Exit Ramp from Syria: Trump's Isolationist Iran Deal

President Trump's decision last month to back out of the Iran nuclear agreement was less about a "horrible, one-sided" deal to delay the deployment of an Iranian nuclear weapon than his own reluctance to confront the progress of militant Iranian dreams of Persian empire in Iraq and Syria.

By finally killing U.S. participation in an Iran deal that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unsuccessfully opposed for so many years, Trump also assured that the Israeli Defense Forces, not the U.S. military, would do the dirty work of containing Tehran's grab for power in the region. That underlies the importance of Netanyahu's media dog-and-pony show about Iran's "secret" nuclear program on the eve of Trump's scuttling the Iranian diplomatic accord that played  so well to his credulous and xenophobic allies in the White House and Congress.

After 15 months of indecision about waiving sanctions against Iran, the move gave Trump cover not only to pull the U.S. out of the nuclear agreement, but, in his mind at least, to withdraw U.S. troops altogether from Syria and the Middle East. Trump's America First is fast morphing before our eyes into  full-blown American isolationism.

These decisions will have major consequences, none of them good.

The majority of Iranians between 18 and 50, deeply skeptical of Iran's clerical rulers and hungry for jobs and fresh ties with the West, will recoil at the American duplicity and doublespeak they rightly see as a U.S. betrayal. Iran's youth demographic, until now largely pro-American, has been a major force for secular change supporting the moderate administration of President Hassan Rouhani. They will turn increasingly anti-Washington as Rouhani's leadership is weakened and his political enemies are strengthened, thanks to Trump's decision.

The American determination to abandon the six-nation nuclear accord will shift Iran's center of political gravity toward the hardcore revolutionaries and militant radicals that control the Iranian Armed Forces, the Revolutionary Guard and Quds Force, as well much of its industry and powerful judiciary. Political power will shift to the military elite that owns major Iranian businesses -- including the ballistic missile and nuclear industries.

It is these hardliners, not the elected Rouhani government, who direct Tehran's regional adventures in the Middle East with the Ayatollah's approval. They are are closely allied with domestic militants who control Iran's repressive judicial policies of imprisoning, torturing, and murdering domestic political enemies. Trump has played into their hands.

They are also the likely inheritors of the White House's desire for regime change in Tehran. The Trump administration is setting up precisely the same resurgent militant factions that chant "Death to America" and are already pushing to restart Iran's nuclear program and to take over Iran's government after six years in the political wilderness. For those Congressional ideologues who hold out for a popular backlash led by pro-U.S. forces, good luck. Iranian means of repression are too ingrained, too refined, and the militant old guard too hardened to allow much hope if the militant radicals and clerics take power.

The much-publicized May 9 hostilities between Iran and Israel and the lethal Israeli attack on Iran's Revolutionary Guard bases in Syria were doubtless timed to coincide with Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal. The unprecedented and well-planned strikes established that Iranian commanders will respond to Israeli provocation (the Israeli attack on Iranian bases a month before) and signaled that Israel will not hesitate to resort to military force on cue (in this case, a massive raid by 28 Israeli fighter jets that killed at least eight Iranians) when threatened by Iranian forces within range of Israel's borders.

Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Iran-Israeli tensions are likely to escalate into a wider regional war anytime soon, despite widespread speculation fed by Israeli propagandists. The acceptance of violent hostilities will only add to the complex of forces that are driving Assad's Syria to becoming a de facto failed state.

With the Iranian rial plunging, increasing unemployment, and an economy shaken by financial corruption and anticipation of new Western sanctions, Iran can't afford a war with Israel. Now that a rogue administration in Washington has ended the nuclear deal, Netanyahu finally has his propaganda victory. For all his threats, bluster, and, trumped-up disinformation, the Israeli prime minister is unlikely to risk starting a full-blown war with the ruling mullahs in Tehran, especially while a moderate president in Tehran holds power and retains the Ayatollah's blessing.

Indeed, Netanyahu himself has other serious political distractions at home, from widely criticized protests and killings of surging Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, to domestic corruption charges. Sooner or later, he may even come under renewed pressure from Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner to restart peace talks.

As the Europeans and Iranians look for ways to salvage the nuclear deal without the U.S., Syria is already edging toward chaos. Negotiations to end the six-year old civil war that has left some 400,000 Syrians dead and forced another 2 million from their homes have stalled. None of the foreign powers arrayed in Syria, including the U.S. military, appear capable of playing an intermediary role as trusted broker in the talks. The Damascus government of President Hafez Assad continues to mount genocidal attacks on its own citizens, with the help of Russian air power and the Iranian proxy force Hezbollah. In the north, the 5-month-old Turkish invasion of northern Syria, seeking the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurdish "terrorists" from border areas, continues to drain away Syrian Kurdish allies of the U.S. from the ongoing mop-up of ISIS fighters.

Long-feared clashes between nominally allied U.S. and Turkish forces, the two largest militaries in NATO, have so far not materialized. It may be just a matter of time. A similarly unimaginable confrontation occurred in March between Russian and U.S. forces near the rebel pocket around Deir al-Zour in eastern Syria when carefully designed U.S.-Russian military "deconfliction" measures unaccountably broke down. Some 200 Russian private mercenaries were killed in U.S. air strikes after they attacked an isolated American military base nearby. Neither Donald Trump's Washington nor Vladimir Putin's' Moscow had much to say officially. As one U.S. officer described the claustrophobic military atmosphere in Syria, "They're testing us every day."

