Former US envoy argues 'Afghan' model to attrition Iran in Syria

• Published date: 17 January 2021
• Author: SETH J. FRANTZMAN
• Date: 17 January 2021

James Jeffrey was widely critiqued for supporting policies aligned with Turkey during his years at the helm of US Middle East policy. During that time, Trump twice claimed he would withdraw from Syria. Consequently, US partner forces were betrayed and bombed by Ankara.

The article praises Trump's foreign policy, including macabre aspects of it, such as turning Syria into a kind of new 1980s Afghanistan. The Syrian war is a stalemate today, Jeffrey writes, adding: "Absent a negotiated solution, the messy war of attrition will likely continue, but that is what worked against the Soviets in Afghanistan."

It is not clear what the word "worked" in this sentence means, since Afghanistan rapidly descended into war and chaos, was taken over by the Taliban and gave a safe haven to al-Qaeda, which then used its freedom of movement in Afghanistan to plan the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, and the Taliban took Kabul in 1996.

Osama bin Laden was praised in Western media in 1993 as an "anti-Soviet warrior" putting his "army" on a road to peace. In 1998, al-Qaeda helped attack the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 200 people. The "anti-Soviet" warrior had turned his killing spree toward murdering Americans and Westerners, also targeting religious minorities all over the world.

In his new article, Jeffrey praises the US decision to rely on countries in the region, as opposed to the US taking the lead through "unilateral" action. "Trump also made clear that he would support Israeli and Turkish military actions against Iran and Russia in Syria and would rely primarily on the Gulf states, Jordan, Iraq and Israel to stand up to Tehran," he writes.

The result of this policy, though, was internal administration infighting as some of its members were tasked with counterterrorism policy and others with an Iran-focused mission.

To create this policy salad, which was at times contradictory, the US ignored "domestic behavior" of countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. This means the US ignored abuses of human rights, Turkey went on to ethnically cleanse Afrin in Syria, harass US allies, threaten to "liberate" parts of Jerusalem from Israeli control, host Hamas terrorists and purge hundreds of thousands and crush dissent and journalists. But for the Trump administration, this was fine, so long as regional countries shouldered the burden.

Jeffrey claims the US built a "resilient coalition even as it sought to reduce its direct...