Barack Obama’s ambassador to Syria just released a devastating op-ed
that removes all doubt about what an abject failure Obama’s Syrian
policy was for the world.
Look, Trump always said he inherited a mess and we are really just now learning the full extent of it. Thankfully, we elected the right man at the right time in history to right the ship.
From The Washington Examiner: The former U.S. ambassador to Syria has said President Trump was “essentially correct” in removing troops from the country.
Algeria under President George W. Bush after being a senior diplomat in Iraq. He was then appointed U.S. ambassador to Syria by President Barack Obama in 2010.
“The president should view the hullabaloo that erupted after he
announced the Syrian pullout as an opportunity to take a number of steps
to make the most of his essentially correct, but widely unpopular,
move,” Ford wrote in an op-ed Thursday for the Washington Post.
Ford is the most recent U.S. ambassador to Syria. He was recalled
in late 2011 due to threats to his safety following the Syrian
uprising, which he supported because Bashar Assad’s regime began using
force against protesters. He retired in 2014 and became a fierce critic
of Obama’s Syria policy.
Ford argued in hius article that it would be virtually impossible
for U.S. troops to defeat the Islamic State’s ideology and suggested
that it was up to Syria to fix its own problems.
“Syrians had electricity and water when they rose up against
Assad in 2011; it is Syria’s underlying societal problems that spawned
the unrest and spurred Islamist extremist recruitment,” he wrote. “Only
Syrians, not U.S. troops and stabilization teams, can reverse that. We
would do well to be humbler about our abilities, especially in the face
of sustained, widespread regional hostility.”
From The Daily Caller: Ford
pointed out that many opponents fear the pullout will lend a victory to
Russia, Iran and Syria, but the former ambassador called this fear
“absurd,” noting that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime already
controls roughly two-thirds of Syria. The regions that the U.S.-backed
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) control are largely deserts and
drought-prone oil fields with low-value crude.
“In sum, holding northeastern Syria would not have enabled
Washington to leverage any important concessions from Damascus, Tehran
or Moscow,” Ford wrote.
When it comes to the United States’s Kurdish allies, who have
been leading the ground war against the Islamic State in order to
achieve autonomy in the northeastern region of Syria, many see the U.S.
pullout as a betrayal.
Ford argues the United States’s long-term interest is “stability,
not a deeply embattled Syrian Kurdish autonomous zone,” which must be
reached through agreements between Turkey, Russia, Iran and Syria.
