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.

Chalabi's Bay of Goats: The Iran Connection

U.S. Gen. Anthony Zinni declared before 9/11 that a flashy Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi was "going to lead us to a Bay of Goats" if Washington bought his plans to depose Saddam Hussein. The outcome, the commander of U.S. forces in the region warned, would be a fiasco that would make the U.S. adventure at the Bay of Pigs look like child's play.

If anything, the reality was far worse. The notorious Shi'ite con man, who died last week in Baghdad of a heart attack, was admired before the Iraq war by a handful of secretive U.S. national security types and exiled neoconservative Republicans in Washington. His stature grew considerably after President George W. Bush's election and the 2003 U.S. invasion. The media postmortems of Chalabi and his legacy have rightly focussed on his critical role in funneling wholesale fictions about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to gullible -- or manipulative -- U.S. policymakers, who for years financed and fed on his disinformation-spewing Iraqi National Congress.

When later questioned about the non-existent WMD, Chalabi quipped, "We were heroes in error."

False intelligence provided by Chalabi's network was instrumental, if not decisive, in enabling the U.S. decision to go to war. Chalabi couldn't have achieved his aims without powerful backers in Washington. But I'm left wishing more attention had been paid to his connections in Tehran. Even for those familiar with Chalabi's past and his methods, it is striking how much is not  known about his record as a member of the Iraqi Parliament and official in the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. What little we do know, however, is consistent with reports of his pre-war relationship to the revolutionary government in Iran.

This is an odd oversight, given current public concern about Iran. The New York Times mentioned the word "Iran" once in two Chalabi stories -- passing reference to wartime suspicions that he might have shared intelligence with Tehran. The great Grey Lady instead incessantly detailed the WMD disinformation that Chalabi and his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, stove-piped to sympathetic minions within the Bush administration. Old news, yes, arguably worth reiterating. But the Times treatment smacked of an in-house mea culpa intended, once more, to correct the uncritical scroll of pre-invasion intelligence 'scoops' the paper once swallowed whole and sold to the American people.

The Iran angle is provocative. Before the war, Chalabi and the INC, funded by the CIA to foment an Iraqi uprising in northern Iraq, were suspected of being simultaneously on the payroll of Iranian intelligence. A close confidant of Chalabi's, Aras Habib, was believed himself to be an Iranian agent. The CIA repeatedly warned senior Bush defense officials that the INC had been infiltrated by Iranian spies. Questioned in 2002 about his Iranian connections, Chalabi was dismissive. "This relationship is normal and necessary," he told CIA interrogators. Neither Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld nor Vice-President Cheney lodged any objection.

During the war, the INC is believed to have helped Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives open up businesses in Iraq by revealing the positions of U.S. combat forces. U.S. intelligence also suspected that Chalabi told the Iranians that Americans regularly intercepted their secret communications, thus betraying sensitive U.S. intelligence sources. Chalabi at the time alternated between his antennae-studded base near Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and a home in Tehran, where he was believed to maintain close ties with Iranian officials. He later played an instrumental role in protecting Shi'ite militias in Iraq with strong ties to Iran.

After the invasion, Chalabi took a lead role in the provisional government's de-Baathification program, likening it to the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II.  He was head of the committee that helped execute a policy that destroyed the Iraqi army and reduced Baghdad to a virtual failed state under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Chalabi reportedly was responsible for engineering wholesale Sunni disenfranchisement by stripping Baathist teachers and civil servants of jobs and disqualifying between 50,000 and 100,000 candidates from local and national election lists.

Together with the disbanding of the Baathist-dominated Iraqi army, Chalabi's de-Baathification work led to unemployment of hundreds of thousand Sunnis, a near-civil war in Iraq, the rise of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and eventually the emergence of its fanatical offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which now dominates huge swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Chalabi later served as interim Iraqi oil minister and deputy prime minister. He was appointed in 2007 to the U.S.-appointed National Council, but dismissed on suspicion of having ties to Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers. He was elected a member of Parliament and served as head of its Finance committee at the time of his death. Chalabi never denied his Tehran connections, and maintained that dealing with the mullahs was part of doing business in Iraq.

