Daily Archives: November 17, 2019

IN the midst of all of the political intrigues and mismanagement that characterised the late former president Robert Mugabes rule, it bears pointing out that the national economy was undergoing a severe crisis, perhaps the most serious in its history.

The crisis was compounded in many respects by the wholesale mismanagement, corruption and outright thievery of the Mugabe years.

Thus, the legacy that was bequeathed by President Emmerson Mnangagwas administration was one of a deeply divided country, where narrow interests, a dispirited citizenry, whose faith in government and in the very concept of Zimbabwe had been badly broken, a prostrate national economy, a decayed social and physical infrastructure system, a demoralised civil service and a political elite tainted by crass opportunism.

The question which many observers posed as the Second Republic was being inaugurated in August 2018 centred around the extent to which it was ready and able to meet these challenges with any degree of credibility.

It remains open to question the extent to which Zimbabweans can begin to congratulate themselves on the restoration of governance. This is because most of the problems which the Second Republic has inherited are complicated and, although, some of them may be amenable to a relatively quick solution, others would require both time and the best of political and managerial efforts to resolve.

One of the biggest legacies of Mugabe rule and one which is serving as an immediate acid test for the Second Republic is the state of Zimbabwes infrastructural facilities.

In spite of the huge budgetary allocations made to the countrys road infrastructure, most remain in a state of disrepair and unmotorable all year round. The dilapidation of the road network and the virtual collapse of the railway took its toll both on intra and inter-state economic transactions. The water supply, too, sank to new depths of inefficiency which, as with the electricity supply situation, allowed both corruption and criminality to thrive on a stupendous scale. The consequence for the economy and society is far-reaching.

The question of the revival of the national infrastructural system is one which is crucial to the establishment of the basis for a functioning national economy and credibility of the renewed effort at governance.

Success in this regard enables the Second Republic to successfully promote a link in the minds of Zimbabweans between good governance and the effective management of public goods and services as contrasted to the depressing record of Mugabe era. To successfully refurbish the national infrastructural system would require both an outlay of huge investments and the institutionalisation of mechanisms for checking financial leakages and the enforcement of a culture of prompt and timely maintenance of facilities.

An acid test of success in tackling the infrastructure crisis would, therefore, not just be the efficiency of the services provided but also the accessibility enjoyed by the generality of Zimbabweans to electricity, water and transportation at prices that are affordable within the prevailing income structure.

Corruption, legitimacy

At the heart of Mugabe governance was the institutionalisation of corruption to the status of a primary objective and directive principle of state policy. The use of the carrot of public resources to complement the stick of the denial of patronage became two sides of the same agenda for serving the interests of the regime as personified by Mugabe.

Mugabe tolerated, encouraged, entrenched, institutionalised corruption and glorified its perpetrators. The early indicators since the inauguration of the Mnangagwa administration would suggest that at the level of executive rhetoric, at least, there is awareness that, both for the sake of the well-being of the economy and the viability of the Second Republic, corruption would need to be tackled frontally.

Mass poverty

Unemployment, particularly among the educated youth, has grown sharply and the health and nutritional status of many Zimbabweans has declined. The ranks of the vibrant middle class professionals have massively depleted as many slid into poverty on account of the collapse in their real incomes associated with the repeated devaluation of Zimbabwe dollar and the high inflationary spiral in the economy.

Mass poverty, therefore, feeds into the political resentment that is building up in the country to pose direct challenges to the stability and viability of the nation. The real test for the Second Republic would be its speed in making a real difference in the lives of the generality of the people and, in this regard, its effort at getting the economy functioning again.

Managing electoral system

Elections have always been a highly contentious issue in Zimbabwe and those that were conducted as part of the transition to the Second Republic have not been an exception, especially at the presidential level. Local and international observers reported widespread irregularities in the polls with electoral officials accused of electoral fraud in favour of one candidate.

The transition from Mugabe rule that occurred on November 2017 marked the beginning of a first, perhaps tentative step in the continuing quest in Zimbabwe for a stable and democratic political order. It is widely recognised across the country that although Mugabe rule may have been formally ended, the effects of his governance mode and the destruction of the economy and the moral fibre of society that are the legacies of prolonged Mugabe rule have not made the task of democratic reforms easy.

While it could be suggested that democracy has been the only game in town in Zimbabwe since November 2017, the democratic ethos remains virtually captive to its imperfect moorings. The zero-sum politics continues to sap the sinews of democracy of much strength.

