Another aspect of that argument is that it is wiser to address the causes of violence than continue expensive treatments of the symptoms. Syria became the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II and has generated a refugee crisis that has overburdened neighboring states of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and extended into Europe. Between 2014 and 2018, approximately 18,000 refugees who, in desperation, trusted their lives to criminal traffickers drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, over 24.3 percent of them children. By 2020, more than 1 million refugees made it to Europe’s shores or across its borders from Turkey. Syrian refugee populations reached 900,000 in Lebanon, 600,000 in Jordan, and 3.6 million in Turkey.8
Statistics, however, were numbing, and reports rarely covered real victims’ experiences. Only occasionally did people in the United States and Europe appear struck by the human cost of the crises, such as when, in September 2015, heartrending photos circulated of the body of the drowned three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi (born Aylan Shenu), on a Turkish beach; or, in August 2016, a video of a child victim of Assad’s bombing of Aleppo, Omran Daqneesh, showed him in shock, bleeding from the face in the back of an ambulance. The refugee crisis grew worse as the war intensified. In late December 2016, counting on continued U.S. and European indifference, Russia had expanded the indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo. In what before the war had been Syria’s most populous city and cultural center, thirty thousand Syrians perished.9 The bombing campaign inflicted mass casualties on civilians, targeting hospitals and funerals. An assault by Iranian proxy Shia militias followed. On December 13, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power asked the Russians rhetorically, “Have you no shame?” But President Obama and his administration were not sufficiently moved to reverse their policy of resignation toward what they regarded as an intractable mess. In an op-ed in the New York Times, National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa Steven Simon wrote, “the truth is that it is too late for the United States to wade deeper into the Syrian conflict without risking a major war.”10 Americans’ continued view of the crisis in the Middle East was as a protracted episode of mass homicide limited to faraway places and therefore not an American problem.
Refugees generated financial and political as well as physical burdens, weakened already fragile political orders in the Middle East, and fueled political polarization and the rise of nativist sentiment across Europe. In countries hosting refugees, initial outpourings of sympathy and willingness to provide assistance gave way to vitriolic debates between those who favored continued support and others who resented the diversion of resources from their own populations. European fears rose that a large influx of Muslims could alter the social and religious character of their nations or that jihadist terrorists would infiltrate the throngs of refugees.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that crises in the Middle East do not stay there, it has proved difficult for the United States to sustain efforts, beyond billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance, that actually addressed the disease of sectarian conflict. In the summer of 2019, President Donald Trump resurrected the Obama administration assumption that the United States could disengage from the region and remain insulated from the conflicts there. As he announced the withdrawal of the small American special operations force that had been fighting alongside the People’s Protection Unit (YPG)–dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria, Trump tweeted that it was time to “get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars.” He described Syria as nothing but “sand and death.”11 While he later stated that two hundred to three hundred troops would remain to secure the oil in eastern Syria, the damage to U.S. credibility and influence compounded the damage done by the Obama administration’s withdrawal from the region.12 Potential consequences of disengagement included a return to low-level Kurdish-Turkish conflict, YPG accommodation with the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian sponsors, the return of ISIS or a new-and-improved version of it, and the extension of Iranian influence across Syria in a way that threatens Israel and perpetuates the sectarian civil war. As horrific as the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have been, disengagement made them worse.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the Assad regime and their Russian and Iranian sponsors intensified their murderous campaign against Syrian civilians in the northeastern province of Idlib. Over 900,000 people, including half a million children, battled the indiscriminate bombing and freezing-cold conditions. Like the Obama administration’s response to the destruction of Aleppo in 2016, the mass murder and forced displacement of innocents in Idlib elicited statements of condemnation but no direct action, even as the Turkish armed forces began to take casualties. The muted response to the mass atrocity in Idlib revealed that the already catastrophic conditions in the Middle East can get worse. Convincing Americans to support sustained engagement in the region should begin with leaders explaining why the Middle East is important to the American people.
