Linkitän tähän vielä muistutukseksi wanhan uutisen vuodelta 2017, silloin kun Trump lähetti nämä samat, nyt pois vedettävät joukot Syyriaan. Tällä viittasin edellisen viestin älämölöön.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/12/observer-view-on-sending-troops-to-syria
Donald Trump’s intervention is high-risk foolhardiness
Donald Trump’s decision to
deploy hundreds of US marines in northern Syria last week has received surprisingly little attention. The deployment pitches relatively inexperienced American soldiers into the middle of a highly toxic, multi-fronted battlefield that includes combat-tested Kurdish militias, Syrian army troops, anti-regime fighters and Russian, Iranian and Turkish forces.The Trump administration says the aim is to defeat Islamic State (Isis) by assisting in the capture of the terrorists’ HQ in Raqqa.
But the simplistic idea, promulgated by Trump, that Isis and its warped jihadi ideology can be annihilated by force is foolish and naive. More dangerous still is Trump’s apparent belief that the US can focus solely on Isis while ignoring bigger questions about Syria’s future. In the space of a few chaotic weeks,
Trump has overturned eight years of Barack Obama’s cautious policy towards Syria. Unlike Iraq, where Washington is co-operating with a mostly friendly government, the US faces the hostility of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, whose removal it still officially seeks.
The US marines and special operations forces, totalling nearly 1,000, are vulnerable to attack by larger groups more accustomed to the terrain. The dire consequences, should a US soldier be taken hostage by Isis, can only be imagined. At the same time, ostensible US allies, such as Turkey, cannot be relied upon, while
Russia and Iran, Assad’s main backers, have no interest in ceding ground and influence.
Whatever Trump thinks about a new era in relations with Moscow, Russia, the real military power in the air and on the ground in Syria, will not help.
Trump’s Syrian intervention is “
fraught with risk”,
Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Damascus, told the Washington Post. “It is a huge policy change.” The potential for military escalation or “mission creep”, if and when US ground troops get into trouble, is obvious, vast and worrying. Northern Syria is a quagmire. Trump just jumped straight in.