President Trump’s abrupt decision to declare victory over ISIS in Syria and withdraw all U.S. ground troops risks repeating what Trump himself called a major blunder by President Barack Obama — the premature withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 that led to ISIS’ rise in the first place.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump labeled Obama, “the founder of ISIS,” telling radio show host Hugh Hewitt, “The way he got out of Iraq was — that was the founding of ISIS, okay?”
Then last year as president, Trump made the same argument in a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“We should never, ever have left,” Trump said. “A vacuum was created.”
Trump has ordered the Syrian pullout over the objections of the Pentagon, which issued a statement noting while the virtually all the territory once held by ISIS has been liberated, “the campaign against ISIS is not over.”
At last report, a small number of ISIS holdouts, presumably including their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, are holding onto a tiny sliver of land in eastern Syria, where they are surrounded by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
Trump, who has been itching to get out of Syria for months, has declared victory over ISIS dozens of times on the past years, only to be gently reminded there was a significant pocket of resistance left.
“We’ve largely cleared the physical manifestation of ISIS inside of Syria. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still thousands of fighters in Syria,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Washington Post forum two weeks ago.
In March, Trump signaled his impatience with the war, telling a crowd in Ohio: “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take of it now.”
But freeing Iraqis and Syrians from ISIS’ brutal rule is only half of the strategy to defeat ISIS. The other half is a program to build up local security forces to prevent ISIS from rising again.
“I’ve said all along, ‘We are not just going to get them out of a town and then walk away, knowing full well we’re up against an unconventional enemy, not a conventional force that could come right back in,’” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters in September.
In a State Department briefing Thursday, the president’s special envoy to the counter-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk said, “It would be reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now.’”
Many in the Pentagon believe the most important part of the campaign, the stabilization phase, is just beginning.
“To me, what that means is we’ve got to complete the training of local forces that can prevent ISIS from coming back,” Dunford said at the Post event.
When asked how long U.S. troops would have to stay in Syria, Dunford indicated they were not close to being able to come home.
“I will give you some idea of the order of magnitude of the work to be done. We estimate, for example, about 35,000 to 40,000 local forces have to be trained and equipped in order to provide stability. We’re probably somewhere along the line of 20 percent through the training of those forces,” Dunford said.
“With regard to stabilization, we still have a long way to go, and so, I’d be reluctant to affix a time.”
Once again, the president has made a tough job tougher for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who will not only have to defend a policy that goes against his better judgment, but he will have to find a way to make it work — perhaps by convincing other members of the 70-nation Defeat-ISIS coalition to make up for the departure of U.S. forces.
“I would not call this a withdrawal, I would call this a surrender,” said Samantha Vinograd, an Obama-era national security official, who is now a CNN analyst.
“The president’s decision is surrendering, obviously to Russian, Iranian, Turkish, and Assad’s own designs in Syria, but it’s also surrendering to the very strong likelihood that ISIS or other terrorist groups will be resurgent in Syria based upon his decision,” she said on CNN.
But President Trump’s famous gut instinct tells him otherwise.
“We’re going to be coming out of there real soon,” he said back in March. “Going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be.”
