Why Trump is right to pull out of 'stupid endless wars' - The Centre for Independent Studies

In the 1967 movie The Producers the Zero Mostel character famously urges: “That’s it, baby – when you’ve got it, flaunt it!” Well, for once, a French president has “got it” and, on his behalf, I’d like to do a bit of flaunting.

Which is a fancy way of saying Jacques Chirac – who died a fortnight ago at age 86 – was right about Iraq and that the long-time French leader who opposed the Anglo-American-Australian decision to topple Saddam Hussein may even help explain, indeed justify, Donald Trump’s big foreign policy decision this week.

On the eve of the Iraq war, in March 2003, Chirac told Tony Blair that the US-led invasion would be a “nightmare”. It would precipitate a civil war and unleash a new wave of terrorism, Chirac warned. Afterwards, Blair laughed it off, telling a colleague: “Poor old Jacques: he just doesn’t get it, does he?”

At the time, Chirac was reviled across America. As it turned out, he “got it” about Iraq.

It is against this background that President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria – and the overwhelmingly hostile criticism it has provoked – is best understood.

Indeed, among those complaining most loudly about the US President’s retreat from what he calls “stupid endless wars” are those who were the most enthusiastic about plunging America in.

Trump is not to blame for the mess o’ potamia, and his desire to get Uncle Sam out of these “un-winnable wars” is fully understandable.

I am not suggesting here that Trump “gets it” in the way Chirac clearly “got” post-war Iraq. The Donald lacks the kind of prudence that characterised Le Bulldozer’s world view. It’s just that Trump’s decision to withdraw from the forever wars of the Middle East is not as crazy as you might think.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, the US foreign-policy establishment – the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Clintons, the Bidens – championed “regime change” across the Middle East. The result was not flourishing new democracies but costly occupations, incalculable bloodshed, political instability, failed states and endless civil wars.

As the distinguished Harvard intellectual Stephen Walt has observed: “Creating a functional democracy is a difficult process under the best of circumstances, but trying to do it in fractured societies one barely understands is a fool’s errand.”

Take Iraq: Chirac had warned that Saddam’s downfall would merely deliver a Shia majority, which meant Iraq would descend into an even more fractured and tribal place.

Before the invasion, Saddam’s Bathists – like the Hashemite monarchy, the British and the Ottomans – had allowed the minority Sunni Arabs to hold a disproportionate share of power and resources.

For the majority Shia, that meant brutal suppression. But the US-led invasion changed all that, upending the sectarian imbalance in Iraqi polity. “Liberation” had attracted jihadists like flies on a dying animal while Iran acquired strategic influence with the new Shia regime in Baghdad.

Years later, at the height of the so-called Arab Spring of 2010-11, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supported “regime change” in Syria and Libya. That campaign to support Sunni rebels helped embolden Sunni jihadists. It also allowed the Kurds to form self-governing regions in war-torn Syria. But is that sustainable?

The cold hard reality, as Trump surely knows, is that Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Mullahs have defeated the US-backed Sunni rebels in Syria. From Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s perspective, Kurdish forces in Syria will link with their terrorist brethren in his nation. How long can America really stay in Syria to protect the Kurds against the Turks?

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it’s worth noting that since the end of the Cold War the US has been at war in three out of every four years.

Without doubt, as Trump argued this week, history will judge the architects of these wars very harshly. In 2016, he resonated with a war-weary public by campaigning on an “America First” anti-interventionist agenda.

Why is all this relevant to Australia? Well, because fighting un-winnable wars in the Middle East makes it more difficult for our most important security ally to make Asia its first strategic priority.

Washington does not have unlimited resources and not every problem can be solved by America. In the face of a rising China, we need an activist and engaged America in our region more than ever.

By pulling troops out of Syria Trump shows, as he tweeted this week, he wants to “get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home”. Somewhere, Jacques Chirac feels vindicated.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.