The military pullout is for anti ISIS effort, our role in the Syrian civil war never included boots
Last edited Sun Dec 23, 2018, 04:42 PM - Edit history (1)
on the ground. The two have been conflated even by some Democratic leaning pundits and elected officials. In addition, I have heard no one, other than an oblique mention from John Kerry in his call to Brian Williams, point out that the US has been absent from diplomatic efforts. (The Trump administration is not involved in the Syrian or the Yemeni talks.)
Mattis and Special Envoy, McGurk resigned over Trump taking a policy - leaving the anti ISIS effort - completely at odds with our interests. The characterization of that conversation shows that Trump has no ability or patience needed to consider all the issues and forces at work in that area. I remember in 2016, Secretary Kerry speaking about how it was the most complex situation he had seen in his over 30 years (when he was either on the SFRC or Secretary). He listed the many simultaneous conflicts that ALL needed to be considered and resolved.
Also, I read accounts of the various Obama era plans to deal with ISIS. In brief the plan was to have the boots on the ground being local people, especially the Kurds, in both Iraq and Syria with US and allies supplying guidance and air power. Obama and his allies worked to involve the Iraqi government and pushed them to make their government more inclusive. In addition to the military, there was a strong effort to restore goverence and rebuild in the areas reclaimed. Norway and the US led on a demining effort and there were efforts to get pledges from governments to fund rebuilding totally decimated cities. The effort was to try to avoid the situation that occured in both Iraq and parts of Afghanistan where we and allies succeeded in winning areas -- only to lose them after we moved on. Developing good goverence was key to Iraq keeping the areas won back.
At this point, ISIS still controls a limited amount of land, but the greater risk is that we have only just started the effort to stabalize and repair the areas they controlled. This work - primarilly not military - was planned to make our effort more likely to lead to long term peace.
Syria was always more complicated because there was a civil war and we could not ally with Assad. In fighting ISIS, we "deconflicted" with Assad, Russia and Iran to avoid hitting each other. The civil war was more complicated, but our role was had two distinct pieces. We trained and arms those rebels we could find who we thought were not jihadis, but often later found that they allied with Al Nusra and other jihadi groups because they both had their main goal of defeating Assad. This was controversial. Many thought we should avoid doing anything and others wanted us to fight on their side. The other piece was that the US was part of the diplomatic efforts that began in 2011 to end the civil war. In 2015, John Kerry and Sergi Lavrov did succeed in getting a resolution passed. This included the very heavy lift of getting both Saudi Arabia and Iran on board. There were also many ceasefires, that never held for long. One part of the UN resolution is it would lead to a UN led election that would also allow the various people who left Syria to vote. As noted in the UN document, the role of Assad was not agreed upon. https://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12171.doc.htm
This resolution was the basis of the January 2018 UN effort and current efforts. Here is a recent statement - https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/note-correspondents/2018-12-18/note-correspondents-statement-of-behalf-of-the-un-special-envoy-for-syria-staffan-de-mistura
The problem here is that Trump never joined the diplomatic effort to end the chaos. That weakens the power of our allies in the coalition and has increased the voice of Assad, Russia and Iran.
Here is a link to a summary of the UN diplomatic efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_peace_process. Note that since mid December 2016, the US has not been involved. The lame duck Obama administration was specifically NOT invited to the first Russia, Turkey and Iran effort, but they extended an invitation at that time for the Trump administration to join when he took office that was reported by the WP and others ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/first-sign-of-enhanced-us-russia-relations-under-trump-an-invite-to-syria-talks/2017/01/13/81d443d6-d9b9-11e6-9f9f-5cdb4b7f8dd7_story.html?utm_term=.b0fe747c9258 ) As can be seen from the time line, the US has been absent for the last two years in these diplomatic efforts.
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