Trump's Syrian See-Saw: From Pullout to Pillage

As National Interest reporter Matthew Petti recognizes, for all the reasons mentioned above, "the U.S. presence in southeastern Syria may not be sustainable in the long run." And, as a senior Pentagon and White House official under Obama sums it up: "This is a sensitive gunpowder barrel of a mission" U.S. forces are being sent with only the shakiest possible legal authorization, knowing their commander-in-chief may change his mind as he has multiple times in the past."

Unsustainable, but being sustained. The US remains as a kind of zombie aggressor in Syria-not wanting to accept how badly it has been defeated (Even Robert Ford, an "architect of the Islamist insurgency," knows it!), and capable of doing enormous damage in refusing to accept that.

How is it that Robert Ford, one of the architects of the Islamist insurgency in #Syria and a man who tirelessly campaigned for the Al-Qaeda tied Ahrar Al-Sham to replace the Assad government, is now being so realistic and actually talking sense? (Interview Oct 10, 2019) pic.twitter.com/0ZWrndjbWK

- Walid (@walid970721) November 6, 2019

So, the neocons are restaging the US armed forces in a precarious "Fort Apache" from which they can't regime-change Syria but will continually threaten to. They are not giving up on their program for the Middle East, but they do now have to account for the fact that the US military in Syria is a rump force.

We might see this as part of the welcome yet worrisome evolution in the balance of forces in the world-in which the US is losing what seemed to be its uncontested prerogative to use military force, while being tempted to reverse that process with dramatic military action that re-asserts its absolute hegemony.

But, for the moment, it's also important to see and resist how US imperialism is adapting, by shifting its focus to economic aggression, where it still holds key levers of power. The most devastating attacks on independent countries like Syria, Iran, and Venezuela come through the US's control of international banking and payments systems, which allows the US to mount an economic siege designed to deprive people of the necessities of life. Even Human Rights Watch has denounced the US's "maximum pressure" sanctions against Iran as "pos[ing] a serious threat to the Iranian people's right to health and access to essential medicine."

Regarding Syria, a report from Ben Norton reveals the testimony of Dana Stroul, the Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Syria Study Group, Senior Professional Staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and longtime permanent-state operative who's spent years formulating Middle East policy-another other, less conspicuous, John Bolton.

Stroul insists that "the conflict is not over; it's entering a new phase." That's the phase of "holding the line on diplomatic isolation, preventing embassies from going back into Damascus," intensifying the "economic sanctions architecture," and "preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria." She wants to revive an alliance with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) by channeling all aid and "stabilization assistance" to it, while "keep[ing] the rest of the country in ruins until it achieved its goal of regime change." All this will be accomplished by using US control of "the international financial institutions and our cooperation with the Europeans."

As Norton says: "It is beyond debate that this approach will lead to massive suffering, privation and even the deaths of masses of Syrians."

That's true, and it's also true that this project will not go as planned. It betrays the same American hubris about the ability to fix and control outcomes that succeeded so well in the Syria war as a whole, and which Robert Ford pegged in the tweet above. In her fevered imperialist imagination, Stroul seems to think that the US can start the same Syrian regime-change operation all over again from the Deir Ezzor oilfields. Ain't gonna happen. There is no possibility that the SDF will overthrow the Syrian government. That could only happen at this point via a direct attack by US forces against the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian and Iranian allies-a walk in the proverbial park for which even Stroul reticently acknowledges "there's limited [!] appetite domestically."

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