US military can't save Syria
- By Mitchell Blatt
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, September 11, 2015
|
|
|
[By Zhai Haijun/China.org.cn] |
The ramp up of Russia's intervention in Syria that fellow columnist Sumantra Maitra wrote about, came in the same week that bodies of refugees were washed up on Turkish beaches. In response, the EU is considering offering asylum for around 160,000 people.
These two events prompted renewed calls by some for the United States to take a more active role resolving the Syria crisis. An Huihou, China's former ambassador to Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and Algeria, had an op-ed published in China Daily on September 9 to the effect that "U.S., [and] EU must jointly resolve Mideast crisis."
Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who presided the invasion of Iraq, also argued that America should be more involved in Syria.
Although they come from different perspectives, they agree on why the U.S. is responsible. An wrote, "As a result of the chaos and power vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the civil war in Syria, several extremist religious groups rushed in." Cheney, in an interview with Fox News, said, "I think what's happened is, he [President Barack Obama] created a huge vacuum [by withdrawing]. … The vacuum that was created once the Caliphate was formed and so forth, and enormous violence that's gone forward in Syria has contributed directly to the refugee crisis."
Implicit is that the situation might be more stable and that ISIS wouldn't have been able to get a foothold if American troops had remained in place in Iraq. That might have been true on a short-term basis. If America still had tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, they probably could have fought off ISIS. Yet, would the U.S. military have to stay there forever? Could they stay there forever?
Already in 2010, there were political questions in both the U.S. and Iraq that derailed half-hearted attempts to extend the status of forces agreement expiring in December 2011. That large contingents of the Iraqi troops threw off their uniforms and fled, leaving U.S.-supplied vehicles to ISIS, challenges the effectiveness of years of U.S. training. If the U.S. had left a few years later, those same problems would still have been evident.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)