By Kevin Baron
12/21/18
Five days before Donald Trump became president, I reported that U.S. elite troops and commanders were worried that the incoming commander in chief lacked the patience for the Obama Doctrine to work in Syria and Iraq. This week, Trump decided he’d seen enough and ordered U.S. troops to quit Syria. The president’s decision to abruptly end the mission was so far afield from the U.S. military’s core beliefs that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis tried to talk him out of it, failed, and surprised the president with an immediate resignation letter from his back pocket. The truth is Trump never knew what he wanted. He has no strategy or plan for the Middle East. And nobody knows why he made this decision now. Ever since the campaign trail, the brash businessman from New York who loved to armchair-quarterback the White House said he would defeat ISIS better and faster than Obama, but also that he would pull the U.S. out of the wars in the Middle East. Trump somehow managed to run on a promise of massive intervention and isolationism at the same time. And Americans bought it. Since he took office, national security leaders have warned the president time and again that he can’t have it both ways. They were able to convince the rookie commander in chief to listen to the generals and not retreat — not from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Korea, or NATO. They held the president in check for 23 months. But in the Oval Office this week, Mattis finally lost. Stephen Miller, the president’s hyper-nationalist adviser, won.
The sad irony is that Mattis was already giving Trump what he wanted. The fights in Iraq and Syria were being conducted a la the Obama Doctrine, which addressed regional problems not with U.S. heavy divisions but with far smaller units of elite troops who recruit, train, and help local forces to fight for themselves and in America’s strategic interests. The U.S. found willing and able local fighters in Iraq to build a new and improved Iraqi army and elite counter-terrorism forces. In Syria, Kurds and Arabs joined the U.S.-led Syrian Democratic Forces, took back their lands, and today hold about half of Syria free from the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. But by September 2017, U.S. special operations commanders on the ground were worried that their bosses in Washington would throw it all away. The State Department, they feared, would abandon the SDF to placate Turkey, which hates and fears the SDF, in order to safeguard larger U.S. nuclear, geopolitical, and strategic interests. “For their part, the U.S. special operators see them as partners who never leave a fight. And the mission, they say, doesn’t cost a lot for all that it offers America. We have a working partner here and that is a rarity in this part of the world.” And they say there is one scenario that could turn the situation from dream to nightmare: the U.S. abandons the Syrian Kurds. There’s no reason to think the next defense secretary will share Mattis’s views. There’s every reason to think Trump will pick someone who shares his own views and continue to pull America back from the world stage, just as he promised on the campaign trail and just as he restated he would do, this week. This is not just on Trump. This is on America. Jim Mattis is not the problem. You are.