Germany, Ozil and Loew: The Clay Triumvrate.

Watching the FIFA 2018 World Cup match between Germany and South Korea that has just ended, it was damn difficult believing it was the same German team that thumped Brazil 7-1 in the semi-finals of the 2014 edition of the same tournament that was on the field. The

magnificent squad that later went on to win the cup at the expense of Argentina. It is charitable saying the team was a shadow of its former self. No shadow, no matter how miserable, would want to be associated with this pathetic performance. Is this not the same team that used to be called the 'German Machine' by admirers all over the world? A moniker earned for competence, ruthless efficiency, crisp passing and wondrous organization. The squad we've just seen rather looked like a chapped-out car, a contraption coughing badly and no amount of pushing was going to make it start. Plenty of pushing there was, as strenuous as hell, millions of German fans at home and abroad doing all they can to urge on their team to glory, but Joachim Loew's team was simply dire. It was a car they couldn't even get to the mechanic. The fire-high passion of supporters would eventually get damped by a performance nothing short of a damp squib.
The prime architect of the heinous 2-0 defeat  was Loew himself, World Cup winner in 2014, now diving steeply and very fast from hero to zero. If Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira played so poorly in the first match defeat to Mexico, and the team managed to win against highly-organized Sweden in the second match, why field them again in the final match? A crucial match that they had to win, take their own fate in their own hands and avoid the risk of depending on other results from the group. Perhaps he thought Mexico would beat Sweden. Perhaps he underestimated South Korea. Perhaps he has lost his gravitas for caution, shrewdness, alertness and judgment.
He had an able lieutenant in Ozil, the hero of 2014 that started Germany's precipitous slip in the current edition long before the tournament started by that notorious photo-op with Erdogan, the Turkish president, a rabble-rouser as loud and violent as they come. With Ilkay Gundogan, another German player of Turkish origins, it was not a little rumpus they caused team preparations by posing with Erdogan and calling him 'my president'. Only God knows the inspiration they hoped to gain from the pugnacious lout? And if they thought that muzzling opposition, clamping opponents into jail without trial and screaming at real or imagined threats were all going to be insightful, the idiocy of it all was ruthlessly exposed by Mexico and South Korea. Loew shouldn't have taken the pair to Germany. Just as he was with Arsenal, his performances were slow, lethargic and horribly sloppy and his body language bespoke that of a spoiled brat, a lout quarreling with team mates and himself. The upside of it all is that he knows he is finished in international football and needs a huge redemption at club level. He might have won the World Cup but hanging around his neck now is the unwanted medal of Germany exiting the tournament at a group stage since 1938, before the 2nd World War.
It is that bad. 

The Bible Isn't God's Word, 1

The bible isn't God's word: at least the larger half of it. The Old Testament. That part is definitely the word of the sons of Israel, with a lot of quotations and deeds attributed to God. Jews have always been excellent poets, in addition to many other alluring attributes and have had little trouble turning what is essentially history into a document that tickles human faith and spiritual yearnings. That is why we must take with a pinch of salt statements quoted to a religious leader in the US, relying heavily on quotations from the bible, that God, more than three thousand years ago, ordained Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel. If we resist the temptation to delve into long history, Tel Aviv has been the capital of Israel for some time now and nothing catastrophic has happened to the Jewish state. Now, in case the resistance crumbles, the time Jerusalem has not been capital of Israel far outstretches the period it has and nothing distinctly evil has been attributed to that displacement. There has been pogroms, genocides, even a holocaust suffered by the race in between but Armenians also suffered genocides at the hand of Turkey and that disaster has never been linked to the failure or non-observation of a divine will of a place being capital or not. At any rate, Russian Jews should be more interested in Moscow being capital of Russia that Jerusalem being capital of Israel. French Jews should be more interested in Paris... Millions of Jews are there all over the world who don't all that care much for Jerusalem. This is what Trump knows distinctly well and it is a bit difficult arguing with his critics that in moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, he was only trying to fulfill electoral promises made to his core political base which included orthodox Jews and right-wing American Christians. This is what Palestinians should have seen through. They rather allowed themselves to be blinded by needless emotions and 58 of them have been killed in another ruinous confrontation with their arch-enemy.
Apropos of things catastrophic. May 15 is al-Nakba or Catastrophe for Palestinians, the most mournful date in their calendar. On May 14, 1948, the British Mandate ended in Palestine and Israel declared war the following day. In the battles that ensued, more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in territories now occupied by Israel and they have not been able to return home since then. Many of them now live as refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and so on. It is certainly a loss of epic proportions but no more catastrophic than the slaying by David, who later became a great Israeli king, of the giant Goliath, commander of the Philistines, ancestors of the present Palestinians. Going back to the bible, so to say. Jews and Palestinians have both suffered mind-numbing catastrophes in course of their entwined histories, yet they have multiplied. The rhetorics of destruction should now sound a bit tiring on both sides. It is too late for that. That urge is a bit more strident on the Palestinian, at least Hamas, side but they should now realize they have more than 8.5 million Jews to destroy in Israel alone. A huge task, potentially catastrophic considering the fact that their enemy has scores of nuclear weapons. It will do very few people harm changing the tune to new rhetorics now

