US envoy in ISIS fight, Brett McGurk, resigns over US withdrawal from Syria

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signalmankenneth

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Washington (CNN)Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, submitted his resignation Friday because of President Donald Trump's decision to pull US forces out of Syria, according to a senior administration official.

McGurk had previously said privately that he was going to leave the administration in February of next year.
A State Department official told CNN that McGurk had informed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday that he was resigning effective December 31.

CBS News was the first to report the news of McGurk's resignation, which came one day after Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned, also in part due to the Syria decision.

Sources familiar with the matter said McGurk was frustrated over Trump's sudden announcement that the US would withdraw its troops from Syria, which was the opposite of the strategy he had just been briefing coalition partners on while in the region: to stay in Syria, fight ISIS and counter Iran.

According to the sources, McGurk viewed the Syria decision as reckless and couldn't defend it, let alone execute it. The sources said Mattis's resignation also played a part in the timing of McGurk's resignation.

When McGurk was initially going to leave the administration in February, he was planning a move to a position at Stanford University, sources said.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/22/politics/brett-mcgurk-resignation/index.html
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So MOST LIKELY, our biggest expert on ISIS--how to deal, counter and/or destroy them--leaves. But since they are DEFEATED who needs an expert on ISIS, right?
 
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Loving91390 said:
McGurk didn't do a very good job now did he ..... The ME is still a shit show .
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And BUSH made it a BIGGER, WIDER, MORE EXPLOSIVE SHIT SHOW!

Unless the American CONSERVATIVE has it wrong...


How the U.S. Wrecked the Middle East

A once stable region descends into chaos thanks to continuing repercussions from the 2003 Iraq invasion. (via TomDispatch)

By PETER VAN BUREN • October 22, 2015
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[COLOR=#888888 !important]U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Tyler J. Clements

What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003? How would things be different in the Middle East today? Was Iraq, in the words of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the “worst foreign policy blunder” in American history? Let’s take a big-picture tour of the Middle East and try to answer those questions. But first, a request: after each paragraph that follows, could you make sure to add the question “What could possibly go wrong?”

Let the History Begin
In March 2003, when the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq, the region, though simmering as ever, looked like this: Libya was stable, ruled by the same strongman for 42 years; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been in power since 1983; Syria had been run by the Assad family since 1971; Saddam Hussein had essentially been in charge of Iraq since 1969, formally becoming president in 1979; the Turks and Kurds had an uneasy but functional ceasefire; and Yemen was quiet enough, other than the terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Relations between the U.S. and most of these nations were so warm that Washington was routinely rendering “terrorists” to their dungeons for some outsourced torture.

Soon after March 2003, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, neighboring Iran faced two American armies at the peak of their strength. To the east, the U.S. military had effectively destroyed the Taliban and significantly weakened al-Qaeda, both enemies of Iran, but had replaced them as an occupying force. To the west, Iran’s decades-old enemy, Saddam, was gone, but similarly replaced by another massive occupying force. From this position of weakness, Iran’s leaders, no doubt terrified that the Americans would pour across its borders, sought real diplomatic rapprochement with Washington for the first time since 1979. The Iranian efforts were rebuffed by the Bush administration.


The Precipitating Event
Nailing down causation is a tricky thing. But like the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that kicked off the Great War, the one to end all others, America’s 2003 invasion was what novelists refer to as “the precipitating event,” the thing that may not actively cause every plot twist to come, but that certainly sets them in motion.

There hadn’t been such an upset in the balance of power in the Middle East since, well, World War I, when Great Britain and France secretly reached the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which, among other things, divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Because the national boundaries created then did not respect on-the-ground tribal, political, ethnic, and religious realities, they could be said to have set the stage for much that was to come.

Now, fast forward to 2003, as the Middle East we had come to know began to unravel. Those U.S. troops had rolled into Baghdad only to find themselves standing there, slack-jawed, gazing at the chaos. Now, fast forward one more time to 2015 and let the grand tour of the unraveling begin!

The Sick Men of the Middle East: It’s easy enough to hustle through three countries in the region in various states of decay before heading into the heart of the chaos: Libya is a failed state, bleeding mayhem into northern Africa; Egypt failed its Arab Spring test and relies on the United States to support its anti-democratic (as well as anti-Islamic fundamentalist) militarized government; and Yemen is a disastrously failed state, now the scene of a proxy war between U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels (with a thriving al-Qaeda outfit and a small but growing arm of the Islamic State [ISIS] thrown into the bargain).