New economic experiment

Zimbabwe faces a massive escalating socio-economic crisis, exacerbated by decades of corruption, mismanagement, sanctions and a recent austerity programme.

But the surprise manner in which the mono-currency reform was announced, and Zimbabwes track record of printing money to plug holes in its public finances, means many people do not believe it will succeed.

One sign Zimbabweans are distrustful of the Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) is that it is weaker on the black market than on the official interbank market, where it trades around six to the dollar. RTGS is an imaginary currency which lacks international convertibility.

Implementation of macro-economic stabilisation and structural changes are generating transitional unemployment since resources cannot be reallocated instantaneously to alternative uses in response to changes in relative commodity and factor prices. Compensatory actions are needed to offset these adverse transitional side effects.

There are uproarious efforts to promote national cohesion and tolerance. The enactment of the National Peace and Reconciliation Act, creation of Political Actors Dialogue (Polad), amendment of Public Order and Security Act (Posa), the Citizen Act, Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (Aippa) are classic examples. This creates a sense of community.

The creation of Presidential Advisory Council and Polad are commendable for promoting tolerance. However, these innovations are part of controlled openness. Controlled openness provides an opportunity for new constituencies to ingratiate with the government that is eager to find new allies in the attempt to redefine its community base.It is correct to argue that there is authoritarian rule reconfiguration in Zimbabwe. The authoritarian rule does not have the same features as the authoritarian rule of Mugabe era. It is combined with limited participatory elements.

Political survival, performance

Successful leaders foster economic growth and prosperity for their citizens. By contrast, leaders who produce famine, poverty and misery seem like dismal failures who ought to be removed from office as quickly as possible. Yet the iron is that leaders who produce poverty and misery keep their jobs much longer than those who make their country richer. For Mugabe, bad policy was good politics because his focus on cronyism and corruption ensured his enduring leadership. This is unlikely for Mnangagwa.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Looking ahead, by what criteria should one judge the success or failure of the latest Zimbabwe reform experiment? The proposed measures are aimed at combating and correcting the deficiencies within Zimbabwean state structures that have combined to produce continued economic decline, increased rates of poverty and social dislocation and, in general, a growing alienated and disillusioned population.

The diaspora must connect with what is happening in Zimbabwe. The diaspora should feel that they are part of Zimbabwe through voting. The diaspora is critical for nation building to promote policy formulation and implementation for advancing Vision 2030. The bottom line: how do we make the diaspora, in its totality, work for advancing the countrys interests? It is a peril if the diaspora is relegated to the socio-economic periphery and is not accorded special attention in terms of how it should be comprehensively integrated into the broader country framework in a manner that is broadly consultative and transparent, with the conscious aim of energising human and financial resources mobilisation strategy for Vision 2030.Market-based system

By pursuing upper middle-income status by 2030, the government should not be blinded to the day-to-day realities with regard to deficiencies in social service delivery, poverty reduction and supporting vulnerable groups.

The market-led economy is a doubly-tragic and paradoxical prescription. On the one hand, it seeks to enthrone democracy. Yet, the policies it seeks to put in place require authoritarian measures to implement.

On the other hand, it is concerned about transparency, accountability, human rights and all that, but it is not concerned with social justice and empowerment of the people. This is the fundamental deficit of the market-led dogma resulting in the commodification of everything. This results in class inequality and might lead to social unrest.

Mnangagwa must deal decisively with the politics of neo-patrimonialism and state capture. Constrained from whipping his opponents in line, he finds himself increasingly a prisoner of the same forces that brought him to power.

Zimbabwes bourgeoisie and middle class still support a strong role for the state, seeking government contracts, state bank loans and bureaucratic employment, bailouts, pegged currencies and controlled interest rates in times of crisis. This leads to a central paradox of politics: good policy is bad politics, and bad policy helps leaders stay in office. Where good policy is also good politics, leaders face greater obstacles to maintaining incumbency.Despite Mnangagwas good intentions and formidable power, he finds his ambitious promises much easier to make than to implement. He has to depend on the goodwill of the very groups that are threatened by his agenda and on the cooperation of the same dysfunctional and corrupt systems that he hopes to reform.

While the public clamoured for the principle of change, it remains beholden for daily survival to functionaries, private bosses and political power brokers who are fighting to protect their interests.

Nevertheless, as his critics have grown louder and more insistent, Mnangagwa has exhibited increasing signs of insecurity and repressive tendencies that belie his claims to tolerate constructive criticism and respect institutional checks and balances.