Many who advocated for withdrawal from Syria argued that the Middle East was no longer important to American security and prosperity because the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer and a net energy exporter.13 But the Middle East has always been and will remain an arena for competitions that have consequences far beyond its geographic expanse. Competitions with revisionist powers, rogue regimes, and jihadist terrorists converge and interact there. Enemies and adversaries often operate in parallel, but they also cooperate when their interests align. For example, Russia and Iran aid, abet, and sustain the murderous Assad regime in Syria. Russia used the crisis in the region as a way to weaken Europe and present itself as the indispensable power broker that can ameliorate the problems that it is helping to create. Iran, too, has taken advantage of regional chaos to its strategic advantage against its foes Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Even North Korea was a participant in destabilizing the region as it contributed to Assad’s nuclear weapons program, an effort that went undetected until 2007.14
Beyond the physical threats associated with the confluence of revisionist powers, hostile states, and terrorist organizations, the Middle East, along with the historical “Khorasan” region (which comprised what is now northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and most of Afghanistan), is foundational to jihadist terrorists’ psychological and ideological strength. Their plan is to reestablish the caliphate in the Fertile Crescent that runs from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and northern Egypt. And their mission is to fight to liberate the ummah, or Muslim community, everywhere from what the jihadis see as foreign control. Moreover, world economic growth still remains dependent on the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz just as it did during the oil embargo and crisis of 1973 and the “tanker wars” of the 1980s.15
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THE REFUGEE crisis and the humanitarian catastrophes in the region are connected to the trafficking of drugs and other illicit goods as well as people. Perhaps most important, the crisis is generating a large-scale, multigenerational threat from jihadist terrorism. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, that threat was more severe than it was on September 10, 2001. It was alumni of the mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s who built Al-Qaeda, declared war on the United States, and executed a series of attacks prior to 9/11. The terrorist alumni from twenty-first-century wars are orders of magnitude larger than their Afghan War alumni predecessors. ISIS was an improvement on Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as it came with a sophisticated propaganda machine, recruiting agency, organized crime network, and proto-state. ISIS attracted more than thirty thousand fighters, not only from the Middle East and the greater Arab world, but also from developed countries such as EU nations, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Within two years following its formation in the heart of the Middle East, ISIS spawned franchise organizations in states ranging from Algeria to Nigeria to Yemen to Somalia and even the Philippines.16
Twenty-first-century terrorist organizations not on
ly have global reach; they are also pursuing technologies and destructive weapons previously associated only with nation states, including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high explosives. There is broad agreement on the worst-case scenario: a terrorist organization in possession of a nuclear device either stolen, purchased, or provided to it by a hostile state. A dirty bomb, which combines commonplace explosives with highly radioactive materials, would inflict far less damage and fewer casualties than a nuclear device, but it would be easier to obtain. Its detonation in a densely populated area would incite fear in cities across the globe. Other emerging capabilities that are readily available, such as offensive cyber and weaponized drones, are threats to aviation and people on the ground.17 The terrorist’s most powerful weapon, however, may be the computer, camera, and communications device that every one of them carries in his or her pocket. Encrypted communications improve terrorists’ ability to evade intelligence collection and coordinate their actions. Also, twenty-first-century terrorists produce and distribute slick propaganda to attract susceptible young people to their depraved cause.
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AT BEST, it will take time and effort for the United States to regain influence lost due to its lack of a sustained and consistent policy in the Middle East. Adversaries have stepped in to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its traditional partners, including Israel, Turkey, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. In 2017, I found that these partners were hedging, working with U.S. adversaries to limit their exposure to another sudden change in U.S. policy. They were falling for empty promises from Russia under what might be labeled Putin’s Potemkin Peace Plan. In exchange for keeping Assad in power and guaranteeing Russian interests in a post–civil war Syria, Russia promised our partners that it would gradually attenuate Iranian influence in Syria. What Russia desperately needed in return was for Gulf States to pay for the reconstruction of the rubble-strewn Sunni Arab cities and towns that Russia, the Assad regime, and the Iranians had destroyed. Russia’s promise was a lie because Assad had become far more reliant on Iranian than on Russian support, but Israel and the Gulf States suspended disbelief because if the United States disengaged from the region, influence with Russia might become vital to preventing even greater threats from Iran.
Turkey joined with Russia and Iran in sham peace processes for Syria that undercut the legitimate UN effort to end the war there. False Russian promises and the reality that Moscow had forces in position to influence the situation is why King Salman of Saudi Arabia flew to Moscow in October 2017 and pledged to buy Russian air defense systems.18 Meanwhile, Jordan purchased more Russian military equipment, and Israel expanded high-tech partnerships with Russian companies. Between 2017 and 2019, Israel pretended to believe Putin in exchange for Russian forces turning a blind eye as the Israel Defense Forces conducted more than two hundred strikes against Iranian facilities and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran operatives in Syria.19 By playing Syria both ways, as Iran’s principal enabler and the best potential check on Iranian hegemony in the region, Russia saw its influence grow.
