There are reasons to keep American troops in Syria. Are the reasons good enough to lose American troops in combat? Could we decide that before the losses compel us to answer that question?
How long will Biden keep American troops in eastern Syria?
How committed President Biden will be to keeping troops in Syria is uncertain, however.
The Biden administration does not appear to be in any rush to pull out the 900 U.S. troops who remain in the country, a relatively small force that some White House officials see as key to preventing a resurgence of Islamic State and a rush to reclaim the area's oil fields by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies.
But White House officials have said they are reviewing the troop presence in Syria — an announcement that has raised concerns that Biden could reconsider the deployment as part of a larger scaling back of U.S. troops in the Middle East and a planned shift of Pentagon focus to Asia.
Hahahaha! It seems just like yesterday when Democrats (wrongly) accused Trump of abandoning the Syrian Kurds:
We aren't abandoning the Syrian Kurds. We are abandoning the Kurds' goal to hold the border region which anti-Turkish Kurds need to fight Turkey.
We've been trying to protect the Kurds in that border area but we've run out of stalling tactics. The Turks were coming in and we could fight the Turks or get out of the way. What should we have done under those circumstances?
This is bad. I don't like siding with Erdogan over the Syrian Kurds. I don't deny that. But it could be worse.
Again, America is not abandoning the Syrian Kurds, as our officials have stated[.]
Somehow our troops are still protecting the Syrian Kurds despite claims Trump abandoned them.
Look, we had a common objective of defeating ISIL in Syria. The Syrian Kurds were never going to spearhead an effort to overthrow Assad even if America wanted to do that. Do we owe the Kurds something for our joint fight to defeat the ISIL caliphate there? No. That was a shared interest. We achieved that. We no more owe them protection against all threats than they owe America troops to overthrow Assad.
But seriously, we have to decide why we're in eastern Syria before we face a Beirut Barracks or Mogadishu moment that exposes the mismatch between troop deployment and willingness to risk lives.
