The number of pejoratives that accurately describe Donald Trump has always been large.
Racist, sexist, narcissist, egotist. Con-man, cheat, megalomaniac, bully. Unprepared, temperamental, lazy, rude. Nasty, mean, foul-mouthed, conceited. And of course . . .
Pathologically dishonest.
One would think so large a list more or less exhausts the possibilities.
One, however, would be wrong.
Because this past week we learned that Donald Trump is also . . .
Preternaturally stupid.
Until a week ago Monday, there were about a thousand American soldiers bivouacked in a portion of northern Syria then under Kurdish control. The Kurds are an ethnic group spread over at least four countries -- Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. They played a central role in freeing northern Syria from ISIS, an al-Qaeda terrorist spin off and wannabe caliphate, losing 11,000 of their own troops in a five year war.
Throughout that period, the United States led a coalition of thirty countries that supported first the Kurdish People's Protection Units (PPUs) and then the more heterogeneous Syrian Defense Force (SDF). At American insistence, 40% of the latter is comprised of indigenous non-Kurdish Arab fighters. The coalition supplied SDF with training, special forces operations, artillery and spotting, and over 45,000 air strikes.
As ISIS was defeated, SDF took over governance of the area.
The border of northern Syria is with Turkey and for years Turkey has viewed the PPU as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (KWP). For its part, as the The New York Times has reported, the KWP is considered a terrorist organization by both Turkey and the United States and "has waged a decades long insurgency inside Turkey."
Turkey has long considered Kurdish control of the northern Syrian border to be a national security threat, albeit a somewhat inchoate one. As the Turks saw it, the success of the PPU in Syria emboldened the KWP in Turkey . . .
Even though the former never attacked it.
When intelligence resided in the White House, America squared this circle of conflict between its NATO ally (Turkey) and its only effective ISIS-fighting ally (the Kurds) with astute diplomacy. It forced the PPU to enlist non-Kurds and become the SDF, and it made the Kurds withdraw from the border. Under these arrangements, there were no border incidents and no PPU sponsored incursions into Turkey.
On October 6, Trump and Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, spoke on the phone.
In that call, Erdogan asked Trump to withdraw American troops from the Turkish-Syrian border.
Trump agreed.
None of this was planned in advance. Nor was acceding to (or even discussing) withdrawal part of the talking points given to Trump in advance of the call.
The Pentagon opposed any withdrawal, as it has for months, and so did Congress (on a bi-partisan basis). The fear in both was that withdrawal would give the Turks a green light to invade northern Syria, that millions of Kurds would either be killed or made homeless in the process, that ISIS prisoners held in northern Syria would escape and re-constitute, and that the Kurds would have nowhere to look for help other than Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin.
The fear was also that America would thereafter be viewed as a dishonest broker and worthless ally.
All these fears have now come to pass.
On Wednesday, the Turks invaded northern Syria and by the weekend they controlled 75 square miles of previously held Kurdish territory. Along the way, they executed Kurdish POWs and bombed civilians, creating 160,000 refugees.
On Sunday, the Kurds cut a deal with Assad to allow Syrian government troops (backed by Russia) to return to the northern territory. These are the same government troops that last year, along with their Russian mercenaries, had stopped attacking the Kurds once American bombers let loose. They are also the same government troops that petrify locals in northern Syria, many of whom opposed Assad. "If the regime returns," said one, it will be a "bloodbath".
As predicted, ISIS detainees are escaping. The US reported that it could not transfer 60 "high-value" ISIS detainees out of the country before we left, and ISIS has already claimed responsibility for two attacks. Meanwhile, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the pull out made ISIS's return "absolutely a given".
The Kurds themselves . . .
Now hate us.
And with good reason.
An American Army officer who fought with the Kurds said "They trusted us and we broke that trust. It's a stain on the American conscience." Another said he was "ashamed." A Kurdish official was more exact. "The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the tenches," he said, "is betrayal."
None of this was necessary.
In the immediate aftermath, as Congress exploded with anger and even his usual political allies eviscerated him, Trump and his seconds careened from one idiotic excuse to another.
On Wednesday, the President justified abandoning the Kurds by tweeting that they "didn't help" at Normandy. On Sunday, his Treasury Secretary implied that Turkey was going to invade northern Syria regardless of our presence; if so, of course, there had been no need for Erdogan to ask Trump to step aside.
On Monday, Trump went all 18th century on the issue, saying "anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away."
The Twin Towers were 7,000 miles away too.
But that didn't stop 9/11.
Earlier in the week, Trump justified the pull out as consistent with his campaign pledge to get us out of "endless wars". This, however, wasn't one of them. It was the Kurds' war. At minimal cost, and with enormous gain, we were just helping them out.
All that has now been lost.
In 2014, six years into his presidency, an angry Barack Obama walked to the back of Air Force One and had it out with critics of his foreign policy. They thought his policy disjointed, ineffective and a large come down from his soaring rhetoric about human rights and democratic possibilities. He thought their criticism unfair. In the wake of Bush II's Iraqui debacle, non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and the humbling of his own "red line" crossed without consequence, he told reporters that his foreign policy was simple . . .
"Don't do stupid shit."
So that year, we allied with the Kurds, formed an international coalition, and began the process of eliminating ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliphate with locals doing the work on the ground as the coalition provided intelligence and air cover.
By this year, that policy had succeeded.
Last week, for no good reason, without any thought, and on the whim of a man who neither reads nor listens, that success was reversed.
Or . . .
To make it simple . . .
Trump just stepped in it.
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