Toward the end, Chalabi reportedly admitted that blocking Sunni participation in the political system was a mistake. But by then, of course, the damage was done, ISIS was on the march -- and the record suggests that Chalabi's longstanding Iranian ties may have played a significant role in hollowing out the state that, next to Syria, is the Ayatollah's major focus in the region.


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Sgt. Connelly's Wars

John Kerry’s question about the last man to die was not a theoretical one for Sgt. Paul Connelly. A 32-year old Army veteran with five deployments under his belt, Connelly led an engineer platoon of 31 soldiers tasked with clearing Taliban improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, from the roads, dirt tracks, and cowpaths of Panjwai. The area is farm country west of Kandahar City and a hotbed of Taliban insurgent activity. For U.S. soldiers, it is "Indian country." Taliban IEDs – unexploded artillery shells wired with detonators, fertilizer bombs, abandoned Soviet anti-tank mines – are responsible for 60% of all U.S. casualties in Afghanistan.

Connelly began to see how bad things could get in the Horn of Panjwai when he was briefed by a fellow sergeant and platoon leader whose unit was rotating out of Afghanistan. As Connelly listened, he recalls a lump forming in the back of his throat. The departing sargeant’s battalion, normally 800-strong, had taken 120 casualties during its 9-month deployment. Many of them were double- and triple-amputations from IED explosions.

The message came through loud and clear. “This is the real deal, I knew this was going to be like no other deployment,” Connelly told me in late September at Forward Operating Base Zangabad in the Panjwai district.

Clearing mines and roadside bombs was what Connelly did, most recently in Iraq’s Diyala Province some 50 miles north of Baghdad. He had felt he could do the same job in Afghanistan “standing on my head.” No longer. He picked up the phone and arranged special training for his unit. He led a convoy to FOB Zangabad two weeks before their deployment began.

The Panjwai is an area of fertile farmland shaped like a rhinoceros horn west of Kandahar City, bounded on the north by the Arghandab River and the Dowri River in the south. Its vegetable farms, grape arbors, pomegranate trees, and poppy fields are crisscrossed by irrigation ditches and narrow dirt paths. Paved highways and dirt roads are often bordered by dried mud walls or farm buildings owned by wealthy Pashtuns in Kandahar City. Many local laborers, many of them quite young, were Taliban sympathizers or fighters paid up to $200 to smuggle explosives and weapons up Highway 4 from Pakistan. With its blind corners and narrow roads, Connelly saw why Panjwai was a paradise for Taliban bombmakers.

In April, his uneasiness only increased with reports that Staff Sgt. Bales had inexplicably gone on a rampage through two Panjwai villages. In addition, disturbing details were emerging about the death of Danny Chen, a young Chinese private from New York City who shot himself in a nearby guard tower. Members of his platoon admitted to brutally hazing him for his shortcomings as a soldier; Chen’s platoon leader was later charged with dereliction of duty and dismissed from the military. To Connelly, Bales’s rampage and Chen’s suicide hinted at a level of tensions well beyond the usual stresses of combat.

Suicide was already a major recruitment liability for the Army. Connelly and his superiors knew it. By the end of 2012, the number of U.S. military suicides for the year – 349 – would far surpass the total number of American soldiers killed last year in Afghanistan – 229. Along with a virtual epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the Army knew it had serious problems.

Sgt. Connelly was really fighting three wars in Panjwai. As platoon commander, he was on the front lines of an internal Army campaign to get soldiers home from war healthy and whole, mentally as well as physically. That did not always square with his second daily battle: making sure their morale did not flag despite the risks they took every day in combat. In his war with the Taliban, Connelly already had several strikes against him. His heavily armored, sixteen-ton Stryker vehicles, fixed with mounted rollers forward to detect buried roadside bombs, could not maneuver when hemmed in by the ditches, narrow local roads, mud buildings, or grape arbors of Panjwai.

Unable to maneuver, the Strykers became sitting ducks for Taliban IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades. As often as not, commanders had to order infantrymen to “dismount” and patrol the tree-lined fields and farm country on foot, making them vulnerable to insurgent surveillance and gunfire.

