Jeremy Shapiro and Aaron Stein review the sorry record of U.S. intervention in Syria over the last seven years:

This is a familiar story in U.S. interventions: Lacking sufficient domestic will or even interest for a proper intervention, innovative thinkers within the U.S. government devise a plan that can achieve American goals on the cheap. Their plan gets the United States involved in the problem but usually lacks sufficient resources or resolve to achieve any sort of decisive result, which would then enable an honorable exit. When, predictably, the plan encounters difficulties, the United States is faced with a Hobson’s choice of doubling down on the mistake or accepting a humiliating retreat.

The main problem with U.S. policy in Syria under both the Obama and Trump administrations is that the U.S. never had much at stake in Syria’s conflict, but our political leaders and policymakers kept insisting that the U.S. had to be involved for the sake of “leadership” or “international order” or some other abstraction unrelated to American security. Interventionists cited the humanitarian disaster being created by the war as a reason to take sides in the war, and then proposed measures that were guaranteed to make things worse by intensifying and prolonging the war. Incoherence and internal contradiction have been the name of the game from the beginning. Many Syria hawks saw the war as an opportunity to hurt Iran and weren’t concerned what effect interventionist policies were having on the population, and later on others used ridiculous “credibility” arguments to claim that intervention in Syria would intimidate Russia and discourage their government from taking further action against Ukraine. It was as pure a case of “do somethingism” as divorced from any rational definition of the national interest as we are likely to see.

Syria didn’t matter enough to the U.S. to justify a major commitment, but hawks were determined to get the U.S. to interfere one way or another and settled for whatever they could get. This meant seizing on practically any pretext for military action inside Syria. Eventually, Obama obliged by expanding the war on ISIS there, but Syria hawks would never forgive him for “failing” to attack the Syrian government in 2013. At no point was any of this seriously debated, and it was never voted on in Congress. The one time that Congress was called on to consider military action against Syria, the backlash against the idea was so strong that the planned attack was called off. Over the last five years, the U.S. has acquired bases and “allies” in Syria to fight this unauthorized war in pursuit of unrealistic goals. We see this same by-hook-or-by-crook approach to keeping U.S. forces in Syria today. Syria hawks aren’t all that interested in taking Syrian oil, except as a way to deny it to the Syrian government, but they are happy to use that as an excuse to maintain a military presence there if that is what it takes to keep Trump on board. It has always been an intervention for the sake of intervening, and that is what it remains.

The U.S. has had an illegal military presence in Syria for at least half a decade without any serious discussion about the merits or wisdom of being there. That is an indictment of Congressional acquiescence to presidential warmaking, and it is also an indictment of the poor quality of our foreign policy debates. One president after another commits the U.S. to take part in conflicts without the consent of the people or our representatives, and this often happens without our knowledge of the full extent of U.S. involvement. Presidents present the country with a fait accompli of involvement in another country’s war, and then this commitment that none of us ever agreed to is transformed by the mystical rites of the Blob into a sacred promise that can never be revoked for fear of angering the Credibility God.

When there is finally a possibility of getting out, we are then told that this would benefit our “adversaries” that would never have been our adversaries if we had not taken sides against them. We are told that we can’t “lose” Syria to Russia, which has been Syria’s patron for half a century. None of these arguments ever makes any sense on closer inspection. All of them are designed to shut up or at least marginalize critics of “do somethingism” by making withdrawal from an illegal war that serves no purpose seem like the extreme and irresponsible position.

The smart thing to do at this point is to face reality and remove U.S. forces from a country where they should never have been. Shapiro and Stein conclude:

The U.S. mission in Syria is not clearly defined, its resources are inadequate to the task, and the probability of success is very low. So, continuing it is probably a bad idea.

The costs of military intervention are usually higher than the benefits, and that is especially true when the U.S. has virtually no interests at stake. If the U.S. is going to accept the risks that come with intervening in a foreign conflict, there has to be a compelling reason directly connected to U.S. security, and in Syria there has never been one. The beginning of learning from the failure of “do somethingism” in Syria is to recognize that.