It’s time for our leaders to give us some straight talk about the turmoil in Syria

“Vietnam Syndrome” haunted the United States for over a decade after the fall of Saigon. Yet American military missions did not end amid this period of national insecurity and introspection; they were simply not subject to much public debate. Americans did not want to know.

A similar malady seems to have accompanied America’s withdrawal from Iraq. U.S. military deployments around the world haven’t abated. If anything, they are intensifying. In Syria, in particular, the slow draw-up of regular American forces has been the focus of far less scrutiny than that mission deserves. But America’s political leaders are not leveling with the public, and the public doesn’t seem to care.

Defense Secretary James Mattis is reportedly considering a U.S. Central Command proposal to send 1,000 soldiers to Syria in preparation for the final assault on Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. If they are deployed, they will join what a U.S. senior military official called the “couple hundred” U.S. Marines operating heavy artillery in Syria. Should they be needed for the Raqqa operation, several hundred U.S. ground forces are being readied in Kuwait.

Those soldiers will join a handful of Stryker Fighting Vehicles manned by American operators that were deployed to northern Syria in early March — not to draw the noose tighter around ISIS, but to prevent anti-ISIS allies from killing each other. Allies like the Kurdish militias doing much of the fighting and Turkish forces that have recently taken to bombing them.

Preventing the outbreak of conflict between American allies in Syria is in the vital interests of the United States. So, too, is the overdue containment of the Syrian conflict. The spread of ISIS terrorists and their militant ideology around the globe is among the greatest preventable tragedies of this decade. The American public might support the mission to contain this threat if any of their political leaders trusted them enough to make that case. Clearly, though, they do not.

This is a bipartisan disgrace. If Republican elected leaders seem too shy to be honest about the necessity of armed intervention in Syria, it’s a habit they adopted from Democrats.

On Sept. 10, 2013, Barack Obama belatedly spelled out the American interests at stake in Syria in a prime-time address. The president cautioned that the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria eroded the prohibition on their use. As the norm against WMDs disappears, he warned, American soldiers would soon find themselves again fighting on chemical battlefields. Obama was right. The Syrian conflict and its chemical warfare did spill over the country’s borders. Yet in that same speech, Obama assured the nation that not only would Russian diplomacy forestall the need for U.S. intervention in Syria, but he would ask Congress to consent to any military action.

Obama put the intervention question to Congress at a point of maximum weakness — right after Secretary of State John Kerry’s humiliating failure to convince the British to help America punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for chemical weapons use. Congress didn’t act and Obama didn’t push. He never wanted to make good on his “red line” for action against the Assad regime, and Congress shielded him from the consequences of his indecision.

Obama was criticized for intervening in the Libyan civil war in 2011 without congressional consent, so he justifiably resented the criticism of his effort to seek a war-powers resolution for Syria. But urgent American national interests to do not lose their urgency while Congress is paralyzed.

It was just over one year later that Obama announced without congressional imprimatur an American air campaign over Syria to combat the terrorist threat arising from its unchecked civil war. American covert support for antiAssad rebels expanded over the next two years — a program exposed to the world only when Russian air forces began striking secret CIA facilities and weapons depots. In spring 2016, Obama ordered American special forces deployed to Syria by the hundreds. There was no prime-time address; no vote in Congress.

It's time for U.S. leaders to be honest with Americans about the nature of threats to their security and the steps required to keep them safe. The American mission in Syria and the larger Middle East won’t expire simply because Americans choose to ignore it.

Noah C. Rothman is the associate online editor for Commentary magazine. On Twitter, @NoahCRothman.