A Different Kind of Fight in the Horn of Panjwai

The fight in Panjwai was different than any Connelly had ever experienced. Insurgents seemed to bring a bitter personal enmity to every engagement. The Taliban had eyes everywhere. In early May, Connelly’s unit had been forced by tight terrain to dismount and was in the midst of a bomb-clearing operation when they came under fire from a group of Taliban fighters. When the shooting stopped, one of Connelly’s squad leaders corralled several soldiers at the side of the road and secured the perimeter. Then he made a mistake: He shouldered his M-4 and took a knee for a much-needed breather. 

The squad leader didn’t know what hit him. His knee came down on the pressure plate of a mine buried in the road, detonating an explosion that blew his legs off. The sergeant next to him was riddled with shrapnel wounds and bleeding badly. The platoon’s staff sergeant standing nearby was sent sprawling by the blast and knocked unconscious. Somehow he shook off the impact of the blast and set about treating the wounded. He would later be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

Connelly and his staff sergeant policed the blast area, collected weapons and backpacks scattered about, and stripped the body armor off the wounded. It took several soldiers, each weighed down by 40 lbs. of their own body armor and weapons, to lift the desperately injured squad leader and the blood-soaked sergeant over a succession of mud walls back to their Stryker. Connelly took the abandoned weapons and gear back to the base, and cleaned the blood away as best he could.

The two junior officers were the first major casualties suffered by Connelly’s platoon. The squad leader and young sergeant “got it right off the bat – the boys took it hard,” Connelly said. But both lived. Connelly tried to keep his soldiers focused on their jobs. But he was also careful to keep them in the loop about the medical progress of the two. He felt the updates were critical both for the morale of those who got away unscathed and the two recovering leaders. But they also brought back to soldiers vivid images of the explosion and suffering that day.

The staff sergeant who had been knocked out began behaving erratically. Connelly’s concern about the effect of the explosion on him worked its way up to battalion and finally brigade commanders, who sent a combat stress team and a flew in a chaplain to talk to the staff sergeant and the others about the aftermath of the IED explosion. The chaplain convened an experimental group, called a Warrior’s Huddle, which included Connelly, the staff sergeant, and other members of the platoon, to talk about the experience.

To Connelly’s astonishment, the chaplain turned to the shaken and subdued staff sergeant and asked him how he felt seeing his squad leader get getting blown up. The sergeant did not respond well. When the session was over, Connelly angrily pulled the chaplain aside. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this,” he told the chaplain, inches from his face. “You just did it the wrong way.”

Capt. Yoonwhan Kim, the South Korean-born chaplain of the 1^st Battalion, 23^rd Infantry Regiment, remembered well the trauma Connelly’s unit went through in April. But he saw it differently. He had been through countless after-action counseling sessions with soldiers. “I offer them an ear, I like to bear witness to what they’ve been through,” he said. “Trauma can stay in the mind in a disorganized way, and talking puts order to the chaos.”

Still, he found that it was best to restrain some soldiers from talking too much. “That can open up a can of worms that can affect mission-readiness,” he explained. Unless they have some common understanding with their fellow soldiers, “just having to go back through the experience is isolating,” he said. “That only reinforces a common feeling of isolation out here. Even I felt it during this tour, where most of what we do is not news back in the States, so there’s a lot of civilian ignorance and lack of awareness.” That only heightened the sense of isolation and vulnerability.

Kim is a fan of the Warriors’ Huddle, an innovation inspired by the downtime World War II veterans spent on troop ships headed home talking through their wartime experiences with other soldiers. For most troops today, flights home are usually isolated two- or three-day affairs as individual soldiers head for scattered destinations. To Kim and advocates of Warriors’ Huddle therapy, it’s critical to give psychologically bruised soldiers a chance to get their feelings out. Kim’s experience is that soldiers who can’t or won’t discuss deeply upsetting incidents within 30 days are prime candidates for PTSD.