Rex Tillerson: Serving God and Mammnon.

The oil industry where Rex Tillerson made his mark was a fairly certain arena. The newly-drilled oil-well is guaranteed to produce; new technology was going to make shale oil commercially available and the shady atmosphere enveloping Nigerian oil was always going to get cruder and darker. Only instability in the prices of oil was going to be of much challenge but that too wasn't exactly rocket science and for a man who had risen to the top echelons of his calling, he could be counted on safely to handle that. In short, the world he was familiar with was stable, rational, fairly predictable: always within his grasp. It was a place of gentlemen and handshakes.
So, it must have been a shock to him when he decided to switch jobs and throw himself into politics. Politics is a calling rough enough and American politics is a particularly toxic variant. It wasn't an arena for gentlemen, handshakes being very, very rare and fists in ample display and use and nobody was going to pull punches. And the most combative of the pugilists was the man he was going to serve as Secretary of State, President Donald Trump, a boxer who was going to play very unfairly, not hesitating a moment to punch below the belt. And the most volatile part of American politics would certainly be found in the State Department, in foreign policy. There he would have to deal with players even worse than his master. A place as stable as earthquake-engendered tsunami. An arena where the appalling Rohingya crisis could break out at any time, where Russian hackers and exterminators were going to cause trouble at any time. An arena filled with irrational souls as Mugabe, Kim Jong-un. A theater savaged by unpredictability such as the North Korean rascal making a volte-face and proposing talks with the US all of a sudden. Moments defined by not only not knowing when the next nuclear test will take place but also not knowing whether the missile was flying towards Hawaii, or flying over Japanese mainland or was going to end up shortly in the Pacific Ocean. Torrid moments of terrorists freshly abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria. Intolerable situations in which Turkey, a NATO ally would attack  Syrian Kurds, America's staunchest allies in the Middle East, and both the president and his top diplomat would be tongue tied. Tillerson was stepping into an insane world he was never prepared for, both by training and temperament.
A world that was perfect fit for his master, by temperament. Tillerson was supposed to be America's face to the outside world but it was an America that that gone Trump, a guy who was as brash and unpredictable and unrestrained as his worst adversaries in the diplomatic boxing ring. A chap whose remarks are often off cuff and whose most coherent foreign policies could be found only on his lips and tweets. It was eerily difficult imagining Tillerson as Trump's Secretary of   State. The Rasputin Coefficient was horribly non-correlative. Tillerson, in Trump administration, was practically serving God and Mammon at the same time.
Hence he would think the Iranian deal to be reasonable while Trump would savage it as nonsense. He would lay into Russia over the Salisbury spy poisoning while his president would be uncharacteristically taciturn and quiet all of a sudden. You would think that if the president was going to accept talks with North Korea, he would consult his secretary first. A dove, so to say, wasn't going to serve a hawk. Tillerson was more studied, careful, restrained than he was a pacifist but he wasn't going to do well in a regime stuffed with hardliners and of which head was a sheriff likely to shoot first before asking questions later.
Trump admitted he didn't agree with Tillerson on most issues. Sacking him behind his back was his most poignant testament to that disagreement.   

