1/ Trump's abandonment of the Kurds is the precipitating cause of this pending disaster in Syria, but we shouldn't let the foreign policy establishment gloss over years of hubris and bad policy in Syria (that all led to this moment) and avoid a real accounting of what went wrong.
2/ First, contrary to the belief of much of the establishment, there was no magic moment in 2011/12 when U.S. could have put our muscle behind the rebels to topple Assad. From the start, Iran/Russia had more at stake than us, & they were always going to do more than us to win.
3/ But our hubris led to us to believe that tepid, mostly secret support to the rebels could do the job. All it did was prolong the war, without ever being enough to help them win. We dragged the war on needlessly, and misled the rebels about what we were prepared to do.
4/ Our real interest all along was defeating ISIS. And with the Turks unwilling to help, and our justifiable reluctance to send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into Syria (creating another Iraq-like disaster), we rightly turned to the Kurds and the SDF to do the job.
5/ But we knew that this would enrage the Turks (and it did), but we just closed our eyes to the coming political nightmare. We had 1 (yes, ONE) diplomat in northern Syria for much of 2015-17 trying to figure out the politics of post-ISIS northern Syria.
6/ Had we had less hubris and focused on ISIS's defeat AND worked from the start with Kurds/Arabs/Turks to create a post-ISIS governance structure, we could have at least had a shot to avoid both the prolonged nightmare of the civil war and the coming slaughter of the Kurds.
7/ But much of DC refuses to learn the lessons of Iraq. U.S. intervention in the region tends to make things worse, especially when we lots of military tools and not enough diplomatic tools.
Yes, Trump will have blood on his hands, but this disaster was years in the making.
Yes, Trump will have blood on his hands, but this disaster was years in the making.
