In their guest essay in the New York Times (NYT), Trita Parsi and Adam N. Weinstein, vice president and research fellow at the Quincy Institute, respectively, find U.S. President Joe Biden's proclamation that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would end "an era of major military operations to remake other countries" to be incomplete at best. Only if its forces leave Iraq can the U.S. be considered in the nation-building business in other countries, according to the authors. They are so very right! However, at the same time, their argument is also incomplete. The U.S. has been trying to redraft the map of the Middle East drawn by the Franco-British union in the early 20th century.
Parsi and Weinstein rightfully purport that “the specter of similar criticism over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will weigh heavily on Mr. Biden” unless he acts quickly and pulls the U.S. soldiers out of Iraq because “attacks on U.S. troops will inevitably increase” soon as a result of provocations by Iran-supported militias.
The authors skillfully confute all the arguments of proponents of staying in Iraq, including that the U.S. needs to remain in the country to collect intelligence on Daesh and al-Qaida and that it prevents terrorists from filling any "vacuum."
“But the truth is that the U.S. presence has helped fuel insurgencies in Iraq. Al-Qaida, and later, the Islamic State (Daesh), were able to take advantage of their gains against the state and the chaos that ensued.”
Regrettably, the authors stop there. Nevertheless, the very same arguments against the U.S. military presence in Iraq can be applied to the U.S. presence in Syria.
After 9/11, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, with the support of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, rolled up their sleeves to do exactly what former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had warned against: establishing a “military-industrial complex” that would put military and industrial powers in the hands of politicians. Eisenhower had warned such a system could potentially be disastrous for civil society. Yet, these neoconservatives, hell-bent on collecting virtue and power in one hand, had many levers they could pull, including late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his close ties with al-Qaida. Those were the magic words that could open any political gate and cement any political gap. They still are, and Giorgio Spagnol, in his brilliant article titled “Joe Biden and Neoconservatism” in Academia Diplomatica Europaea of the European Institute of International Relations (IERI), shows how "the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction" have been handed down from one president to another, from former U.S. President George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Biden.
In the piece, he writes: “In 2019, Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, along with Antony Blinken (current Secretary of State) wrote an article urging the U.S. to abandon Trump’s America First policies and continue the policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Specifically, they called for a policy of ‘preventive diplomacy and deterrence’ against ‘U.S. adversaries,’ calling for containment of Russia and China ... The infamous Brett McGurk, who in his tenure as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State (Daesh) insisted on the support of PKK-related militias in Syria, is also a neocon, and started his career in the George W. Bush administration. He is the Middle East czar in Biden’s National Security Council. At the same time, there are serious anti-Chinese players in the Biden administration, particularly Kurt Campbell, who is the so-called China czar.”
These people know that Afghanistan is not an important gateway for Russia to “the warm seas” as it was for the former Soviet Union. (Now there are many countries in between that could be used as a hurdle to stop Russia. Remember the latest trial in Kazakhstan!) Instead of Afghanistan, Russian can use Iran, Iraq or Syria. In addition, Iran, with its own religious regime, has stood out as a major threat to Israel, while Iraq and Syria, with their Shiite majorities, have been spreading the Iranian threat.
Meanwhile, Kurds in these countries have been the victims of discriminatory abuse for a long, long time, as well as in Turkey. Giving your child a Kurdish name was banned until only two decades ago. Even though the Kurds are constituents of modern Turkey, they have not been allowed to participate in national politics as an ethnic entity, but, rather, as members of the nation. In Iran, Iraq and Syria, not even this opportunity has been afforded to the Kurdish people.
Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Syria's Hafez Assad (dictator and father of current regime leader, Bashar Assad) denied the registration of Kurdish citizens hailing from Iraq and Syria. The PKK terrorist organization, which historically operated throughout southeastern Turkey but is now primarily based in the mountainous regions of northern Iraq, assisted McGurk and his co-conspirators when they devised a plan to dismember Iraq and Syria.
McGurk served in senior national security positions under Bush, Obama and Trump. He was also the special presidential envoy for the anti-Daesh coalition. He was appointed to this post by Obama in October 2015 and was retained in that role by the Trump administration until 2018. In January 2021, Biden chose McGurk as the National Security Council's coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. Now he's back to carry out his redesign of the maps of Iraq and Syria. He would love to include Turkey in his cartographic scheme.
One of the frequently unasked questions about Daesh is how this haphazardly thrown-together group of Osama bin Laden supporters (mostly jobless goons, motivated by adventurism, guns, a few dollars, a killing spree by Russian soldiers and the knowledge that the conscripts of puppet regimes were not fighting but trying to run back to Moscow or Iran) was able to spread in Iraq and Syria, reaching all the way to Yemen, Sudan and Libya? When those assets were no longer useful once the war led by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher against the Soviet occupation ended, and bin Laden turned against the hands that once fed him, the Bushes – father and son – started their own war against terror. With bin Laden dead, it was thought his followers would dissipate. However, apparently, that was not the case. In short, whenever or wherever McGurk and his ilk needed an enemy to justify the presence of the G-I Joes, al-Qaida would materialize there.
Parsi and Weinstein, in their NYT article, posited that the U.S. presence has helped fuel insurgencies in Iraq. Accordingly, al-Qaida, and later, Daesh, they wrote, were able to take advantage of the chaos that ensued after the U.S. forces entered the country. Let’s assume this is correct for Iraq. But how can you account for the emergence of Daesh in Syria? How do you explain the mighty U.S. armed forces, with their F-16s and assortment of weapons, and the SDF (a separatist umbrella group dominated by the PKK's Syrian affiliates, the YPG and PYD), which was supplied tens of thousands of trailers of inventory, failing to prevail against a few hundred al-Qaida remnants?
Trump couldn’t explain this either and, as a result, asked McGurk to leave the government and ordered U.S. forces to leave Syria, as they would in Afghanistan and Iraq. He agreed with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the Turkish military could take care of what McGurk used to call Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida's Syria branch.
Thanks to the U.S. electorate, Trump lost the elections and consequently, McGurk resumed his work in Syria and Daesh for al-Qaida reappeared. Now, the Biden-Kamala Harris team is back in the Situation Room at the White House to watch live the extermination of al-Qaida leaders in their hideouts in Syria.
So, to answer authors Parsi and Weinstein's (and the NYT's) inquiry about why the U.S. troops are still in Iraq (and Syria), to use Biden's words, "remaking those countries is not over yet."
