Tom Barrack, Great Unifier(!)

He has done what no summit or peace plan could. Turks, Kurds and Arabs now agree on something.

What, in these times, could possibly have brought Turks, Kurds and Arabs into rare agreement?

There is a kind of achievement that eludes negotiators, summits and the whole machinery of regional diplomacy, and Tom Barrack has managed it without appearing to try. The peoples of the region agree on very little, and have spent the better part of a century disagreeing violently. They now hold one thing in common. They cannot stand him.

Oh, the extent of the contempt. Scroll the replies piled beneath any of his posts, if you can spare the time, and you will find dislike in all its variations.

Wallahi maşallah to Barrack. After decades in real estate, he has turned what may prove a brief diplomatic stint into the kind of achievement many diplomats never manage in a lifetime.

Barrack, a Lebanese-American property billionaire, a friend and fundraiser of Donald Trump, and since last year the US ambassador to Turkey and the president’s envoy to Syria, had his brief widened again on 1 June. In a Tru…