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Trump Still Wants to Keep Syria’s "Beautiful Babies" Out of the US

Mother Jones

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The graphic images of the youngest victims of the recent sarin attack on Khan Sheikoun, Syria, apparently prompted President Donald Trump to have a change of heart about the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big impact,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday. “My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.” In a statement last night, after he gave orders to strike the Syrian air base from which the chemical weapon attack originated, Trump said, “Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.”

Yet the Trump who fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria out of professed humanitarian concerns is the same one who not so long ago insisted he could look Syrian children “in the face and say, ‘You can’t come here.'” A week into his presidency, he signed an executive order that would indefinitely ban Syrians, even beautiful babies, from seeking refuge in the United States.

The irony of Trump’s sudden flare-up of compassion is not lost on the human rights advocates who have been pushing back against Trump’s attempt to shut out Syrians. “This would be a great opportunity for the president to reconsider his previous statements and to think about the fact that these refugees are fleeing precisely the type of violence we are seeing this week in Syria,” says Jennifer Sime, a senior vice president of the International Rescue Committee‘s United States programs. Trump’s newfound humanitarian concerns, Sime says, provides an opportunity “to reconsider the travel ban, to reconsider the cap on the total number of refugees who can enter this country, to reconsider the suspension on refugee resettlement in the United States, and to make our country again a welcoming country for refugees.”

A statement from the International Refugee Assistance Project following the missile strikes took a similar tone. “Rather than pay lip service to the plight of innocent Syrian children, President Trump should provide actual solutions for the children who have been languishing in refugee camps for years,” it reads. “Many refugee children have been left in life or death situations following the President’s executive order, which suspends and severely curtails the U.S. resettlement program.”

Trump has repeatedly called for the “extreme vetting” of refugees and has suggested that some, including a Syrian family with young children, might be ISIS sleepers. Kirk W. Johnson, a former United States Agency for International Development worker who has led an effort to resettle Iraqis in the United States, told Mother Jones in January that Trump’s refugee ban “reads as though 9/11 happened yesterday, and that 9/11 was carried out by refugees, which it wasn’t, and it creates a series of policy prescriptions to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, as if the stringent measures that have been put in place over the past 15 years to screen refugees don’t exist.”

After the 2013 attack in eastern Ghouta, in which the Syrian government killed more than 1,000 people with chemical weapons, Trump penned dozens of tweets imploring President Barack Obama to do nothing. “President Obama, do not attack Syria. There is no upside and tremendous downside,” read one. “Save your ‘powder’ for another (and more important) day!” Despite the fact that the Assad government has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties in the Syrian civil war, Trump previously excused its brutality by arguing that while it was bad, it was also “killing ISIS.”

If Trump’s strike on Syria was intended to curtail Assad’s ability to launch more attacks on civilians, it does not seem to have worked. An American official told ABC News that 20 Syrian aircraft were destroyed in Thursday’s strike on the Shaayrat airbase, but the runway was left untouched. Syrian warplanes have already resumed using the base to launch air strikes on rebel-held areas.

More than six years since the conflict in Syria began, nearly a half million people are dead, 6.3 million are displaced inside the country, and 4.8 million refugees have sought safety in neighboring countries. “These people didn’t flee because they wanted a change in scenery,” says Sime. “They fled because of the extreme violence, and the United States, along with other countries in the international community, should open their doors to provide refuge to these people who have been through these terrible circumstances.”

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Trump Still Wants to Keep Syria’s "Beautiful Babies" Out of the US

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This Week’s Chemical Attack in Syria is Just the Latest "Red Line"

Mother Jones

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On July 23, 2012, a former spokesman for the Syrian foreign ministry acknowledged for the first time that his government had stockpiles of chemical weapons, but asserted that they would “never, never be used against the Syrian people or civilians during this crisis, under any circumstances.” A little more than a year later, approximately 1,400 people on the outskirts of Damascus were killed in a chemical attack carried out by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It was the largest chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in Halabja, Iraq, 25 years earlier. Now, as the Syrian civil war enters its sixth year, chemical weapon attacks on civilians continue apace.

