Nearly six months after a frustrated President Trump expressed a desire to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, his national security adviser appears to be ready to commit U.S. forces to an indefinite stay.
“We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” John Bolton said at the United Nations Monday, per the Associated Press.
Outlasting Iranian forces in Syria would likely require a much more open-ended commitment of U.S. forces than the current stated mission, which is to finish off the remnants of Islamic State fighters and train local security forces to protect the civilian population while diplomats search for a way to end the seven-year civil war.
At the Pentagon, there’s a pejorative term for what Bolton is advocating: “mission creep,” the idea that a limited, narrowly-focused objective can, with the best of intentions, expand into a “mission impossible.”
“Right now, our troops inside Syria are there for one purpose, and that’s under U.N. authorization about defeating ISIS,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said just hours after Bolton described the goal more broadly as also countering Iran.
“I worry that the role of U.S. forces in Syria has now been twisted, from defeating ISIS, a very worthwhile goal, to now somehow taking on and countering Iranian influence in Syria and the Middle East,” said Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest. “It does feel like mission creep to me.”
Mark Cancian, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said this goes against Trump’s campaign promises.
“This would expand the mission to counter Iran, a long-term commitment with no clear end. It is the kind of mission expansion that Trump had campaigned against as a candidate,” he said. “This is a classic example of mission creep.”
Mattis insisted he’s “on the same sheet of music” with Bolton because he does not favor the sort of precipitous withdrawal advocated by Trump in April, when the president blurted out, “I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home,” during a press conference.
But Mattis believes the continuing presence of at least some of the 2,200 U.S. troops currently in Syria will be necessary to both protect civilians newly freed from the brutal rule of ISIS, and to prevent the resurgence of the terrorist group.
U.S. commanders have been given no orders to confront or contain Iranian-backed militias in Syria, something that the head of U.S. Central Command pointed out to the House Armed Services Committee in late February.
“As you know, countering Iran is not one of the coalition missions in Syria,” Gen. Joseph Votel testified when asked what he was doing on the ground in Syria about Iran.
Some believe that Bolton is freelancing, as he did in May when he suggested Libya could serve as a model for getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program, only to be rebuked and contradicted by Trump a few days later.
“In fact, you have to consider if Ambassador Bolton was going off script again — another ‘Libya model’ moment — trying to tweak the administration’s approach to Syria to something resembling his own personal viewpoint,” Kazianis said. “If so, that would be quite dangerous — and President Trump should take notice.”
Bolton’s latest comment is not the first time he has linked the two separate goals.
“I think the president has made it clear that we are there until the ISIS territorial caliphate is removed and as long as the Iranian menace continues throughout the Middle East,” Bolton said on ABC’s “This Week” in July.
Some key Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said the administration might be pursuing the right strategy by remaining in Syria to counter Iran.
“I don’t see that as a change of policy. First of all, I can’t be objective when we’re talking about John Bolton because everything he does is right and I have a long history with him,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I think that’s a policy that should be projected or he wouldn’t have said it, so I would have to agree with him.”
Keeping troops in Syria would serve U.S. strategic interests, including the defeat of the Islamic State and countering a top adversary, said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“We have a military presence in a variety of places around the world to protect our interests, to prevent our adversaries from advancing their interests, and there is no question that Iran is being incredibly aggressive,” Thornberry said. “We can be in a better position to have some sort of — we’ll call it a decent outcome given where we are now in Syria if we’re there. We can’t shape it at all if we’re not there.”
But Bolton’s policy could also stoke bipartisan concerns in Congress over the administration’s expansive use of 9/11-era war powers for military operations around the world and the legal justification for any operations against Iran.
“There is absolutely no legal justification for U.S. troops to be in Syria to fight Iran and this admission by the administration shows clearly that the U.S. troop presence in Syria is unconstitutional today,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. “It’s imperative that we have a debate about the authorization of the use of military force given the fact that the administration is copping to an illegal troop presence.”
Meanwhile, in his address to the United National General Assembly, Trump was declaring victory over ISIS.
“I am pleased to report that the bloodthirsty killers known as ISIS have been driven out from the territory they once held in Iraq and Syria,” the president said, while over at the Pentagon his defense secretary was providing reporters a more sober, and more accurate assessment.
The fight against ISIS is down to the last two percent of territory held by ISIS in Syria’s Middle Euphrates’s River Valley near the border with Iraq.
“That fighting is ongoing. As we’ve forecasted, it’s been a tough fight,” Mattis said. “And we are winning.”
But Mattis concedes that regardless of what Iran does, destroying the ISIS physical caliphate will not be the end of the group.
“This is not a conventional war where you raise a flag over the enemy’s capital and they sign a peace treaty, it’s not that kind of an enemy,” Mattis said.
