The U.S. can’t win the war in Syria. Biden should abandon the regime change delusion and bring our troops home.
The U.S. cannot win the war in Syria. It’s time to bring our troops home. Nearly a decade ago, America and its allies began to provide covert military support to a constellation of rebel factions in hopes they would destabilize and ultimately overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. Chastened by the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya, the U.S. and its allies also mobilized significant support for The Day After project to create a civil apparatus to prevent the ruinous collapse of Syria’s administrative state. Both plans failed. Although fighting continues on limited fronts, Syria’s ruling regime is no longer seriously threatened.
Yet under the incoming Biden administration, the U.S. will remain committed to an outcome it cannot attain: regime change. Overthrowing the al-Assad government militarily would necessitate levels of violence and a direct commitment of troops and resources that the U.S. rejected years ago, when local conditions were far more conducive to American objectives. Under Biden, the U.S. military will not use its foothold in northeast Syria to carry out purposeful operations against government forces, nor should it.
Procedural avenues for the political “transition” demanded by Washington are also inoperative. The Geneva peace process is hopelessly deadlocked, and it is essentially controlled by the Syrian government, which will not use the platform to produce a constitution that abnegates its own grip on power. After surviving an existential test in the war itself, al-Assad is equally unlikely to step down willingly during national elections in 2021.
Economic pressures are also poorly calibrated to force a change of government in Damascus. Punitive American sanctions will not seriously degrade the Syrian government’s war-fighting capacity or precipitate the collapse of the regime. They will, however, fuel elite capture and hasten the precipitous downfall of the Syrian state, the only vehicle capable of mass service delivery and social support to destitute Syrians battered by war (see: The Caesar Sanctions Won’t Get Rid of Assad, But They Will Hurt Ordinary Syrians. The Cruelty Is the Point - SPRI). All told, the only foreseeable outcomes of U.S. actions in Syria are perpetual delay, the further immiseration of 20 million Syrians, and the enrichment of the very regime and its crony supporters that Washington seeks to oust.
Somehow removing al-Assad through indirect pressure, where past military actions failed, is a preposterous goal and an instance of baseless mission creep. Fortunately, it is also irrelevant to genuine U.S. interests. Advocates of a redoubled U.S. presence in Syria wrongly conflate an open-ended military footprint with positive outcomes for the U.S. and for Syrians themselves. This is a dangerous miscalculation. Prolonging the American military engagement in Syria will only multiply the losses already incurred. Joe Biden should withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. Here’s how.
A U.S. military staging area in eastern Syria. / Department of Defense via Creative Commons
What is the U.S. actually doing in Syria?
In the absence of a coherent strategy, current U.S. efforts in Syria converge around three tenuously related objectives. The first is the overthrow of the al-Assad regime. This goal has been the unambiguous core of U.S. policy on Syria since the onset of the uprising, in 2011. That this goal has persisted to this day is evidence of how divorced U.S. policy preferences are from ground realities. Despite the much-publicized debate that took place within the Obama administration on the issue, the U.S. renounced the use of direct military force to overthrow the Syrian government. Instead, it hoped — against all evidence — that consistent pressure from an armed insurgency would destabilize Damascus and spark a managed political transition. In reality, the support yielded a combination of the worst of all possible outcomes: It fueled rebel infighting, provided a pretext for the Syrian government’s resulting crackdown, and succeeded only in prompting Russia’s decisive entry into the conflict in support of Damascus in 2015.
The U.S. continues to pursue regime change through indirect pressures, primarily in the financial and diplomatic spheres. Accordingly, the U.S. maintains that the growing desperation of the Syrian street can be instrumentalized to force al-Assad to step down in a crisis of legitimacy. This approach has two main prongs: resource denial and sanctions. In order to deny the Syrian government access to its main font of resource wealth, U.S. forces in eastern Syria now occupy the nation’s most important oil fields. The Caesar sanctions internationalized this denial strategy, and they specifically bar foreign support for the rehabilitation of Syria’s oil infrastructure. The approach locks in an unstable economic status quo in which the Syrian state’s capacity to provide basic services is dwindling, forcing ordinary Syrians to bear a heavier direct burden as subsidies disappear and inflation runs rampant. Ruined by conflict, isolation, and de-industrialization, Syria produces almost nothing, and it is heavily reliant upon imports it cannot afford. So worrying is Syria’s macroeconomic decline that licit foreign exports are dwarfed by the value of illegal narcotics that leave Syria for the wider region. Despite the enormity of these conditions, it strains credulity to believe the suffering of ordinary Syrians will spur changes in al-Assad’s behavior.
