Still in Syria
National security adviser John Bolton appears to roll back President Trump’s decision to rapidly withdraw from Syria, laying out conditions that could take years.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, appeared Sunday to roll back Trump’s decision to rapidly withdraw from Syria, laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave U.S. forces there for months or even years.
Bolton, making a visit to Israel, told reporters that U.S. forces would remain in Syria until the last remnants of the Islamic State group were defeated and Turkey provided guarantees that it would not strike Kurdish forces allied with the United States. He and other top White House advisers have led a behind-the-scenes effort to slow Trump’s order and reassure allies, including Israel.
“We don’t think the Turks ought to undertake military action that’s not fully coordinated with and agreed to by the United States, at a minimum so they don’t endanger our troops,” Bolton said in Jerusalem, where he was traveling before a visit Tuesday to Turkey.
Bolton’s comments inserted into Trump’s strategy something the president had omitted when he announced Dec. 19 that the U.S. would depart within 30 days: any conditions that must be met before the pullout.
The remarks also reflected the disarray that has surrounded the president’s decision, which took his staff and foreign allies by surprise and drew objections from the Pentagon that it was logistically impossible and strategically unwise. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned within hours of the announcement, and the Pentagon chief of staff, Kevin Sweeney, said Saturday evening that he was also leaving.
While Bolton said Sunday that he expected U.S. forces to eventually leave northeastern Syria, where most of the 2,000 troops in the country are based for the mission against the Islamic State, he began to lay out an argument for keeping some troops at a garrison in the southeast that is used to monitor the flow of Iranian arms and soldiers. In September, three months before Trump’s announcement, Bolton had declared that the U.S. would remain in Syria as long as Iranians were on the ground there.
Asked on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” if Bolton’s comments amounted to an admission that Trump had made a mistake, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who at times has been one of the president’s staunchest supporters, said, “This is the reality setting in that you’ve got to plan this out.”
Graham, who described the dangers of making the announcement first and then considering the longer-term implications, added, “The president is slowing down and is re-evaluating his policies in light of those three objectives: Don’t let Iran get the oil fields, don’t let the Turks slaughter the Kurds and don’t let ISIS come back.”
The move to reverse course on Trump’s promised swift withdrawal picked up in recent days, even as Bolton worked to avoid openly confronting the president the way Mattis did. On Friday, in a background briefing for reporters about a forthcoming trip to the Middle East by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a senior State Department official said there was no fixed timetable for the U.S. withdrawal.
Asked about the shifting timeline Sunday as he left the White House for meetings about border security at Camp David, Trump told reporters that he had “never said we were doing it that quickly.” But in a video on the evening of his announcement last month, he had said that “our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” He later extended that to four months.
Now, the four-month schedule appears highly in doubt. The conditions Bolton described, including the complete defeat of the Islamic State and the guarantees from Turkey, could easily stretch out.
Bolton will meet Tuesday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who argued to Trump in a phone call last month that the Islamic State had been defeated, and that U.S. troops were therefore no longer needed to aid Kurdish fighters. Turkey considers the Kurdish forces a terrorist body bent on carving out a separate nation.
Before the visit to Turkey, Bolton was expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over dinner Sunday evening. Netanyahu has also been concerned about the U.S. plan, for fear it will leave a vacuum and embolden Iran.
In Jerusalem, Bolton described the conditions as “policy decisions that we need to implement,” and he said a timeline for a withdrawal would be necessary only once those stipulations were met. He said Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would negotiate with Turkish officials this week over the protection of the Kurdish fighters.
Bolton’s comments seemed to expand on a classified memo he wrote to Cabinet officials Dec. 24 that outlined a strategy for Turkish troops to replace the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops conducting counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State in northeastern Syria, according to two Defense Department officials.
Bolton’s memo came after Trump and Erdogan spoke by phone the day before. After that conversation, Trump tweeted: “I just had a long and productive call with President @RT—Erdogan of Turkey. We discussed ISIS, our mutual involvement in Syria, & the slow & highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area. After many years they are coming home.”
Bolton also wrote in the memo, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that the administration’s objectives in Syria remained consistent. Those goals have included routing the Islamic State from its last enclaves in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, ousting Iranian-commanded forces and pursuing a diplomatic resolution to the country’s civil war.
Pentagon officials almost immediately expressed skepticism that the Turkish military, which has struggled to carry out limited operations along its border with Syria in the past two years, could execute expansive counterterrorism operations deeper into Syria, toward the border with Iraq. Moreover, U.S. military planners said any Turkish movements into northeastern Syria would lead to clashes with the Syrian Kurdish-Arab coalition known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.