It’s Not Time for Our Troops to Leave the Middle East

The United States base at Tower 22 in Jordan is in the middle of a seemingly unending desert, astride the ancient Damascus-Baghdad Highway near the border with Syria. In January it is cold, often rainy and very bleak. Last month three U.S. service members at Tower 22 were killed by a drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia. Their deaths prompted more than 80 retaliatory strikes by the United States against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and militias operating in Iraq and Syria.

The attack in Jordan was the clear, foreseeable result of our tepid responses to more than 150 attacks against U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq since October. The simple fact of the matter is this: For too long, we postponed dealing with a growing threat to our forces in the region because our troops were able to defend themselves so well. In other words, our troops’ capabilities enabled Washington to minimize the risk they faced — and to avoid making hard choices.

The Tower 22 attack ended that state of play and sparked fresh questions about the safety of thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed in Jordan, Syria and Iraq as the Middle East conflict widens. Last month, the United States and Iraq started talks that could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Some members of the Biden administration may be considering pulling troops from Syria as well, according to one report.

This kind of talk can be seriously damaging to U.S. interests in the region. It gives hope to Tehran that it is succeeding in its long-term goal of ejecting the United States from the region through its proxy militias. Nothing could be less helpful — or more dangerous to our service members who are already in harm’s way.

Should U.S. troops stay in Syria and Iraq, or should they go? And if they stay, how does American leadership prevent these attacks from continuing? What’s needed now is a presidential decision that has been too long deferred: a firm commitment to keeping our troops in Syria and an additional, nuanced commitment to work with the Iraqi government to find a mutually agreeable force level in that country.

Let’s look first at Syria. It’s become commonplace in Washington to say that the presence of our 900 service members in Syria has outrun our foreign policy. The reality is much more complex than that. The United States entered Syria in 2014 with an international coalition to confront ISIS with our partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces. By mid-2019, we achieved the goal of removing the caliphate as a geographic entity, but remnants of ISIS endured.