 On top of the tensions between jumpy American, Russian, Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian-supported troops, Syria will now also become a de facto theater of operations for air sorties from the Israeli Air Force and missile attacks from Syrian outposts of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds force, led by the aggressive and charismatic Iranian strategist, Gen. Qassem Suleimani.

Gen. Suleiman's stature has grown from a covert Iranian military tactician in Iraq to a culture hero whose popularity inside Iran now verges on President Rouhani's. In the vacuum of U.S. political and diplomatic power in Syria since the fall of ISIS, Suleimani has run rings around Trump as a dealmaker. Last fall he quietly negotiated a ceasefire between between Iraqi Kurdish fighters occupying Kirkuk and the allied victorious Iraqi Army, winning the cooperation of both U.S. allies. A U.S. hand was nowhere to be seen.

The devoutly Islamic general is also credited with cutting a deal for the 2017 release of a Qatari hunting party kidnapped in Iraq that reportedly put hundreds of millions of dollars in Iranian coffers - and resulted in a bitter diplomatic blockade of Qatar by the Sunni Arab powers led by Saudi Arabia over charges that they secretly backed Iranian terrorism. Trump is now desperate to heal the intra-Arab rift.

The president's bombshell in April that he intends to order a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria within six months was a powerful affirmation of his new hands-off policy in Syria. Trump  also declared that he wants to replace American troops with an all-Arab force financed by Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, and Egypt, which remain divided among themselves. However tired or unrealistic the proposal, it's real significance is that Trump has reversed his administration's prior emphasis on keeping U.S. boots on the ground to monitor the threats posed by Suleimani and the Iranians as well as the inevitable conflicts between competing armies and ethnic militias jostling for influence and turf in Syria.

If Trump achieves even half of his publicly stated intentions, the abdication of American power in the Middle East will be breathtaking. By transferring the overwatch responsibility to a Sunni Arab proxy force of Iran's enemies, the president would not only set himself squarely at odds with U.S. military commanders in Syria and at the Pentagon. He would risk leaving the final campaign against ISIS  unfinished. He would chain Israel to a guard dog role over Iran and lock the U.S. into military support of Israel in the event of war. He will also have to shoulder personal responsibility for destabilization and division in Iran, as well as  turning Tehran's secular government over to a cadre of rightwing mullahs and aging revolutionaries.

And he also seems to be washing his hands of any American participation in forging a negotiated ceasefire and settlement in Syria's civil war -- thus leaving the worst humanitarian disaster of this generation in the hands of the Russians and Iranians.


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The Road to Damascus: A Storm Gathers While Trump Fiddles

While Donald Trump is preoccupied by allegations of past affairs and "fake news" of Russian indictments, a crisis with potentially grave real world consequences has been building in the ashes of ISIS's nominal defeat in Syria -- with no sign of U.S. leadership in sight.

Following the breakdown of Syrian peace talks in Geneva, Russian, Iranian, Syrian, and American forces have been at each other's throats in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta, the northern city of Idlib, and points east. The massacre of civilians in Ghouta, led by Syrian forces with Russian air support, has sparked international outrage. Near the town of Deir al Zour, on the edge of territory held by Syrian Democratic Forces, an attack earlier this month on an American outpost by Russian mercenaries bankrolled by a Putin oligarch triggered a U.S. counterattack that left dozens of Russians dead or wounded. The Trump White House has had no comment on the Russian attack or its aftermath.

Sowing further confusion, with Moscow's apparent blessing, Turkish forces weeks ago invaded Syria near the northeastern town of Afrin in a quixotic drive to protect their border from alleged Kurdish "terrorists" aligned with U.S. military advisers mopping up after ISIS. This has raised the prospect of a military clash between nearby American troops and Turkish forces, the two largest militaries in NATO.

Worse, Assad's commanders have responded to the Afrin incursion, reportedly with the assent of Russian and Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders, by sending a convoy of Iranian-trained militias to protect the Kurds from the Turkish invaders, at once usurping the Washington's role protecting nearby Syrian Kurdish enclaves and undercutting U.S. military credibility.

In addition, Israel two weeks ago shot down an Iranian drone, backing up recent threats to attack Iranian forces in Syria, which it regards as venturing too close to northern Israel for comfort. Syrian anti-aircraft batteries retaliated by downing an Israeli F-16, the first time in a generation Israel's Air Force has lost a jet fighter in combat.

In Washington, President Trump has said nothing. The White House now faces the possibility of a shooting war in Syria with a NATO ally. As was the case in post-ISIS Iraq, Trump and his military brass have been outmaneuvered on the ground in Syria by Iranian and Syrian commanders, who are providing protection for U.S. Kurdish allies that U.S. military leaders are reluctant to provide. Israel's saber-rattling against Iranian-supported forces in Syria has increased the possibility of an outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Iran that could lure Trump's generals into the fight.

The Wall St. Journal called this a "gathering storm" for which "the U.S. has no strategy." The "real" news here? The president is AWOL, and the stakes for the U.S. and the region are growing daily.