Now that the U.S. Appears to be Leaving Syria, a Real Political Settlement can be Reached

With Trump's announcement yesterday that he will withdraw 2,000 special operations troops from northern Syria the prestige press is emitting its expected animal wail, encapsulated as follows by The New York Times editorial board ("Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming. Just Ask His Advisers."):

An American withdrawal would also be a gift to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, who has been working hard to supplant American influence in the region, as well as to Iran, which has also expanded its regional footprint. It would certainly make it harder for the Trump administration to implement its policy of ratcheting up what it calls “maximum pressure” on Iran.

David Sanger, The New York Times' principal national security reporter, amplifies this "Great Game" wail in his "A Strategy of Retreat in Syria, With Echoes of Obama":

In fact, as recently as Monday, as Mr. Trump was contemplating getting out, the State Department insisted that America was not going anywhere — and Mr. Assad would be making a big mistake if he thought the United States was going to leave.

“I think if that’s his strategy, he is going to have to wait a very long time,” James F. Jeffrey, the United States special representative for Syria, said in an address at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

As it turns out, Mr. Assad will have to wait only about a month for the American withdrawal to be complete.

In his speech this week, Mr. Jeffrey made an impassioned case that the civil war in Syria was not just about the half-million people dead, nor the 11 million others who have been driven from their homes.

It has “become a great-power conflict,” he said, with Americans, Russians, Iranians, Turks and Israelis all involved. Any American policy, he said, “cannot focus only on the internal conflict.” He added later than “Iran has to get out of there,” meaning Iranian ground troops.

What goes unmentioned is any legal basis for the continued presence of U.S. troops on Syrian soil. The Hajin pocket, the last remaining toehold for ISIS in Syria, has been captured. The Times claims 20,000 - 30,000 ISIS fighters there, but that's ludicrous, an embarrassing display of "fake news" to gin up support for continued participation in the Great Game.

The deal is not yet done though. Don't count out the military just yet, as Mark Landler, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt report in "Trump Withdraws U.S. Forces From Syria, Declaring ‘We Have Won Against ISIS’":

The abrupt, chaotic nature of the move — and the opposition it immediately provoked on Capitol Hill and beyond — raised questions about how Mr. Trump will follow through with the full withdrawal. Even after the president’s announcement, officials said, the Pentagon and State Department continued to try to talk him out of it.

“We have won against ISIS,” Mr. Trump declared in a video posted Wednesday evening on Twitter, adding, “Our boys, our young women, our men — they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.”

“We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they want it,” he said, pointing a finger skyward, referring to American troops who had been killed in battle.

The White House did not provide a timetable or other specifics for the military departure. “We have started returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. Defense Department officials said that Mr. Trump had ordered that the withdrawal be completed in 30 days.

The decision brought a storm of protest in Congress, even from Republican allies of Mr. Trump’s like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who said he had been “blindsided.” The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, suggested that the president had acted out of “personal or political objectives” rather than national security interests.

[snip]

Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, and Brett H. McGurk, the American envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, fiercely protested the military withdrawal, administration officials said. Both argued that the Islamic State would never have been defeated without the Kurdish fighters, whom General Votel said suffered many casualties and always lived up to their word.

Officials said General Votel argued that withdrawing American troops would leave the Kurds vulnerable to attack from Turkey, which has warned it will soon launch an offensive against them. It would also cement the survival of Mr. Assad, whose ouster had long been an article of faith in Washington.

The Pentagon said in a statement that it would “continue working with our partners and allies to defeat” the Islamic State wherever it operated.

More on the humiliation of the odious McGurk, one of the architects of the caliphate, from Rod Nordland in "U.S. Exit Seen as a Betrayal of the Kurds, and a Boon for ISIS":

Brett McGurk, Mr. Trump’s special envoy in the fight against the Islamic State, said in a briefing last week that the fight was far from over.

“If we’ve learned one thing over the years, enduring defeat of a group like this means you can’t just defeat their physical space and then leave,” he said. “You have to make sure the internal security forces are in place to ensure that those gains, security gains, are enduring.”

He did not mince words about what an American withdrawal would mean. “It would be reckless if we were just to say, well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now,” he said. “I think anyone who’s looked at a conflict like this would agree with that.”

Efforts to reach Mr. McGurk on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Not all is lost for the YPG. The PKK collaboration with the United States and Saudi Arabia was doomed to begin with. Rojava has a greater chance of survival as a (new) constitutionally protected federal territory within Syria.

As the Russians say, now that the U.S. appears to be going, a real political settlement can be reached.