President Trump said something this week that flew largely under the radar of a media obsessed with Stormy Daniels and whether it can get the scalp of “embattled” (by them) EPA boss, Scott Pruitt. It had to do with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and what, if any, America’s long-term role should be in that sorry corner of the world. He said that our troops would be withdrawing “very soon” from Syria, no later than this autumn.
The reaction from the proponents of endless war was illustrative of why, going on 17 years after 9/11, America still finds itself embroiled in Muslim-bred conflicts in which it has no material interest other than strictly punitive. As the Washington Post reported:
President Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between the president and his generals. Trump has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.
Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room debates over virtually every spot on the globe where U.S. troops are engaged in combat, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president against his instincts to support an open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.
No wonder McMaster is gone. An “open-ended commitment” of U.S. forces to anywhere, much less the notional “country” of Afghanistan, is one of the worst ideas ever and runs counter to American policy since the days of George Washington. But the enthusiasm for it among the careerist military and the consensus-loving bureaucrats of the State Department remains unabated.
It’s apparently not enough that we’ve been fighting the same collection of goatherds with AK-47s since early in the first term of the George W. Bush Administration. It’s bad enough that we didn’t finish the job—which was to take Osama bin Laden at his word, and at his declaration of war upon us in the name of Islam—and deal the expansionist, triumphalist faith a blow from which it might never recover. The Saudis, in the form of the bin Laden family and most of the 9/11 hijackers, had given us a casus belli, as had the Iranians, dating all the way back to the hostage crisis of the Carter Administration, and for which they have never been properly disciplined. All right-thinking allies would have been behind us.
But of course, we didn’t. The war in Afghanistan was effectively over in a matter of a few months, although bin Laden escaped to next-door Pakistan, where the duplicitous Pakistanis—whose countrymen are currently visiting a rape epidemic upon poor, politically correct Britain—gave him shelter right under the noses of their military establishment. Then Bush chose to turn his attention to Poppy’s unfinished spat with Saddam Hussein. And here we are, nearly two decades later, still taking off our shoes to get on an airplane in our own country, and with troops scattered all across the Middle East for no purpose.
