We may as well start by talking briefly about the one area that the United States has started addressing and thus far has taken the proper and righteous approach. Contrary to what many have claimed, President Trump had begun to implement a Syria strategy. The first, and thus far, primary step has been to work to show that the United States has a group they are willing to stand with and are going to protect. They have made this statement boldly and sent a message to President Erdogan of Turkey that the Kurds are to be left alone. No longer will his indiscriminate attacks by air and land against the Kurds be tolerated and if President Erdogan desires to join the fight in Syria, then it will be against the Islamic State like he has told the world he was fighting and not against the Kurds who was who he was really fighting. The green and gold banner of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia and the colors of the United States were noticeable as they flew side-by-side in northern Syria for the first time. The images of Army Strykers and YPG vehicles rolling in Kurdish territories in Syria flooded social media and is intended to send a hands-off message to Turkish forces and to President Erdogan in Ankara. The YPG Militias are part of the Syrian Democratic Forces that the United States has been backing through arming them and now is showing a more active support. In the Washington Times Erdogan was quoted saying on Sunday that he vowed to carry out more strikes against Kurdish targets in northern Syria, telling reporters in Istanbul he was “saddened” by the images of the American and YPG flags flying in tandem. He impressed that this would be a major issue at his scheduled May meeting with President Trump in mid-May. We hope President Erdogan is prepared to be disappointed.
United States Armored Troops Move into Kurdish Areas of Syria
More news on the Syrian front comes as the White House has called for making areas safe-zones complete with enforced “No-fly zones” in place. President Trump spoke at length with Russian President Putin and it was reported that the talks were productive and the two men appear to have found some common middle ground. It is expected that Turkey’s President Erdogan will oppose any no-fly zones or safe zones that include Kurdish held ground as President Erdogan has sworn to wipe the Kurdish people from the map as he sees them as no different than the Ottomans viewed the Armenian and he desires applying the same solution. Should Presidents Putin and Trump reach an accord on these safe zones and no-fly zones and mutually enforce such, then Erdogan would prove to be a mad-man should he decide to test the resolve of Russia and the United States. Still, we suspect that he will test the American resolve at least twice and once he loses some of his aircraft will he finally return to Turkey and resign that he will not reach his envisioned “Greater Turkey” (see map below). Meanwhile, despite the fact that Syrian Dictator Bashir al-Assad would dearly love to see the Kurds crushed, he shares with Erdogan their mutual hatred of the Kurds viewing them as less Muslim than their own people, the Alawites for Assad and the Turks for Erdogan. As far as the Russians are concerned, as the Kurds have mostly just protected their own spaces and not attacked anyone other than the Islamic State, they are not posing any direct threat to Russia or Assad in their eyes. This will likely lead Putin to allow the Kurdish areas to be designated safe zones and placed under a no-fly order, which would fall to the United States to enforce. President Trump can expect Erdogan to attempt to disallow American aircraft from the base in Turkey to be utilized for this purpose. President Trump could then use an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea off of Syria or Israel, secretly use an Israel airfield, or ignore Erdogan and test his resolve. Erdogan just might be the fool enough to test President Trump by taking measures against American forced in Turkey thus potentially making Turkey the test case for what happens to people who test a commitment by President Trump. We figure such would be a very risky move with terrible consequences, but Erdogan believes that the United States is still under weak leadership as the American media have portrayed President Trump with their constant questioning and belittling his every move. This could have horrible consequences.
Greater Turkey
There will be two areas where President Trump will face great tests. His being used to business deals where contracts actually mean what the two sides intend to commit to is quite different than when dealing with rogue regimes. President Erdogan will simply be an introductory course in the art of international miscreants. There will be little learned here as this will be reminiscent of President Trump’s days growing up in a rough and tumble New York neighborhood where deeds were the real rest and talk often could substitute for deeds until somebody called you on your words and you needed to then prove your mettle. The real test will come from North Korea and the Palestinian Arabs. Both Kim Jong Un and Mahmoud Abbas have the same record in observing and keeping promises made in agreements, none. Both men will sign agreements, demand the other side meet all obligations and then refute that any demands or promises were made by their side and renege on everything upon which they had agreed. This defaulting by them has no bearing on their demands that everyone else meet the terms of that very agreement. This is the kind of dealing which gets one a bad name in business dealings but is not so uncommon in international affairs. The dictatorial and rogue states are well versed in double-dealing and will not feign from taking affront at others’ comments about them while dispensing insults as if they were candy at a children’s birthday party. This may be something Trump needs to realize that there is no arbitration between nations and the only means of enforcing agreements is through coercion, threat or actual use of force. Where this may be undesirable, it is still a necessary lesson that such is the way of the world and things are far from ideal.
