My simple question to President Obama about his very complicated Syria policy

I have a question. Now that we're in, how do we get out?

We're there, on the ground, with troops committed, in the most violent sector on earth. Regional infighting reigns, factions have ramified, ancient religious hostilities thrive; all of which makes the Balkans, circa 1910, a relatively intelligible, straightforward problem — and Southeast Asia, a half-century later, child's play. One superpower was already sucked in — willingly — and now another joins the byzantine turmoil. Once joined, how to disengage?

Will it be 50 special-ops forces disengaging, whenever that day (year, decade) comes? Most unlikely. Yesterday, a Pentagon official "call[ed] the move a first step as officials continue to reevaluate the need for more special forces troops on the front lines." A first step, continuing reevaluations and the need for more troops, which hardly makes for a hanging mystery.

Could the defense official have been more explicit? He sure could: "You shouldn't rule out anything. We'll adjust once we get a better sense of who's on the ground, their capability and what's actually needed."

Ah, they'll adjust — Pentagonese for "escalate." They don't yet know "what's actually needed."

Let's dust off the ouija board: Are 50 U.S. troops in northeast Syria likely to act as an enormous magnet to ISIS, which is itching for a recruitment-lathered fight with the West's Satan? Strike that; there's no need to ask, for the defense official had some famous last words: "The area where we're planning to place [U.S. forces] is not an area [the Russians] have struck, nor would they need to strike. It's not ISIL and it's not regime-controlled, so we don't anticipate any problems." With the Russians, that is. 

Yes, this operation should go as smoothly as did our mere advisory capacity in Vietnam. Well, sure, I mean, we did undergo the occasional "reevaluation" of what was "actually needed" there, which resulted, from time to time, in bits of force augmentation. But all in all, unanticipated problems never materialized. Why? Because that's war for you, war in a nutshell: Tomorrow is always discernible.

Of course sarcasm aside, to some degree, it is. The one absolute predicability of war is its utter unpredictability. That's a cliché, but a profoundly true one. Another knowable is that once you're in, it's nearly impossible to get out. The loss or imperilment of 50 calls for 100, 1,000 or 10,000 more — that, or turn tail and run, which can be politically lethal — which leads to even greater losses and greater imperilment.

I can't know the president's thinking behind his decision. I suspect he listened to one too many defense officials. But that he dispatched his press secretary to announce what the NYT correctly called a "huge shift" in his Syria strategy suggests the president himself doesn't quite know his thinking.

Whatever. My question to him remains: Now that we're in, how do we get out?

***

I'm reading various interpretations of why we're on the ground in Syria, which, when one stops to think about it, is rather offensive. Should 300 million Americans be left to speculate as to why we're there — presently at a numerical force of 50, which the Pentagon has virtually promised to escalate, and which American lives lost or captured would categorically guarantee? Should not the president — not a presidential spokesman — have stepped to the podium yesterday and made clear the reason for our ground intervention? Why is it that as the United States enters another Middle East war — a civil war, at that — the American people should be left wondering why? It's not rather offensive. It is offensive.  

But more than that, far more than that, is that tendered speculations as to the reason or reasons we're there leave the above, fundamental, long-term and most disturbing question unaddressed: Now that we're in, how do we get out?

Barring some miraculous political resolution to the Assad-Syria-Saudi-Iran-ISIS-Kurd-Sunni-Shia conflict — which, if anywhere among the greater powers, lies in Putin's hands more than Obama's — just how is it we exit? What's the plan? — which, assuming there is one, will undergo a thousand mutations between now and said, elusive departure.

 

Comments

[Bob]

Juan Cole thinks the deployment and announcement might be a warning to Turkey to quit killing Kurds. I can't guess whether it's a good move or not and was hoping to never have to read Cole regularly again.

[Charlieford]

I suspect it's to counter Russia's move into Syria, and its attacks on Sunni rebels we've been supporting. We can't just leave them twisting in the wind. At the same time, we don't want actual fights with Russians. Placing Americans in these groups or areas means Putin has to worry about killing an American in any of these attacks. Obama has upped the ante, in effect, and is now saying to the Russians "Your move." At the same time, he can swat back at Saudi/Sunni complaints that we're indifferent to their fates.

