FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

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Is the Pentagon Planning To Sabotage Trump’s Syria Withdrawal?

Dec. 29, 2018 (EIRNS )—The potential that the permanent warfare crowd, through its assets within the Pentagon, might try to sabotage President Donald Trump’s intention that the U.S. military be withdrawn from Syria cannot be discounted. Reuters reported that planners at the Pentagon are proposing that the Kurdish YPG militia be allowed to keep the heavy weapons America has supplied it with, though Reuters’ sources stress that planning is still at an early stage and nothing has been decided.

If true, such a step would throw a monkey wrench in the arrangements that Trump is trying to make with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on U.S. withdrawal. It would also represent a backdown from U.S. promises made earlier to the Turks to retrieve the weapons. The idea that the U.S. could retrieve those weapons that it no longer controls is a dubious one, anyway, and there are legitimate questions about whether or not Turkish troops could really operate against the last ISIS holdouts in the Middle Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border, hundreds of kilometers from the Turkish border.

But the key to the alleged Pentagon proposal is this: The recommendation “is a rejection of Trump’s policy to withdraw from Syria,” a person familiar with the discussions told Reuters. So, in effect, it is an attempt at sabotage.