Yesterday, disturbing photos and videos (warning: they’re graphic) started coming out of the town of Khan Sheikoun in rebel-held Idlib Province: children in spasms, foaming at their mouths, gasping for breath, and lying motionless as parents cry over them and rescue teams attempt to wash chemical agents from their bodies. According to the Syrian American Medical Society and various monitoring groups, barrel bombs were dropped on civilian areas, reportedly killing at least 74 people, including at least 11 children, and injuring hundreds more. The bombs contained toxic chemical agents, likely including sarin—a liquid nerve agent that often causes death by asphyxia.

After the attack, the White House pinned the blame on the Obama administration’s “weakness and irresolution.” This morning, President Donald Trump, who previously excused Assad’s crimes by highlighting that his regime was also fighting ISIS, said that the attack “crosses many lines, beyond a red line, many many lines,” possibly signaling a change in attitude toward Syria and Assad. (Just days before the attack, Nikki Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, stated that the administration does not consider removing Assad from power a priority, echoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who said last week that Assad’s future “will be decided by the Syrian people.”)

Yesterday’s attack was the latest in a long string of chemical attacks against Syrian civilians. Here’s a brief timeline of how we got here.

August 20, 2012

President Barack Obama says that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a “red line” and would “change my calculus” for a military response in Syria.

December 23, 2012

The first allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria are reported. Seven people in Homs are allegedly killed by “poisonous gas” used by the Assad regime. Later, a leaked State Department cable stated that there was credible evidence that the government used a chemical weapon known as Agent 15 in the attack.

March 12, 2013

After France and the United Kingdom send letters urging an investigation into three alleged uses of chemical weapons in Syria, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announces that the UN would investigate. Within a month, opposition activists and observers allege that the Assad regime has carried out two more chemical weapons attacks. Ban states that Syria has impeded in the investigations.

August 21, 2013

More than 1,000 people are killed in a large chemical weapon attack on the outskirts of Damascus. A UN investigation concludes that ground-to-ground rockets delivered the nerve agent sarin, and the evidence suggests the government was behind the assault. The United States later issues a report blaming the Syrian government.

August 31, 2013

President Obama says he will seek congressional authorization for the use of force against Syria: “I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.” Congress never votes on it, and the measure is shelved after then-Secretary of State John Kerry remarks that Assad can avoid military strikes if he turns over his chemical weapons stockpile.

September 27, 2013

The United Nations Security Council orders the Syrian government to destroy all of its chemical weapons stockpiles by 2014, threatening to authorize the use of force if it doesn’t comply.

June 23, 2014

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announces that all remaining chemical weapons have been shipped out of Syria for disposal. Yet it is widely suspected that not all of Syria’s chemical weapons were removed.

September 10, 2014

A OPCW fact-finding mission concludes that chlorine gas is being used as a weapon in Syria. Chlorine, a choking agent which fills the lungs with liquid, was not among the chemicals that had to be destroyed under the UN agreement. But it is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention.

August 7, 2015

The UN Security Council authorizes OPCW and UN investigators to determine who was behind chlorine gas attacks on civilians in rebel-held areas.

August 10, 2016

For the third time in two weeks, chlorine gas is reportedly used against civilians in northern Syria, killing at least 4 people and wounding 60 more. Experts warn that the abundance of chemical weapons attacks may normalize war crimes.

August 24, 2016

The OPCW-UN joint investigation report concludes that the Syrian government was responsible for deploying chlorine gas on two separate occasions on civilian areas in rebel-held northern Idlib Province.

April 4, 2017

More than 70 people, including many children, are killed in a suspected sarin attack in Idlib. The Syrian government is believed to be behind the attack. A day after the attack, Khan Sheikoun’s main medical clinic was directly hit by an airstrike.

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This Week’s Chemical Attack in Syria is Just the Latest "Red Line"

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Mike Pence Insists He and Trump Totally Agree on Syria

Mother Jones

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On Sunday night, Donald Trump made headlines by saying he disagreed with Mike Pence on Syria. By Monday morning, the Trump campaign was desperately insisting there was no disagreement at all.

At last week’s vice presidential debate, Pence stunned viewers by saying that Russia is helping the Syrian government kill civilians in Aleppo—and that the United States should be ready to use force against the Syrian regime. It was a sharp turn away from Trump’s previous comments, in which the real estate mogul has praised Syria and Russia for allegedly attacking ISIS.

At Sunday’s presidential debate, it was Trump’s turn to contradict Pence. “He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree. I disagree,” Trump replied icily when asked about Pence’s comments. “I think you have to knock out ISIS.”