The second objective — and the only one with a fig leaf of Congressional approval — is to combat ISIS. Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) is limited primarily to air strikes and ground operations against Islamic State-linked cells in Syria’s eastern rural hinterlands. Yet the Islamic State was eradicated as a territorial entity in March 2019. OIR’s footprint also presumably supports unrelated air strikes on Al-Qaeda-linked targets in northwest Syria. However, the cohesive, battle-hardened, and strategically entrenched radical groups in northwestern Syria’s Idleb province — numbering tens of thousands — do not factor in any clear way in long-term U.S. strategy, except insofar as their tactical strength confounds Russia by denying Syrian government forces territory.
President Barack Obama delivers an address on Syria, on Sept. 10, 2013. / The White House
The third U.S. goal in Syria is the extension of global campaigns to contain Iran and confront Russia. By withholding reconstruction support and political legitimacy, the U.S. aims to burden Tehran and Moscow with the associated financial and political costs of continuing to support a Syrian pariah state. Both Iran and Russia have achieved major strategic objectives by ensuring the survival of their Damascus allies. Despite the vital support they provide, neither Russia nor Iran is capable of forcing al-Assad to step down. The mistaken belief that either will somehow do so in exchange for American or European reconstruction aid seriously misconstrues their relations with Damascus and their responsiveness to the Syrian street.
At best, only one of the current U.S. goals is both achievable and in-sync with genuine interests: preventing an ISIS resurgence. Yet this does not warrant a continuing U.S. military occupation of Syria, and it can be achieved on a sustainable basis only by local forces themselves. The OIR mission states as much: “The Coalition strategy acknowledges that the best forces to win the fight against ISIS are local forces.” It’s time they put this into practice.
U.S. military operations in Syria have little legal basis
U.S. military operations in Syria have flimsy legal basis — if any at all. The U.S.’s counter-ISIS activities under OIR are justified on the same flawed 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force that underpin the global war on terror more broadly.1
The post-Sept. 11 AUMFs exceeded their original intent and any reasonable shelf life long ago. They also give no legal justification for military confrontation with Iran-backed forces in Syria. Using Syria as a battlefield to contain Iran (or Russia) conflates two distinct U.S. policy preferences. One of them — counter-terror operations — has legal basis, albeit a tenuous one. The other — military operations against Iran conducted in Syria — has none. Currently, the U.S. garrison at the isolated border outpost at Al-Tanf, in rural south-central Syria, cuts off the Damascus-Baghdad highway. Doing so does not substantially contribute to any legal U.S. actions in Syria. It is also evidence of the mission creep that underscores the U.S.’s global military presence, as deployed forces use existing access to generate new, self-justifying missions.
Equally problematic is the fact that unilateral U.S. sanctions amount to a form of collective punishment of the Syrian population, a crime under international law. By forcing civilians to bear the predictable outcomes of sanctions and a strategy of resource denial, the U.S. has made the Syrian populace the focal point of a policy designed to pressure al-Assad. Yet there is no indication whatsoever that Damascus will divert resources from a conflict it views as existential in order to maintain discretionary social spending — for wages, price supports, or more effective monetary policy to prop up the flagging currency — to ameliorate the suffering of a population that has no means of voicing dissent. In 2018, the UN special rapporteur on the impact of sanctions determined that U.S. sanctions in Syria are illegal.
Obama speaks with Saudi foreign minister Saud Al-Faisal during a meeting of Arab coalition leaders in the fight against Islamic State in 2014. / The White House
Worse yet, the Department of Defense’s maximal interpretation of the legal right to “collective self-defense” makes a mockery of an important legal principle and creates the risk of unnecessary foreign military escalation. Russia, Iran, and Turkey all maintain military forces in Syria that have, at times, engaged U.S. personnel. Collective self-defense is recognized as the right of states to defend other states. It is enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. However, in an 2 Oct. 2018 letter to Congress, DOD explained that it, alone among nations, extends “unit self-defense to foreign or irregular partner forces,” meaning that as a rule of engagement, “U.S. forces are permitted to defend partner forces from attack or imminent threat of attack with necessary and appropriate force.”2 Critically, this legal cover is “not... limited to groups covered by the 2001 AUMF or other congressional authorizations for the use of force.”
This is not merely abstract legal reasoning on the part of the Pentagon. DOD has already invoked its radical interpretation of collective self-defense to justify attacks on Russian and Syrian government forces. In a report required by the Fiscal Year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, DOD lays out the rationale for military strikes against pro-Syrian government forces. On 7 Feb. 2018, U.S. forces killed as many as 300 Syrian soldiers and Russian Wagner Group military contractors in retaliation for an attack on a position held by Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). DOD justified the lethal airstrikes under “collective self-defense.” The Department of Defense had previously invoked the same argument in June 2017 to justify downing a Syrian government jet.
