Obama's ambassador to Syria: Trump's troop withdrawal decision 'essentially correct'

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dukkha

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he former U.S. ambassador to Syria has said President Trump was "essentially correct" in removing troops from the country.

Robert Ford, a career diplomat and fluent Arabic speaker served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria under President George W. Bush after being a senior diplomat in Iraq. He was then appointed U.S. ambassador to Syria by President Barack Obama in 2010.

"The president should view the hullabaloo that erupted after he announced the Syrian pullout as an opportunity to take a number of steps to make the most of his essentially correct, but widely unpopular, move," Ford wrote in an op-ed Thursday for the Washington Post.

Ford is the most recent U.S. ambassador to Syria. He was recalled in late 2011 due to threats to his safety following the Syrian uprising, which he supported because Bashar Assad's regime began using force against protesters. He retired in 2014 and became a fierce critic of Obama's Syria policy.

Ford argued in hius article that it would be virtually impossible for U.S. troops to defeat the Islamic State's ideology and suggested that it was up to Syria to fix its own problems.

"Syrians had electricity and water when they rose up against Assad in 2011; it is Syria’s underlying societal problems that spawned the unrest and spurred Islamist extremist recruitment," he wrote. "Only Syrians, not U.S. troops and stabilization teams, can reverse that. We would do well to be humbler about our abilities, especially in the face of sustained, widespread regional hostility."

Ford addressed one of the main objections to Trump's decision — that it would cede influence to Iran — by noting that Trump can support Israeli operations against Iranian forces, despite a lack of troops in the area.

He concluded by saying that Trump's foreign policy team "got ahead" of him on a Syrian withdrawal and says Trump needs a more efficient National Security Council.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...-is-essentially-correct-in-pulling-troops-out
 
as always Trump comes up with the right idea.
It is refreshing to see someone -not a neocon interventionist- who understands Syria & backs him
 
noise said:
as always Trump comes up with the right idea.
It is refreshing to see someone -not a neocon interventionist- who understands Syria & backs him
Click to expand...

Meanwhile, the Kurds are begging Assad for protection and ISIS is carrying out a suicide bombing against an Egyptian tour bus.
 
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In 2010, U. S. President Barack Obama nominated Ford as the first U.S. Ambassador to Syria in five years (pending U.S. Senate approval). In December 2010, after the U.S. Senate had failed to act on the nomination, Obama used a recess appointment to secure Ford the position. The Senate then confirmed Ford by unanimous consent on October 3, 2011. As a result, Ford no longer was serving under a recess appointment and therefore could have held the position until Obama's term ended in January 2017.

On October 24, 2011, Ford was recalled from Syria due to what the U.S. State Department described as "credible threats" to his safety. Ford had attracted the ire of pro-Assad Syrians due to his strong support of the Syrian uprising.

According to American officials, Ford had been attacked by an armed pro-government mob, and Syrian state television had begun running reports blaming him for the formation of death squads similar to those in Iraq. This led to fears that supporters of the Syrian government might try to kill him.

In August 2013, it was reported by The New York Times that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had recommended that Ford serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, following the incumbent ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, being nominated to serve as the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs – the head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs within the U.S. Department of State, which oversees the Middle East.

On February 4, 2014, officials of the U.S. State Department said that Ford was retiring and on February 28 announced his departure.

The U.S. States Department announced the appointment of Daniel Rubinstein as U.S. special envoy for Syria on March 14.

In 2014 and 2015, Ford said he could "no longer defend" the Obama Administration's Syria policy, claiming that if the Administration armed the moderate rebels, the al-Qaida groups would have been "unable to compete".[16] He later walked back these comments and shifted his criticism towards the rebel groups for cooperating with jihadists.


In December 2018, Ford declared his support for President Trump's decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, describing it as "essentially correct."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Stephen_Ford

And in addition to being a flip flopper, he's one of the best Arabists in the State Dept.
 
noise said:
he former U.S. ambassador to Syria has said President Trump was "essentially correct" in removing troops from the country.

Robert Ford, a career diplomat and fluent Arabic speaker served as U.S. ambassador to Algeria under President George W. Bush after being a senior diplomat in Iraq. He was then appointed U.S. ambassador to Syria by President Barack Obama in 2010.

"The president should view the hullabaloo that erupted after he announced the Syrian pullout as an opportunity to take a number of steps to make the most of his essentially correct, but widely unpopular, move," Ford wrote in an op-ed Thursday for the Washington Post.

Ford is the most recent U.S. ambassador to Syria. He was recalled in late 2011 due to threats to his safety following the Syrian uprising, which he supported because Bashar Assad's regime began using force against protesters. He retired in 2014 and became a fierce critic of Obama's Syria policy.

Ford argued in hius article that it would be virtually impossible for U.S. troops to defeat the Islamic State's ideology and suggested that it was up to Syria to fix its own problems.