The contrast was obvious, but now Pence and Trump are pretending it never happened.

Pence appeared on all the major cable news networks Monday morning and claimed that ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who co-moderated Sunday’s debate, had “mischaracterized” his position on Syria. Pence said last week that “if Russia chooses to be involved…in this barbaric attack on civilians in Aleppo, the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime to prevent them from this humanitarian crisis that is taking place in Aleppo.” On Monday, he claimed his statement had been narrowly focused on Aleppo and that Raddatz had wrongly implied he wanted take on Syria and Russia in general. “The way Martha presented that question last night was to suggest that Russian provocation broadly and that of the Assad regime should be met with military force,” he said on MSNBC.

In fact, during Sunday’s debate, Raddatz asked both Clinton and Trump specifically about the crisis in Aleppo. “If you were president, what would you do about Syria and the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo?” Raddatz asked Trump. Immediately after saying that, Raddatz described Pence’s comments nearly verbatim: “And I want to remind you what your running mate said. He said provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength and that if Russia continues to be involved in airstrikes along with the Syrian government forces of Assad, the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike the military targets of the Assad regime.”

Trump then said twice that he and Pence disagreed. Trump went on to falsely suggest that Aleppo “basically has fallen.” He also praised the Syrian government’s alleged actions against ISIS. “Right now, Syria is fighting ISIS,” he said. That claim is also false: The Syrian government and its allies, including Russia, have overwhelmingly attacked rebel groups and civilians rather than ISIS. In fact, the Syrian regime abetted the rise of ISIS and has even struck oil deals with the terrorist group.

Pence isn’t the only member of the Trump campaign struggling to answer questions about the GOP candidate’s disagreement on Aleppo. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a national security adviser to the Trump campaign, was asked on CNN Monday what the campaign’s policy on Syria actually is. Woolsey refused to even answer the question.

“But, wait, Mr. Director,” said Kate Bolduan, a CNN anchor who was visibly baffled by Woolsey’s attempts to dodge the issue. “You’re the former CIA director. You’re a national security adviser to the Donald Trump campaign. When it comes to a key policy position that you would assume would be a unified position of the campaign, I would also assume you would know what it is and be able to voice it.”

“I’m not telling you one way or the other,” Woolsey replied. “The candidates are the ones who are going to communicate the policy decisions to the public, not me.”

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Mike Pence Insists He and Trump Totally Agree on Syria

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Gary Johnson Thinks Barack Obama and Bashar Assad Are Morally About the Same

Mother Jones

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Gary Johnson thinks our foreign policy should be less interventionist. That’s fair enough. I agree with him. But this is ridiculous:

Attacking Hillary Clinton over what he criticized as her overly interventionist instincts, Mr. Johnson pointed to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians killed by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, as well as civilian deaths caused by the American-backed coalition, and said Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, bore at least partial responsibility…He charged that Mrs. Clinton “bears responsibility for what’s happened, shared responsibility for what’s happened in Syria. I would not have put us in that situation from the get-go.”

This is nuts. Hillary Clinton played no role in starting the civil war in Syria, and 400,000 people have died there even though Barack Obama chose not to adopt her policy preferences. Our responsibility for what’s happened in Syria—whether you think it’s large or small—belongs to Obama, not Clinton. Then there’s this:

Johnson drew a parallel on Wednesday between the Syrian government’s targeting of noncombatants in that nation’s civil war and the accidental bombing of civilians by United States-backed forces…When pressed four times on whether he saw a moral equivalence between deaths caused by the United States, directly or indirectly, and mass killings of civilians by Mr. Assad and his allies, Mr. Johnson made clear that he did.

Words fail. Yes, the United States is far from perfect. Yes, we sometimes kill innocent civilians. Yes, we often do too little to make sure civilians are safe. All of this is worth protest until we get better.

But we do try to spare civilians. In fact, our rules of engagement are famously restrictive. Bashar Assad, by contrast, deliberately targets civilians in huge numbers. Civilian or not, if you oppose Assad he wants you dead.

