It seems their aim is to establish a 32km deep buffer zone inside Syria across the extent of the area called Rojava, the YPG/PKK’s coveted “statelet”, and in addition splitting it in two in the north-south direction alongside the Euphrates.

What will this lead to?”

Too early. Too many players. Too complex. Plus, not everyone of the players is making plain what their aims are (like Pres. Trump, for instance, to say nothing of Putin, Assad, and the Mullahs.)

So no one knows.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/14/abc-news-busted-creating-fake-news-propaganda-surrounding-syrian-conflict/

Posted on October 14, 2019 by sundance
Last night and again this morning ABC News aired shocking footage supposedly from the frontline battle between Syrian Kurds and the invading Turkish troops. The report and footage was described in shock-filled breathless language, intended to provoke the audience. ABC News anchor Tom Llamas aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians.

However, there is a very big problem. The footage is 100% fake…. it never happened.

The footage ABC News used in their broadcast comes from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
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Let’s be clear about this. This is ABC international News using footage from a Kentucky gun exhibition and passing it off as attack footage in Syria. That is not a mistake.

This production had to pass through several layers of ABC News editorial review prior to broadcast. This is not a simple mistake of the wrong footage…. ABC News was caught purposefully creating “Fake News”.

Does anyone have a link to the original gun range video so we can see what was doctored?
And who called them on it to start with?

Why do they keep thinking no one will notice the fakes?

I know they count on their willing dupes (I don’t think that’s too strong a word anymore) who will see the original report and never hear about the take-down, but it’s getting hard to keep up the pretense, with anyone paying attention, that they aren’t Fake News .

I don’t think Matt Taibbi would approve.

From Julie’s CTH link:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/14/trumps-syrian-maneuver-works-president-erdogan-asks-for-negotiations-with-kurds-insyria/

President Trump has played this out perfectly. By isolating Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and effectively leaving him naked to an alliance of his enemies, Erdogan is now urgently asking for the U.S. to mediate peace negotiations with Kurdish forces.

This request happens immediately after President Trump signed an executive order [See Here] triggering the sanction authority of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Erdogan called the White House requesting an urgent phone call with President Trump.

After President Trump talked to Kurdish General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the commander of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, President Trump then discussed the options available to President Erdogan. As a result of that conversation, Erdogan requested the U.S. mediate negotiations. Vice-President Mike Pence announces he will be traveling to the region with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien to lead that effort.

If Trump did not have something like this already in mind when he pulled our “trip wire” forces out of the line of fire, he sure got things going awfully quick with his “chaotic and dysfunctional” administration and “shoot-from-the-hip” style.

President’s don’t have EOs like that just sitting around in a drawer on the off chance they might be useful someday.
I’m quite sure it took as long to draft as did the Whistlegate Magnum Opus.

As long as we are living in the slippery-slope universe Matt Taibbi so clearly described, I would like someone to leak the transcripts of that call, just to see the list of options!

https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/10/15/syria-trump-sends-delegation-to-negotiate-abc-gives-us-turkish-attack-filmed-in-kentuck

t’s been a rough week for analysis, with most of the commentary in knee-jerk mode. This isn’t alleviated at all by so much of the “straight news” coverage being in “Pallywood and Exaggeration: The Movie” mode. What can you do. Here we are.

I pause only to note that if you pointed out, a week ago, the likelihood that some of the Kurds would want to ensure survival by looking for an accord with Russia and Assad, your perspective is being vindicated.

Other than that, there’s little real-world vindication for all the various dire or sunny predictions. Unless he has a death wish, Erdogan is basically stopped now. See paragraph two, above. Pushback with Russia behind it means Erdogan’s forces start taking casualties if he keeps pushing further in a wholly discretionary campaign. This is a fight he doesn’t, strictly speaking, have to be waging. He’s not fighting for Turkey’s survival; he’s fighting to drive a stake in Syria, in part so that Syria won’t end up being weaponized against him.

If Syria is to be weaponized – and if Erdogan has anything to say about it, Syria will be, somewhere in a hazy future – it will be on Neo-Ottoman terms, not Russia’s or Iran’s. That’s Erdogan’s position. But weaponizations can be delayed until timing is propitious. Pick a century since 1453, and Ottoman Turkey, Russia, and Persia have been out in force shooting at each other, trying to get that straightened out. Syria and Iraq have hosted their battles for quite a long time.
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As the week swings into gear, just a couple of observations. First, Trump is sending a “high-level” negotiating team to Turkey to, we are told, negotiate a ceasefire. A couple of hours before that, sanctions and punitive bilateral measures against Turkey were announced, including a 50% tariff increase and a halt to trade deal negotiations.

