Mattis urges Turkish restraint in Syria, wary of toll on civilians
January 23, 2018 by admin
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JAKARTA (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged Turkey on Tuesday to exercise restraint in its military operations in northern Syria, which he said had disrupted the peaceful return of refugees and could prove to be an opening for al Qaeda and Islamic State.
“This could be exploited by ISIS and al Qaeda, obviously, that we’re not staying focused on them right now. And obviously it risks exacerbating the humanitarian crisis that most of Syria is going through,” Mattis told reporters during a trip to Indonesia, using an acronym for Islamic State.
Turkey’s four-day-old campaign aims to crush U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG fighters in an air and ground offensive on Syria’s Afrin region and has opened a new front in Syria’s multi-sided civil war.
Mattis said Afrin had been stabilizing, prior to the Turkish military operation.
“In the Afrin area, we had actually gotten to the point where humanitarian aid was flowing, refugees were coming back in … The Turkish incursion disrupts that effort,” Mattis said.
Ankara has long been infuriated by U.S. support for the YPG, which it sees as a domestic security threat, one of several issues that have brought relations between the United States and its Muslim NATO ally close to the breaking point.
The United States hopes to leverage the YPG’s control and that of U.S.-backed Arab fighters in northern Syria to give it more diplomatic muscle as it tries to revive U.N.-led talks in Geneva on a deal that would end Syria’s civil war.
A key U.S. negotiating position is that there must be a political transition away from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Washington blames for the brutal conflict and accuses of using chemical weapons on his people.
Mattis said Turkey had legitimate security concerns, even as he reaffirmed the U.S. strategy in Syria.
“We’ve had our disagreements (with Turkey). But at the same time, I would just say that it is much better for Turkey and for the Kurds and for the Sunnis that we have the Americans in a position to influence the situation rather than Assad,” Mattis said.
Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Clarence Fernandez
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Trust Is Collapsing in America
January 22, 2018 by admin
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“The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for compromise,” said Bersoff. “When that goes away, the whole foundation of democracy gets shaken.”
“This is a global, not an American issue,” Edelman told me. “And it’s undermining confidence in all the other institutions because if you don’t have an agreed set of facts, then it’s really hard to judge whether the prime minister is good or bad, or a company is good or bad.” A recent Pew Research Center poll, in fact, found across dozens of countries that satisfaction with the news media was typically highest in countries where trust in government and positive views of the economy were highest, though it didn’t investigate how these factors were related to one another.
America actually falls in the middle of surveyed countries in terms of trust in the media, which emerges from the Edelman poll as the least-trusted institution globally of the four under consideration. (In the United States, the firm finds, Donald Trump voters are over two times more likely than Hillary Clinton voters to distrust the media.) Nearly 70 percent of respondents globally were concerned about “fake news” being used as a weapon and 63 percent said they weren’t sure how to tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods. Most respondents agreed that the media was too focused on attracting large audiences, breaking news, and supporting a particular political ideology rather than informing the public with accurate reporting. While trust in journalism actually increased a bit in Edelman’s survey this year, trust in search and social-media platforms dipped.
Percent Trust in Media and Change From 2017 to 2018
In last year’s survey, the perspective that many respondents expressed was “‘I’m not sure about the future of my job because of robots or globalization. I’m not sure about my community anymore because there are a lot of new people coming in. I’m not sure about my economic future; in fact, it looks fairly dim because I’m downwardly mobile,’” Edelman said. These sentiments found expression in the success of populist politicians in the United States and Europe, who promised a return to past certainties. Now, this year, truth itself seems more uncertain.
“We’re desperately looking for land,” Edelman observed. “We’re flailing, and people can’t quite get a sense of reality.” It’s no way to live, let alone sustain a democracy.