Does Johnson really see no difference there? That wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman ethics class, let alone the real world. I’d like to see the United States rely less on a military approach to the Middle East, too, but I sure wouldn’t want our military in the hands of a guy who apparently sees no real moral difference between a butcher like Bashar Assad and decent but imperfect leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

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Gary Johnson Thinks Barack Obama and Bashar Assad Are Morally About the Same

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

Mother Jones

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Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has seemed content to cede leadership in Syria to Russia. But at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made a stunning about-face from his running mate’s position by saying the United States should stand up to Russia and even be willing to bomb the Syrian military to stop humanitarian disasters.

“If Russia…continues to be involved in this barbaric attack on civilians in Aleppo, the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime,” Pence said. It was part of a forceful case that the United States should stand up to Russia, which is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian aircraft have flown bombing missions in Syria for the past year, killing almost 10,000 people in that time. Russia has also stepped up its air campaign in recent days in the city of Aleppo, killing several hundred civilians and destroying hospitals in the process. “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength,” Pence said.

Pence’s comments were by far the most hawkish ones made so far by either the Trump or Clinton campaigns. During the Republican primaries, Trump proposed putting 30,000 troops in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS. But he has also said that the US has “bigger problems than Assad” and has repeatedly called for working with Russia on an anti-ISIS campaign. “If we could get Russia to help us get rid of ISIS—if we could actually be friendly with Russia—wouldn’t that be a good thing?” he said at a rally this summer. Confronting the Syrian army and its Russian allies could lead to direct combat between US and Russian aircraft or US jets being shot down by recently placed Russian missiles.

Clinton is also seen as a Syria hawk. She has criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Syria and supports the creation of a no-fly-zone to protect Syrian civilians. That hawkishness has drawn criticism from other Democrats, and Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last month that a no-fly-zone could drag the United States into war with Russia. Kaine reiterated Clinton’s desire to create a “humanitarian zone” during Tuesday’s debate, but he pointedly avoided saying how a Clinton administration would enforce such safe areas and did not mention Clinton’s support for a no-fly-zone.

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

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The Rise of Syria’s Brutal Chemical Attacks on Civilians

Mother Jones

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For the third time in just two weeks, chemical weapons were reportedly used against civilians in northern Syria. The United Nations is investigating the most recent case, which came Wednesday when barrel bombs thought to contain chlorine gas dropped on the rebel-controlled neighborhood of Zubdiya in eastern Aleppo, killing at least four people, including a mother and her two children, and wounding around 60 more.

Both the Assad regime and opposition forces have denied responsibility, but several witnesses and monitoring groups have said that helicopters dropped explosive barrel bombs on the affected neighborhood. Opposition forces, it bears noting, do not have helicopters.

Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy for Syria, told reporters yesterday that there is “a lot of evidence” that the attack took place, and if confirmed, would amount to a war crime. Images from the alleged attack, showing men and young children being fitted with oxygen masks, circulated widely on social media.

A doctor in Aleppo told Amnesty International that the victims “were all suffering from the same symptoms, mainly coughing and shortness of breath. I could easily smell chlorine on people’s clothes.” And Hamza Khatib, the manager of Aleppo’s Al Quds hospital, told Reuters on Wednesday that he was preserving fragments from the bombs and pieces of clothing to submit as evidence.

Chlorine gas is classified as a choking agent, and when inhaled, fills the lungs with liquid and can lead to asphyxiation. Using it in a weapon is banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Assad regime agreed to join after a 2013 UN investigation found that the nerve agent Sarin was used against civilians in Eastern Ghouta, killing 1,429 people, more than 400 of them children. The Syrian government subsequently turned over thousands of tons of chemical agents, but chlorine, because of its necessary and legal use in other areas, was not among the chemicals that had to be destroyed. Since then, there have been dozens of chlorine gas attacks that have not been countered with any repercussions from the international community.

This latest example comes shortly after rebel forces—led largely by hardline jihadi groups including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly known as the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra)—broke the Syrian government’s siege of Aleppo. The siege had cut off the city’s last supply lines, subjecting the 250,000 residents remaining in the rebel-held east to a lack of food, water, and medical supplies. Shortly after the siege broke, doctors warned of revenge air strikes, including a fear that the regime would resort to chemical weapons.

“Looking at the regime’s track record, they are ready to do anything to try to win back power,” Zaher Sahloul, a Syrian-American doctor who was recently in Aleppo, told the Telegraph. “We expect more bombing…They know that the world will not respond.”