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 2

So President Erdogan  sends troops, tanks and warplanes into Syria at will to attack the Kurds while President Trump and Secretary Tillerson look on numbly like rabbits caught plumb in powerful headlights. It does not really matter that Syria is supposed to be a sovereign state, the country had long been partitioned among Russians, Iranians, The Gulf States, Saudis, Turks, Kurds and just anybody that could arm a miscreant with a rifle. This inaction, even silent acquiescence, on the part of the US is even more baffling in the sense that the Kurds remain the only sensible option for securing the porous borders and crossing points  from Syria to Iraq and even to Turkey itself. Hence the decision of the US to convert the YPG to a border force is a well thought out policy, the only effective way to stop the IS from regrouping. After all, Turkey with all its huge army and security paranoia was unable to prevent would-be militants from Europe and elsewhere from using the country as transit points to join  the shitty caliphate in Syria and Iraq at the height of IS ascendancy. Hordes of them were crossing the borders in broad daylight and Turkish officials were looking the other way as a result of compromise or sheer incompetence. The Kurds represent the only credible and capable buffer force in those climes, a fact Trump well recognizes. Hence shrugging helplessly while Erdogan attacks and decimates the forces required to carry out the all-important policing can only be as a result of a foreign policy that is at best, formulated in tweets. Trump is horribly incoherent in his foreign policy and in no instance is this more demonstrated than his inertia in coming to the defense of his most dependable allies in the Middle East. It seems as if he had gathered the Kurds in a police compound for training and then he sends in a bomb-laden suicide truck to blow up the whole place. When policies are set out in tweets, or on a glib tongue, the obvious victims are organization, logic and unity. Senselessness supplanting sense and vice versa.
Maybe Trump thinks that it is a choice between NATO and the Kurds. Then it is equally a choice between where he could put his two feet in and a place that could, in all honesty, admit in other feet. It is leaving immediate, pressing certainty for a long-term certainty, if we can even qualify it as such. It is the Kurds that are in the demand books of the US now, not the Turks. A country that the EU would not even allow in.
Someone said he was confused as to what the US could have done when Turkey sent in its forces into Afrin. Very simple, a couple of US soldiers stationed in very visible places in the enclave. There was no need to do anything combative. No need to unleash warplanes to protect her allies. Something very symbolic would have stopped the tanks. Erdogan's attack on Afrin was no more than a diplomatic test of will, just like Hitler's re-militarization of Rhineland. He was really expecting a firmness from Trump that an attack on YPG and Kurds would be an attack on US troops itself. A couple of  unarmed Green Berets placed on Afrin roads would have driven that home quite trenchantly.
Just like Hitler, all he got in response was sordid appeasement.
After Rhineland, Austria was next and then Czechoslovakia. After Afrin, Manbij, Raqqa and other Kurdish enclaves.
Appeasement is defined as letting a bully have his way always. 

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 1

President Trump's most coherent foreign policies are on his lips, so it is a huge wonder that he is presently tongue-tied as Turkey sends tanks and troops to attack the only slice of influence the US has left in Syria: the sliver of territories controlled by Kurds in the eastern margins of the country. Putin and his Iranian allies call all the shots now in wider Syria, committing men and materiel to underline an influence growing by leaps and bounds every hour while the US has been hiding in the deserts of eastern Syria. Right from Obama, the country didn't even have a plan A in Syria, not to talk of a plan B or C. In other words, Russia had a focus it was going to enforce with a trenchant ruthlessness now yielding immense results while the US simply did not know what to do, looking back fearfully at an American public that had grown so weary of war.
But the US was lucky, so to say. It did not have to move in thousands of troops or an aircraft carrier brimming with warplanes. Like in Afghanistan during the invasion, all it needed on ground was a proxy army. And no proxy army could ever be more reliable than the Kurds, sturdy individuals with fighting skills and resilience that easily put to flight the famed capabilities of the Northern Alliance. Their heroics in Kobane is well known, a battle that showed everyone that the Islamic State was not an invincible evil horde before which every resistance must melt. The Islamic State impaled itself on the chimneys of Kobane and once they were defeated there, their days were numbered, just as Nazi Germany days were numbered after Stalingrad. The Kurds, under their YPG militia, were to later play the crucial role in driving the IS out of their fiefdoms in Raqqa, Manbij and several other towns and territories in eastern parts of the country, aided by Arab allies and US airstrikes. Without the Kurds, maybe IS would have been defeated but there was little doubt it would have been a very protracted conflict: infinitely sapping on morale and public opinion.
Faithful and largely peaceable individuals the pugnacious, rabble-rousing Erdogan now label as terrorists despite the fact that not a single instance of terrorism on Turkish soil, whether tenuous or even contrived, has ever been linked to the YPG. The border crossings now controlled by the YPG used to be manned by the evil IS fighters and not a single shot was fired by Turkey into Syrian territory then. Naturally, Erdogan would be more comfy with Daesh. Convoys of trucks laden with fuel stolen from Syrian oilfields were crossing the Turkish border in broad daylight on a daily basis, driven by IS terrorists while they held sway in areas now controlled by Kurds. Perhaps Erdogan feared a bullet would ignite one of the trucks and set off a fearsome conflagration.
So it is easy to understand Erdogan's contrived animosity towards the Syrian Kurds. What is far more nebulous is the US silence and inaction. Save for a couple of rhetorics that do not even qualify for a whimper, Trump and his Secretary, Tillerson, have watched with soporific eyes as Turkey rolls its tanks deeper and deeper into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria.  

