FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
High-Level Officials Knew of Syria Pullout Beforehand
Dec. 21, 2018 (EIRNS)—In a Dec. 20 article published in the American Spectator, analyst Mark Perry gets behind the hysteria that accompanied President Donald Trump’s allegedly “sudden” decision to withdraw troops from Syria, writing that a “select group of administration officials, as well as a handful of senior military officers,” have known about the decision for a week. The matter was thoroughly discussed during a Dec. 14 phone call that the President had with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as well, according to Perry’s report.
In several recent phone calls with Trump, Erdogan, who has opposed the U.S. alliance with the Syrian Kurdish PYD/YPG, insisted that there’s no reason for the U.S. to stay in Syria to deal with Iran, as Turkey is the best hedge against that nation’s influence in the region. In this context, Perry offered details on the disagreement between European Command Commander Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who favors a troop withdrawal, and Centcom commander Gen. Joseph Votel, who doesn’t, in which Scaparrotti argues that the U.S. alliance with Turkey is far more strategically important than that with the Kurds and should not be disrupted.
Iran expert John Allen Gay, from the John Quincy Adams Society, told Perry that Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria confirms what many analysts have been saying quietly for the past year—that keeping U.S. forces in Syria looks very much like mission-creep, a way for the “administration interventionists” to argue the case for taking on Iran.
“Yet dangling a few thousand guys in between Turkish forces on one side and the Iranians, Russians and Syrians on the other, was never going to be decisive on Iran’s regional role, and it came with real risks and no endgame,”
he said. “I just don’t think there’s any appetite in the American public for a big fight with Iran anywhere, let alone in Eastern Syria.” Perry states that “a number of U.S. military officers” with whom he’s consulted, concur.