This is evident in the recent banning of all public protests and breaking up public gatherings by opposition leaders. Immediately after the 2017 coup, the government gave the impression that it was out to save the country for democracy, not to gain power for itself. This was evident in Mnangagwas Vox Populi, Vox Dei slogan, meaning the Voice of the People is the Voice of God .

Tawanda Zinyama holds a PhD and lectures Public Administration at the University of Zimbabwe.

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#Coup17: Second Republic: Governance myths, realities - Zimbabwe Independent

The 2016 presidential election brought renewed attention to the plight of rural communities grappling with the decline of American manufacturing. Trumps attacks on globalists struck a chord with voters who lost their jobs to off-shoring, not to mention those who had lost loved ones in the ensuing opioid epidemic. But the medias portrayal of the struggles of rural Americans as a white working-class problem is deeply misleading. Indeed, African Americans were in a sense the original and most severe victims of deindustrialization. This fact suggests that working-class people of all stripes have more in common than our political discourse tends to recognize.

Manufacturing has historically provided good jobs for workers without higher education. In the early 20th century, for instance, manufacturing work helped lift less educated Irish and Italian immigrants into the middle class. The same was beginning to be true for African Americans following the civil rights movement. Black high school graduation rates were finally converging with whites by the early 1970. Yet tragically, the 1970s also marked the peak of U.S. manufacturing employment and the end of socio-economic convergence between blacks and whites.

While its easy to see the impact of a small town factory that moves overseas, its much harder to imagine the counterfactual in which the same jobs never existed in the first place. Yet this was the reality for many African Americans, whose educational attainment caught up at precisely the time when the demands of the global economy pulled away.

Deindustrialization has negatively impacted black and white workers alike, but white Americans have historically recovered more easily from displacement thanks to existing social networks and status. Economists Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles have found that the earnings gap between black and white workers shrank between 1940-1970, but widened again after that. Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. The shocking fact is that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 50 years.

The end of convergence between white and black households also coincided with slowing convergence between Northern and Southern states. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the most severe effects of the China Shock the sudden collapse in manufacturing employment in the early 2000s occurred not in the Rust Belt, but in South Atlantic states. As MIT economist David Autor has shown, deindustrialization began in the North decades earlier, when manufacturing moved south to take advantage of lower labor costs. The labor-intensity of Southern manufacturers left their workers particularly vulnerable to import competition, helping to explain why the China Shock was so shocking.

The economist Eric Gould explains that the disappearance of manufacturing work may not have only lowered socio-economic outcomes within each racial group, but increased inequality within each group as well. His research finds that the loss of manufacturing jobs is associated with increasing rates of poverty and single motherhood for both black and white women, but with stronger effects for black women in both cases. Gould also finds that declining manufacturing employment increases the rates of black and white children in poverty, the percent of children raised in single-parent households, and child mortality rates before the age of 10. But here too, the effects are stronger for black children.

If these studies reveal anything, it is that the effects of deindustrialization arent uniform across race, gender, and location. And yet some common themes emerge. White or black, North or South, deindustrialization has hurt the economic prospects of men without a college education, reduced family formation and household stability, and undermined predictors of mental health.

In retrospect, even the legacy of slavery can be understood through the lens of deindustrialization. Plantations in the Cotton Belt treated human beings as literal machines, reducing the need for the South to industrialize as fast as the North. This specialization in labor-intensive production persisted long after the official end of slavery. Emancipation was, in a deeper sense, incomplete absent major catch-up investments in productivity-enhancing technology and infrastructure.

Alexander Hamilton worked for a West Indian import-export firm in his youth, where the limitations of a slave economy based on sugar cane exports were self-evident. This may have been the inspiration for his strong belief in federal programs to promote and develop Americas nascent manufacturing base. Unfortunately, the loss of particular American industries cant be easily reversed. Nonetheless, in the spirit of Hamilton, we could do much more to identify and foster the emancipating technologies of the future.

While the economic distress connected to deindustrialization in white communities can be used to reinforce racial resentments, as the Trump presidency demonstrates, it also holds the potential for a new kind of cross-racial, working-class consciousness. The notions that the crack epidemic or high rates of black single motherhood were the results of personal failings or a backwards culture become less tenable when parallel phenomena manifest in deindustrializing white communities, too.

