Charlie Avery | 20/05/2018
“I want to get out”,
stated President Trump in a White House press conference in early April, “I want to bring our troops back
home”. He was referring to his decision to withdraw American ground forces from
Syria as the “task” of defeating Islamic State draws towards an apparent
conclusion. Mr Trump, who generally opposes US military intervention as part of
his ‘America First’ approach to foreign policy, indicated to aides that he
wanted all two thousand US troops currently stationed in Syria to return home
within six months.
However, just under
two weeks later, the President had authorised a fresh round of missile strikes
against Syrian government forces. This came days after President Bashar
al-Assad, a close ally of Moscow, unleashed a suspected chemical attack against
civilians in the rebel-held town of Douma, located just outside Damascus.
Such
a sudden, and dramatic change in Trump’s position on Syria mirrors the events
of almost exactly a year before, when he ordered strikes against the Shayrat
airbase, following a sarin gas poisoning. In both cases, his statements were
highly emotive, invoking images of innocence and family, justifying bombing
raids on the grounds that such atrocities cannot be allowed to go unanswered.
This time, though, it has triggered a stronger commitment from Washington to
“sustain” military pressure against the Syrian regime.
Yet evidence of mass
executions, torture and attacks against civilian targets is already widespread.
According to humanitarian organisations from Amnesty International to the UN’s
Human Rights Council, who have documented the seven-year conflict since it
began, Syrian government forces have committed war crimes since as early as
2012.
The U-turn of early
April was simply the latest development in an ever-unfolding history of
American policy in Syria, a history characterised by inconsistency. This trend
spans, not merely the seven years during which the complex and bloody conflict
has ravaged the country, but seven decades of American interest in the Middle
Eastern nation.
Democracy
Having taken a
“special interest” in the nascent Syrian state after the Second World War, the
US played an active role in training the newly formed national army. However,
as regional tensions escalated in response to emergent conflicts in Palestine,
all military support was withdrawn, for fears of American expertise and
weaponry being used against Israel, their favoured new ally.
After supporting
democracy in Syria since its independence in 1946, the Truman administration
helped orchestrate a coup d’état three years later, replacing the
democratically elected al-Quwatli with army commander Husni al-Za’im. al-Za’im,
part of the Alawi minority, offered to further Washington’s strategic regional
interests, namely acquiescing to peace talks with Israel and banning Communism.
Most notably, however, he agreed to the installation of the trans-Arabia
pipeline on Syrian territory, something his fiercely nationalistic predecessor
would never have sanctioned.
Some historians have
traced the origins of today’s civil war back to the 1949 coup, pointing to the
resultant dominance of Alawite military leaders within Syria’s turbulent
political affairs. Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the
University of Oklahoma, Joshua Landis, writes: “The reason there is a civil war
today is because much of the Sunni majority rose up in protest and wanted to
get rid of this Alawite military dictatorship”
Islamic
fundamentalism
In recent history,
American Middle Eastern policy has been characterised by its staunch opposition
to Islamic extremism, notably using Syria as a location for some of its
infamous ‘Black Sites’ during the War On
Terror. In coordination with the Assad regime,
suspected terrorists were beaten, tortured and indefinitely detained for
information which was allegedly passed to US officials on the hunt for Muslim
extremists.
Although its stance
upon radical Islam is now steadfast, documents uncovered from an elite CIA-MI6 working group in 1957 reveal that the former
intended to “augment tension” in Syria through the militarisation of “political
factions”. The strategy was later employed with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan
under the Reagan administration. In this instance, “factions” referred to the
Islamist Muslim Brotherhood which, at the time, remained a largely peaceful
organisation. US intelligence officials had hoped to use the context of violent
unrest to justify a foreign intervention from pro-Western Jordan or Iraq, so as
to destabilise the anti-Western Ba’athist-Communist government.
Despite the fact
that the plans were subsequently cancelled, the documents shed light upon the
America’s conflicted record regarding Syrian self-determination and its historical stance towards
radical Islamic groups.
Timber Sycamore
Jumping forward to
2012, in spite of Obama’s initially firm stance against further covert
intervention in the escalating civil war, the US changed its course of action
once again. He sanctioned a CIA program (codenamed Timber Sycamore) which
trained and supplied arms to rebel groups, aiming to blunt the advances of the
Syrian regime.
Although it brought
fleeting periods of success, the $1-billion-dollar plan has proven vastly
ineffective, particularly since the relentless, overt Russian bombing campaign
began in 2015. Critics point to the fact that Timber Sycamore has flooded the
Middle Eastern black market with weapons, allowing guns to fall into the hands
of al-Qaeda affiliates like the Nusra Front who often fight alongside rebel
forces. The program was cancelled by Trump last year.
Charles Lister, a
Syria expert at the Middle East Institute, concluded that the Obama
administration “never gave it the necessary resources or space to determine the
dynamics of the battlefield. They were drip-feeding opposition groups just
enough to survive but never enough to become dominant actors.”
Few commentators can
predict what the Trump administration’s next move will be: “his preferences are still
unpredictable in the extreme”. Examining Syria’s relations with the United States over the years only
serves to confirm such uncertainty. As George Bernard Shaw rather poignantly
summarised, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.".
