One of the more bizarre elements of President Trump’s Syrian policy is his decision to station troops to protect Syrian oil fields. Ostensibly, the policy is designed to prevent ISIS from controlling the oil and gaining revenues from its sale. But President Trump’s earlier statement that the US should have taken control of Iraq’s oil fields in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq raises questions about his intentions. The Guardian has several quotes on the matter:
“At a forum hosted by NBC on 7 September, Trump suggested oil seizure would have been a way to pay for the Iraq war, saying: ‘We go in, we spend $3tn, we lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then … what happens is we get nothing. You know, it used to be to the victor belong the spoils.’
He added: ‘One of the benefits we would have had if we took the oil is Isis would not have been able to take oil and use that oil to fuel themselves.’
The idea predates Trump’s presidential campaign. As far back as 2011, he was telling the Wall Street Journal that this was his policy for Iraq. ‘You heard me, I would take the oil,’ he said. ‘I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.’ And he insisted to ABC News that this did not amount to national theft.
“’You’re not stealing anything,’ Trump said. ‘We’re reimbursing ourselves … at a minimum, and I say more. We’re taking back $1.5tn to reimburse ourselves.’”
Trump’s assertions are pure nonsense. The right of conquest was nullified by the UN Charter and such imperial adventures are politically unpalatable today. But in his speech yesterday announcing the death of Baghdadi, Mr. Trump made this comment:
“We’re out. But we are leaving soldiers to secure the oil. And we may have to fight for the oil. It’s okay. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.
“And we’re securing it for a couple of reasons. Number one, it stops ISIS, because ISIS got tremendous wealth from that oil. We have taken it. It’s secured.
“Number two — and again, somebody else may claim it, but either we’ll negotiate a deal with whoever is claiming it, if we think it’s fair, or we will militarily stop them very quickly. We have tremendous power in that part of the world. We have — you know, the airport is right nearby. A very big, very monstrous, very powerful airport, and very expensive airport that was built years ago. We were in there — we’re in that Middle East now for $8 trillion.”
Mr. Trump went on to say “We should be able to take some also, and what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.”
What Mr. Trump is talking about is called “pillaging” and it is prohibited in both international and US domestic law. According to ABC News:
“Pillaging is illegal under international law, explicitly prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention, which the U.S. ratified as a treaty in 1955. The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 also made it punishable under U.S. law to commit a ‘grave breach’ of any of the Geneva conventions ‘whether inside or outside the United States.’
“These codifications were built on many previous legal prohibitions and military practices, from the charter of the Nuremberg trials that prosecuted the Nazis after World War II, to the Hague Convention of 1907 which was first proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt, all the way back to the 1863 Lieber Code. Commissioned and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, it governed the conduct of the Union Army in the field during the American Civil War and prohibited ‘all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force,’ punishable by death.
One should also remember that the oil belongs to the Syrian state. Syria may wish to strike a deal with ExxonMobil, but it is difficult to imagine that the company would jump at the idea of managing tiny oil fields in the middle of a war zone. Mr. Trump may wish to negotiate a deal with ExxonMobil itself (I suspect that Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State that Mr. Trump fired who was also the CEO of ExxonMobil, would not make such a deal), but that amounts to stealing from Syria. And 500 US troops would not be nearly enough to defend the oil fields from Syrian troops backed up by the Russian military. The Guardian quotes Chris Harmer, a former navy officer and naval aviator, who is now a military analyst:
“‘It would take close to 100,000 troops plus the equipment, the airborne patrols, to secure the oilfields and extract the oil,’ Harmer said. ‘Theoretically it would suck up all the deployable assets we have. Forget about the Pacific, forget about Africa. They would just have one purpose – sucking up oil assets in the Middle East.’
“The military footprint would have to be even larger to actually get the oil out.
