He wants to declare that he won victory over ISIS so he can have his stupid parade
by digby
The Trump administration has frozen more than $200 million allocated for recovery efforts in Syria, it was reported Friday, a day after President Donald Trump announced he wants U.S. troops out of the country “very soon.”
The administration’s actions, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, send more mixed signals on a highly sensitive issue: Suspending the funds could alarm Saudi Arabia, Israel and others worried about growing Iranian influence in the restive region.
The White House ordered the freeze to the State Department funding following a news report the president read noting the U.S. had committed an additional $200 million to support earlier recovery efforts in Syria, a State Department official confirmed to POLITICO.
The additional funds were pledged by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in February during a meeting in Kuwait with the coalition to defeat ISIS.
Tillerson, who was fired by Trump on March 13, earlier this year introduced a strategy for the ongoing war in Syria that called for U.S. troops to stay in the country for the foreseeable future to ward off ISIS resurgence and Iran’s influence.
Trump’s declaration he wanted to soon end the U.S. presence in Syria was just the latest instance in which the president has publicly undercut or defied his foreign policy team, to the frustration and confusion of U.S. officials and America’s allies.
Apparently, he’s been on this for a while:
President Donald Trump’s unscripted remark this week about pulling out of Syria “very soon,” while at odds with his own policy, was not a one-off: For weeks, top advisers have been fretting about an overly hasty withdrawal as the president has increasingly told them privately he wants out, U.S. officials said.
Only two months ago, Trump’s aides thought they’d persuaded him that the U.S. needed to keep its presence in Syria open-ended — not only because the Islamic State group has yet to be entirely defeated, but also because the resulting power vacuum could be filled by other extremist groups or by Iran. Trump signed off on major speech in January in which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid out the new strategy and declared “it is vital for the United States to remain engaged in Syria.”
But by mid-February, Trump was telling his top aides in meetings that as soon as victory can be declared against IS, he wanted American troops out of Syria, said the officials. Alarm bells went off at the State Department and the Pentagon, where officials have been planning for a gradual, methodical shift from a military-led operation to a diplomatic mission to start rebuilding basic infrastructure like roads and sewers in the war-wracked country.
I would guess that it’s mostly because he wants to have his parade and to do that he needs to be able to declare victory somewhere.
But it could also be because he has made a deal:
If President Donald Trump makes good on his promise to get out of Syria “very soon,” one of the biggest winners will be Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
Although the Kremlin has tried to cast its involvement in Syria as primarily an air campaign, there are extensive Russian boots on the ground through military contractors, and a US withdrawal would make their job of combating forces hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad considerably easier…
And most foreign policy experts believe that vacuum would likely be further filled by Russia.
Angela Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, told CNN on Friday that “if the US were to withdraw, it seems to me the Russians would have a free hand” in Syria and the forces “fighting Assad would be weakened.”
Additionally, Stent said, a US withdrawal would help Iran, a country whose forces are fighting alongside Russians in Syria.“I do wonder if that is something the President thought about when he made that announcement,” Stent said, noting that any departure would elevate Russia’s status to make it “the main power broker in that area.”
I don’t know what he has in mind but he almost certainly wants to pretend that he’s won a war somewhere. It is very likely nothing more than that. If someone else benefits from his puerile egomania well, that’s the fallout we’ll all have to face.
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