Bush 43 won the Iraq War, defeating a series of enemies. Obama lost and then began Iraq War 2.0 against ISIL. Trump won Iraq War 2.0. And Biden has negotiated another premature departure. Will Trump complete that, including a withdrawal from Syria, and risk either losing Iraq or creating Iraq War 3.0?*
The United States has troops inside eastern Syria in the SDF area to help our Kurdish-led allies fight ISIL remnants, hold ISIL prisoners, and screen Iraq from infiltration from Syria, which was deadly during the Iraq War. American troops are also stationed at the Syria-Jordan-Iraq border to fight infiltration in the Al Tanf Deconfliction Zone. The total is about 2,000. There was a kerfuffle when the figure was learned to be double that. But it was mostly a fake issue given that we traditionally don't say where our special forces are.
I'm sympathetic to calls to get out of Syria:
For the sake of argument, I'll pretend to be agnostic on the issue of whether American forces belong in Syria, and I invite you to join me in being momentarily open-minded. In our tabula rasa state, if there's a case for being in Syria... let the President of the United States — or, more likely, one of his minions — MAKE THE CASE.
And I fully want our leaders to make the case. And the case includes preventing ISIL from regenerating inside Syria. ISIL is a threat from Syria to Iraq to New Orleans.
If our departure allows the 40,000 ISIL members (including fighters and their families) to escape their imprisonment by the Kurds in eastern Syria prison camps, Iraq could again be
under threat from jihadis which will risk losing our still-fragile victory in Iraq
to Iranian influence. The Iranian ability to undermine Iraq from Syria is obviously crippled. But that victory would be nullified by letting ISIL become a major threat again. That would be a direct threat , obviously. But it would also enable Iran to strengthen its hold on Iraqis who will need help to defeat the jihadis--the same threat that enabled Iran to create pro-Iran militias in Iraq after Iraq's security forces in the north collapsed in 2014 in the face of the original ISIL uprising/invasion.
Already, we found we had to respond to the threat:
F-16s and F-15s carried out airstrikes against ISIS fighters operating in Iraq’s Hamrin Mountains. U.S. Air Force A-10s, which were called in to support ground forces, were successful in killing Islamic State militants fighting in the cave, [CENTCOM] said.
Ceding eastern Syria to ISIL won't help our national security if ISIL revives and Iran exploits Iraqi Shia fear of Sunni Arab terrorism. Will fellow jihadis in HTS really fight ISIL for us? And ultimately, ceding Iraq to Iran whicht can exploit ISIL advances inside Iraq is no way to exert maximum pressure on Iran, if that is our future policy toward mullah-run Iran.
And yes, we won the Iraq War.
*You can make the case that the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War the first Iraq War. I tend not to because the objective was more narrow--liberating Kuwait from Saddam and containing Iraq--rather than eliminating Iraq as a threat. And it seemed more like the end of the Cold War, a symbolic victory over the USSR by smashing Iraq's Soviet arsenal.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
NOTE: You may also like to read my posts on Substack, at The Dignified Rant: Evolved. Go ahead and subscribe to it.