Kim Jong Un and Mahmoud Abbas
The first installment of this message came fast and furious from the Palestinian Authority (PA) this week. While President Trump lauded Mahmoud Abbas for promising to end the payments to terrorists and their families commensurate on the numbers of Israelis the murdered and injured including those in prison in Israel, Mahmoud Abbas and nearly the entirety of the PA hierarchy upon Abbas returning came out in force to deny that any such promise had passed his lips. They also pointed out that such payments were a central tenet of their government and would continue. We guess the good news is that at least they did not announce an increase in these payments. This comes atop news that President Trump promised the PA additional funds and we can only hope that these funds are now prevented in response to the announced continuing for using such funds to reward terrorism directly, a definitive form of incitement if ever there was one. The unilateral PA announcement that funds will continue to be used to pay terrorists benefits commensurate with people murdered and maimed should be used by Congress, if the President does not take the initiative, as the reason to end all United States aid to the PA and to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). The additional reason for including UNRWA is the curriculum, which is full of terror incitement and terrorist glorification throughout their schoolbooks and enforced further by employing Hamas members as teachers and administrators in Gaza and PA appointees in similar positions in Judea and Samaria. Their teaching incitement and aggrandizement of terrorism is reason enough under stipulations already in place to end funding to all entities involved. This is but the first test from these two fronts.
President Trump will need to understand the duplicitous dealings from these actors before dealing with Iran who proved to have taken President Obama to the cleaners. The fact is President Obama desired just such an end and actually led the parade with the part of class clown aptly played by Secretary of State John Kerry. The fact that Secretary Kerry was actually attempting to please his boss and attempting to do as best as he could only added to the shame heaped on the United States by the Nuclear Deal with Iran. Making matters even worse was the fact that Iran wrote up the agreement they were to make in Farsi which nobody at the State Department or Defense Department ever translated or checked to verify it concurred at least with the European or Russian versions, we already knew the United States version was for domestic use only and that everyone had their own version, this deal was a farce in action. When the news broke that the United States version given to the media did not jibe with either the Russian or the European versions, the Russian and European versions at least matched fairly well and were likely the sole true representation of the actual agreement, the media reported on that for two days never quite detailing the differences and then the Iran deal became old news seldom to be mentioned again until the campaign and Trump using it as a campaign point. Such a fiasco can and must never be permitted again in the future and any and all translations need be vetted for reality and matching the actual points as agreed upon, otherwise we are allowing each member to write and sign their own version of reality and everybody leaves with copies of a treaty which do not match one-another and everyone just then does what they decide is best and no real treaty exists.
Kin Jong Un is also delusional, megalomaniacal, and dangerously paranoid. This is not a healthy combination when it comes to world leaders of nations, especially nations on the verge of having warhead size thermonuclear weapons and the ICBM’s on which to place them threatening the entirety of the globe. The entire population of North Korea have been raised and actually believe that when their country fails, that is when, not if, that the entire globe will also be failing as everywhere is just like North Korea. The reality is except for Venezuela of late, the rest of the globe is doing much better than North Korea which is an even more dysfunctional state than Hamastan in Gaza, the PA in Judea and Samaria and possible on par, without the warfare, with Syria. The people are close to starving as a rule of life, there is little relief in sight but they honestly believe that should North Korea fail by war, starvation or plague, then the entirety of the globe must fail with them. This is how they are educated from infancy through into the military if they are fortunate as the military at least can afford food and shelter. Kim Jong Un lives like a king and his top people, military commanders live well, and he is only shown small areas of the capital of Pyongyang where his leadership live in relative comfort with ample housing. The distressing poverty of the country is kept from his eyes as should he realize the mismanagement, nobody can predict how many and whom he would have executed as responsible. As he has had an uncle executed for speaking sharply to him, executed a general for treason with little evidence and even less of a trial and his half brother assassinated sending a hit squad to another nation to murder him, Kim Jong Un has earned his credentials as unstable. How to make such a person hold to a treaty or anything resembling sanity is the question. Strangling him through embargoes may be all it would take for him to initiate nuclear Armageddon.
As if Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, Hamas, the PA, Islamic State and Bashir al-Assad was not enough facing President Trump plus a roguish President Putin with his exploits, there is one last madman backed by a regime of madmen, Iran. Their Supreme Leader, the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei (Persian: سید علی حسینی خامنهای) believes that he speaks with and for Allah and Muhammad here on earth. He is to be the leader to prepare all Islam for the coming of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam who has been in hiding for near on nine-hundred years. His return is to be some mythically magical event and a highway has been built from the perceived well in Qom to the center of the capital of Iran, Yehran, where he will be welcomed by the Supreme Leader, the Assembly of Experts and others from the religious heirarchy in Iran. Iran had two independent militaries with seperate lines of command and sets of orders. The Iranian military is a normative military which is tasked with protection of the nation from all external enemies. The IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) is responsible for activities outside the nation and national security within the nations including the religious police. They are responsible for providing troops and weaponry for the efforts in Syria, for Hezballah in Lebanon, occasionally for arming, training and providing rocket technology to Hamas in Gaza, running and securing the training camps in the Tri-Border region in South America. The Tri-Border Region (see map and picture below) is an area on the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil and an area where all three national police and militaries refuse to interfere. It was from these camps that the terror squads, which carried out the bombings on Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires, were carried out. This has been an IRGC and Hezballah training paradise since the mid 1970’s and has faced little to no interference largely because it is almost as well armed as any force that might be sent to face them in the surrounding jungles. This is the reach available to the IRGC who are in close operational interconnectivity with Hezballah as both serve Iran as foreign contingents. The advantage of the IRGC working with Hezballah is that through such affiliation they provide Iran with sufficient separation to have plausible deniability. Never suspect that Iran does not know how to play political games, remember that it was the Persians who invented the game of chess.
