On Tuesday, news broke that the Defense Department is putting together plans to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. This is the sort of thing that drives empire builders mad. In late 2019, President Donald Trump ordered Defense Secretary James Mattis to withdraw American troops from Syria. Mr. Mad Dog thought the idea so repulsive he resigned in protest.
If the Pentagon is to be believed, there are about 2,000 troops in the worn-torn, recently upset nation. The official justification for America’s presence is to “degrade the Islamic State terrorist group and support local partners operating there.” U.S. troops have been languishing in the Syrian desert since at least 2015. That’s when Barack Obama sent them there to counter said Islamic State. For those who haven’t been keeping up with Syrian current events, the nation hosted a coup just in time for Christmas 2024. An Islamist militant organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad and is now running things, a development that supposedly caught the entire international community by surprise, including the United States, which, again, has been in the country for a decade.
The American Empire
America is an empire. It maintains about 750 U.S. military bases abroad, according to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Moreover, the U.S. has at least three times as many overseas bases as all other countries combined. Those bases cost taxpayers an estimated $55 billion annually. Good thing we’re not $36 trillion in debt.
The average American doesn’t know his country is an empire, but he intuitively opposes it. A YouGov poll from December 2023 revealed that only 12 percent of Americans preferred “extensive” involvement in foreign affairs, which is the current degree of involvement. More than double that, 24 percent, took an “isolationist” position. The largest segment, YouGov says, prefers a Goldilocks degree of involvement, “somewhere in between.” More Americans would likely be in the “isolationist” category if they knew what it really meant. Nevertheless, however these numbers are interpreted, it’s clear that, overwhelmingly, Americans do not harbor interventionist ambitions.
But that doesn’t matter to the people in charge, including elected legislators like Kentucky’s Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. […]
— Read More: thenewamerican.com