Iraq: Obama is now the fourth American president in a row to have ordered the bombing of Iraq and his successor will almost certainly be the fifth. If ever a post-Vietnam American adventure deserved to inherit the moniker of quagmire, Iraq is it....


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-u-s-wrecked-the-middle-east/
 
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EXCEPT THEY ARE NOT RATS LEAVING THE SHIP...

...THEY ARE, FOR THE MOST PART, COMPETENT, ABLE, HARD WORKING PEOPLE WHO JUST CANNOT TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS DISGUSTING, INCOMPETENT ADMINISTRATION.
 
kudzu said:
He knows the ME.. He doesn't control Assad, you nincompoop.
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Man, I gotta tell you! I watched ol BARBARA WALTERS interview him at least 15 years ago. A quiet, low keyed, SEEMINGLY thoughtful man, seemingly a modern man with democratic leanings. (If I remember correctly). AND he was a MEDICAL DOCTOR, an opthalmologist at that--they're not exactly the god-complex types in the MD heirarchy. (The poor guy didn't have a chin and had speech impediment but I digress).

Bottom line, I got FOOLED majorly! An autocrat like his father but a man who took an oath to do no harm (I assume all MD's from every country take a similar HIPPOCRATIC oath). So that makes ASSAD particularly EVIL!
 
Centerleftfl said:
Man, I gotta tell you! I watched ol BARBARA WALTERS interview him at least 15 years ago. A quiet, low keyed, SEEMINGLY thoughtful man, seemingly a modern man with democratic leanings. (If I remember correctly). AND he was a MEDICAL DOCTOR, an opthalmologist at that--they're not exactly the god-complex types in the MD heirarchy. (The poor guy didn't have a chin and had speech impediment but I digress).

Bottom line, I got FOOLED majorly! An autocrat like his father but a man who took an oath to do no harm (I assume all MD's from every country take a similar HIPPOCRATIC oath). So that makes ASSAD particularly EVIL!
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We love them when they do our bidding. We'll overlook whatever they do as long as we can sell our war and mass surveillance population control tools and access their resources.
 
Centerleftfl said:
Man, I gotta tell you! I watched ol BARBARA WALTERS interview him at least 15 years ago. A quiet, low keyed, SEEMINGLY thoughtful man, seemingly a modern man with democratic leanings. (If I remember correctly). AND he was a MEDICAL DOCTOR, an opthalmologist at that--they're not exactly the god-complex types in the MD heirarchy. (The poor guy didn't have a chin and had speech impediment but I digress).

Bottom line, I got FOOLED majorly! An autocrat like his father but a man who took an oath to do no harm (I assume all MD's from every country take a similar HIPPOCRATIC oath). So that makes ASSAD particularly EVIL!
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I think EVERYONE had high expectations of Bashar Assad.. That he would be an intelligent, benevolent leader.. I saw the Barbara Walters interview (available on Youtube) from late 2012. I thought he was on Valium and evasive as hell.

He kept saying.. "I didn't do that, the government did that"..

His father was a monster... and I suspect he is a victim of the extended family that would kill him if he stepped down or left Syria.
 
kudzu said:
I think EVERYONE had high expectations of Bashar Assad.. That he would be an intelligent, benevolent leader.. I saw the Barbara Walters interview (available on Youtube) from late 2012. I thought he was on Valium and evasive as hell.

He kept saying.. "I didn't do that, the government did that"..

His father was a monster... and I suspect he is a victim of the extended family that would kill him if he stepped down or left Syria.
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... and I suspect he is a victim of the extended family
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We have a crime family in the white house we need to keep an eye on in that regard. There is no way Don's spawn can have grown up to be decent honorable honest compassionate human beings. And we've seen plenty of that already.

Yes, Chelsey too.
 
Fentoine Lum said:
We have a crime family in the white house we need to keep an eye on in that regard. There is no way Don's spawn can have grown up to be decent honorable honest compassionate human beings. And we've seen plenty of that already.

Yes, Chelsey too.
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I agree with you about the WH. .. and I have been following Syria since I was a kid. They have a long history of military coups, assassinations and collective violence against the citizens.
 
kudzu said:
I agree with you about the WH. .. and I have been following Syria since I was a kid. They have a long history of military coups, assassinations and collective violence against the citizens.
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And we're bound to be in the middle of it all, endlessly. We annexed the middle east.
 
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