Alas, we cannot call him “the Nobel Laureate Donald.” But he pulled off a Nobel-level trick on his ecurie Benjamin Netanyahu. I suspect they negotiated the Nobel Peace Prize, along with $4 billion in economic aid and $6 billion in military aid. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu could hold off his fire for a certain period of time in exchange for 6 billion! Plus, you make the man happy and keep him in your debt for the rest of his life.
So, the peace brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump is not spoiling any plan Netanyahu might have. We’ll know for sure in a short while.
OK! Now to the question that strains my mind as much as the Nobel Prize strained Trump’s. But first, a little background information!
“The Kurdish-led region in northeastern Syria” is the last vestige of the New Middle East Map that kept adorning neocons’ dreams since Aug. 2, 1990.
That day, Iraq’s late dictator Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait and occupied the country within two days. Saddam owed the Kuwaiti sheikh tons of money from the Iran-Iraq war; he thought that if he set up a puppet government, he could wipe the slate clean. He learned the bitter facts that the U.S. ambassador could lie to you when she says, “Yes, you can invade Kuwait!” and that there is such a thing as “petro-dollar brotherhood.” But, when he was made privy to these pieces of information a decade later, he had his head in a hangman's noose on the gallows set up by the U.S. and a 42-country coalition.
However, the liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party, along with the growing New Left, colloquially known as “the neocons" (short for neoconservatism), did not get an enlightenment on that day. Since the late 1960s, when the U.S. gained full control of the Skyes Picot real estate and the old maps drawn by the British and the French and admitted Israel entirely under its guardianship, the neocons have been working on their own enlightenment. They had two specific objectives: Israel needed more security and space to become greater and the Middle East oil should have better protection for oil and dollars to flow freely.
Naturally, those ambitions needed specific contraptions, and the neocons and their natural allies, globalists and interventionists, worked on them as the events provided them better opportunities. The U.S. ally Iran went Islamic and, in a referendum on April 1, 1979, the people of Iran overwhelmingly approved the establishment of an Islamic republic. The first international activity of its new rulers was to threaten Israel to wipe it off the face of the earth.
Another happy occasion was Afghanistan’s becoming an Islamic emirate in the hands of the Taliban in September 1996. Neocons, globalists and interventionists were lucky, because on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked four airplanes, perpetrating a series of attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York City. President George W. Bush surveyed the destruction left by terrorist attacks three days later and, in a sense, commissioned neocons to draw the regional maps. He helped them by declaring the war on terror against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and later their allies in Iraq.
To make the long story of the endless wars short, it is sufficient to say that for the American re-mappers, Afghanistan lost its strategic importance after the demise of the Soviet Union, for the Russian Federation had no use for the mountainous Afghan steppes or more extremist allies. But Iraq might provide help to create a country that would not fall under Islamic government and be a natural enemy of Iran, but a natural ally of Zionism. If the neocons could convince Iraqi Kurds to declare independence, U.S. Central Command forces would gladly dismember Iraq into three pieces!
This is also another long story by itself, and to shorten it, we have to bring the separatist terrorist group operating in the name of the Kurds, the PKK, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to the scene.
Some Kurdish groups in Iraq seemed willing to be lured by the U.S. State Department’s independence bait, but Erdoğan convinced them that, instead of opening the box of Pandora, aka Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state, a regional autonomy would be safer for them. But U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) took the PKK into its arms and dragged them to Iraq and Syria.
In Iraq, the terrorists were not effective, but in Syria, there were no regional Kurds to outdrive them, and they simply infiltrated into the civil war-torn Syria to create YPG and PYD as the PKK’s extensions. Later, one of America's most senior generals, Raymond Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command, helped them “to change their brand” and declared them as “The Syrian Democratic Forces,” SDF. However, they are neither Syrian nor democratic, but very useful tools since 2015 to this day to deny the new Syrian government from creating a unified, democratic Syria after 10 years of civil war. The general even joked, saying, “It was a stroke of brilliance to put democracy in there somewhere.”
But it was not a matter of joke for Türkiye because the PKK and its Syrian extensions were ruining not only the first opportunity to create a unified Syria, but they were creating a hotbed of terrorism along the border. Türkiye had created its own security area, known as the Northern Syria Buffer Zone, on the Syrian side of the Syrian border, and helped the transitional government in Syria to regain control of towns such as al-Bab, Azaz, Manbij, Jarabulus, Rajo, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. Türkiye also helped the current Syrian administration by supporting the enhancement of its defense capacity and intensifying its fight against terrorist organizations.
Now, please fast forward your watch to March 10 to the agreement signing ceremony between the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces and the Unity government of Syria. The Syrian presidency had announced that the SDF agreed to be integrated into state institutions. Tom Barrack, U.S. ambassador to Türkiye and special envoy for Syria, made such statements; I, for one, went out on a limb, calling the ambassador’s words a feast for the ears.
Well! Weeks followed days, months followed weeks; not a full year yet, but the agreement has not been fulfilled by the PKK terrorists. Ambassador Barracks, who kept visiting the PKK’s Syria man Mazlum Abdi as if he were someone living next door, claimed that the YPG was no longer affiliated with the PKK, but it was now a U.S. ally! Apparently, the Ambassador’s words were a feast for Mazlum Abdi’s ears this time. He began demanding decentralization, insisting that SDF troops cannot join the Syrian army as individuals but as a separate military bloc. He said the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, failed to address their security concerns, like the "threat" from Türkiye!
Not only issuing those statements, but Abdi’s army began shooting at the Syrian army! On top of it, Mr. Barrack visited Abdi in what SDF considers the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), dragging the CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper with him. They had their photographs taken in front of a map that shows the AANES-controlled area as a separate region in Syria.
All these bring one and only one question to mind: Can Trump cancel the neocons’ longtime cherished hopes to dismember some country to create a fence to board Iran from Israel? The PKK and YPG, the CentCom believed, would never go Islamic; and a disassembled Syria (or Iraq, Türkiye, Iran) would provide a space for Greater Israel.
Yes, like his ambassador Barrack, President Trump himself discredited an entire class of “interventionists” on the left and right in his own country. He even named names: “Those so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
Up to here, it was the background information for the mind-straining question I have: Can Trump strike the neocons' Greater Israel Plan off, too?
Once, he said identical things about Netanyahu and his War on Iran: Do not even think about attacking Iran; I’ll talk to them. We’ll find a solution to the nuclear dispute through talks. Also, about Netanyahu’s war on Gaza: Stop bombing; I’ll talk to Hamas.
What happened after those talks and warnings, Netanyahu not only bombed Iran but also made Trump join him in bombing! Trump is providing the bombs, and Netanyahu is still bombing Gaza.
Ambassador Barrack rejects suggestions that his recent visit to Mazlum Abdi has undermined Türkiye’s and Syria’s interests, asserting the trip was conducted to advance security objectives shared by Ankara and Washington.
Well, Uncle Tom, soon we’ll know if you tell the truth!
