Although Trump has been widely criticized for abandoning the Kurds, on the plane ride over Esper told reporters the latest plan is to leave “about 500 to 600-ish” troops there — in collaboration with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whom we are no longer abandoning. Their mission is to stop the Islamic State from taking over the Kurdish-held oil fields in Deir ez-Zor province, he said.
“If [the Islamic State] can generate revenue, then they can pay fighters, they can buy arms, they can conduct operations. They can do all those things because the revenue enables them,” Esper said. “So that’s how the mission relates.”
His explanation makes a certain degree of sense, but it ignores the larger context. It’s much likelier that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iran — not the Islamic State — will take over the oil fields if U.S. troops depart. Invoking the Islamic State is a way to put forth a semi-plausible legal justification for putting U.S. combat troops there.
The pretense that the American troop deployment is to prevent ISIL from capturing the oil fields is a flimsy legal rationale. But one the Democrats will not be able to challenge given their sudden embrace of the Syrian Kurdish cause. But this disconnect between our willingness to fight ISIL for the oil fields and the actual Syrian/Iranian/Hezbollah/Russian threat to those oil fields means we still have not come to grips with deciding why we are willing to fight and die to remain in eastern Syria:
The Obama administration ignored the logical consequences of saying Assad had to step down by waging a parallel war as a de facto ally of Assad against the common enemy of ISIL that put off enforcing that declaration. The defeat of the ISIL caliphate has exposed the wide gap between the stated preference for Assad to leave and the focus of military action on ISIL only. So what do we do now?
Because have no doubt, if we stay we will be forced to do that eventually:
If we try to hold a new DMZ at the DCL, eventually Syria will rebuild their army and come after the lightly armed militias that hold the east with the help of a small contingent of American troops (and other coalition troops, I assume) on the ground and a lot of air power that can be called in.
What will we do then? Abandon our local allies and withdraw from Syria or decide to fight Assad after failing to do so when he is weakest? We do have an interest in holding eastern Syria (protecting our local allies and keeping a buffer to protect Iraq from threats that build up in Syria, as they did in 2014). But at some point the cost of supporting those interests will exceed what we should or are willing to bear. Again, what do we do then, as I noted as an aside in this post?
The indecision is bugging me. If we go, there will be trouble; and if we stay it will be double. There will be a clash.
Will it be a Mogadishu or Beirut Barracks shock that compels America to rapidly decide what we are willing to fight and die to achieve in eastern Syria?