“’You’d have to occupy most of Syria to get the oil out of the country, since the Syrian export pipelines travel from the oilfields in eastern Syria all the way to the Mediterranean coast, right across the central breadth of the country,’ Krane [Jim Krane, an energy studies fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston] said.
“’It wouldn’t do you much good to just capture the oilfields. If you wanted to steal the oil, it would take a full military occupation of Syria to control the full length of the pipelines, so you could move the oil to market. At a minimum, that would mean occupying the city of Homs in central Syria, as well as the main Syrian oil terminals at Banias and Tartus. All that is in addition to occupying rebel-held areas such as Deir ez-Zour where the oilfields lie.’
“…..The costs of the military operations would far exceed any revenue that could be extracted.”
The reality of the battlefield will overtake this fantasy. Let’s hope that it occurs before a major confrontation.
“Despite its reputation as a relatively wealthy Latin American country, Chilean society is deeply divided between the rich and poor. Income inequality is worse in Chile than in any other OECD nation. Meanwhile, public services ranging from the pension system to water remain privatized — as much a legacy of the Pinochet years as the 1980 constitution and the state of emergency.
“’Economically, Chile continues to do the same thing it’s been doing for twenty years, namely following an extractivist model, which relies heavily on copper but also has to do with forestry, fisheries, etc.,’ explains Emilia Ríos Saavedra, a Revolución Democrática (a member party of Frente Amplio) militant and city councilor in Ñuñoa, a suburb of Santiago. ‘This creates a tension and a feeling of helplessness where the political system cannot respond. There is no capacity on the one hand, and on the other hand, the political and economic elites, above all, are not capable of thinking about the larger needs of the country.’”
“At first glance, the politics of each of these movements seems quite distinct. But they are all occurring against a worrisome backdrop: a collapse of economic growth. Over the past year, the International Monetary Fund has sharply cut its estimate for 2019, warning that ‘the global economy is in a synchronized slowdown,’ growing at ‘its slowest pace since the global financial crisis.’
“When growth collapses, anxieties rise, especially among the middle class who feel squeezed, get enraged by corruption and inequality, and have the capacity to voice their anger. Consider Chile, where a subway fare hike has led to the worst street violence in decades. The unrest is happening, however, in an atmosphere of diminished expectations. Not long ago, Chile was the star economy of Latin America, growing at 6 percent in the 1990s and 4 percent in the 2000s. Over the past five years, growth has averaged 2 percent . The IMF cut its estimate for Latin America as a whole from 2 percent to 0.2 percent in the past year.”
Protests in Iraq are continuing and in the most recent demonstrations, about 40 Iraqis were killed. Al Jazeera describes the discontent fueling the demonstrations:
“Renewed anti-government demonstrations in Iraq have gripped the capital, Baghdad, and swept through several other cities in the country’s south, leaving at least 30 people dead, according to the country’s human rights commission and a monitor.
“The protests on Friday came three weeks after an earlier bout of rallies erupted as a result of widespread anger at official corruption, mass unemployment and failing public services. More than 150 people were killed during those demonstrations amid a crackdown by security forces.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi took office about a year ago and he has yet to establish a well-functioning government. Increased instability in Iraq will rattle many states in the region. The demonstrators are using an very unusual image to press their case against the government–the Joker as portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix.
The US has asserted that the troops being removed from Syria will be stationed in Iraq in order to make sure that ISIS does not resurface. But the Iraqis have said that the US does not have its permission to station the troops in their country for longer than a month. Al Jazeera provides the background to this situation:
“The Iraqi military said on Tuesday that the US forces do not have permission to stay in Iraq, in a response to Esper’s previous comments that the approximately 700 troops leaving Syria would continue operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) armed group from Iraq to prevent its resurgence in the region.
“The US already has more than 5,000 troops in Iraq under an agreement between Washington and Baghdad forged when ISIL began taking large portions of the country in 2014.
“Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Baghdad, said Baghdad’s reaction appeared to have stemmed from ‘the language that the US used’.
