Let 'Em Have It

In our last article, we talked about how difficult it is to rein in and control defense spending. Ever since the end of World War II, there have always been serious threats facing the United States, so there have been valid reasons for strengthening our military defense. That’s the reason Republicans and Democrats have often put their political differences behind and have united to increasingly spend more money on the military.

However, behind the scenes there is another strong force advocating for increased defense spending, and that is the reputed “Deep State.” Sounds like a “conspiracy theory,” doesn’t it? Maybe not! Let’s look at what happened in Syria, and what is happening now.

During the second term of the Obama Administration, the United States took a strong stance against Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, and Commander-in Chief of the Syrian Armed Forces. President Obama declared: “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside. As a part of that effort, my Administration is announcing unprecedented sanctions to deepen the financial isolation of the Assad regime and further disrupt its ability to finance a campaign of violence against the Syrian people. I have signed a new Executive Order requiring the immediate freeze of all assets of the government of Syria…”

In 2014, President Obama went further, and he rejected any alliance with Bashar al-Assad against the Islamic State group, arguing that the Syrian ruler was illegitimate and that any such pact would backfire. "Assad has ruthlessly murdered hundreds of thousands of his citizens. As a consequence, he has completely lost legitimacy with the majority of the country," "For us to then make common cause with him against ISIL (Islamic State) would only turn more Sunnis in Syria in the direction of supporting ISIL and would weaken our coalition (against IS),"

In September 2015, then Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump took a different and more practical stance, saying that the United States should let Russia fight it out against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria.

“We have ISIS, and ISIS wants to go after Assad, but we’re knocking the hell out of ‘em… — we’re still droppin’ bombs all over the place… “So we’re stopping them, to a certain extent, from going after Assad,” “You have Russia that’s now there. Russia’s on the side of Assad, and Russia wants to get rid of ISIS as much as we do, if not more, because they don’t want ‘em coming into Russia.” And I’m saying, ‘Why are we knocking ISIS and yet at the same time we’re against Assad?’ Let them fight… But more importantly, let Russia fight ISIS, if they want to fight ‘em … in Syria,.. “Let Syria and ISIS fight. Why do we care?

“We have to get rid of ISIS, very importantly, but I look at Assad, and Assad to me looks better than the other side,” he said. “And you know, this has happened before. We back a certain side, and that side turns out to be a total catastrophe. Russia likes Assad, seemingly, a lot — let them worry about ISIS. Let them fight it out.”

As President, Mr. Trump lived up to his words, and concentrated on defeating ISIS rather than Assad; and when the Islamic Caliphate was routed, he repeatedly called for the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, but every time he received pushback. According to Trump Special envoy to Syria, Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

But that’s not the whole story! When Mr. Jeffrey resigned at the end of the Trump Presidency, he admitted in an interview with Defense One that he misled President Trump about the true number of US troops deployed in Syria. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.” Jeffrey said the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the approximately 200 troops Trump agreed to keep in the country in 2019. According to anonymous sources who spoke with Defense One, the true number of U.S. troops in Syria is said to be around 900, though the precise number is classified and reportedly remains unknown even to Trump and other members of his administration hoping to bring U.S. troops out of foreign engagements.

What?!? An unelected bureaucrat lied to his boss, the President of the United States, who had campaigned, and was elected by the American people, in part, on disengaging from foreign entanglements, and getting out of unwinnable and wasteful foreign wars. We were flabbergasted then, and still remain so, that there was no big outcry against Mr. Jeffrey. Shouldn’t he be prosecuted? There has got to be some law against what he did. So yes, there is a Deep State, and even the President of the United States doesn’t seem to have the power to counteract it. You have to wonder - what else are they hiding, and lying to Congress and the President about?

So where are we now? We are still in Syria, but now there are approximately 2,000 at-risk soldiers there. What are they doing? They are defending Syrian oil fields. You have to ask - does President Biden really know what is happening over there? Perhaps he does know, and he doesn’t really care. After all, spending more US dollars to defend Syrian oil production fits perfectly with his strategy of asking the dictators in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the likes to produce more oil; while, at the same time, he does everything he can to discourage US oil production.