Just Get Us the Hell out of Syria Already

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Thirty-mumble years ago, I argued that President Bush père was wrong to send troops to Somalia (and President Clinton was wrong to keep them there) because there’s no such country. Somalia, I bitterly joked, isn’t a country so much as a hole in the map where other countries aren’t. Years later, I’d repeat that joke about our mission-creep/nation-building exercise in Afghanistan. You can’t build a nation in a hole in the map.

Which brings us, bitterly once more, to Syria.

Edward Luttwak’s latest for Unherd includes a brief but informative history of the country that, like Somalia and Afghanistan, never was. “Syria was never meant to function as a unitary state,” he wrote, and the “foreign busybodies… pressing for the reconstruction of a unitary Syrian state should reflect on the country’s history.”

An uneasy mix of Alawites, Arab Orthodox, Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Ismailis, and Shia Arabs was held together (albeit barely) in a loose confederation by the French after World War One. In the post-WWII/post-colonial era, only two things kept Syria from flying apart: the Assad dynasty’s Stalinesque iron fist and (since the 2011-20?? civil war) Russo-Iranian largess.

The Assads are gone, and with them so is support from Tehran and Russia. Even Assad’s defunct Syrian Arab Army is gone. Not just defeated or surrendered, but the Israeli Air Force (IAF) quickly bombed their equipment and storage depots into oblivion.

Israel is also busy carving out a slightly larger security zone outward from the Golan Heights. If ISIS should return or the HTS “government” in Damascus gets frisky, that’s just another job for the IAF.

Syria is returning to what might be its natural state: the majority Sunni Arabs lording over the various minority groups as best they’re able over a ~~country~~ geographical area they don’t fully control and likely never will. It’s another Middle East tar baby, and we have no business getting stuck in yet another one of those.

So why in hell aren’t we bugging our 2,000 or so servicemembers out of Syria already?

The word you’re looking for right now is hubris. Washington — and this applies to members of both parties — seems to believe that every problem is a Washington problem. And all too often, the Washington solution is to send in the troops without real consideration of their mission.

Are they there to keep a lid on sectarian violence? Prevent the Israelis and the Turks from going at it? Fight terrorism?

All of that and none of that. The troops are there because they’re there and therefore must remain.

The only thing missing is… us.

“Flimsy arguments connecting the Islamic State to Al-Qaeda – arguing that the former grew out of the latter – are another ugly expansion of unchecked executive power aimed at limiting U.S. citizen input on the critical decisions of their elected officials,” Alexander Langlois argued at American Greatness on Sunday. And he has it precisely correct.

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.

That nobody in the administration is willing or able to make the case — or, hell, just be honest about the size of our presence there — tells me that there’s little case to be made. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn about “muh democracy” they’re always prattling on about. Maybe both.

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