But the sessions, he conceded, can go south quickly. If soldiers are intimidated by tough-talking officers or NCOs ventilating about the hopelessness of the Afghanistan war or the rigidity of Army life, they often clam up. “The Army can be dehumanizing,” said Kim. “My job is to try to humanize this experience for soldiers.” Contrary to Army denials, Kim believes that multiple deployments have taken a psychological toll on many soldiers, which may help explain the outsized number of suicides and cases of PSTD. 

Since last July, Command Sgt. Maj. Eric Volk, the 1^st Battalion’s top enlisted officer at Zangabad, has focused on how the Army can help soldiers make the transition from high-tempo, high-stress combat conditions to the slower pace of home and family.  He was bullish on Kim’s work, both for keeping up soldiers’ battlefield morale and easing their ‘reintegration’ into civilian life. “The best asset we have is our chaplain,” said Volk. “In every difficult case we’ve had, the chaplain was usually first on the scene.”

Going home has been difficult for many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, as it has been for veterans of other wars. Many combat veterans are so addicted to the physical and psychological effects of surging adrenaline, Volk explained, that they find it impossible to take life at a saner civilian pace. Soldiers too often have turned into thrill-seekers wrecking cars and motorcycles, handling guns carelessly, drinking excessively and taking drugs, getting into family fights, and even committing murders. “We know this is going to be an issue,” said Volk. “The transition is not something you can turn on and off.”

He is one of a growing number of senior NCOs who believe soldiers must have time to air out their problems and understand potential setbacks before they go home. “If they say they don’t have fears or nightmares, they’re lying,” he said. “What they are feeling here is normal because of what they face.” Officers and NCOs have learned and adapted since 9/11 by working to keep soldiers connected with their Army buddies. “We understand better who we are addressing now. We talk more now than we ever have.”

“It’s hard getting up every morning knowing it may be your last.”

Despite the support and counseling they received, Connelly’s platoon had a rough deployment. One non-commissioned officer mysteriously broke his hand to avoid combat. Another soldier had recurring nightmares and was flown to Kandahar Airfield for combat stress therapy. He was eventually mustered out of the Army. A 19-year old woman developed acute anxiety problems after seeing one of her squad killed in a firefight. She was one of a group of soldiers Connelly either did not assign to patrols or rotated so that she never had to leave her Stryker. She too was finally sent home. He admitted his job came down to playing the strengths and weaknesses of platoon members off against one another to get the unit’s daily missions done.

Connelly also made it a point to lead dismounted patrols from the front, despite the danger, to boost the confidence of his troops. By last September, he had led 75 such missions, one for 11 days straight. He confessed he had become superstitious enough to wear the same Velcro unit patch every day to ward off bad luck. “It’s hard getting up every morning knowing it may be your last,” he told me. “After eleven years of war, this tour has been more personal than anything I’ve ever done.”

Like many good NCOs, Connelly is a careful observer of his soldiers. He sees a different quality of recruit in the Army since 2006, when only one out of four young lieutenants of the 3-2 Stryker Brigade left the Army. “After 2006, the brigade took a lot of hits, including many naturally gifted soldiers who got out,” he said. “The Army definitely lowered standards.” The “overall” problem, he felt, was that the new wave of recruits had a harder time than their predecessors “accepting or understanding authority.”

“Some get it,” he concluded. “Some never do.” As the war in Afghanistan winds down, said Connelly, “my boys are a mixed bag. Some are getting pressure from their families, or wives, or mothers to get out. Right now I have two squad leaders who are staying in and two who’re getting out.”

Has the situation on the ground in places like Panjwai improved, thanks to the hard work and heartache of Connelly and officers like him? His successors have stepped back to let their Afghan army partners take the lead in most recent operations, and that may be a step forward. But as any good American officer will tell you, as soon as U.S. operations stop, and already limited U.S support for Afghan operations is withdrawn, the Taliban will begin to return. The intimidation and murder of Afghan villagers, mullahs, and local officials who still don’t see it the Taliban’s way will begin anew. Replacement American units fighting in Panjwai had lost three officers or NCOs to Taliban IEDs by mid-January during a dismounted patrol. If anything, the Taliban has punched up the fight since then.

On the road to Damascus

Two little-noticed news stories this week raised our eyebrows about the prospects that the Obamas may be floating trial balloons about a changing American role in the Syrian civil war.

