So I saw this piece
today: “The
Pentagon could send conventional military forces into Syria”
My major problem
with it is of course that it would be an utter quagmire as the US has
no natural allies in Syria, except perhaps the Kurds and they’re
only in the Northern part of that country. We’d get bogged down
again even worse than we were in Iraq. But, an even worse problem is
that the Daesh/ISIS problem is largely solved anyway.
Let’s put this in
terms of World War II analogies. Everyone knows about the battles of
Stalingrad (Nazi Wehrmacht vs the Soviet Union), Midway (Imperial
Japanese Navy vs the US) and El
Alamein (The Nazi Afrika Corps against the British), where the
German/Japanese advances were stopped. Then there were three battles
where the Axis powers might possibly have been able to stop the
Allies and reversed the course of the war, but didn’t and victory
for the Allies was never really in doubt afterwards. These were
Kursk
(In the Soviet Union), Guadalcanal
(In the Pacific) and the Normandy Landings (France).
The situation with
Daesh right now is comfortable after the Kursk/Guadalcanal/Normandy
stage. Daesh has lost a great deal of land and people. They’re
hanging
onto a part of the city of Mosul, the Western part, but they’ve
lost much else of their Iraqi territory. There’s
even talk of their leaving Raqqa, their capitol in Syria.
Are there further
battles the US may wish to fight in the region?
The main conflict in Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar
al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, against an
array of rebel groups aiming to oust him, including some that have
been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.
This is a battle the
the US really doesn’t want to get into, even though we’re
obviously involved to some degree anyway. It’s really not clear
that we wouldn’t be better off by simply abandoning the region. The
main thing keeping us there is the oil supplied by the Gulf
monarchies and global warming/climate change is a strong motivation
to get
ourselves off of fossil fuels anyway. The Saudi Arabians see
the writing on the wall and have determined to get themselves out
of the oil-supplying business during the 2020s.
No, we don’t need
to send troops into the Mideast. We don’t need to throw US troops
into a war against Daesh that Daesh has largely lost anyway and we
really don’t want to “gin up” a conflict against
Russian/Iranian forces.