Completely apart from the utter foolishness of President Trump’s decision to betray the Kurds, risk reinvigorating the Islamic State, and give a boost to Islamist Turkish thug Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the sheer incompetence of his actions vis-à-vis Syria are mind-boggling and disastrous.
The grim evidence is vividly and tragically related in a Wall Street Journal news article today on the “Sand and Blood and Death” of “America’s Chaotic Retreat.” The virtually unavoidable takeaway was that even if Trump had good reason to withdraw American personnel from the key region in Syria, the way that he went about it was unforgivably rash and detrimental to United States interests.
As the report notes, the withdrawal was so precipitous and “haphazard” that American troops, in seeming danger of their lives, fled their base so rapidly that they couldn’t properly deconstruct it and take munitions and other things of military value with them. “Troops had only hours to decide what military equipment to take, destroy or leave behind.” It was left to “two U.S. jet fighters [that] returned to destroy an ammunition depot, tents and latrines, an attempt to reduce the facility’s military usefulness to Turkish-backed forces.”
According to the report, this was “a cascade of chaos that upended U.S. policy in the Middle East, cast doubt on America’s reliability as an ally and allowed Washington’s adversaries to fill the void: The Assad regime strengthens its hold. Russia expands its influence. And Iran sees greater freedom to ferry weapons to allies in the region, posing new threats to neighboring Israel.”
Russia is chortling at American humiliation: “A Russian reporter in a New York Yankees cap posted a video of an abandoned U.S. base in Manbij, Syria, taken over by Russian and Syrian fighters. Dining hall refrigerators were still filled with cans of Coke and Pepsi. Kitchen shelves were loaded with bread, bagels and Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes.”
Turkish shelling hit within a few hundred yards of known American locations. Reports were rampant of American troops deeply demoralized. Fighters allied with the U.S. and at least dozens of civilians, including women and children, were butchered. And the mighty U.S. was left looking so feckless that Erdoğan threw into the trash can the letter from Trump desperately pleading for Erdoğan not “to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people.”
This is not how a great nation should conduct military policy and foreign affairs. When a president springs a surprise of this magnitude on his own diplomats and generals, disaster ensues.
There is no decent reason for even a bad decision like this one to be carried out in a way this embarrassing and deadly. If the foolish withdrawal was to occur, it should have been planned. It should have been organized. It should have been done with protection. It should have included clearly delineated and enforceable understandings applicable to all parties, including the Turks, about how, why, and under what conditions we would withdraw. The consequences, including against the Turks, for violating those understandings should have been clear, certain, and powerful.
Instead, the U.S. engaged in ignominious retreat and suffered ignominious defeat. And the leader of the free world was left a supplicant, still fawning all over the tyrant Erdoğan by calling him “a friend” and a “hell of a leader” while still pleading with him to visit the White House next month.
This isn’t “so much winning.” This is groveling and losing. And it shows Trump to be inept, bumbling, and pathetically weak.