"Syrians had electricity and water when they rose up against Assad in 2011; it is Syria’s underlying societal problems that spawned the unrest and spurred Islamist extremist recruitment," he wrote. "Only Syrians, not U.S. troops and stabilization teams, can reverse that. We would do well to be humbler about our abilities, especially in the face of sustained, widespread regional hostility."

Ford addressed one of the main objections to Trump's decision — that it would cede influence to Iran — by noting that Trump can support Israeli operations against Iranian forces, despite a lack of troops in the area.

He concluded by saying that Trump's foreign policy team "got ahead" of him on a Syrian withdrawal and says Trump needs a more efficient National Security Council.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...-is-essentially-correct-in-pulling-troops-out
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Obama’s former ambassador said ‘you can’t defeat the ideology of ISIS and it’s up to Syrians to fix their own country’.

He’s right on both counts: you can’t defeat an ideology with bombs and bullets; and it’s not up to us to fix Syria—that’s up to Syrians. It’s unvarnished common sense and it’s sadly missing from so much of our policy in that part of the world.
 
Darth Beto Omar said:
Obama’s former ambassador said ‘you can’t defeat the ideology of ISIS and it’s up to Syrians to fix their own country’.

He’s right on both counts: you can’t defeat an ideology with bombs and bullets; and it’s not up to us to fix Syria—that’s up to Syrians. It’s unvarnished common sense and it’s sadly missing from so much of our policy in that part of the world.
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"We would do well to be humbler about our abilities, especially in the face of sustained, widespread regional hostility."
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get out. we can't do anything about "shaping Syria", nor do we care to
 
noise said:
get out. we can't do anything about "shaping Syria", nor do we care to
Click to expand...


"Syrians had electricity and water when they rose up against Assad in 2011; it is Syria’s underlying societal problems that spawned the unrest and spurred Islamist extremist recruitment," he wrote.

The above it true.. The US didn't orchestrate the civil war in Syria as so many have claimed. Syria already had severe drought, unemployment, inflation, and sectarian strife before Assad began killing protesters.

Our concern is sheltering over six million Syrian refugees.. They are NOT Syria's problem. They are our problem and that of the international community.
 
They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone.
The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration.
By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.

By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.

In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.”

Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting, where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.

Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly.
He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria.

Mattis responded that an immediate withdrawal from Syria was impossible to carry out responsibly, would risk the return of Islamic State, and would play into the hands of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose interests ran counter to those of the United States.

Trump reportedly then relented and said they have could five or six months to destroy the Islamic State.
But he also made it clear that he did not want them to come back to him in October and say that they had been unable to defeat ISIS and had to remain in Syria.
When his advisors reiterated that they didn’t think America could withdraw responsibly, Trump told them to “just get it done.”

Trump’s national security team had prepared carefully for the meeting in order to steer him away from an explicit timetable for withdrawal.
They had brought papers that omitted any specific options for withdrawal timetables.
Instead, as the detailed AP account shows, they framed the options as a binary choice—either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State.
The leave option was described as risking a return of ISIS and leaving a power vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill.

Such a binary strategy had worked in the past, according to administration sources.
That would account for Trump’s long public silence on Syria during the early months of 2018 while then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Mattis were articulating detailed arguments for a long-term military commitment.

Another reason the approach had been so successful, however, was that Trump had made such a big issue out of Barack Obama giving the Pentagon a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
As a result, he was hesitant to go public with a similar request for a Syria timetable.
As CNN reported, a DoD official who had been briefed on the meeting “rejected that any sort of timeline was discussed.” Furthermore the official asserted that Mattis “was not asked to draw up withdrawal options….” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Chiefs, also told reporters, “the president has actually been very good in not giving us a specific timeline.”

Nevertheless, without referring to a timeline, the White House issued a short statement saying that the U.S. role in Syria was coming to a “rapid end.”

Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it.
That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed.
The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous.
What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April.

The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created.
Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.

Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective.
That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture.
If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today.
https://www.theamericanconservative...rals-50-year-war-record-syria-mattis-dunford/
His national security team had been trying to box him in like every other president. But he called their bluff.
 
noise said:
They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone.
The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration.
By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.

By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.

In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.”

Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting, where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.

Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly.
He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria.

Mattis responded that an immediate withdrawal from Syria was impossible to carry out responsibly, would risk the return of Islamic State, and would play into the hands of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose interests ran counter to those of the United States.

Trump reportedly then relented and said they have could five or six months to destroy the Islamic State.
But he also made it clear that he did not want them to come back to him in October and say that they had been unable to defeat ISIS and had to remain in Syria.
When his advisors reiterated that they didn’t think America could withdraw responsibly, Trump told them to “just get it done.”

