After a ton of criticism from many corners about his seemingly rash decision to pull out of Syria, Trump is changing his position with the help of John Bolton.
He’s making sure the Kurds will survive Trump’s foreign policy:
President Donald Trump will not withdraw American troops from northern Syria until the Turkish government guarantees it won’t then attack Syrian Kurdish forces that have been critical allies in the fight against ISIS, national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday.
Bolton said a commitment from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that protects the Kurds after American forces exit is something Trump is demanding, and that it’s just one of several conditions that have to be met before U.S. troops leave.
“There are objectives that we want to accomplish that condition the withdrawal,” Bolton said.
He spoke to reporters traveling with him to Israel and Turkey as he tried to clarify Trump’s Syria withdrawal policy for allies. He’s meeting with Israeli officials Sunday and Monday, and with Turkish officials, including Erdogan, on Tuesday.
SO this is very interesting. Erdogan absolutely despises the Kurds and considers them terrorist elements worth hunting down and destroying. I could see him agreeing to this demand from Bolton, then lying and killing all the Kurds anyway.
On the other hand, if Bolton just wants to get out of Syria, he could also be doing this just for the sake of giving us a pretense to leave. Basically, we’ll know if this is cynical or not depending on how long it takes for Erdogan to start the massacre.
And that’s not all that has changed:
“This is a cause and effect mission,” Bolton said. “Timetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see. And once that’s done, then you talk about a timetable.”
Bolton also indicated that the U.S. troop withdrawal will not be a complete drawdown, as Trump had promised. Instead, he discussed a withdrawal of American forces from northern Syria, where most of the estimated 2,000 U.S. troops are based, while leaving some of them in the southern part of the country.
Very interesting indeed. Will all those people who praised him for pulling out Syria now complain that it wasn’t fast enough? We shall see…