Trump muddles Syria policy with vow to exit ‘very soon’

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump says the US will withdraw troops from Syria “very soon.” He’s also vowed to counter Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East. Doing both at the same time may be impossible.
Trump’s off-the-cuff aside at a rally in Ohio last week — “We’re knocking the hell out of IS. We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon” — underscored the muddled state of US policy towards the country’s civil war.
As IS terrorists lose most of their self-proclaimed caliphate, the US is losing its only professed reason to keep troops on the ground and send airstrikes into the maelstrom of the seven-year war. Yet Pentagon officials have made it clear they have no intention of pulling out and enabling President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Russia and Iran to seal their victory.
“Right now they haven’t come up with a coherent policy” in Washington, said James Jeffrey, who served as US ambassador to Iraq and Turkey and as an assistant to President George W. Bush. “Unless we’re very lucky, it will be just as flawed and based on unrealistic goals as the last two administrations.”
While Trump has remained more conciliatory towards Russian President Vladimir Putin than others in his administration — he has yet to comment personally on the US’s expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats after the nerve-gas attack on a former spy in the UK — he has made a centerpiece of his foreign policy combating what he’s called Iran’s “deadly funding, training and equipping of terrorists and militias.”
Trump has threatened to drop out of the multinational accord intended to curb Iran’s nuclear program, and his tough-on-Iran stance is expected to be reinforced by his new national security adviser John Bolton and his nominee for secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Yet Iran and its ally, the militant group Hezbollah, will gain in influence if Assad consolidates his victory in Syria. That prospect threatens neighbouring Israel and has led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn that his country would “act not just against Iran’s proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself.”
Army General Joseph Votel, the head of US Central Command, told a House committee in February that “countering Iran is not one of the coalition missions in Syria” but “Iran’s malign activities across the region pose a long-term threat to stability in this part of the world.”
From the start of Trump’s campaign for the White House, he called for an “America First” foreign policy based on avoiding costly conflicts and nation-building exercises. In his Ohio comments predicting a US departure from Syria, he said, “Let other people take care of it now.”
Yet Trump’s talk of leaving Syria soon contradicts “everything that he has said his foreign policy would stand for — except for his resistance to getting involved in new foreign wars,” said Charles Lister, director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute. Lister said a US withdrawal would be seen as “empowering Iran further in the Middle East, not weakening it.”

CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Trump, like his predecessor Barack Obama, has at times broached a deeper US engagement in the war. Both condemned Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and Trump acted almost a year ago by approving a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase after accusing Assad of using deadly sarin gas against civilians.
The official Pentagon stance remains that IS has yet to be completely wiped out in Syria even though the extremist group has been driven out from almost all of the territory it once controlled.
“We cannot allow our focus to deviate from the most important task of eliminating IS from the region,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters last week. “The IS terrorist network is more fragile than it was one year ago, but it is still presents a capable and committed threat.”
For now, at least, the US remains engaged in Syria. The Pentagon said in December that about 2,000 American troops were deployed there, four times what the Trump administration had previously disclosed. Since September 20, 2014, when operations in Syria began, the US has spent an average of $14.3 million a day on operations there and in neighbouring Iraq, according to the Pentagon.