Trump’s national security team had prepared carefully for the meeting in order to steer him away from an explicit timetable for withdrawal.
They had brought papers that omitted any specific options for withdrawal timetables.
Instead, as the detailed AP account shows, they framed the options as a binary choice—either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State.
The leave option was described as risking a return of ISIS and leaving a power vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill.

Such a binary strategy had worked in the past, according to administration sources.
That would account for Trump’s long public silence on Syria during the early months of 2018 while then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Mattis were articulating detailed arguments for a long-term military commitment.

Another reason the approach had been so successful, however, was that Trump had made such a big issue out of Barack Obama giving the Pentagon a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
As a result, he was hesitant to go public with a similar request for a Syria timetable.
As CNN reported, a DoD official who had been briefed on the meeting “rejected that any sort of timeline was discussed.” Furthermore the official asserted that Mattis “was not asked to draw up withdrawal options….” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Chiefs, also told reporters, “the president has actually been very good in not giving us a specific timeline.”

Nevertheless, without referring to a timeline, the White House issued a short statement saying that the U.S. role in Syria was coming to a “rapid end.”

Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it.
That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed.
The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous.
What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April.

The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created.
Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.

Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective.
That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture.
If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today.
https://www.theamericanconservative...rals-50-year-war-record-syria-mattis-dunford/
His national security team had been trying to box him in like every other president. But he called their bluff.
Click to expand...

You and the author and Ambassador Ford have given far more thought to Syria than Trump.
 
iolo said:
Even under the present utter shambles, surely, imperialist bullies stick together? Sell out the Kurds and prove what ruthless, sick sods these Republicans are, running away with their tails between their legs..
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What do you propose?

Should we invade Turkey and Syria so we can grant some real estate to the Kurds?
 
iolo said:
No, give them plenty of arms and guarantees of support if the killers attack them. They've done a lot for you, and you owe quite a lot of blood.
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When the Kurds come and defend my country we will ‘owe them blood’ and not a minute sooner.

You neocon-lefties are unseemly.
 
Darth Beto Omar said:
When the Kurds come and defend my country we will ‘owe them blood’ and not a minute sooner.

You neocon-lefties are unseemly.
Click to expand...

Shows the world what you and your alliance is worth, eh? The defence of trumpf's left buttock unites the racist shitehawks. Trumpf, trumpf, trumpf the boys are scuttling!
 
kudzu said:
You and the author and Ambassador Ford have given far more thought to Syria than Trump.
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everyone has their own talents. I've been doing the geopolitics thing for over 50 years now-
but I agree with the last piece I posted that NSC advisors ALWAYS want to stay
( going back to Vietnam and probably more)

Trump isn't an idiot though..he seems to come up with the right ideas-at least I've agree with
the emphasis on trade agreements, "perpetual war" etc.
 
anatta said:
everyone has their own talents. I've been doing the geopolitics thing for over 50 years now-
but I agree with the last piece I posted that NSC advisors ALWAYS want to stay
( going back to Vietnam and probably more)

Trump isn't an idiot though..he seems to come up with the right ideas-at least I've agree with
the emphasis on trade agreements, "perpetual war" etc.
Click to expand...
You think it’s your talent :laugh:
 
anatta said:
everyone has their own talents. I've been doing the geopolitics thing for over 50 years now-
but I agree with the last piece I posted that NSC advisors ALWAYS want to stay
( going back to Vietnam and probably more)

Trump isn't an idiot though..he seems to come up with the right ideas-at least I've agree with
the emphasis on trade agreements, "perpetual war" etc.
Click to expand...

Geopolitics for the last 50 years? Me too. Sometimes all your choices are lousy .. and if you want guarantees, you go to Walmart and buy a toaster.

If the Kurds align with Assad.. and it appears that's what they are asking for .. that puts Turkey on the offensive and it puts Israel at risk. Iran and Russia will be thrilled and the 6 million Sunni Syrian refugees are still in the weeds.
 
kudzu said:
Geopolitics for the last 50 years? Me too. Sometimes all your choices are lousy .. and if you want guarantees, you go to Walmart and buy a toaster.

If the Kurds align with Assad.. and it appears that's what they are asking for .. that puts Turkey on the offensive and it puts Israel at risk. Iran and Russia will be thrilled and the 6 million Sunni Syrian refugees are still in the weeds.
Click to expand...
lol..we're from way back "old cold warriors" and then some.
~~
Ya. Turkey looks like it's got the green light from Trump, but staying there...well there is always a reason- no?
Which was the point of it.. sometime you just gotta say no to endless deployments
 
anatta said:
lol..we're from way back "old cold warriors" and then some.
~~
Ya. Turkey looks like it's got the green light from Trump, ut staying there...well there is always a reason- no?
Which was the point of it.. sometime you just gotta say no to endless deployments
Click to expand...

I don't have any illusions about the US or Trump being in control of the various players in the ME, but I fear that we are accidentally on a path for war with Iran.
 
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