This doesnt eliminate culture as a factor of social health. But it does point to a way out of the most divisive versions of our contemporary culture war. Indeed, policies that tackle deindustrialization head-on have the potential to unite working-class people of all racial, cultural, and regional backgrounds. And by jump-starting convergence in regional productivity, convergence on the interests working people hold in common spiritual and material may follow closely behind.

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Deindustrialization Isnt (Just) a White Working-Class Problem - The Bulwark

As old certainties crumble and systems crystallize, social divisions grow and extremes harden, a friend asks: Why is there so much wrong in our society? Its a good question. He was referring specifically to Britain where we both live, but, although the specific problems may vary, the question could be applied to any country, and by extension, to world society.

Politicians, lost in a fog of their own ambition and blinded by ideologies, argue and deceive; they have no answers to the pressing issues or my friends question and, addicted to the privilege, status and motorcades, are concerned only with gaining and retaining office. Corporations and undemocratic institutions exert increasing political power and sociological influence; religion, essential to some, is irrelevant to many, the church east and west groans under the weight of its inhibiting doctrine, fails to provide guidance and succor, and the people most of whom live under a blanket of economic insecurity feel increasingly anxious, angry and depressed.

We had been discussing the justice system and specifically prisons, retribution and the total absence of rehabilitation in the UK system, when my friend posed his rhetorical question. The areas of chaos and dysfunction are many and varied, from environmental carnage to armed conflict, slavery, economic injustice and homelessness. All, however, flow from the same polluted source, us mankind; motive, often short-term ideologically rooted, conditions and corrupts action and the construction of socio-economic forms.

Society is not an abstraction, it is a reflection of the consciousness of the people who live within it, the seed of what is wrong in our society lies within this consciousness, not simply in the forms and systems themselves. There will never be peace in the world, for example, until we ourselves are free of conflict: that we constitute society and that societal problems flow from us is clearly true, but, as with most things in life, the issue is more complex and nuanced.

Firstly, the relationship between the forces of society and the individual is a symbiotic one, and this is well known to those that most powerfully control the systems under which we all live; secondly, the vast majority of people have little or no influence over the mechanics of society. Depending on the nature of the society in which we live, we are all to a greater or lesser degree, structural victims, with little or no voice and even less influence something that in recent years in particular, millions have been marching to change. Billions of people throughout the world, the overwhelming majority, feel themselves to be subjects within a Giant Game of Aggrandizement and Profit played by governments and powerful organizations, including the media in its many strands.

These interconnected and interdependent groups, which are of course made up of men and women, design and shape the way society functions, and do all they can to manipulate how the masses think and act. The ideology of choice for those functioning within the corporate political sphere is founded on and promotes the dogma of greed and profit. Selfishness, ambition, competition, nationalism all are found within its tenets and are promoted as natural human tendencies that are beneficial for an individual and so should be developed. Such qualities they claim, bring success, usually understood as material comfort, career achievement or social position, and with success, the story goes, comes happiness. Within the Corrupt Construct happiness, which is rightly recognized as something that everyone longs for, has been replaced by pleasure, which is sought after day and night. Likewise, desire and the satiation of desire, itself an impossibility this too is well known by the architects has been substituted for love, which has been assimilated, commodified and neatly packaged.

The tendency towards greed and selfishness, hate and violence, no doubt exist within the human being, the negative lies within us all, so does the good. The Good is our inherent nature, hidden within the detritus of conditioning and fear. The negative, aggravated, rises, and, within the Corrupt Construct it is relentlessly prodded and stirred up. Desire is demanded, facilitating its bedmate fear, which manifests as anxiety/stress, to which an antidote is offered by the deeply concerned, eternally grateful, trillion dollar pharmaceutical companies, recreational drugs/alcohol and the world of entertainment. Common sense, restraint and The Wisdom of The Wise is trivialized, discarded; conflict and suffering, within and without goes on. Discontent leading to the pursuit of pleasure is the aim, desire, agitated, the means.

The two most pervasive and effective tools employed to condition the minds of all are education and the media. Conditioning into competition and nationalism, pleasure and individualism not individuality, which is dangerous to the status quo and is therefore actively discouraged; conformity is insisted upon and forms a cornerstone of education and the stereotypes churned out by the media.

This is a transitional time, a time of collapse and expansion, of disintegration and rebuilding; underlying the present tensions and discord is the energy of change and the emergence of the new.

