The US pulled out of Syria (or at least pulled out its largest and most visible forces) in 2019, you might remember the news coverage of this event being "we're abandoning the Kurds to be killed by ISIS!" This basically forced the Kurdish militias to adapt or die, and most including the YPG ended up signing an agreement with Assad to maintain some autonomy but give up on total independence.
That withdraw never really happened, Defence One or one of those weird military blogs has a good interview with Trump's former Syrian envoy about what happened. The Kurds are the singular instance of US support for violence that I'm pretty much alright with. I have a personal connection to it but I don't think that affects my judgment.
EDIT:
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
TIL, it's also not worrying at all that a military official could just straight up say "we lied to the president in order to pursue a war he didn't sign off on" and nobody really cared.
Yeah which I honestly thought was probably the best outcome for everyone. So idk, I guess if he was an op he didn’t do a very good job furthering Americas interests in the region.
The US pulled out of Syria (or at least pulled out its largest and most visible forces) in 2019, you might remember the news coverage of this event being "we're abandoning the Kurds to be killed by ISIS!" This basically forced the Kurdish militias to adapt or die, and most including the YPG ended up signing an agreement with Assad to maintain some autonomy but give up on total independence.
That withdraw never really happened, Defence One or one of those weird military blogs has a good interview with Trump's former Syrian envoy about what happened. The Kurds are the singular instance of US support for violence that I'm pretty much alright with. I have a personal connection to it but I don't think that affects my judgment.
EDIT:
www defenseone com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/
TIL, it's also not worrying at all that a military official could just straight up say "we lied to the president in order to pursue a war he didn't sign off on" and nobody really cared.
Liberals bragged about this when this interview came out, actually.
Yeah which I honestly thought was probably the best outcome for everyone. So idk, I guess if he was an op he didn’t do a very good job furthering Americas interests in the region.
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