Posted on 05/09/2017 8:55:11 AM PDT by Helicondelta
Sometimes you make such announcements so you can watch how the cockroaches scramble, if you get my drift.
Trump says no to the media when they want to know the timing of such things.
Did Trump expose the timing?
Here, Trump is signalling his political intention clearly to the Turks, and to the Kurds.
He is also signalling his military intention.
This can be invaluable in a Middle East War, where morale is supremely important. Think of it as a broad brush signal to any wavering actors in Raqqa that the Strong Horse is back, and that Raqqa is in his sights.
What a mess when the battle lines are fuzzy and blurred by what is an ally and who has your back (or front for that matter).
We need to “alienate” the current transformation of the Turkish State. The Turks made a heroic (considering that the Turks are Moslem) attempt to join Western Civilization and then the pathology that is islam reasserted itself and infected the body terminally and must be sloughed off by Western Civilization if Western Civilization itself is to survive.
You said it. There are a dizzying number of factions, and the allegiances of the major players shift over time. It’s like a World-war in a bottle.
The only way to make sense of it is to decide who you hate most at any one time (ISIS and Turkey I guess?) and root for their defeat.
It all keeps shifting. So e.g. the US no longer supports ISIS with ammunition and airstrikes.
Turkey no longer tries to shoot down Russian planes, but relations between the two remain wary.
The US and Russia together recently blocked an advance by Turkey into the Manbij canton (around Manbu) that is held by the SDF.
And so many of the smaller factions involved are sketchy, but are fighting ISIS. So good on them, I guess.
Case in point: Liwa al Quds (backed by ‘palestinian businessmen’) are a paramilitary faction armed with the PLO’s old tanks. We would all regard them as a spade-bearded bunch of killers in any other context - but they’ve fought manfully against Al-Queda in many decisive operations to liberate Aleppo.
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