A battle is taking place, between those forces in the world that are wedded to the old ways, and a dynamic, global movement for social justice, environmental action, peace and freedom. Sapped of energy, the existing forms and modes of living are in a state of decay; propelled solely by the impetus of the past they persist in form only, hollow carcasses without vitality. Growing numbers of people around the world know this to be true, and while some react with fear and look for certainty behind a flag or ideology, the majority call for a fundamental shift, for justice and the inculcation of systems that allow unifying harmonious ways of living to evolve. As always, resistance is fierce, but change and the spirit of the time cannot be held at bay indefinitely.

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Why is there so Much Wrong in Our Society? - CounterPunch

President Trump signs the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018. Image:Stephanie Chasez/DoD

The barrage of attacks that followed Trumps decision to reduce the U.S. military presence in Syria obscures the decades-long bankruptcy of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

When Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced on October 13 that President Donald Trump would bring home 2,000 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, it ignited a bipartisan firestorm. Punditsconservatives and liberals alikesavaged Trump for deserting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), composed largely of Kurds who had fought alongside the United States against the Islamic State (IS). In Congress, even Trumps most stalwart defenders, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham, parted ways with him.

Trumpscritics issuethe standard Beltway cocktail of bromides, stale thinking, skin-deep historical knowledge, and hypocritical sentimentality. That is the real pity.

The critics were playing a familiar tune. By announcing his intention to pull out of Syria, Trump was corroding U.S. credibility across the globe, demoralizing U.S. allies, undercutting the campaign against terrorism, throwing a lifeline to a (supposedly) dying IS, opening the door to genocide, and handing unearned victories to Iran, Russia, and by extension to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.The charge sheet was extravagantly comprehensive; dissenters were few and far between.

In fairness to Trumps critics, the presidents operating style, unique in the annals of U.S. statecraft, does not inspire confidence; and his decision on Syria was of a piece. It owed, seemingly, to id and impulse, not reason, and it was suffused with that dangerous Trumpian amalgam of ignorance and overweening self-confidence. Moreover, the presidents own Syria policy has been all over the map. After being elected, he actually increased the number of U.S. troops there, to a total of about 2,000. Then, in late 2018, he surprised his advisers by calling for an immediate reduction on the grounds that IS had been defeated. Then he changed his mind again. Less than a week after last months abrupt order for a full withdrawal, he reversed course yet again, decreeing that a small, unspecified number of troops would remain, to guard Syrias oil fieldsnever mind that these are dispersed and nowhere near the SDF-controlled northeast.

By going with his gut on this decision, Trump effectively ignored his foreign policy and national security team and the top military brass, all of whom seemed stupefied following Espers newsflash. These advisers were left to contemplate various what-next questions that had seemingly never occurred to the commander-in-chief. How, for example, would U.S. troops exit a war zone speedily and safely, especially with angry Kurds flinging trash and invective at them? What, precisely, would limit the advance of Turkish forces once the U.S. troops were gone? What fate would befall the Kurds inhabiting the twenty-mile buffer that Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to create in northern Syria, and then to flood with Syrian Arab refugees? Who would care for Kurdish refugees fleeing the advance of Turkish-backed Syrian opposition fighters and al-Assads army? What if in the ensuing melee IS prisoners under the SDFs control managed to escape?

Indubitably, then, Trumps Syria decision was hasty and the (non-) process used to decide inept. Yet what his recklessness laced with grandiosity elicited from his critics was the standard Beltway cocktail of bromides, stale thinking, skin-deep historical knowledge, and hypocritical sentimentality. And that, in the end, is the real pity.

American presidents have unique autonomy and latitude when it comes to enacting foreign policy. Apart from conflating U.S. interests with their own personal interests, they can set the agenda and execute their priorities. Given the magnitude of this responsibility and the complexity of decision making involved, they rely on what Stephen Walt calls the blobthe amorphous foreign policy establishment that diffuses responsibility and rarely if ever suffers consequences for its mistakes.

Obamas plan to partner with the SDF was doomed from the start. Insisting on aU.S. presence in Syria sweeps various additional problems under the rug.

To understand how calamitous this partnership between politician and blob has been in recent years, consider the U.S. policy that resulted with troops in Syria in the first place. For starters, recall that it was President Barack Obama, not Trump, who first engineered the U.S. collaboration with the SDF, in 2015partly in response to calls, including from some members of his administration, to intervene more forcefully in Syrias civil war. Bipartisan legislation in 2014 had approved $500 million to extract Syrian Arab rebels out of Syria to train and arm them for the fight against IS. But this program produced little of value: the rebels proved more interested in resisting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad than in fighting IS.