Tri_Border Region of South America Terror training haven and Iranian proxy state in the Americas and Base of operations for the 17 March 1992 Israeli Embassy Bombing murdering 29 injuring 242 and the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) 18 July 1994 bombing murdered 85 injured over 800 and now we must add the murdered Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman to AMIA fatalities
Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as he is oft referred in the international media, knows well the art of warfare by other means. He appears to be versed in Sun Tzu and the other writers on warfare. He uses words for weapons and assassins when required to strike where he desires. His rule is absolute and as such he has grown accustom to things as he prefers to see them and his subordinates dare not fall short in their assigned tasks. The power structure in Iran follows a duality just as does the military. The Iranians have two main targets, the United States and the Zionist Entity, as they refer to Israel. Together these two make up the Great Satan, United States, and the Little Satan, Israel. Israel is privileged in this world as unlike the United States that only need worry about the Iranian Army and the IRGC military, Israel gets to have an addition to these two adversaries, the al-Quds force, named for the Arab name for Jerusalem. The al-Quds force is responsible directly for the reconquest of Jerusalem primarily and secondarily for the complete destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews, that is all Jews. The al-Quds force is a special group of squads who are selected from the Special Forces groups within the IRGC, which is considered the Special Forces taken from within the military ranks rated on their military prowess and their religious purity. The entirety of the IRGC is religious warriors modeled on the Persian Immortals from history and the al-Quds would then be the Hashshashins, a select group willing to fight to the death without a second thought. Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a person not used to being denied that which he desires. Still, he commands the respect that one will speak only truthfully when answering his questions. This does not mean you will be well received or even survive the telling, but if you are caught in a lie, things will go even worse for you. Torture is a tool in Iran as it is in the PA, Hamastan and North Korea as well as more of the world than most would like to believe. Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei truly believes that his position will welcome the coming of the final days and be at the center of the world once it has been transformed. He realizes he might not be alive to see this day but that whoever fills the role of Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah must be prepared to take on this mantle at any moment. They will be the leader of the conquering forces, which will subdue the world and bring everybody to Islam as they believe. They honestly believe that the Shiites, who are approximately ten percent of Muslims, will win out as the preferred of Allah instead of being murdered as Apostates under a world ruled by Sunni Islam.
These are simply the initial individuals who often define the world as they wish it to be and then act from there. The one thing all these leaders and their followers have in common is that they believe they are the rightful and powerful on the world’s stage, and that the United States can be easily defeated and they know exactly how to proceed to do so. They all believe their country to be one of the major forces in the world or a member of what will be the ruling force in the end when everything is settled. They all believe that the world can be brought under the rule of a single individual and that they are the one. (This is where normally we would have to say, “Zathros know, you are not the one, Zathros can tell.” One need remember the show Babylon V to understand or recognize this.) The Western World has reached the decision that the world cannot be conquered and placed under a single leader. They also believe that this is intuitively obvious and that everyone can see that world conquest is a pipe dream that cannot be accomplished. All this means is that they will never rule the world but it does not mean that there are no longer people out in the world willing to try. One might remember in the early days of the Islamic State when, as ISIS, their forces of terrorists were taking uncontested ground and destroying all they could find including irreplaceable artifacts and treasures and their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declaring himself Caliph and announcing how the ISIS fighters (terror forces) were going to conquer the world for Allah and convert or murder all unbelievers and simply murder all apostates. Their initial run was impressive until the clash with the Kurds and was bloodied. There went their invincibility, from there the Iraqis contained them, and they stalled out completely. The point was that al-Baghdadi with a few thousand fighters, many not well trained or untrained, still believed that ruling the world was possible. Turkey’s President Erdogan sees himself as the Caliph ruling over the same areas as once made up the Ottoman Empire, which started as a single tribe in Turkey that set out to conquer the world. President Erdogan sees himself as the one to reestablish the Turkish-Ottoman Empire with himself as the central Caliph. It is time that the Europeans woke up and smelled the threats at their doorsteps and their own self-made weakness and how dangerously unprepared they have become for their own defense. They have at most a decade before such might becomes necessary and already it appears that Germany, if they remain with Merkel and France after electing Macron, have simply surrendered to their conquerors. President Trump needs to awaken a sleeping world to the onrushing dangers before the onrushing dangers reach their shores and announce themselves formally. Thus far, the violence has been sporadic and disorganized. That will not remain the case and the time is drawing nigh with not a lot of time to turn Europe around and prepared to fight to save their way of life and their liberated lifestyles. President Trump may have been elected at a crucial time but it will be the two Presidents that follow Trump who will really be inheriting the whirlwind. Inbetween, we will see broken promises strewn as windblown autumn leaves.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 