This Fire Won't Cease in Syria.

It would have been laughable, the latest ceasefire moves by the UN in Syria if the situation in that country, especially in Eastern Ghouta, has not been so pathetic. On Saturday, the Security Council managed to secure a ceasefire resolution, barely an hour after Russia had strongly objected to the list of groups exempted from the ceasefire. Russia knew anyway that securing a resolution was the only possible part of the whole rigmarole, complying with the ceasefire was well nigh impossible. Of course, by Sunday, barely a day after, Sweden and Kuwait, the originators of the Saturday document, were appealing for a new truce, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, having said the ceasefire would only come into effect until the details were worked out. By Monday, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and Emmanuel Macron, the French president were virtually on their knees begging Vladimir Putin to do something. You would hardly see a more heartbreaking sight in international diplomacy. Russia seems to have scored very big in Syria and that only by brushing squeamishness and pity and humane pretensions aside and realizing the conflict was in effect, a fight to death, a war in which no quarter would be asked or given. The US has long abandoned her dreams or lack of them, in the country, its influence having been reduced to a sliver of territory being controlled by Kurds in Eastern Syria, and even Turkey is making her uncomfortable there.
The whole gobbledygook of the ceasefire was likely to flummox you and me. So if you are excluding big, hardline, Islamist groups like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, formely Al-Nusra Front or Jaysh al-Islam or Faylaq al-Rahman from the deal, whom are you expecting to observe the truce? These are the most ferocious and active groups in Eastern Ghouta and their contributions to the conflict has been the most intense. Even if the government forces and their allies were going to stop fighting, the rivalry and fight for turf among these rebel groups were going to make aid convoys reaching those in need a very huge task indeed. It is a bitter truth Russia is very  conversant with and is ready to exploit happily for its burgeoning influence in the Middle East: It is a reality the UN is so distant from and which it has mishandled with pitiable comedy.
Tuesday morning, the UN had abjectly reduced its hopes and pretensions from thirty days of ceasefire to just five hours. Again, Putin was sitting high on his throne, calling the shots. A semblance of peace managed to reign for two hours and then the shelling and airstrikes resumed pell-mell. The two hours in itself was a miracle in Syria, though no succor got to those besieged. Folks in the ultimately senseless revolution have long given up on the miracles the UN is still hopelessly trying to conjure.
The besieged in Hom only got relieved when the rebels could no longer continue with the fighting and had to shipped out. The same with Aleppo. It is a bit difficult saying this but the mot plausible hope for the starving and desperate in Eastern Ghouta lies in the blasphemy of the fight being allowed to continue for some time in the hope that the government forces will ultimately gain the upper hand. That is the solution is military. This in itself is little hope. Check out the geography. Benign territory for rebels to withdraw to from where they are presently entrenched lies far, very far away and the only reasonable scenario is a fight to death. Ceasefire is out of the question and the conflict is going to be drawn out, as is expected of resistance from people happily fighting to die.
And for the 400,000 trapped in Eastern Ghouta, too bad they are caught up in a war not of their own making. Too many proxy wars being fought by so many powers. They don't have many choices now, except miracles they themselves don't believe in. And which the UN is only believing in because of the fear of being seen to be doing nothing.