Obama sought to project toughness on terrorism. With polls taken in late 2014 and early 2015 revealing that a majority of Americans favored sending ground troops to fight IS in Syria, he terminated the 2014 program and developed a new, measured plan. Yet Obama understood that protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had made Americans wary of military expeditions that began with promises of easy victories and then dragged on for years, with vast expenditure of blood and treasure. So he chose to deploy a limited number of Special Operations Forcesfewer than 50 in October 2015, and then another 450 in April and December of the following yearto train and equip a more clearly defined local partner to do the bulk of the fighting, with air support provided by U.S. warplanes already stationed nearby at Incirlik, Turkey. Enter the SDF, which was already engaged in fighting on the ground and shared the U.S. interest of destroying the sprawling caliphate that IS had by then erected in parts of Syria (and Iraq).

The partnership, while superficially plausible, was doomed from the start. Though the SDF included Syrian Arabs and Assyrians, it was dominated by the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), the fighting arm of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Syrian Kurdish nationalist organization. The United States and the Syrian Kurds had a common enemy in IS, but they did not share common political objectives. The Syrian Kurds minimal goal, which required the liquidation of IS, was an autonomous Kurdish region in northeastern Syria; what it really coveted was an independent state for Syrias Kurdsan outcome unacceptable to just about every nation in the region, especially Turkey.

Erdoganand Turks generallyrecognized that the PYD was now essentially masquerading as the SDF. The PYD, while organizationally distinct, is a kindred spirit of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought for a Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey for decades. In 1997 and again in 2019, the U.S. State Department had labeled the PKK a terrorist group. Photographs of the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan abound in PYD-ruled Syrian territories, and some PKK fighters have joined their PYD comrades in battle, as have Iranian Kurds from the Party of Free Life for Kurdistan (PAJAK), which, in 2009, the U.S. Treasury Department also labeled a terrorist group.

One can sympathize with the Kurds, of course. The post-World War I territorial settlement Britain and France devised to carve up much of the Near East eviscerated the Kurds hope for statehood, dispersing them across three countries. The cold historical reality, however, is that no state with the power to prevent the emergence of a separatist state on its flank, to say nothing of one aligned with a homegrown secessionist insurgency it has battled for decades, will allow that to happen. Long before Erdogan was even elected prime minister in 2003 (he became president in 2014), the Turkish state had demonstrated, repeatedly, its determination to wage a pitiless counterinsurgency war against the PKK, which included the burning of over 2,000 Kurdish villages. Between 1984when the PKK took up armsand 2014, more than 65,000 civilians and combatants on both sides died or were injured, with the Kurds getting the worst of it by far.

Yes, Trump is a disastrous president. But U.S. foreign policy has been a disaster for much longer.

The idea that Turkey would permit a PKK affiliate to create a de facto state within Syria adjacent to Turkey proper was therefore delusional. Erdogan has been reviled in the United States; but you neednt like the man to understand what drives his actions in northern Syria. In 2018 he denounced the SDF as aU.S.-backed terror army and most Turks support himindeed, as opinion polls demonstrate, Turks are turning increasing hostile toward the United States.

Obama, for his part, seems to have given scant thought in 2015 to how the United States might respond if Turkey moved to crush the SDF. Clearly, he had no intention of sending troops numerous enough to deter, let alone repel, a Turkish offensive against the SDF. His focus was on limiting U.S. exposurehence, his resistance to taking bolder steps, such as creating a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace or safe areas inside Syria for refugees fleeing Assads army. His plan for demolishing IS by relying on the SDF, though successful, was all but certain to give rise to an additional set of problems.

For example, Turkeys interests aside, consider that Assads forces have been making steady gains since 2015, which is the year Vladimir Putin intervened with Russian airpower and thousands of so-called contract soldiers to prevent the Syrian states collapse. As Putin sees it, Assads fall would perpetuate chaos and create further space for the rise of a radical Islamist government. Russia thus remains determined to help Assad retake the lands he has lost to an assortment of armed opponents. So, to those who demand that the United States maintain troops in Syria (or even increase their number), the question Obama swept under the rug remains: would the United States be willing to defend the SDF from a Russian-supported assault by Assads army in the south while Turkey was also pressing against it in the north?