“‘The US said that the forces will come back to Ain al-Assad in western Iraq and mount operations against ISIL from there – and that seems to have angered the Iraqis,’ Khan said.”
We are still trying to determine how social media affects politics and there is a dearth of hard information about its effects. One media outlet is, of course, Twitter, an outlet that US President Trump uses quite frequently. But the Pew Research Center has released a poll which raises serious questions about the outsized influence of Twitter. According to the study:
“For years now, Twitter has been an important platform for disseminating news and sharing opinions about U.S. politics, and 22% of U.S. adults say they use the platform. But the Twitter conversation about national politics among U.S. adult users is driven by a small number of prolific political tweeters. These users make up just 6% of all U.S. adults with public accounts on the site, but they account for 73% of tweets from American adults that mention national politics.
” Most U.S. adults on Twitter largely avoid the topic: The median user never tweeted about national politics, while 69% only tweeted about it once or not at all. Across all tweets from U.S. adults, just 13% focused on national politics, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis based on public tweets that were posted between June 2018 and June 2019.
Pew does a very good job of identifying the attributes of what it calls political twitters. I have never used the outlet and cannot really assess how accurate the assessment actually is.
“A new study released Tuesday found that the amount of pollutants in U.S. air rose between 2016 and 2018 after seven straight years of improvement. Two economists who conducted a study of Environmental Protection Agency data found that particulate matter air pollution dropped 24 percent in the U.S. from 2009 to 2016 but increased 5.5 percent the next two years, which correlated with thousands of premature deaths.
“’That increase was associated with 9,700 premature deaths in 2018,’ Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller, economists with Carnegie Mellon, wrote in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“The researchers concluded that the deaths represent $89 billion worth in damages.”
“The study linked declining air quality to three factors, all tied to the climate crisis and the U.S. government’s refusal to reduce fossil fuel emissions that are warming the planet.
“Since taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump has completed 10 regulatory rollbacks involving efforts to improve air quality and has slashed nine regulations on fossil fuel extraction industries.
“Trump’s repeal of a rule requiring state authorities to track vehicle emissions on highways, his decision to change how oil and gas refineries monitor pollution, and his rollback of a rule limiting industrial pollution are among the decisions that have led to worsened air quality, according to the report written by Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“‘This is happening at a time when the EPA has disbanded its scientific panel reviewing fine particle air pollution,’ tweeted Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham.”
Given these causes, it seems unlikely that there will be any decrease in air pollution in the near term. Apparently more deaths and substantial economic losses are not enough to get a change in policy.
President Trump announced today that he was lifting the sanctions against Turkey because he believes that the “cease-fire” brokered by Vice-President Trump and Turkish President Erdogan was “permanent”. In his remarks he thanked Turkey and Syria for taking control over the swathe of territory once held by the US and its allies, the Kurds. Interestingly, he did not mention Russia once in his remarks, although the Russians are clearly the most important guarantor of the “cease-fire” because the Turks and the Syrians would be at each other’s throats without the mediating influence of the Russians. I have placed the phrase “cease-fire” in quotations marks because it is not a cease-fire, but actually a surrender. The US has given up strategic territory and betrayed its allies without getting anything in return from Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Syria–all of whom have benefited tremendously from the US withdrawal. President Trump did admit that some US troops would stay in Syria to protect the oil fields, but his statement was curiously ominous: “We’ve secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of U.S. troops will remain in the area where they have the oil. And we’re going to be protecting it, and we’ll be deciding what we’re going to do with it in the future.” I suspect that the Syrians will insist that the oil in their territory is theirs and will not allow the US to appropriate the oil for any reason.
