Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper at The New York Times reported Thursday that while hundreds of U.S. troops are departing Syria, hundreds more are being inserted there. When this exchange is done, there will be about 900 U.S. troops there, compared with the 1,000 that were there when Donald Trump ordered a complete withdrawal as a favor to the Turks prior to their invasion of the Kurdish part of Syria.
Since this betrayal of the key fighters against the ultra-extremists of ISIS, hundreds of Kurds have been killed, tens of thousands have fled, and Trump has met his critics’ objections to withdrawal by deploying American troops to Syrian oil fields, saying that the U.S. should seize the oil, which would constitute looting in violation of the Nuremberg principles and the U.N. definition of aggression:
“It’s damage control,” said Alexander Bick, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who oversaw Syria issues at the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “But the damage is already done in terms of partners’ alarm at the capriciousness of U.S. policymaking, a strategic reshuffle along the Turkish border and the overwhelming sense that the United States is on its way out.”
Some of the remaining or newly arrived troops in Syria will be Special Forces assigned to carry out missions against ISIS on their own or together with Kurds, or to guard what Trump believes ought to be “our” oil.
Paul Pilar, a retired intelligence officer and now a fellow at the Center for Security Studies, writes:
In its current status as an insurgent movement and terrorist group rather than a mini-state, ISIS is in no position to exploit the oil, except perhaps in an extremely small way, in the manner of Nigerian banditry, by surreptitiously tapping into a pipeline.
This leaves open the question of what the Trump administration intends to do with the oil that it has “secured” through military occupation. That in turn raises disturbing questions of whether the United States is engaging, contrary to international law, in wartime pillaging of Syria’s oil.
But there is another disturbing implication that deserves attention especially because of how big a deal Trump is attempting to make of the blows against ISIS and how they supposedly have made the world “much safer.” From a counterterrorist perspective, taking possession of oil resources is one of the worst possible rationales for justifying a U.S. military presence in a foreign country. And in his Sunday morning performance, Trump couched the subject in one of the worst possible ways.
The Trump doctrine seems to be “Screw things up internationally as much as possible.” The better elements of the Obama foreign policy have been shattered, American leadership is widely ridiculed, alliances shredded. Meanwhile, Trump shows he clearly prefers autocrats to democrats. Saying that the oil can help the Kurds, Trump noted over the weekend that “it can help us because we should be able to take some also. And what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.”
Thus, as Pilar and others have pointed out, Trump operates as a top recruiter for ISIS by confirming what the organization’s leaders (and far less extremist leaders in the region) have said about the U.S. grabbing of resources in Muslim countries.
In fact, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the newly chosen, mostly unknown successor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—the ISIS leader killed during a pursuit by U.S. forces—can be expected to replenish his ranks using the seize-the-oil remarks as the lure.