Critics of Trumps recent withdrawal claim that Trump has handed Russia a big prize. This is absurd. Imagine, for a moment, that Assad routs his opponents soon and once again rules all of Syria. What strategic gain will accrue to Putin? Large parts of Syria have been demolished and resemble a smoldering ruin. No Western country will pony up the cash needed for a serious reconstruction, which the UN estimates will require $250 billion (Syrias entire GDP before the civil war began in 2011) and other sources estimate at $400 billion. Whatever the sum, the Russians cant afford it. The Chinese have the money to help rebuild Syria, but why would they when Russia would then reap the benefits?

The proponents of hanging tough in Syria also warn of wily Russian diplomats forging ties with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Turkey. To hear them tell it, you would think that Russiawith a military budget that is less than a tenth of the United States and a GDP comparable to that of the Benelux countrieshas all but driven the United States out of the Middle East. But Russias achievements here cannot be blamed on Trumps actions in Syria. Russias diplomatic successes in the Middle East were evident during Obamas presidency and continued even as Trump beefed up the military deployment in Syria that he inherited following the 2016 election. Indeed, the extensive cooperation between Israel in particular and Russia can be traced at least to the 1990s. Putin has certainly built energetically on that foundation, but his success cannot be ascribed to U.S. policy in Syria, let alone Trumps decision to reduce the number of troops deployed there. Moreover, the question remains of how substantial and lasting these relationships will prove to be. Each of the countries in question, for example, remains much more closely tied to the United States than to Russia, or indeed any other state.

As for the charge that Trump has betrayed the Kurds, well, he has. Indeed, the United States has forsaken the Kurds repeatedly, on a much grander scale, and long before Trump came on the scene. Consider just a couple of examples. Washington armed Turkeyto the tune of $800 million a year on average during Bill Clintons presidencyas Turkey mounted its massive counterinsurgency against the PKK in the 1990s. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein in several ways, including providing Iraq economic credits as well as intelligence information on Iranian troop deployments, even as Hussein set out to retake Kurdish territories in northern Iraq. During their 1988 offensive, called Operation Anfal, Iraqi troops killed thousands of Kurdish civilians, demolished entire villages, and used poison gas in the town of Halabja, taking some 5,000 Kurdish lives. The entire campaign may have killed as many as 100,000 civilians. The White House and State Department uttered nary a word of condemnation after the attack on Halabja and even opposed Congressional resolutions that sought to do so.

There is, then, much amnesia at work in 2019.

From where we sit, Donald Trump has been a disastrous president, and in ways too numerous to recount here. Apart from his policies, his personal comportmentthe sexism, the racist dog whistles, the demagoguery, the coarsenesshas been revolting. With luck, and assuming he manages to finish his term, voters will cashier him in 2020. That said, however, the barrage of attacks and news coverage that followed his decision to reduce the U.S. military presence in Syria has obscured something the country really needs: a debate about the basic principles of recent U.S. foreign policy. This policy, which has loomed large since 9/11, has five, interrelated elements.

The foreign policy establishment says that we must persevere lest adversaries doubt our will and allies lose their nerve. But endless interventionsensure militants a steady stream of recruits.

First, recent U.S. foreign policy has authorized serial military interventions undertaken in the name of universal human rights, the commitment to which is belied by the many repressive regimes that the United States supports. A recent, egregious example is U.S.-armed Saudi Arabias war in Yemen, which began in the final year of Obamas presidency and has ravaged a dirt-poor country, killed thousands of civilians, and created a cholera epidemic and a famine.

Second, recent U.S. foreign policy rests largely on the so-called war against terrorism which has no clarity of strategic purposenamely, whether the terrorists pose a clear and present danger or are a species of militant Islam produced by complex causes that may be rooted in local factors that have little to do with the United States. The war on terror has used drone strikes and special operations to convert large swathes of the planet into a battlefield and commits the country to promiscuous, preventive, and open-ended interventions across the globe.

Third, and a consequence of the first two, the decapitation of governments (such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya) produce chaos and bloodletting while leaving the United States with two bad choices: doubling down for years (Afghanistan and Iraq) or bugging out (Libya). The first two ventures have cost $5.9 trillion (counting the money already spent and the future obligations to our troops), while the third has proved to be a boon for Al-Qaeda, IS, and a network of human traffickers and armed militias who have thrived in the resulting power vacuum.