The British Parliament has approved the Withdrawal Agreement Bill agreed upon by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the European Union. But the Parliament decided not to implement the agreement before the official deadline of 31 October. The delay means that Britain will need an extension from the EU but it also means that Members of Parliament and the British public will have time to study the agreement carefully which means that opposition to the agreement will have time to organize. The leaders of all 27 EU countries will have to approve the extension, but the EU Council President, Donald Tusk, indicated that approval was “likely”. Johnson will probably push for a final vote before the 31st, but it does not seem as if that will happen. The BBC summarizes its understanding of the Withdrawal Agreement:
It sets out exactly how the UK will make “divorce bill” payments to the EU for years to come
It repeals the European Communities Act, which took the UK into the EU, but then reinstates it immediately for as long as a post-Brexit transition period lasts
It contains language on how the new protocol on Ireland – setting up a customs and regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain – will work in practice. An accompanying impact assessment lays out some of the costs and bureaucracy that companies doing business in Northern Ireland will face
It sets out areas in which the European Court of Justice still plays a role in the UK, and makes the withdrawal agreement in some respects “supreme” over other areas of UK law
Its language on workers’ rights – an important issue for many MPs – is pretty vague, because Mr Johnson’s deal moves obligations in this area from the withdrawal agreement to the non-binding political declaration on future relations
It suggests that if the government doesn’t ask for an extension of the transition period beyond the end of 2020, parliament won’t have a say in changing that, even if a free trade deal isn’t ready in time
In the section on citizens’ rights it sets up an independent monitoring authority (IMA) with which EU nationals in the UK can lodge any complaints about the way the government treats them
In several policy areas, particularly in Northern Ireland, the bill gives ministers a lot of power to change the law (through secondary legislation) without MPs getting to vote
Prime Minister Johnson may decide to call for a new election if Parliament does not approve the agreement before 31 October. Perhaps a new election will give him a Parliament more willing to accept the terms of the agreement. In any event, Brexit remains uncertain.
Turkish President Erdogan and Russian President Putin met in Sochi, Russia, to discuss the future of the northeast region of Syria. The press is reporting that the two states will conduct joint security operations in the region, replacing the US troops that had conducted similar operations. We now have the bizarre situation of Russia patrolling the southern border of NATO, the very state for which NATO was created to contain. Russia and Turkey will oversee the removal of all Kurdish YPG forces, the Kurdish militia that fought alongside the US to remove ISIS from Syria and Iraq. Reuters reports:
“Under the deal with Moscow, the length of border which the YPG would be required to pull back from is more than three times the size of the territory covered by the U.S.-Turkish accord, covering most of the area Turkey had wanted to include.
“’The outcome of the Putin-Erdogan meeting in Sochi today indicates that Erdogan has become a master of leveraging the U.S. and Russia against each other to maximize Ankara’s gains,’ Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute said in a tweet.”
Russia obviously negotiated the presence of Turkish troops in Syrian territory, even though Turkey had long sought the removal of Syrian President Assad throughout the Syrian civil war which began in 2011. It is hard to believe that Assad has forgotten the Turkish opposition. I am certain that Assad is wondering whether the Turkish troops will leave, or whether Syria has just been chopped up for the interests of the Great Power game being conducted on its territory.
It has been 3 decades since most of the communist countries in East and Central Europe underwent a dramatic change in their systems. Many of those states have embraced liberal values and institutions and most sought membership in pre-communist institutions such as NATO and the European Union. The Pew Research Center conducted a poll in those states to see how the citizenry now regards those changes. In most cases, it appears as if citizens believe that the change was beneficial. The Center found that:
“Thirty years ago, a wave of optimism swept across Europe as walls and regimes fell, and long-oppressed publics embraced open societies, open markets and a more united Europe. Three decades later, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that few people in the former Eastern Bloc regret the monumental changes of 1989-1991. Yet, neither are they entirely content with their current political or economic circumstances. Indeed, like their Western European counterparts, substantial shares of Central and Eastern European citizens worry about the future on issues like inequality and the functioning of their political systems.”
Perhaps the most pervasive reservation the European publics have in the transition is the sense that elected officials are not really responsive to the interests of the broader public. In many respects, that belief underlies the growth of the nationalist/populist regimes in some states.
