They say it is because he disagrees with President Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.
And yet, if you read his resignation letter, he claims to agree that the US Military should not be the “world policeman”, which is essentially what we are doing in not only Syria but the entire Middle East. It seems to me Trump is trying to get us out of another quagmire.
I don't know how you define quagmire. If your yardsticks are Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq then NE Syria doesn't quite fit.
The Kurds asked for our help after the Assad regime pulled gov't troops from East of the Euphrates in order to shore up the defense in the West, leaving Northern and Eastern Syria wide open to ISIS military columns equipped with US equipment captured from the Iraqi Army. The Turks watched the slaughter from across the border, the same as the Assad Regime, the Iranians, and Russians. The Kurds didn't ask us to do the fighting for them. They put up their own sons and fathers
and daughters and mothers in the fight. The casualty count confirms it.
Yes, the Obama administration pulled troops from Iraq. That was not only a campaign promise, but a request by the Iraqi government who would not provide a decent status of forces agreement. The Iraqis made it clear they wanted us out. Their inability to defend themselves against Sunni insurgents and AQ who morphed into ISIS was their fault. Not ours. They couldn’t even hold onto the equipment we left behind. ISIS used that equipment to advance all the way to the Syrian-Turkish border.
Seeing the vacuum left by their mistake, the Obama administration began sending larger numbers of SOF into Northern Iraq and then Syria in 2016. They build out an Army SF headquarters in the ME in early 2017. I know this because my DS wired it. By this time they were fully engaged throughout Northern Syria.
I have pictures of my blond hair blued eyed DS in a T-shirt, without a weapon or body armor strolling down the street in Kobane in the summer of 2017, escorted by a single armed teenaged YPG/SDF fighter assigned to protect them. There is a picture of the Turkish military outpost across the border which sat on its hands during the slaughter just a few months earlier. Turkish military units have be massing at that same border area, ready to cross now that ISIS is gone from the area.
Now that the Kurds, with our considerable assistance, have mostly cleared ISIS from East of the Euphrates, we are leaving them to the tender mercies of the Assad regime, Turks, Russians, Iranians and their Shiite proxies, that is, if ISIS doesn't re-energize itself first.
President Trump inherited an ongoing successful operation and deserves credit for seeing it to something like a conclusion despite his ridiculous campaign rhetoric. However, as Gen. Mattis’ resignation and that of Brett McGurk prove, President Trump owns the immediate fate of the Syrian Kurds, who may possibly be the best Middle Eastern Partners we have ever had.
As a side note, this stupid “Gov’t Shutdown” serves the purpose of deflecting attention away from the total repudiation of the President by his Sec Def and his personal representative to the anti-ISIS coalition.