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The Rise of Syria’s Brutal Chemical Attacks on Civilians

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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

Mother Jones

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Vladimir Putin announced today that he would begin withdrawing most of his forces from Syria. The move came as a complete surprise—sort of:

But U.S. officials also said that there had been evidence over the last several months that appeared to suggest that Moscow didn’t have plans for a long-term stay at the bases it used in Syria.

For instance, the Russian military didn’t appear to be rotating its equipment—tanks, aircraft and artillery—among bases throughout the country in a way that would be consistent with a military’s plans for a sustained presence. Equipment wasn’t being withdrawn for maintenance, for example, and Russian forces weren’t being rotated in and out, according to U.S. officials.

It’s unlikely that Putin ever really intended to stay for a long time in the first place. His goal wasn’t to help Assad win his civil war, but merely to prevent him from losing—just as there’s a reasonable case to be made that this is basically our goal too on the other side of the fight. It’s realpolitik at its nastiest and most cynical. And while the recently convened peace talks in Geneva provided Putin with a convenient pretext to get out, there was more to the timing than just that:

Russia is also facing deepening economic problems caused by the collapse in global oil prices, and the announcement may reflect Mr. Putin’s desire to declare victory and extricate his country from a costly military venture….There have been growing signs of differences between Russia and the Syrian government over the Geneva talks, which Moscow has pressed hard for, along with Washington. And for Mr. Assad, the prospect of Russia’s leaving him to fend for himself is sure to focus his mind on following its lead — advice that Russian officials have publicly offered him in recent days.

In the end, Putin managed to prop up Assad for a little while longer and reassert control over Russia’s only military base outside of its own territory. He also earned a place at the negotiating table and, perhaps, kept Iran’s influence over Syria at bay. In terms of pure military achievement, however, it was a modest affair. The maps below, from ISW, show what’s happened over the past six months. Syrian forces have made progress toward retaking Aleppo, which is significant but hardly tide turning. And that’s about it. What’s more, with Russian air support gone and Kurdish forces also advancing on Aleppo, it’s unclear if Assad can hold this ground in the long term. Stay tuned.

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Russia Decides It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out of Syria

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

Mother Jones

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Less than two weeks after peace talks over the Syrian civil war abruptly ended, the International Syria Support Group—a body of about 20 countries and international organizations involved in the war, including the European Union and the United Nations—announced on Thursday that they had finally brokered the terms of a halt to the brutal war that has killed nearly half a million people. The “cessation of hostilities” between regime forces and rebel groups, if successful, would be the first general stop to the fighting in almost four years. It seemed to meet some of the Syrian opposition’s demands for humanitarian relief and a halt to Russian airstrikes against civilians and rebels. But none of this means the agreement is likely to succeed.

The International Syria Support Group group pledged its members would push “all parties to allow immediate and sustained humanitarian access to reach all people in need” and “take immediate steps to secure the full support of all parties to the conflict for a cessation of hostilities.” Those parties, however—the Syrian government and mainstream rebel groups—weren’t actually part of the negotiations. Thursday’s agreement merely sets the terms for how a cessation of hostilities would look, leaving the United States, Russia, Iran, and others to convince their allies on the ground to abide by the pact.

How exactly they’ll convince the regime and the opposition to play along hasn’t yet been decided; the declaration gives the ISSG a week to figure out the details of the agreement and implement them. “We will only be able to see whether this was a breakthrough in a few days,” admitted German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier during the announcement, which took place at a security conference in Munich. Secretary of State John Kerry also tempered expectations for the cessation agreement. “The real test is clearly whether or not all the parties honor those commitments and implement them in reality,” he said. “What I’ve said again and again is we cannot guarantee success in the outcome.”

The fact that the opposition’s High Negotiations Council, a body made up of dissident Syrian politicians and rebel leaders, is not taking part in the discussions in Munich means the agreement may not get crucial buy-in from armed groups on the battlefield. Such support is critical for political negotiations or agreements to hold.

