Even by rather robust Israeli standards, the last few weeks have been unusually action packed.
Hezbollah tunnels burrowing into Israel from Lebanon were exposed, and the United Nations Security Council reacted to this egregious breach of international law and Resolution 1701 with a big fat yawn. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. is withdrawing the thin but highly effective American troop presence from Syria. And Defense Secretary Mattis, one of the very few widely-respected senior officials in this administration, is on his way out the door.
Each of the inventoried occurrences above is explosive in terms of its potential to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. Combined and in a short period of time, they are positively thermonuclear.
Trump has just paved the road from Tehran to the Mediterranean in gold for Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps tanks and troops. His uninformed, incomprehensible declaration that ISIS is defeated, hence vitiating any real need for an American military presence in the region, is cataclysmically negligent.
Much more important than the real kinetic power of the U.S. forces deployed in Syria is the message they send: America is barely present, but we are not “out cold” at the switch. We are watching and waiting and, if necessary, we will use our might.
The extreme power vacuum that will follow an American withdrawal has Erdogan smacking his lips. Within hours of Trump’s Christmas gift, Ankara’s officials promised that Kurdish militants would “be buried in ditches” by Turkey.
Kurdish valor in keeping ISIS expansion at bay is dangerously overlooked in the West. That the Kurds will be attacked and massacred by Erdogan’s forces is pretty much a foregone conclusion. That Trump has played so pathetically into the plans of Erdogan is baffling, even for Trump.
A key supporter of the Islamist Muslim brotherhood—and, for strategic reasons, ISIS—Erdogan can be depended upon to act boldly. Also, as a NATO member, Turkey will almost certainly not be held responsible for its continued outrageous conduct.
The potential combustion in the region arising from clashing regimes—Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and with a significant Russian presence and influence—could well ignite a disastrous regional conflict with the potential to spread far beyond.
All these surreal goings-on clearly were the last straw for Defense Secretary Mattis. The most stolid of soldiers, Mattis simply could not abide such an extreme dereliction of duty on the part of the Commander-in-Chief, who clearly regards the few qualified subordinates left in his orbit as little more than tree ornaments.