Trump right to pull out of Middle-East quagmire

Fifty US soldiers have been pulled from observation posts within the northern Syria safe zone. Picture: AFP

For more than a week there has been a heated and angry reaction to US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull back 50 soldiers from observation posts within the northern Syria safe zone.

Yet neither the European Union nor the United Nations — indeed no country — has offered to send a single soldier into harm’s way to protect the Syrian Kurds, let alone to continue to eliminate Islamic State cells. Not one.

This despite the EU bearing the brunt of the ISIS terror campaign. And it is the EU that benefited the most in terms of security from the US-led fight against ISIS. As for the UN, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been too busy meeting Greta Thunberg and drafting the new green deal to redistribute Western wealth to poor nations, among them, remarkably, China. At least former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon sent an angry letter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi — not that the terror boss quaked in his dishdasha. Indeed the note became a running joke among the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Nonetheless, Guterres needs to focus on this more pressing issue.

The policy advisers and think tanks arguing for the US to stay in Syria are the same people who have kept the US and the rest of us in Afghanistan for 18 years. These are the same advisers who called for regime change in Syria. Imagine that nightmare. These people suffer from strategic paralysis and group-think perhaps triggered by the so-called Trump derangement syndrome.

They are overlooking key factors. First, the decision will not benefit Iran, Russia or Syria. Russia has been Syria’s ally since 1946. That will not change. After eight years of war Syria is wrecked. It will be Russia, not the US, dragged down by propping up Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad. Trump has not stopped targeting Western-hating extremists, or removed key Middle East-based strategic assets. The US has thousands of troops, naval facilities, airfields and bases across the region. Iran’s biggest threat remains the US. And during all this time Israel has been pounding Iranian-linked targets, all of which will continue.

Second, as Scott Morrison rightly points out, Turkey needs to be responsible for deciding to invade Syria. It is, after all, Turkey’s backyard. That said, the YPG (a northern Syrian Kurdish militia) is tied to the socialist Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, designated a terrorist group by the EU, NATO, Britain, the US and Japan. Since 1984 the PKK has been waging an insurgency inside Turkey. Whether we like it or not, Turkey wants to get ahead of what it perceives to be an over-the-horizon threat along its southern border.

Third, the refugee crisis was partly brought on by the EU and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous open-borders, welfare-for-all policy. It encouraged people-smugglers and economic migrants not only from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan, Africa and Asia.

Fourth, it is nonsense that this is a shock decision. Establishing a safe zone between the border of Turkey and within northern Syria has been planned for 18 months. Until late last month, US forces were conducting joint patrols with Turkish forces within the 30km-wide safe zone.

Simultaneously, the US had been working with the Syrian Democratic Front to remove Kurdish fortifications near border towns such as Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. Again, there has never been an offer from the EU or the UN to keep the peace in this area.

And the US does not owe the Syrian Kurds. As retired US lieutenant colonel Daniel Davis has outlined, the Syrian Kurds were the greatest beneficiaries of the US military excursion into Syria. Until the US arrived Kobane was virtually lost. The Kurds could have been wiped out by ISIS if not for the US. The US air force was basically loaned to the Kurds to level Raqqa and drive ISIS out of their towns and villages.

It’s not as if the Iraqi Kurds are rolling across the border from Erbil to support their Syrian brothers and sisters. The differences within this dispersed ethnic group are akin to the The Life of Brian’s People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. Despite the great Kurdish warrior Saladin and his efforts to unite the region, it has been engulfed in centuries of internecine conflict. No US president in their right mind would choose to be bogged down policing that environment.

British PM Margaret Thatcher was right when she observed that after the fall of communism the West spent too much time focusing on welfare rather than defence, believing in the creation of a global village without fences we would find only nice neighbours. Instead we live in a world of risk and conflict. In this context there are few pleasant decisions and even fewer agreeable leaders with whom the West can do business.

As for Australians held in Syrian detention camps, none should be repatriated. An unequivocal message needs to be sent to all who decide to join an enemy of our nation. Save the money we’d need to spend on these traitors and instead provide better health and welfare for our servicemen and women suffering from PTSD and physical challenges following almost two decades of continual deployments.

Do we really want these enemies of the West on our soil when the next phase of the Islamist extremists’ global insurgency begins?