The default option is pointless suffering
The leading lights of the Beltway think tank establishment continue to advocate for military escalation to achieve impossible outcomes in Syria (see: Brookings Is Wrong about Syria. Give the National Security Elite Less Power, Not More - SPRI). Their recommendations include: a troop surge, heightened military spending, larger arms transfers to partner forces, more punishing sanctions, and escalation against Russia and Iran in a quixotic hope that change will somehow come by staying the course.
The incoming Biden administration will also equate force with leverage. This false notion has led to an uninterrupted string of bad decisions on Syria. Anthony Blinken, recently tapped to be Biden’s secretary of state, was one of the Obama administration’s most vocal proponents of U.S. military action in Syria. Though contrite over the U.S.’s past failures, Blinken has vowed a continuation of current Syria polices, and he recently described the Caesar sanctions as a “very important tool” to shape the conflict, as if the damage they inflict is a measure of the leverage they will generate. Biden himself has suggested that a deployment of at least one thousand troops above current estimated levels will be needed in Syria to carry out counter-terror operations alone.
Such conventional wisdom has prevailed since the Syrian uprising was militarized, except for a brief episode in October 2019, when Donald Trump partially withdrew U.S. forces from border areas in northeast Syria to make way for a Turkish incursion against the predominantly Kurdish SDF. However, Trump reversed course after U.S. war planners convinced him that U.S. troops could occupy Syria’s largest oil fields as a point of leverage against Damascus and Tehran. Since then, the U.S. has maintained “a lot more” than the 200 troops in Syria, the number apparently agreed to by Trump. This is in addition to an unknown number of special operations forces and CIA personnel.
Donald Trump delivers remarks during a medal ceremony with a K-9 used in special forces operations in Syria. / The White House
The U.S. military establishment and members of Congress from both parties have been apoplectic over Trump’s approach to Syria. Most have equated Trump’s actions with a betrayal of Syria’s Kurds, the most important partner forces on the ground in Syria. Without question, the U.S. owes a debt of responsibility to Syrians, including the long-neglected Kurdish communities of the northeast. Yet on all sides of the conflict, there are Syrians who view past U.S. blundering as the cause of their misery: be it the Obama administration’s tepid support for rebels, which escalated the conflict but achieved no meaningful outcome; its failure to respond to grievous chemical weapons attacks, despite its explicit threats; or the regionally destabilizing consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. All of these arguments have merit. Yet proponents of U.S. military action in Syria have never reckoned with the actual costs borne by Syrians themselves. At best, humanitarian intervention and the interests of actual Syrians have been superficial justifications marshaled in support of bad decisions made in the interest of misguided realpolitik.
More importantly, none of these grievances justifies the continuing U.S. military involvement in Syria, which has exceeded its formal legal basis, is creeping ever-further from its mandate, and will cause real harm. Those who push for escalation in Syria reason that the al-Assad regime cannot rule legitimately, given its culpability for some of the worst abuses of the conflict, on top of its violent, 50-year authoritarian rule. Yet they fail to account for the wanton suffering that will result from continued aimless conflict, which is made all the more callous by the lack of realistic goals on the part of the U.S.. By denying the Syrian government access to vital oil and wheat fields, the U.S. military magnifies food insecurity in the rest of the country and impoverishes the Syrian state. Although this sustains a favorable status quo in areas governed by the Western-backed Self-Administration in the northeast, which rules over some 2.4 million people, it punishes the 13.6 million Syrians who live in areas under government control — to no significant effect. The U.S. has never advocated for the partition of Syria, and Biden has disavowed “meddl[ing]” in Syrian political dynamics. If his administration holds true to this, the U.S. will, at best, accelerate the collapse of the government in Damascus and forestall what is likely to be a painful rapprochement between the regions.
Nonetheless, given the open-ended nature of the forever wars, it is not impossible that U.S. forces will preside over Syria’s northeast long enough for a de facto autonomous Kurdish region to emerge. This would be a realization of Syrian Kurds’ often-downplayed aspiration for self-rule, but it too would have significant ramifications. A similar outcome in Iraqi Kurdistan was achieved through 13 years under a punishing UN sanctions regime that was among the most ruinous in history. Iraqi federalism coalesced only after the U.S.’s disastrous and illegal military invasion to unseat Saddam Hussein. Replicating this scenario in Syria would immiserate the remainder of the country by depriving the vast majority of the Syrian population of the nation’s resource wealth. This is equally true of the unlikely scenario that northeast Syria, under Kurdish control, will unite with its ideological enemies among the remnants of the Turkish-influeced Syrian opposition in the country’s northwest.
It remains to be established that any U.S. strategy for Syria will right historical injustices or reduce Syrians’ misery. More importantly, such an outcome is not even within the purview of current U.S. goals. The ground realities in Syria are daunting, and the U.S. political establishment’s record of navigating them is damning. Twelve million Syrians are currently displaced. Nine in ten people in Syria are impoverished. Famine is on the horizon. The burden of proof now lies with Syria hawks, who have serially failed to demonstrate that the U.S.’s goals in the country will serve the real interests of either Americans or Syrians. Instead, they have chosen to recommit to an approach for which victory is not an option and the only sure outcome is greater suffering for an already exhausted civilian population.