[Peter G]

That's the heart of it. All these situations are unique and not every comparison to Vietnam is apt. The mindset that dominated in that war is that conventional forces and war fighting doctrine could be applied to a jungle insurgency that bordered on a hostile superpower. As far as the Iraq war goes it was the military that warned the Bush Administration about the requirements for dealing with the post war situation. The Bush people, you will recall, punished General Shinoseki by ending his career. I fear no such situation will arise with the Obama administration. Or a subsequent Clinton administration for that matter. You have Vietnam and you have Iraq. And you have a dozen other situations where scale toon did not occur. There is nothing inevitable about it. Your armed forces are much more likely to object to open ended military commitments than to embrace them.

[Peter G]

Good one autocorrect! Escalation becomes scale toon, whatever that might be.

[Charlieford]

I see David Rothkopf has a pretty good column in FP where he argues the same basic thesis--but then goes off the rails at the end, wailing about "leadership." Good lord, I wish we could just excise that word from all our discussions of foreign affairs.

[Peter G]

I'm not buying that at all. The US and allies need Turkey, specifically the Incirlik airbase, a lot more than Turkey needs anything in return.

[Marc]

That kind of crazy shit is way above my pay grade.

[Peter G]

I agree that the president owes an explanation for the question he will doubtless be asked at the first opportunity. As to how you will get out that would be the same way you got out of Lebanon, Somalia, the Balkans and the other places American forces with or without allies have had occasion to find themselves. They will leave when so ordered.

[Tom Benjamin]

I don't think we have nearly enough information to decide whether this is a good call or not. The situation is so complicated it makes my head want to explode.

Is it even a big deal? It seems to me that the US troops are doing for the Kurds in Syria what they are doing for the Iraqis in Iraq. In both cases the enemy is ISIL. I don't see how it changes much in terms of the American commitment. They are going to help a group that wants to take it to ISIL in Syria.

What else has changed recently? Europe is under incredible pressure to do something about the Syrian civil war to stop the flood of refugees. Assad was on the verge of collapse and Russia and Iran had to directly intervene to prevent it.

Does that open an opportunity? A meeting is held among the coalition, the Russians and Iran trying to find a way out. It (apparently) fails when the US correctly points out that Assad is acceptable to few Syrians. The Russians and Iranians pose the question the Americans can't answer "If not Assad, who?"

They all agree to meet again. Does the Obama announcement have anything to do with that process?

Who knows?

[Bob]

I don't necessarily buy it either, but it does make sense. Turkey has been oppressing Kurds, our most effective allies against ISIS, for years because they see them as an internal threat. At Foreign Policy, one of my other sources for this kind of news, David Rothkopf's take seems to have too much to do with bashing Obama to be taken seriously. Turkey needs NATO, which is a major part of its defense structure.

[Peter G]

We can only speculate and the very nature of the probable missions means we may never know. What fifty special forces troops aren't is a war fighting force. But I know why they are there in a general way They are there precisely because the situation is extremely complicated and other forms of intellgence gathering unequal to the task of providing the president with what he needs to know. Neither satellite nor air reconnaissance nor signals intelligence can tell you much about what is going on there. So what can fifty special forces do? Aside from supporting existing military air based operations they are almost surely acting as security for the unbooted intellgence assets who may very well outnumber them. And supporting fifty special forces in the field requires hundreds of people in the logistical tail. All these people are there to find things out that cannot be found out any other way. How this knowledge is used is more problematic. It may, as PM fears, be used to map out strategies and tactics for further intrusion. Or it may not. It depends on what the mission, as determined by the president, becomes.

It's easy to look at what Afghanistan became and forget how it all started. The campaign there started with a few dozen spooks supported by special forces backed by air power that successfully drove the very unpopular Talban out of power in a matter of weeks. What's left, as in Libya,is inevitably a power vacuum. Which course to pursue is probably the most difficult decision a president has to make. That Obama wants to deploy assets to find out what those possibilities might be does not bother me. I will reserve judgement.

[Charlieford]

I think it's best Obama keep this as low-key as possible, and that means, as President, he not associate the country with it, even to the degree of publicly addressing it in a speech.

I think Friedman (I know!) is correct when he says Obama has concluded that if, in Iraq, it was "You break it, you own it," in Syria, it's more like "You touch it, you own it."

One of Obama's responsibilities at this point in his presidency is to saddle his successor with as few difficult-to-extricate-us-from foreign entanglements as possible. If he addresses this, he'll have to outline our national goals. His successor would have to explain how those no longer obtain. That might be hard.

As it is, it's Special Forces. Special Forces are currently deployed to around 135 countries. For good or for ill, we don't get a presidential explanation for each of those deployments. That situation--and not Desert Storm--is the real new world order.

I agree: If you think about it too much, it's downright unnerving. That's why God gave us alcohol . . .