Declaring victory and bringing the defeated troops home is absolutely the right move in Syria. The same thing should be done in Afghanistan and Iraq.
President Donald Trump’s decision to declare ISIS defeated and order a full US withdrawal from Syria has been met with anger and disbelief by the Washington establishment that hoped for regime change in Damascus.
Trump declared victory over Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) on Wednesday morning, as media reported that some 2,000 or so US troops will leave Syria within 60 to 100 days. Though Trump had openly spoken about wanting to leave Syria back in March, senior officials in his administration have said that US forces would stay there indefinitely.
One satirical news site perhaps put it best, “reporting” that both the left and the right were taking aim at Trump for “breaking with the longstanding American tradition of remaining in Middle Eastern countries indefinitely.”
Cue another round of “the troops weren’t defeated, they just weren’t permitted to win.” Such statements reflect a total ignorance of what war is. The USA completely failed to obtain its military objectives. Despite many, many threats, Assad is still standing and the US-Israeli proxy troops of the Islamic State and the Kurds were repeatedly defeated by the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah-Russian alliance. All the US forces have accomplished is to prevent the complete destruction of their Syrian allies.
Like it or not, the USA is an empire in deep decline, and the sooner AIPAC realizes this and stops trying to parasitically make use of the US military forces to accomplish objectives it is incapable of accomplishing, the better it will be for everyone, especially Israel. Israel faces its own problems of a corrupt and declining military, as Martin van Creveld has been pointing out since before its failure to defeat Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War.
But at least Israel can defend its own borders. The much-vaunted US military cannot even manage that.