brooklyn13, Who puts words into other people's mouths? Your
"p.s., since you're a Turkey-phile (I have a Turkish brother in law, so I'm not necessarily inherently biased against it)"
is exactly that jerk trick. And i wonder about your need to say it. Might indicate some insecurity in you about your position.
US to reduce military presence in Syria, keeping only one base operational [...] President Trump dropped a stunner during his rambling press conference, on Sunday, after announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, in a U.S. raid. In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.” The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said. The goal would be to “spread out the wealth.”
The President was wrong on so many counts. Seizing the oil, after twice ordering all U.S. troops out of Syria, violates a basic international treaty on war. It may amount to pillaging—even piracy, according to legal experts and former senior military commanders. “Bring in US oil companies to modernize the field. WHAT ARE WE BECOMING.... PIRATES?” General Barry McCaffrey (Ret.), who commanded a mechanized Army division in Iraq during the Gulf War, tweeted.
Trump’s new policy may also violate the military authorization from Congress which allowed the United States to enter Syria. It certainly violates Syrian sovereignty. “If ISIS is defeated we lack Congressional authority to stay,” McCaffrey tweeted. “The oil belongs to Syria.”
Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could expropriate a portion of Syria’s oil “sounds like the international crime of pillage,” Ryan Goodman, a former special legal counsel at the Department of Defense who is now at the New York University School of Law, said. Any such move is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by the precedents set by the United Nations war-crimes tribunals that the U.S. helped establish in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. “U.S. military commanders who engaged in pillaging Syria’s oil would risk criminal liability under the U.S. War Crimes Act,” Goodman said. The international rules of war, he added, were designed “to deter nations from engaging in predatory wars to seize other countries’ natural resources.”
Most of all, the new policy—which may keep some five hundred American troops in Syria—wasn’t well thought out, U.S. officials and Middle East experts told me. “It was seat-of-the-pants type shit,” a U.S. official said. Another told me, “To say the oil stuff isn’t thought through is an understatement. The N.S.C. is scrambling to build policy around the President’s tweets.” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, described it as “cockamamie.” [...] The United States, however, cannot legally seize Syria’s oil or benefit from it, a State Department official told me. Any military action to protect the oil fields of another country—without its consent—is dubious. “The United States is on even weaker legal ground since President Trump has said that there is no reason for the U.S. to be fighting ISIS to protect the U.S. homeland,” Goodman told me. “So the basis for a claim that this military operation is in self-defense against a terrorist group posing a threat to the United States has gotten a whole lot weaker.”
Legally, the United States has pushed the envelope since 2014 by relying on the Authorization for Use of Military Force originally passed by Congress, in 2001, to justify military action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. Critics have long argued that both the Obama and Trump Administrations needed a new A.U.M.F. for campaigns in Iraq and Syria. Yet another legal quagmire is the issue of U.S. sanctions on any dealings in Syria oil. Repairing Syria’s damaged oil fields or improving their extraction capacity would require billions of dollars and a decades-long investment. But any American or foreign company that offers to engage in Syria could face sanctions, unless the U.S. lifts restrictions on Syria. “Who’s going to lay billions to rehab the S.D.F. oil industry?” a U.S. official asked. A further complication is that other international oil companies, including Shell and the Chinese National Petroleum Company, held rights to the fields before the civil war—and could challenge any U.S. claim to the fields.
The Administration may have unspoken ancillary goals in its decision to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Having physical control over the oil fields could give the U.S.—and its allies—leverage down the road with the Syrian regime and its allies Russia and Iran, Landis said. “It would keep Russia weak and Iran weak in the Middle East, as their client state wouldn’t be able to rebuild—and therefore they would not be able to ‘win.’ ” On Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry charged that “what Washington is doing now, the seizure and control of oil fields in eastern Syria under its armed control, is, quite simply, international state banditry.” Trump’s original decision to withdraw U.S. troops had weakened its leverage and forced the S.D.F. to turn to Damascus for help. With Graham’s nudge, Trump may be trying to regain the U.S. position—as much over Russia and Iran as over Syria.
Your Israel gets more attention here because it's more important to your country than the injustice to indigenous of other countries does. And people are more emotionally involved if Israel's problems than they are of difficulties of indigenous in other countries.
That would be obvious to you if you weren't so biased about Israel.
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