When I confronted our partners about the contradiction between their grave concern about growing Iranian influence in the region and behavior that aided Iran’s principal enabler, Russia, they protested. They pointed to the Obama administration’s withdrawal from the region and enablement of Iran with sanctions relief associated with the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal and professed the need to retain some influence with Russia as a way to mitigate the damage. I tried to assure them that the Trump administration had developed a long-term strategy for breaking the cycle of sectarian violence in the region that would, over time, influence an outcome consistent with not only U.S. but also their vital interests.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson summarized that strategy in a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in January 2018. First, U.S. military presence and engagement in the region was essential for deterring actions that magnified the humanitarian crisis. He recalled that, the previous April, President Trump had responded to Assad’s use of sarin nerve agent against innocent civilians with strikes that destroyed 20 percent of Assad’s air force. He then summarized the need for a long-term effort to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations that represented “continued strategic threats to the U.S.” He highlighted the need to counter the IRGC’s attempts to control routes from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean and the need to reduce Iranian influence such that it could no longer perpetuate sectarian civil wars in the region. He reassured allies and partners that the president would not repeat the 2011 mistake of premature disengagement from Iraq and pledged to “continue to remain engaged as a means to protect our own national security interest.” Finally, the United States would implement a comprehensive regional strategy for ensuring jihadist terrorists did not threaten the United States and its allies, ending the Syrian Civil War under the UN political process; checking Iranian ambitions; and ending the humanitarian crises across the region such that refugees could return to secure environments and start rebuilding their lives. He acknowledged that accomplishing those goals would take a long-term diplomatic and military effort, but assured all listening that our military mission in Syria and elsewhere in the region would remain conditions-based.20
Our partners’ skepticism frustrated me, but it turned out to be well placed. They knew that, in 2016, even as candidate Trump vowed to accelerate the defeat of ISIS, he shared the Obama administration’s sentiment that continued military engagement in the Middle East was futile and wasteful. On October 13, 2019, after a series of announcements of his intention to withdraw from Syria and reversals of that decision, Trump ordered all U.S. forces out immediately, in part to clear the way for a Turkish offensive to take control of a “safe zone” south of its border with Syria.21 Subsequent to the withdrawal, Russian forces raised flags over former U.S. bases and tens of thousands of Iranian-backed militias occupied territory that was formerly held by ISIS in eastern Syria. Turkish-supported militias poured into Northern Syria. Many committed war crimes against Kurdish civilians, including the murder of Hevrin Khalaf, a female Kurdish politician.22 The U.S. abandonment of its Kurdish YPG partners and its withdrawal from northeastern Syria validated the wary approach of our allies in the region, but the regional accommodation to the Iran-Syria-Russia axis was as unnatural as it was detestable.
The people of the region know the cause of their suffering. In September 2019, major protests broke out in the eastern Syrian province of Dayr al-Zawr as Sunni Arabs demanded the withdrawal of Iranian militias. In southern Syria, protests against the Assad regime continued, and insurgent attacks grew more frequent. In October, in Iraq, antigovernment protests directed at the Iraqi political leaders evolved into a revolt against Shia political parties and increasing Iranian influence. That same month, Lebanon had the biggest protest since its independence, where demonstrators demanding political reform and an end to corruption forced Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign. Then, in December, more than two hundred thousand protesters in Iraq raged against the Iraqi government and a foreign occupier—not the United States, but Iran—chanting, “Free, free Iraq” and “Iran get out, get out.”23 They demanded the resignation of the Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi. He resigned on November 30, 2019, but remained at the head of a caretaker government until February 2020, when Iraqi president Barham Salih appointed Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, a former minister of communication under Prime Minister Maliki, as prime minister.
At the end of 2019, as Iraqi protests intensified, Iranian proxies stepped up attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. On December 27, a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq killed an American contractor, Nawres Waleed Hamid, and wounded several soldiers.24 Iran’s IRGC had clearly used Iraqi proxy militias under the command of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. After the United States retaliated with airstrikes on five militia outposts along the Syrian border, Irania
n-backed Shia militias mobilized mass protests and an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The images of the angry mob on December 31 were reminiscent of Iranian attacks on the U.S. embassy in Tehran forty years earlier. Simultaneously, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, was coordinating broader and potentially deadly attacks on U.S. facilities in the region. On January 3, at around 1 a.m., soon after Muhandis picked up Soleimani at Baghdad Airport to coordinate their next move, a U.S. missile struck their vehicle, destroying it and its passengers. President Trump decided that the action was necessary to restore deterrence against Iran and to prevent the attacks Soleimani was planning. Although Shia protesters in Baghdad and other Shia-majority cities, such as Basra, lamented the deaths of Muhandis and Soleimani and the Iraqi parliament, with Sunni and Kurd members abstaining, passed a nonbinding resolution for U.S. forces to withdraw, Iraqis continued to call for Iran to withdraw. In early 2020, Iran did its best to increase the pressure on the United States in Iraq by mobilizing a million-man march and a resistance front that would integrate rival militias. The Iranian regime grew increasingly concerned that protests in its own country and in Lebanon and Iraq, combined with severe economic problems, represented a grave threat to the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. Iran attempted to use the Soleimani and Muhandis killings to co-opt the Iraqi protest movement and quash opposition to its subversion of the Iraqi state. That effort failed because Iraqi alignment with Iran is unnatural, and the vast majority of the Iraqi people equate Iranian influence with corruption and failing governance. In early 2020, Iraqi protesters rejected the appointment of Tawfiq Allawi as prime minister and continued to demand an end to corruption, ineffective governance, and malign Iranian influence.
But despite the growing resistance to Iran and its proxy militias, the prospects for stabilizing Iraq remained dim due to the fragmentation of Iraqi society along sectarian lines, Iran’s sustained campaign of subversion, and America’s vacillation between intervention and disengagement. In 2020, U.S. influence, not only in Iraq but also across the Middle East, had diminished due to the United States’ demonstrated inability to develop and implement a consistent, long-term policy toward that vexing region.
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