Let’s leave Syria

Donald Trump is looking to make a precipitate exit from Syria. His advisers, most of the leading opinion writers in the country, and all the great and the good of America’s foreign-policy elite are crying out at the blunder they anticipate it will be. The president is handing a gift to Vladimir Putin and Iran. The president is betraying our allies. Disaster.

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I don’t think so.

You may remember that the U.S. Congress refused to authorize intervention in Syria in 2013, when President Obama kicked the question to them. They refused to do so because of polls showing that Americans opposed intervention overwhelmingly, roughly 70–30. And support for intervention tends to go down over time. However, U.S. forces had already been active in Syria, and in Syria’s civil war, for at least a year by that point, working with the CIA to arm and train Sunnis fighting the government. Alas, in our scramble to find “moderate rebels,” we often ended up arming Al Nusra, the franchise of al-Qaeda that is native to Syria.

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