Give Americans straight talk on Syria
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 received far less scrutiny than it 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 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 military official called a “couple hundred” 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 combat vehicles, manned by U.S. operators, that were deployed to northern Syria in March. They were sent not to tighten the noose around ISIS but to prevent anti-ISIS allies from killing each other — allies such as the Kurdish militias doing much of the fighting and the Turkish forces bombing them.
Preventing the outbreak of conflict between U.S. allies in Syria is in our vital interests. 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 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, President Obama cautioned that the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria eroded the prohibition on their use. In that same speech, Obama assured the nation that Russian diplomacy would forestall the need for U.S. intervention in Syria, and that he would ask Congress to consent to any military action. But Congress didn’t act and Obama didn’t push.
Obama had been 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 national interests to do not lose their urgency while Congress is paralyzed.
In 2014, Obama announced without congressional imprimatur a U.S. air campaign over Syria to combat the terrorist threat arising from its unchecked civil war. Covert operations there expanded over the next two years. Last spring, Obama ordered special operations 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. Our mission in the Middle East won’t expire simply because Americans choose to ignore it.