The Syria policy vacuum has become an open sore for the White House. Bitter rebel leaders have begun to echo sharp international criticism of American inability to ramp up much support beyond non-lethal aid. So far, the 2 1/2-year-old civil war has resulted in the deaths of some 100,000 Syrians, most of them at the hands of the Syrian Army and President Hafez al-Assad.

But the dust clouds suggest that the Obama White House may be taking another road to Damascus.

The first eye-opener, a bipartisan report co-authored by former Clinton secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Romney foreign-policy adviser Richard Williamson, advocates the so-called "responsibility to protect", known as R2P in diplomatic jargon, a United Nations-sanctioned legal trigger justifying outside intervention to stop genocide or other mass atrocities.

Conceived in response to the Bosnian Army slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, R2P influenced the U.S. decision in 2011 to support besieged and outgunned Libyan rebels with the NATO bombing of Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces. One of its guiding lights, Samantha Power, a top aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was approved this week by the Senate as  Obama's ambassador to the United Nations.

Power has resolutely maintained that R2P must take a back seat to Obama's cautious policy of providing non-lethal support to the rebels. She dutifully reiterated to the Times this week that R2P was "less important, I think, than U.S. practice and policy."

Albright maintains, just as its critics contend, that R2P calls for building multilateral coalitions to provide diplomacy and economic leverage to curb atrocities short of military force, though it nowhere rules out military action. She argues that that the "responsibility to protect" principle "would strengthen the hand of the U.S." and Syrian "sovereignty" because it "makes it the duty of the sovereign to protect its people."

Pressure for a ceasefire and stability in Damascus appear to have trumped American and rebel demands that Assad step down as a pre-condition to talks sought by Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ivanov. The aim appears to be a Syrian accord that would stop the slaughter and seek Assad's departure as part of an American-Russian brokered agreement. Even that outcome, however, runs against the grain of the UN Security Council, where Russia has blocked aggressive measures against Assad.

If R2P would provide a kind of rough framework for a human-rights-based U.S. Syrian intervention, this week Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, under intense pressure from Sen. John McCain, for the first time supplied a detailed outline of the U.S. military muscle the Pentagon can bring to bear in Syria. Under questioning from McCain last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dempsey correctly balked at McCain's questions, demurring that his job was to provide military options and advice to the President.

That provoked McCain to threaten to hold up Dempsey's pending nomination for a second term as joint chiefs chairman. It also generated a letter co-signed by McCain and Democratic committee chairman Carl Levin formally asking for Dempsey's views on Syria. Without so much as asking for a private meeting with senators, standard protocol in military hearings, Dempsey this week spelled out five options proposed by Pentagon for U.S. military action in Syria by return mail.

1. A "train, advise, and assist mission", costing $500 million a year, would not involve U.S. boots on the ground in Syria, would boost the rebels militarily, but risk U.S. weapons falling into the hands of militant Islamic rebels.

2."Limited stand-off strikes" from outside Syria would target high-value Syrian military targets with U.S. bombs and missiles, but cost "in the billions" per year and risk major civilian casualties.

3. Establishing a "no-fly zone" would target Syrian air defenses, involve U.S. flights over Syrian airspace, and cost $500 million in upfront costs and $1 billion a month to maintain, plus put U.S. aircraft at risk.

4. Setting up "buffer zones to protect the borders" of Turkey and Jordan would require "partial no-fly zones" with similar costs and risks.

5. The last option, "controlling chemical weapons", would involve a no-fly zone, air and missile strikes and thousands of troops in Syria, all at a cost of more than $1billion per month.

Dempsey's letter could be construed as just the sort of military freelancing that got Gen. Stanley McChrystal in hot water with Obama and later fired. Such ventilation of opinion by generals is too often used to put political pressure on the White House. But this episode feels different. Dempsey is no McChrystal, and like many in the military, is deeply leery about military intervention in Syria.

There is no more evidence that the Obama White House gave Dempsey the green light to talk out of school than there are tracks of the National Security Council on the Albright/Williamson report. But the timing and confluence of Albright and Williamson's diplomatic proposal with Dempsey's military message raise intriguing questions about the possible formulation of a new U.S. Syria strategy.

