The blow to America's standing in the Middle East was sudden and unexpectedly swift
The hasty U.S. pullback from Syria is a searing moment in America’s withdrawal from the Middle East
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hasty-us-pullback-from-syria-is-a-searing-moment-in-americas-withdrawal-from-the-middle-east/2019/10/16/82c0ff3c-ef5a-11e9-bb7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
BEIRUT — The blow to America’s standing in the Middle East was sudden and unexpectedly swift. Within the space of a few hours, advances by Turkish troops in Syria this week had compelled the U.S. military’s Syrian Kurdish allies to switch sides, unraveled years of U.S. Syria policy and recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East.
As Russian and Syrian troops roll into vacated towns and U.S. bases, the winners are counting the spoils.
The withdrawal delivered a huge victory to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who won back control of an area roughly amounting to a third of the country almost overnight. It affirmed Moscow as the arbiter of Syria’s fate and the rising power in the Middle East. It sent another signal to Iran that Washington has no appetite for the kind of confrontation that its rhetoric suggests and that Iran’s expanded influence in Syria is now likely to go unchallenged.
It sent a message to the wider world that the United States is in the process of a disengagement that could resonate beyond the Middle East, said Hussein Ibish of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
“There’s a sense that the long goodbye has begun and that the long goodbye from the Middle East could become a long goodbye from Asia and everywhere else,” he said.
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“Let’s see how they lived and what they ate,” he said, before ducking into one of the tents and filming the soldiers’ discarded snacks.
On Arab news channels, coverage switched from footage of jubilant Syrian troops to scenes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish receptions by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Washington’s most vital Arab allies in the Persian Gulf. The visits had been long planned, but the timing gave them the feel of a victory lap.
“This has left a bad taste for all of America’s friends and allies in the region, not only among the Kurds,” said a former regional minister who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to not embarrass his government, an American ally. “Many will now be looking for new friends. The Russians don’t abandon their allies. They fight for them. And so do the Iranians.”
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The withdrawal is a "huge victory" for Assad? Destroyed infrastructure, tens of thousands of dead, millions displaced. What a victory.
Drive out the Islamic State? Our actions in Iraq created them and simultaneously provided a rationale for SOC presence in Syria.
Iran's expanded influence? See US destruction of Iraq.
The Russian's don't abandon their friends? Nonsense. What happened in Libya was a result.
They have in recent history undergone a huge retrenchment, yielded territory, and given up a prior overextended world wide military posture which they have only recently tentatively begun trying to recover.
This is third time the US has abandoned the Kurds, in case anyone has been keeping track.
These hybrid war operations aimed at regime change follow recognizable patterns. Sedition, terrorism, proxy forces, civil flight, open warfare; then if standard tactics originating in the CIA, SOC, NSC secret discussions and cables meet with a determined opposition, eventually the pretext and rationalization for the commitment of substantial conventional military power emerges:
The United States remains overwhelmingly the dominant military power in the Middle East, with around 50,000 troops deployed in the region and a level of technological superiority that will ensure allies covet American weapons and support for years....
...“People are asking: Could the United States not only be an unreliable power, but could it actually be a weak power as well?” he said. “Not because it lacks the capability but because it lacks the will.”