The Washington Post reported that while rebels may accept the “ceasefire”—the United States and Russia are divided on whether to use the term—out of exhaustion and lack of options, they are still highly skeptical. “We no longer trust words. There have been too many recently, matched with opposite action on the ground from the Russians,” Issam Rayess, a spokesman for the rebels’ Southern Front coalition that fights near Damascus, told the Post‘s Liz Sly. “Within a week everything will have been destroyed,” one civilian told her. And no matter what the rebels decide, the agreement will also have no effect on jihadi groups like ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s homegrown affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The High Negotiations Council has adopted a wait-and-see approach. When the Geneva talks stopped earlier this month, the HNC said it would not return to the table until Russian airstrikes ended and humanitarian aid began flowing to starving and decimated areas of Syria. The United Nation’s Syria envoy hopes to restart the talks by February 25, and HNC spokesman Salim al-Muslat says the cessation of hostilities must actually take effect before the opposition returns to talks. “If we see action and implementation, we will see you very soon in Geneva,” he told reporters on Thursday.

But even if the fighting does stop for any significant length of time, the two sides are still no closer to agreeing on the most basic issue of the war: what to do with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The opposition and its backers will not accept any political solution that allows Assad to stay in office. But on the same day the cessation was announced, Assad told the French wire service AFP that he has no plans to give up any territory or power, instead reconfirming his intent to regain control of the entire country. “This is a goal we are seeking to achieve without any hesitation,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “It makes no sense for us to say that we will give up any part of Syria.” As Middle East analyst Brooklyn Middleton noted on Twitter, Assad’s statement means the cessation of hostilities will mostly be an illusion of progress rather than an actual achievement.

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There’s Finally an Agreement to Stop the Fighting in Syria—and It’s Probably Doomed

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Everything You Need to Know About the Iran-Saudi Arabia Crisis

Mother Jones

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Relations between Shiite Iran and its oil-rich Sunni neighbors across the Persian Gulf have never been warm, and the civil wars in Syria and Yemen have fueled mistrust and proxy battles between the two countries for years. But even those conflicts didn’t manage to bring about the diplomatic meltdown that occurred this weekend, when Saudi Arabia severed ties with Iran and significantly ramped up tensions between two of the Middle East’s most powerful players.

What happened? Saudi Arabia rang in the new year by executing 47 prisoners on Saturday. One of them was a Shiite cleric named Nimr al-Nimr, a longtime critic of the Saudi government who was accused by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir during an interview with Reuters of “agitating, organizing cells, and providing them with weapons and money.” In response, protesters attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran. Shortly thereafter Saudi Arabia ceased diplomatic relations with Iran.

Bahrain and Sudan have since joined the Saudis in cutting diplomatic ties, and the United Arab Emirates “downgraded” its relations with Iran by recalling its ambassador and reducing staff in Tehran. The Saudis also announced other steps, including cutting off flights between Iran and Saudi Arabia and banning Saudis from traveling to the Islamic Republic.

Why does it matter? Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are major players in international trade, as well as in various conflicts playing out throughout the Middle East, and outright hostility between the two countries could bleed over in many ways.

The diplomatic crisis could affect efforts to broker peace in Syria. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran are deeply enmeshed in Syria’s civil war. Saudis fund Islamist rebels in Syria while Iran supplies weapons, soldiers, money, and diplomatic backing to the Syrian government along with extensive support to its close ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Both countries are also important players in any attempt at a peace process for Syria. The UN special envoy for Syria hoped to restart peace talks between the Syrian opposition and the Assad regime this month, but a collapse in Saudi-Iranian relations could sink negotiations before they get going again. “We were hoping that a diplomatic solution could be found to the Syrian crisis in the next few months. Forget about it,” Fawaz Gerges, a Middle Eastern studies professor at the London School of Economics, told CNN.

It could worsen Yemen’s civil war. Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbor, normally ruled by a Sunni-led government, is under the control of a Shiite rebel group called the Houthis. The Saudis launched an air campaign against those rebels in March and has been bombing Yemen ever since. While the campaign hasn’t dislodged the Houthis, it has killed more than 1,000 civilians by the United Nation’s estimate and laid waste to the capital of Sanaa. While Iran supports the Houthis, Yemen experts believe Iran hasn’t backed them in the same large-scale way as it has Hezbollah. But if tensions continue to rise with Saudi Arabia, Iran could be tempted to ratchet up its involvement in Yemen.

