Donald Trump posted his 37, 297th tweet, thanking the United Kingdom and France for their perfect partnership and wrote: “Mission Accomplished.”
In the tweet, the emphasis on the military power of the United Kingdom and France was a clue of the real aim of the operation.
This is like a boxer, who is preparing for a heavyweight championship, flexing his muscles and saying, “Look at how strong I am.”
During noon hours, the anchor of CNN International asked the question which we have been asking for years, to the consultant of the channel, who is a retired major general:
“Chemical weapons are a red line everyone must enforce. However, Assad carries out the actual massacres with conventional weapons. How will this be stopped?”
The military consultant replied with the cold-bloodedness of the Pentagon saying, “There is a civil war in Syria. Standing against chemical weapons, poisonous gas and intervening in the civil war are totally different things.”
We should know this:
All military operations are carried out for a political aim.
The soldier sees the political perspective that is presented to him, makes his operation plan accordingly and takes action. Thus, to foresee the scope of a military operation,
it is sufficient to follow up on the political aims.
It was obvious that Trump would carry out an operation in Syria when he said “Animal Assad” upon his chemical massacre in Douma and threatened Russia by saying “Russia, wait for us. They [missiles] are coming.”
However, these bold statements did not present any proof for any changes in the U.S.’s Syria policy.
- Trump mentions Assad as a man that kills his own people with poisonous gas. However, he does not propose any idea about how much longer such a killer will remain in office.
- Was there a political project following the operation that would end the tragedy in Syria which is entering its eight year?
There was not.
- Was there any other approach than the one underlying the red line on chemical weapons usage? No, there was not.
I guess it’s because Assad must have understood the meaning of the message being sent to him before anyone else.
Because he must have been guaranteed that the he would not be shot by the Tomahawks launched from the Mediterranean.
He wanted to be seen with his James Bond bag entering one of the palaces while missiles were dropping.
As in one of the overnight missile attacks last year, we can foresee that the war in Syria will continue around its own dynamics from now on as well.
We have seen that it has adopted a prudent manner from last week. Despite the statements made by officials supporting the operation, using a tone against Russia, which is Turkey’s partner in the region, has been avoided. President Erdoğan said the day before: “We consider this operation appropriate. The regime has seen that its attacks will not be left unanswered. We will support the efforts for solutions in Geneva and Astana.”
In the same speech, these sentences that start with “The games played in Syria are different” reflect Ankara’s position on this issue:
“What is being conducted in Syria is firstly remaining silent against the cruelty of the regime; secondly it is sending a terror organization to the region by supporting it surreptitiously and it is finally launching the real project with another terror organization.
No one can ignore these, but we have already said it and talked about it. We have already perceived this game.”
The president was tearing into the U.S.’s actual policy which hasn’t given any signals of change yet.
If we start from the end and follow the process up to the beginning, it can be seen clearly that the Syria policy of the U.S. fits under two headings.
1. Prolonging the civil war in Syria for as long as possible. More people dying, more people becoming refugees, more cities being destroyed.
2. By benefiting from the circumstances of this war, punishing Turkey with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
You can go back and read it again. The words of Erdoğan that I cited above, fit also into the frames of these two points.