“Netanyahu had been given 28 days to secure the 61 seats necessary to achieve a functioning majority by building support from other, smaller parties in the 120-member Knesset. After the most recent election — the country’s second inconclusive vote in less than six months — Likud won 32 seats, but the scandal-plagued prime minister could not make up the gap necessary to obtain a majority and secure his fifth straight term in office.
“Now, on Netanyahu’s 70th birthday, Rivlin has turned to the prime minister’s principal rival, Benny Gantz, a former army chief of staff and leader of the centrist Blue and White party. In a tweet Monday, Gantz responded to the new mandate quite simply: ‘It is time for blue and white.'”
Gantz now has 28 days to form a government. The Jerusalem Post gives a nice timeline of what Gantz will have to do and what happend if he cannot organize a coalition. The Israeli political system is incredibly complex, but it is also fairly robust. The current situation, however, is highly unusual.
Chile has been rocked by protests, largely led by students who were protesting increases in fares for the metro system in Santiago but also fueled by concerns over economic inequality. After 7 days of protests, the government reversed its decision on metro fares and declared a state of emergency and a curfew. But the protests have continued. The protests in Chile have followed large protests in Peru and Ecuador over similar issues. Violent protests have also occurred in Lebanon, as citizens appear to be fed up with the incompetence of their government. Protests in Hong Kong have entered the third month as Hong Kongers continue to fear the encroaching authority of the Beijing government. One should also not forget the protests by Extinction Rebellion in various European cities. It appears as if there is widespread dissatisfaction in many polities in the world–these protests are not simple coincidences. But figuring out the common thread in all of them is very difficult.
Protests in Valparaiso, Chile
The British Parliament, in a rare Saturday session, refused to ratify the agreement reached by Prime Minister Boris Johnson with the European Union. Essentially, the Parliament was asking for more time, but it meant that Prime Minister Johnson will have to ask that the 31 October deadline be extended. Johnson did send such a request (which he did not sign) but also sent a second letter to the EU stating his intention to get Parliamentary approval before the deadline. So we now have to see whether Johnson can pressure the Parliament to approve the agreement. Johnson does not want a lot of time to pass–every day delayed means that opposition can build to specific parts of the agreement. But if the Parliament does not approve the agreement in a second vote, the situation becomes very murky. The alternatives now include a three month delay (if the EU approves–not a given), a second referendum, a new election which may give Johnson a genuine majority), or a “no-deal” Brexit.
For last few years, many people in the Catalan region of Spain have been agitating for independence from the Spanish state. These movements are not really new–for centuries, Catalonians have considered themselves to be a separate nation from the Spanish nation. These attitudes have sharpened in recent years as Catalan has been quite prosperous and Catalonians think that their wealth is being siphoned off to finance the Spanish state. In 2017 there were pressures for a referendum so that Catalonians could secede from Spain, a move that is not permitted under the Spanish constitution (similar to the US Constitution’s prohibition against secession and quite different from the British system which allows secession). The Spanish Supreme Court has jailed several of the supporters of that referendum and many Catalonians believe the sentences to be excessive and unfair. In response, there have been large protests in Catalan cities, such as Barcelona. The sentiment in Catalonia is mixed on the issue of independence: ” Independence is a highly divisive issue, with a poll in July showing backing for secession in the region at its lowest level in two years, with 48.3% of people against and 44% in favour.”
US Vice-President Pence was sent to Turkey to seek a cease-fire between Turkey and the Kurds in northeast Syria. Prior to his arrival, Turkish President Erdogan had emphatically rejected a cease-fire, saying “Declare a ceasefire, they say. We will never declare a ceasefire. We do not sit at the table with terrorist organizations.” We shall see what happens, but the photo below suggests that neither man was looking forward to the discussion. Additionally, note that, in violation of standard diplomatic protocol, Vice-President Pence in sitting in front of a Turkish, not an American, flag. Usually the format is that of the two smaller flags on the small table between the two men. Perhaps the Turks did not have a large US flag. Or perhaps President Erdogan wants deliberately to show disrespect.