A better Syria policy
Coordinate with the SDF for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and DOD-contracted personnel from Syria. The Self-Administration, which governs northeast Syria, must make its own choices, but its leadership is likely to pursue some combination of rapprochement with Damascus, severance of ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and detente with rival Kurdish parties (i.e. KNC) whose buy-in may alleviate Turkish security concerns and stabilize its position vis-à-vis Iraqi Kurdistan.
Do not prevent the Self-Administration from reaching an administrative accord with Damascus, if it so chooses. The Self-Administration leadership remains nominally committed to a territorially unified, decentralized Syrian state, and it wields significant leverage via its formidable military capacity and control over Syria’s resource wealth, but it is also vulnerable to military incursion by Turkey. Damascus needs wheat and oil from the northeast, but its military forces are concentrated on other frontlines, and their capacity is severely degraded after nearly a decade of constant warfare. Soft gains such as social and cultural rights for Kurds are important and achievable. Hard gains will be tougher to win. Limited federalism under a decentralization framework dictated by Damascus (i.e. a repealed and replaced Law 107) would likely fall short of their demands for Syria’s future, but it is the only readily foreseeable approach that will satisfy some key needs of both the Syrian government and the Self-Administration.
Recognize that Bashar al-Assad has evaded military overthrow and likely will not step down. This does not require diplomatic recognition or political detente on the part of the West. However, conditioning a change in U.S. policy and the provision of needed humanitarian and stabilization assistance upon al-Assad’s ouster means that Syrians will suffer needlessly in anticipation of an improbable outcome which the U.S. is not meaningfully pursuing.
The international community should seek to reduce needless suffering, restore vital state capacity, and prevent a refugee exodus. To achieve this, the Biden administration should trade “more for more.” Greater levels of targeted non-humanitarian assistance conditioned upon access and non-interference by the regime can be traded for incremental relief from sanctions and international political isolation. Importantly, aid capture can be averted only by circumventing the Syrian regime, not by hoping to employ funding as leverage directly.
Do not allow the deadlock in northwest Syria to become a pretext to sustain unrelated troop deployments in the northeast or at Al-Tanf. Syria’s northwest is home to the remnants of armed opposition factions and radical groups, some of which are genuine concerns for the international community. However, the region is well beyond the remit of U.S. forces currently in the country. Resolving the status of northwest Syria will be a test of multilateral negotiations by Turkey, Russia, and Iran, likely under pressure from Damascus. It has no bearing on the U.S. presence elsewhere in Syria.
Defer responsibility for counter-terror operations to regional partners and allies, including Turkey and Iraq, rather than open-ended U.S. military deployments. The U.S.’s pursuit of the “enduring defeat of ISIS” is an invitation to permanent occupation.
Resolve the status of ISIS-linked detainees. Al-Hol camp hosts approximately 65,000 residents, the vast majority of whom are civilians who were displaced from the last territories held by ISIS. Thousands of ISIS fighters are detained in other other prisons. Altogether, these populations are a burden on the SDF and a potential bargaining chip in the hands of Damascus. The fate of detainees and camp residents must be resolved legally and humanely. It is past time for the U.S. to end forever wars and indefinite detention without trial for terror suspects. Pressure countries of origin to repatriate their nationals and provide support for trials, rehabilitation, and counter-radicalism for combatants. Reintegration support will be critical for families linked to ISIS, particularly those from Iraq and Syria. However, it is critical to facilitate resettlement options for stigmatized civilians who have justly founded fears of reprisal.
De-couple Iran and Syria policies. Removing Iranian forces and Shia influence from Syria — a key plank of the “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran — is an impossible goal. Using Syria as a battlefield to contain Iran punishes Syrians needlessly.
Use Syria as a test case of cooperation with Russia in pursuit of mutual goals — not confrontation. Russia seeks to unify the Self-Administration with Damascus-held areas, and its chief political interest in Syria is now stability, not uncompromising regime dominance. The U.S. and Russia can build mutual good-will in Syria. Cooperation on vital interests can follow, such as nuclear nonproliferation, a globalized Green New Deal, and regional flash points such as Libya.
- During Congressional testimony, James Mattis argued against congressional challenges to the laws, which are now so out-of-date that they have covered multiple generations of conflict. “Repealing the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs would only cause unnecessary policy and legal uncertainty, which could lead to additional litigation and public doubt.” See: https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/1358069/mattis-military-force-authorizations-remain-sound/.
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- No other country has interpreted collective self-defense in this way, and the ICJ rejected this reading in Nicaragua v United States. ↩