, 2017

Obama White House archive search, conducted April 11, 2017

Phone interview, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Philip Gordon, April 11, 2017

Forget Sykes-Picot. It’s the Treaty of Sèvres That Explains the Modern Middle East.10AUG15

Treaty of Sevres | Historical Atlas of Europe (10 August 1920) | Omniatlas
TURKEY has been on the news a lot the past few years but most know little of the history of Turkey. Here is an interesting piece from +Foreign Policy on Turkish history on the 95th anniversary of the Treaty Of Sevres. Consideration of just who drew the lines on these maps explains a lot of the conflicts that continue from 1923 to today, the massive humanitarian crisis in Europe and the Middle East and why Turkish President Recep Erdogan is intent on dragging Turkey into a dangerous episode of paranoid nationalism. 

Forget Sykes-Picot. It’s the Treaty of Sèvres That Explains the Modern Middle East.

Ninety-five years ago today, Europe carved up the Ottoman empire. That treaty barely lasted a year, but we're feeling its aftershocks today.

• BY NICK DANFORTH
• AUGUST 10, 2015

Ninety-five years ago today, European diplomats gathered at a porcelain factory in the Paris suburb of Sèvres and signed a treaty to remake the Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The plan collapsed so quickly we barely remember it anymore, but the short-lived Treaty of Sèvres, no less than the endlessly discussed Sykes-Picot agreement, had consequences that can still be seen today. We might do well to consider a few of them as the anniversary of this forgotten treaty quietly passes by.

In 1915, as British troops prepared to march on Istanbul by way of the Gallipoli peninsula, the government in London printed silk handkerchiefs heralding the end of the Ottoman empire. It was a bit premature (the battle of Gallipoli turned out to be one of the Ottomans’ few World War I victories) but by 1920 Britain’s confidence seemed justified: With allied troops occupying the Ottoman capital, representatives from the war’s victorious powers signed a treaty with the defeated Ottoman government that divided the empire’s lands into European spheres of influence. Sèvres internationalized Istanbul and the Bosphorus, while giving pieces of Anatolian territory to the Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, French, British, and Italians. Seeing how and why the first European plan for dividing up the Middle East failed, we can better understand the region’s present-day borders, as well as the contradictions of contemporary Kurdish nationalism and the political challenges facing modern Turkey.

Within a year of signing the Treaty of Sèvres, European powers began to suspect they had bitten off more than they could chew. Determined to resist foreign occupation, Ottoman officers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk reorganized the remnants of the Ottoman army and, after several years of desperate fighting, drove out the foreign armies seeking to enforce the treaty’s terms. The result was Turkey as we recognize it today, whose new borders were officially established in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Sèvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the “Sèvres syndrome.” Sèvres certainly plays a role in Turkey’s sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief that the Armenian genocide — widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920 — was always an anti-Turkish conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth. Moreover, Turkey’s foundational struggle with colonial occupation left its mark in a persistent form of anti-imperial nationalism, directed first against Britain, during the Cold War against Russia, and now, quite frequently, against the United States.

But the legacy of Sèvres extends well beyond Turkey, which is precisely why we should include this treaty alongside Sykes-Picot in our history of the Middle East. It will help us challenge the widespread notion that the region’s problems all began with Europeans drawing borders on a blank map.

There’s no doubt that Europeans were happy to create borders that conformed to their own interests whenever they could get away with it. But the failure of Sèvres proves that that sometimes they couldn’t. When European statesmen tried to redraw the map of Anatolia, their efforts were forcefully defeated. In the Middle East, by contrast, Europeans succeeded in imposing borders because they had the military power to prevail over the people resisting them. Had the Syrian nationalist Yusuf al-‘Azma, another mustachioed Ottoman army officer, replicated Ataturk’s military success and defeated the French at the Battle of Maysalun, European plans for the Levant would have gone the way of Sèvres.

Would different borders have made the Middle East more stable, or perhaps less prone to sectarian violence? Not necessarily. But looking at history through the lens of the Sèvres treaty suggests a deeper point about the cause-and-effect relationship between European-drawn borders and Middle Eastern instability: the regions that ended up with borders imposed by Europe tended to be those already too weak or disorganized to successfully resist colonial occupation. Turkey didn’t become wealthier and more democratic than Syria or Iraq because it had the good fortune to get the right borders. Rather, the factors that enabled Turkey to defy European plans and draw its own borders — including an army and economic infrastructure inherited from the Ottoman empire — were some of the same ones that enabled Turkey to build a strong, centralized, European-style nation-state.

Of course, plenty of Kurdish nationalists might claim that Turkey’s borders actually are wrong. Indeed, some cite Kurdish statelessness as a fatal flaw in the region’s post-Ottoman borders. But when European imperialists tried to create a Kurdish state at Sèvres, many Kurds fought alongside Ataturk to upend the treaty. It’s a reminder that political loyalties can and do transcend national identities in ways we would do well to realize today.

The Kurdish state envisioned in the Sèvres Treaty would, crucially, have been under British control. While this appealed to some Kurdish nationalists, others found this form of British-dominated “independence” problematic. So they joined up to fight with the Turkish national movement. Particularly among religious Kurds, continued Turkish or Ottoman rule seemed preferable to Christian colonization. Other Kurds, for more practical reasons, worried that once in charge the British would inevitably support recently dispossessed Armenians seeking to return to the region. Some subsequently regretted their decision when it became clear the state they had fought to create would be significantly more Turkish — and less religious — than anticipated. But others, under varying degrees of duress, chose instead to accept the identity the new state offered them.

Many Turkish nationalists remain frightened by the way their state was destroyed by Sèvres, while many Kurdish nationalists still imagine the state they might have achieved. At the same time, today’s Turkish government extolls the virtues of Ottoman tolerance and multiculturalism, while Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, apparently after reading the sociologist Benedict Anderson in prison, claims to have discovered that all nations are merely social constructs. The governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish HDP spent much of the last decade competing to convince Kurdish voters that a vote for their party was a vote for peace — competing, that is, over which party was capable of resolving Turkey’s long-simmering conflict by creating a more stable and inclusive state. In short, as many Americans still debate the “artificial” nature of European-made states in the Middle East, Turkey is fitfully transcending a century-long obsession with proving how “real” it is.

Needless to say, the renewed violence Turkey has seen in the past several weeks threatens these fragile elements of a post-national consensus. With the AKP calling for the arrest of Kurdish political leaders and Kurdish guerrillas shooting police officers, nationalists on both sides are falling back into familiar, irreconcilable positions. For 95 years, Turkey reaped the political and economic benefits of its victory over the Treaty of Sèvres. But building on this success now requires forging a more flexible political model, one that helps render battles over borders and national identity irrelevant.

Photo credit: David Rumsey Map Collection

FOREIGN POLICY EDITOR'S PICKS 6-10OKT14

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