Let us all observe a solemn two-minute hate for the annoyance of this situation not fitting any of our preconceptions. I’m the first to say it doesn’t fit mine. That also puts me first in line to say that I can’t predict how it’s going to go.

What Trump has done here is somehow get to a situation he can at least try to negotiate on the terms he is familiar with. Instead of having the military reality on the ground dictate his relative negotiating strength, he has removed that as a constraint on him. Ten days ago, there were a few dozen American soldiers in a position of exceptional vulnerability on the Syrian border. Now there aren’t. Moreover, Russia, Assad, and the Syrian Kurds are suddenly in league against Turkey instead of jockeying against each other, and the hand of Iran in what’s going on is at the moment a secondary and compromised one at best.

I doubt the economic pressure Trump proposes to bring on Turkey would be decisive, if it were applied by itself. But the other actors in the drama – Russia and Assad, now partnering with Kurds – are setting up a juncture at which the sanctions could potentially make the outcome of negotiations more fruitful. All the parties want something out of a deal, and there’s still no nation other than the United States that could hope to maneuver everyone into getting something. It has the makings of a Trump situation being set on a table, with place cards.

I leave it to readers to decide if Trump cleverly foresaw all this. I have no strong argument either way. As to what outcome it will produce, all we can do is wait and see.
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If we continue to accept the “mainstream” media as a good-faith actor, we condemn ourselves to believing misrepresentations, absurd exaggerations, and endlessly repeated narrative points, rather than simple facts. I’ve never seen such an unseemly caterwauling as the one set up over the situation in Syria. I don’t even agree with what Trump did, and certainly not with the way he did it, and yet it’s crystal clear that the media have been trying to sell us a bill of goods about Trump’s move and the consequences ever since.

The TDS-addled seem content to duel endlessly over biased media coverage. But the biased media coverage puts severe limits on the quality of public dialogue the president and his top officials can count on. The bias has become decisively toxic, in fact, to the point that it does no good for any of us to even talk to each other. Nor do we learn facts from perusing the media’s offerings.

Instead, we get YouTube video footage from a gun range in Kentucky, edited so the American spectators aren’t visible, being presented by ABC as video of “Slaughter in Syria.” There’s no living that down. They had to go twice around the barn and stop for drinks along the way to come up with that one; you don’t just accidentally pull a video off YouTube, edit out the Yankee audience, and then use it to illustrate combat in Syria.

“Perhaps Harry just posts the same comments on many blogs, and if the shoe doesn’t fit, no biggee to him.”

That’s why I have often wondered, and mentioned it here at your blog, if he’s just another paid troll. I do go back and forth, leaning one way then another. He’s not quite so obvious as manju, if a troll he is.

Perhaps Harry just posts the same comments on many blogs, and if the shoe doesn’t fit, no biggee to him.

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2019/10/for-whom-bell-tolls.html

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2019/10/permanent-coup.html

Nope, no blind loyalty to the king on this blog.

Some are loyal, some are more independent.

Huxley and Ymar tend to be more of the outliers. Huxley is an outlier on the lefter side of things. While I am on the Right. On the right pf parker, Neo, everybody else, and Trum included. I am to the right… of the Alt Right even. I am so far right in fact, that Trum supporters sometimes think I am a Leftist opposed to Trum.

We are the Right hand path: thus sayrth the Divine Counsel of Elohim, under the Most High, Almighty.

Trump haters like Harry will never agree with anything he does. There is no way Pelosi would cooperate with Trump. There are major domestic bills in the House that Democrats will not vote on because “We can’t gibve Triump a victory.”

“One thing we don’t need is foreign policy according to shtick.”

Unless it’s a big shtick!

I kid, I kid!

You can call it a shtick all you want Art. Its a clever turn of phrase, and I’m always a fan of such things. But I don’t mean it to be humorous hyperbole or clever or attention grabbing. I save that crap for the likes of Harry and Artfldgr.

It is my sincere belief based on our largely failed history of interventionism in the late 20th and 21st centuries. I have evolved on this over the years quite a bit. Ten years ago, I would have been all in on staying to help the Kurds.
The Cold War is over. A Cold Civil War is cooking along right at home and looks to go hot anytime.

We can’t afford any more foreign entanglements right now, no matter how we rationalize the need to be there and help out.

I should add, here in the ‘edit’ function, I am not specifically mentioning the US Navy and the protection of our ships and trade on the seas. I should have been more specific from the get-go.