Quote Originally Posted by Wales-Bales View Post
Wait, we were told the FSA were the good guys, trained and armed by the West to oppose Assad, and now they are the bad guys and it's all Trump's fault? You need to give some more details here ...
You dodge a straight question about Trump's responsibility for this political and humanitarian disaster - so far over 100 dead (including executions of prisoners), over 150,000 people fled from their homes, 750 ISIS affiliates escape from detention.... abandoned Kurds appealing to Assad for help.... all the result of Turkish air and ground attacks and the actions of their local clients and proxies.... and I need to give 'more details'?

Are you trying to claim that Trump had a reasonable expectation that the Turks and the FSA would occupy swathes of northern Syria under Kurdish control and would not commit atrocities? That ISIS prisoners would be kept secure? Turkey has been armed and trained by other NATO powers for almost 70 years but has not hidden its agenda in regard to the Kurds and Syria. The FSA (who have morphed all over the place in the past 8 years from anti-Assad military defectors through to Turkish client jihadists) are just an adjunct to the Turks.

Trump set this off through his deal with Erdogan when he had slipped his minders. He has never had the interest or the capacity or the attention span to understand complex geopolitical issues, and in this case he sold out the Kurds and threw a hand grenade into the Middle East for what the thought would be glowing domestic headlines (to distract from impeachment talk). He was wrong on that too.

It seems your best defence of him and answer to 'Why blame Trump?' is that he was too stupid to know better ('we were told the FSA were the good guys'....). He is to blame for this political chaos and humanitarian tragedy. Own it!