World powers are watching the situation closely. Russia has allied itself with Iran in Syria by sending weapons to the Assad regime and launching airstrikes against rebels. Sputnik, a Russian government-run media outlet, quoted a foreign ministry source who said Russia was “willing to play, if necessary, a role as a mediator in the settlement of existing and emerging discords between these countries.” China, a major consumer of Gulf oil, is also watching the situation and has urged both sides to calm tensions.

Uncertainty in the oil market is only rising. Iran has huge oil reserves, and it will finally be able to export that oil to the world market again this year now that Western sanctions are lifting. That could mean even more oil on the world market and another year of low prices—or tensions between Iran and Saudia Arabia could send oil prices rising again. No one’s sure which way it will go.

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Everything You Need to Know About the Iran-Saudi Arabia Crisis

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Trump, Carson Duel For Title of Least Prepared Commander-in-Chief

Mother Jones

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One of the highlights of last night was watching the outsiders talk about foreign policy. Gerard Baker asked Ben Carson if he approved of President Obama’s decision to send special ops teams into Syria. Here’s his answer, in all its glory:

Well, putting the special ops people in there is better than not having them there, because they — that’s why they’re called special ops, they’re actually able to guide some of the other things that we’re doing there. And what we have to recognize is that Putin is trying to really spread his influence throughout the Middle East. This is going to be his base. And we have to oppose him there in an effective way.

We also must recognize that it’s a very complex place. You know, the Chinese are there, as well as the Russians, and you have all kinds of factions there. What we’ve been doing so far is very ineffective, but we can’t give up ground right there. But we have to look at this on a much more global scale. We’re talking about global jihadists. And their desire is to destroy us and to destroy our way of life. So we have to be saying, how do we make them look like losers? Because that’s the way that they’re able to gather a lot of influence.

And I think in order to make them look like losers, we have to destroy their caliphate. And you look for the easiest place to do that? It would be in Iraq. And if — outside of Anbar in Iraq, there’s a big energy field. Take that from them. Take all of that land from them. We could do that, I believe, fairly easily, I’ve learned from talking to several generals, and then you move on from there.

Translation: I have no idea what to do in the Middle East. And even though I’ve been running for president for a year, I’m too lazy to learn even the first thing about it.

Then there was Donald Trump’s even more gloriously ADD response to a question about how he’d handle Russia:

Well, first of all, it’s not only Russia. We have problems with North Korea where they actually have nuclear weapons. You know, nobody talks about it, we talk about Iran, and that’s one of the worst deals ever made. One of the worst contracts ever signed, ever, in anything, and it’s a disgrace. But, we have somebody over there, a madman, who already has nuclear weapons we don’t talk about that. That’s a problem.

China is a problem, both economically in what they’re doing in the South China Sea, I mean, they are becoming a very, very major force. So, we have more than just Russia. But, as far as the Ukraine is concerned, and you could Syria — as far as Syria, I like — if Putin wants to go in, and I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates, and we did very well that night. But, you know that.

But, if Putin wants to go and knock the hell out of ISIS, I am all for it, 100%, and I can’t understand how anybody would be against it….They blew up a Russian airplane. He cannot be in love with these people. He’s going in, and we can go in, and everybody should go in. As far as the Ukraine is concerned, we have a group of people, and a group of countries, including Germany — tremendous economic behemoth — why are we always doing the work?

I’m all for protecting Ukraine and working — but, we have countries that are surrounding the Ukraine that aren’t doing anything. They say, “Keep going, keep going, you dummies, keep going. Protect us…” And we have to get smart. We can’t continue to be the policeman of the world. We are $19 trillion dollars, we have a country that’s going to hell, we have an infrastructure that’s falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, our schools, our airports, and we have to start investing money in our country.

….I don’t like Assad. Who’s going to like Assad? But, we have no idea who these people, and what they’re going to be, and what they’re going to represent. They may be far worse than Assad. Look at Libya. Look at Iraq. Look at the mess we have after spending $2 trillion dollars, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over the place — who I love, OK? All over.

We have nothing. And, I said, keep the oil. And we should have kept the oil, believe me. We should have kept the oil.

Translation: Russia! North Korea! Iran! Ukraine! Syria! ISIS! Germany! Ukraine again! Assad! Libya! Iraq! Oil! Keep the oil! But we should let other people handle all this because our roads are falling apart.

Republicans can’t seriously be thinking about nominating either of these guys, can they?

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Trump, Carson Duel For Title of Least Prepared Commander-in-Chief

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