Fourth, recent foreign policy has all but ignored the cumulative opportunity costs. While it is true that money cant fix all of our festering domestic problems, it would certainly help ameliorate some of them. Imagine if the money saved by winding down needless, counterproductive wars was put towards updating crumbling infrastructure, or addressing the child poverty rate (which ranks among the highest in OECD countries), or treating the raging opioid and suicide epidemics (the latter of which has taken a heavy toll on veterans and active-duty soldiers; at least 45,000 have killed themselves since 2013). The military, which is currently having to lower its health and education standards in order to field a force, is especially aware of the consequences of decreased domestic investment.

Lastly, U.S. foreign policy since 9/11 has largely allowed Congress to go AWOL. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation passed on September 14, 2001, has amounted to a permanent permission slip presidents can invoke to mount armed interventions of various sorts, thus enabling the continual military interventions of recent years. Congress can undo this legislation whenever it chooses, but instead has all but abdicated its constitutional right to declare war.

Since 2016, the number of U.S. troops has increased in virtually every region of the world.

By assuming the cloak of anti-terrorism, U.S. foreign policy post 9/11 has amounted to an endless game of whack-a-mole, pitting the United States against militant movements that move from one country to another. How, then, does this game end? What will victory look like? The foreign policy establishment says that we must persevere lest adversaries doubt our will and allies lose their nerve. But these shopworn shibboleths about being persistent and demonstrating credibility keep the game going. Endless interventions simply generate resentments that ensure militants a steady stream of recruits. Sticking with the same failed strategy in hopes of a obtaining a different result amounts to insanity.

Trump famously described himself as a very stable genius. He is, in fact, neither stable nor particularly smart. Yet he deserves credit for his intuition in 2016. He sensed the American publics frustration over the forever wars, the burden of which is borne by a small segment of our society because we do not have a military draft, and which are paid for with the national credit card rather than by raising taxes. Trump also grasped the depth of resentment among those who feel belittled, even mocked, by a super-richelite that knows nothing, and perhaps cares less, about their workaday hardships. He tapped into the despair of people whose jobs succumbed to outsourcing and automation and those who have jobs but nevertheless struggle to cover basic expenses.

Trump spun a narrative, which, for all of its simplemindedness and crudeness, portrayed him, a quintessential creature of privilege, as a revolutionary savior. It convinced nearly 63 million voters that he would dismantle a dysfunctional system and replace it with one that would, at long last, fix their problems. In the end, unsurprisingly, Trump has managed only to perpetrate one more con job. His promise of a new foreign policy has proven bogus. Since 2016, the number of U.S. troops has increased in virtually every region of the world; the total in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria soared from 18,000 at the end of Obamas term to 26,000 by the end of 2017. Most recently Trump dispatched 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, supposedly to shore up its defenses against Iran, never mind that the United Sates has sold the House of Saud $90 billion worth of arms since 1950 so it could supposedly defend itself.

Under Trump, the forever wars grind on. Drone strikes and military raids remain the commander-in-chiefs tools of choicenotably in Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Obama was scarcely a paragon of transparency on civilian deaths caused by drone strikes, but as of this year, the Trump administration stopped releasing annual reports on drone attacks, thereby making it even harder to ascertain civilian casualties and deaths. If anything, Trump uses military force even less discriminately than his predecessor did. The self-proclaimed architect of restraint turns out to be the avatar of more of the same.

The foreign policy establishment needs to rethinks its worldview,including acknowledgingthe role its collective folly has played in elevating someone like Trump.

And yet all that disaffection he tapped into to win the presidency remains. Though not all of it stems from a loss of confidence in U.S. foreign policy, the disenchantment with militarized global leadership and awareness of its abundant failures will likely still haunt us in 2020 and beyond. A true change in our policy will require a root-and-branch assessment that distinguishes between essential goals, commitments, and expenditures and those that owe to bureaucratic inertia, entrenched vested interests, and a foreign policy establishment that not only lacks new ideas but is also increasingly sequestered in Washington, D.C., and disconnected from public sentiment. It will entail realigning ends and means, redefining national security so as to take account of domestic socio-economic considerations. It will require winding down wars that breed millenarian movements and more terrorism. Despite his propensity for big talk, the current commander in chief wont achieve any of this.

No thoroughgoing change will occur unless the foreign policy establishment rethinks its worldview. And that wont happen until members of the blobwhether in Congress, the military, think tanks, or the mediaacknowledge the role that their collective folly has played in elevating someone like Trump to the presidency. The U.S. foreign policy crisis predates Trump. It wont end simply with his removal from office.

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The President and the Blob - Boston Review