Nonetheless, a cease-fire was agreed upon by the two powers. But it is a very strange cease-fire. The cease-fire requires the Kurds to leave the swathe of territory in northeast Syria. That outcome was the objective of the Turkish invasion. In other words, Pence agreed to allow Turkey to ethnically cleanse the region without firing its weapons. The agreement is essentially the second part of the abandonment of the Kurds. Moreover, Turkey will enforce the cease-fire. According to The Guardian:
” A statement released after the meeting reiterated the US understanding of Turkey’s need for a safe zone which will be ‘primarily enforced by the Turkish Armed Forces’ after the Kurdish withdrawal, implying that Ankara still intends to occupy the 270m (440km) stretch of land, which includes several important Kurdish towns and parts of a major highway.”
What is still unclear is the status of the Syrian and Russian troops in the region. Will Syria consent to the Turkish occupation of its sovereign territory? And will the Kurds agree to leave the homes they have occupied for many, many years? And do the Turks think they agreed to a case-fire or just a pause in their operations? According to the Turkish media group, Anadolu Agency:
“The pause of Turkey’s anti-terror operation in Syria is not a cease-fire, cease-fire can only happen between the two legitimate sides, the Turkish foreign minister said on Thursday.
“‘Turkey will end the operation in northern Syria only after YPG/PKK terrorists leave [safe zone], Mevlut Cavusoglu [the Foreign Minister] told a news conference.
“‘We [Turkey and the U.S.] agreed on collecting heavy weapons of YPG, destructing their positions and fortifications,’ Cavusoglu added.”
Great Britain and the European Union have apparently reached an agreement on Brexit. The deal was made possible because of revisions to the relationship between Northern Ireland, the EU, and Great Britain. Jen Kirby, writing for Vox, explains:
“What’s changed in the withdrawal agreement is the format for the so-called “Irish backstop,” which has been the major sticking point in the Brexit deal for the better part of the past year.
“To recap, the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland, as it’s technically called, is a safeguard in the Brexit withdrawal agreement to guarantee that, no matter what happens with the future EU-UK relationship, the border between Northern Ireland (which is part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (which is an EU member-state) remains free of infrastructure and physical checks on goods.
“This commitment was seen as vital to the peace process in Northern Ireland. That’s because that border was heavily militarized during the Troubles, the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland between “nationalists,” who identified more closely with Ireland and sought a united Ireland, and “unionists,” who identified more closely with Britain and wanted to remain part of the UK.
“During that period, the border became both a symbol of the divide and a very real target for nationalist paramilitary groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
“A 1998 peace deal, known as the Good Friday Agreement, formally ended the conflict. That agreement included greater cooperation between Northern Ireland and Ireland, which meant softening the border between the two. Today, that border is all but invisible.”
The revised agreement is quite complex, but essentially keeps Northern Ireland in accord with the rules of the EU allowing goods to flow freely between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The difficulty is that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has to get the agreement approved in the British Parliament. And part of the coalition in Johnson’s majority is the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), an Irish party that controls 10 votes in Parliament. The DUP has announced that it does not support the new agreement:
“In a statement, the Democratic Unionist Party, which the government relies on for support in key votes, said: ‘These proposals are not, in our view, beneficial to the economic well-being of Northern Ireland and they undermine the integrity of the Union.’
“The DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds criticised Mr Johnson, telling BBC News: ‘If he’d held his nerve – and held out – he would, of course, have got better concessions which kept the integrity, both economic and constitutional, of the UK.’
“He said he expected a ‘massive vote’ against Mr Johnson’s deal on Saturday in the House of Commons – and the DUP expected to ‘play a crucial role in amending the legislation.”
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