The major pieces of the puzzle are present: An essentially humanitarian diplomatic rationale, along R2P lines; the tools of big-power economic and political leverage for a ceasefire; the formation of a multilateral coalition to help provide resources and enforcement; defensive, limited no-fly zones designed to protect a flood of Syrian refugees and the borders of two key regional allies, Turkey and Jordan; and the framework of a Geneva-based peace convention sponsored by Washington and Moscow to bring all interested parties to the table to hammer out some kind of regional stability.

Two things seem clear enough: The close-mouthed Obama administration is playing it's cards close to the vest; and politically speaking, Obama's judiciously restrained instinct on Syria is at the end of its rope.


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Drone Wars: Obama's Critics Missed the Boat

With cameras rolling and hand slicing the air, John McCain took to the Senate floor to blast the Obama administration for leaking the president's personal use of "kill lists" to select targets in the U.S. drone war against al Qaeda, decrying the President's brazen exploitation of "classified" information to burnish his tough-guy political credentials in an election year.

Senate and House intelligence committee members, for their part, called for a bipartisan investigation of the Obama disclosures on national security grounds, claiming they're "putting American lives at risk."

Left-leaning pundits excoriated Obama's hands-on hawkery as commander-in-chief (reported here, here, and here) as the egregious presidential abuse of war powers plucked from the rightful hands of Congress. Oped venues of the liberal media resounded with syncopated calls for investigation of the secret Tuesday targeting meetings where the President personally has ordered the foreign assassination of American citizens. 

Screeds from the blogosphere likened the sycophantic reporting of the Obama White House operation to the travesties Judith Miller enabled George W. Bush & Co. to perform on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

All these charges have an element of truth to them. But only an element. Obama critics left and right know all too well the President is likely, as a Democrat, to come out of this controversy politically untouched and even strengthened. But that is not why the chattering classes across the political spectrum ought to be exercised about how Obama and a handful of aides are so aggressively micromanaging the nation's counterterrorism brief. 

Polls will almost certainly continue to show that most Americans approve of Obama's handling of terrorism and the drone war against terrorists. What surveys will not show -- and what most of the President's critics have entirely missed -- is the tectonic shift that seems to have taken place in what former Bush counsel and Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith calls "wartime presidential accountability". 

It is precisely these changing standards, together with the changing nature of international warfare, Goldsmith believes, that President Obama and his administration are struggling with, and his critics are groping to understand.

Forget about media conspiracies and witch-hunts. There is no question that Obama's aides have supplied members of the press with inside accounts that make their man look good. You don't have to read carefully to know who in the White House, the Pentagon, or the intelligence agencies is talking to reporters -- whose work, by the way, is as clean as a whistle.

Nor is there evidence that the White House has deployed secrecy, deceit, or duplicity to get the word out about Obama's engagement in counterterrorist operations. The Obama White House has, in fact, arguably performed a public service by opening up some usually darkened corners of the military/intelligence world for public scrutiny. 

The "kill list" controversy is not about abuse of power or a runaway presidency. It is about an administration trying to cope with changing concepts of warfare and struggling to settle on the legal and moral principles to fight it. 

Goldsmith, an unapologetic conservative, believes a new and unconventional set of checks and balances has grown up over time, vetted and legitimized largely by the judicial branch of government, that now regulate the President's management of hostilities against stateless terrorist enemies. A similar surge of lawyering-up now monitors and protects every Army brigade on the battleground. 

Lawyers and the courts, Goldsmith argues, have gradually come to replace Congressional oversight in providing functional checks and balances on the president. Some lawyers and legal scholars are leery of what they see as a dangerous evolution of power toward the executive and judicial branches of government that Obama has inherited from the Bush administration.

As a former constitutional law professor, Obama is more aware than most of how changing tactical and strategic circumstances on the ground affect constitutional definitions of warfare, and is not hesitant about parsing new legal precedents and testing new standards for guidance. Obama, Goldsmith argues, has adopted many of Bush’s special wartime powers, from keeping Guantanamo open to backing away from civilian trials for terrorist combatants, because he understands their utility and legitimacy. 

