Getting out of conflicts in Mideast isn’t easy
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria will mean more soldiers coming home. We “are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers & military home,” he tweeted earlier this month. “It’s time for us to come home,” he told reporters last week. “Bringing soldiers home!” he tweeted Sunday.
It turns out it’s not that simple. Trump’s announcement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria was followed by another announcement that the United States would send 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia. Over the weekend, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced that the roughly 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria would be shifted to western Iraq.
On Monday, Esper said that not all U.S. troops may be leaving Syria anyway. During a visit to Afghanistan, the secretary said that a residual force of U.S. troops may stay to guard oil fields from the Islamic State and others who could “seek that revenue to enable their own malign activities.”
This chaotic reshuffling of troops in the region comes amid considerable debate about their presence there at all. The practice has put not only the lives of Americans at risk in wars that often have no obvious benefit to the United States but has done little to calm things. Polls of U.S. veterans have shown that a majority believe U.S. military engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria were not worth it.
However, as Trump has shown, withdrawing troops from these countries can set back other priorities. In Afghanistan, where Esper announced Monday that troop numbers had quietly been scaled back by 2,000, talks with the Taliban have broken down — with the extremist organization effectively discovering that one of its key demands in negotiations is effectively happening anyway.
In Syria, the removal of support for Kurdish forces led to the military intervention of Turkey, the spread of influence from the Syrian government and Russia, and the potential for a group like the Islamic State to regroup. U.S. troops serving in Syria are “livid” about a cease-fire agreement touted by Trump, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Before Trump, President Barack Obama had his own ideas about bringing troops home. “The time has come for us to end this engagement in Iraq,” he said on the campaign trail in Chicago in 2007. He said he was determined to bring troops home from Afghanistan before the end of his second term, and repeated the mantra that there was “no military solution” for disputes around the world.
While Obama did pull U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, he sent thousands back in 2014 as the Iraqi military crumbled under pressure from the Islamic State. Meanwhile, his plans to pull out of Afghanistan completely never came to pass. During his two terms, the United States conducted airstrikes or military raids on seven nations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Obama may have succeeded in ending U.S. involvement in the worst of the fighting, but he left troops deeply embedded in regional conflicts that proved just as hard to decisively end. Trump’s complaints about U.S. military presence overseas appear far broader — he has taken aim at relationships like the basing of U.S. troops in South Korea, Japan and Germany — but also more contradictory.
On Monday, the same day that U.S. troops pulled out of Syria as Kurds threw stones and rotten fruit at them, Trump warned that “we may have to get in wars too,” and pointed toward ongoing tensions with Iran. “If Iran does something, they’ll be hit like they’ve never been hit before. I mean, we have things that we’re looking at.”
That muddled view only adds to the strains on America’s military presence abroad. That presence has already sprawled farther then imagined — one 2015 estimate puts it at 800 bases in 70 countries, far more than all other nations combined — because of a combination of the legacies of World War II, the Cold War, the war on terrorism, security interests of the host nations and even plain old mission creep.
Obama tried to solve the puzzle of U.S. troops locked in foreign wars, while Trump is hoping to ignore it. But for now, it still seems to be that keeping U.S. troops in the Middle East is proving far easier than bringing them home.