At issue, as Yale law professor John Fabian Witt writes, is that "the foundation of laws of armed conflict that have been evolving for three centuries" are in a state of collapse. Our fight against well-organized and well-financed stateless terrorists has eroded the once-sharp distinctions between war and peace, soldiering and criminality, wartime innocence and guilt. 

Obama is in an entirely new zone of on-the-job training and uncertainty. So far he has played his hand better than might have been expected. But one senses that Goldsmith's new edifice of evolutionary constitutional principle to guide warfare is far from a finished construct. 

Is it, for example, an act of war to attack a sovereign nation with pilotless drones if that nation is Pakistan and the targets are insurgent sanctuaries? And if that nation is the U.S. and the targets are military bases or government buildings?

It will only get harder from here.

Gideon Rose's grand metaphor

Gideon Rose, the new editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and author of How Wars End (Simon & Schuster, 2010), deploys a stunningly ungainly but accurate metaphor of counterinsurgency warfare in his recent book to describe American grand strategy in its foreign entanglements of the past century.

Playing on the shorthand description of COIN theory, Rose rolls out the phrase "clear, hold, and build" to describe the strategic policy aims of United States in Europe (World Wars I and II, Bosnia and Kosovo), East Asia (Korea and Vietnam), and most recently, the Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan). In counterinsurgency terms, he writes, the outcome of individual wars have varied wildly in the 'clearing', and 'holding' stages, with some positive, but more often checkered results in the third stage, 'building' stable nations in America's image.

For any real policymaker to spout such talk would be "ridiculous and unattractive", admits Rose. Yet his brief is unswervingly that "the United States has been engaged in nothing less than an ongoing campaign of global pacification -- clearing, holding, and building in region after region around the world", from well before Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama.

Without quite saying so, Rose's grand metaphor not-so-subtly fashions the United States as a deeply imperial power driven by its sense of its own exceptionalism, great wealth, and a strong instinct to use military power to deter 'insurgent' foreign threats. It's almost, but not quite, American history in the image of the Vietnam War. Rose's point, however, is less contentious: U.S. political leaders, too often adept at starting wars, are not very good at thinking through how those wars should end, or of imagining sustainable and desireable postwar political conditions, before conflicts begin.

He's no doubt right. However elusive such exquisite rational and clairvoyant planning may prove, Rose's quirky rendering of grand American strategy accurately describes a 20th century worldview shared by successive presidents that presupposes rising U.S. economic power, unchallenged American hegemony, and the backing of a far-flung, world-class professional military. No president thus far, including Obama, has shown any real inclination to back away from this script.

Rose's grand strategy metaphor thus places him in the company of military historians like Andrew Bacevich and other critics of Washington's imperial reach and militarization of U.S. foreign policy.

The metaphor itself, however, has limited staying power. Rose flicks at the existence of an alternative strategic outlook with "as distinguished a pedigree" -- "that it's somebody else's job to clear, and somebody else's job to hold, and somebody else's job to build" -- but fails to elaborate. A new approach would seem to embrace Washington's stepping back to leave Libya to the British and French, and leaving terrorist threats in Afghanistan to the Afghan army and national police, measures guaranteed to conjure images of American irresoluteness.

It also leaves the coining of a new grand strategy metaphor to a new generation of anti-isolationist foreign policy realists. I would nominate Harvard's Stephen Walt, who stakes out fundamental strategic assumptions that include 1.) compromised U.S. economic prospects; 2.) the rise of China as a superpower, 3.) withdrawal from Afghanistan-style overcommitment, and 4.) selective future military engagement based on regional balance-of-power politics.

Such a policy may well ring in "the end of the American Century", as one Washington pundit put it. But surely it describes what we are witnessing. That's not altogether a bad thing, and recognizing it is arguably long overdue. Rose's contribution is to encourage a sophisticated approach to the calibration of military and political restraint. He leaves it to others to suggest that dumping the global counterinsurgency strategy just might lead to new era of enhanced American power and influence, rather than the inevitable decline the Cassandras of the right and left so confidently predict.