Curs'd conceit

As I feared I might, I've already been hearing the chorus of Trumpists, neoconservatives, and liberal hawks start up, collectively denouncing people who were in favor of Obama leaving Iraq but who now oppose Trump's leaving northern Syria (or at least oppose his doing so in this way, at this moment, with these consequences at stake). Despite detesting each other, all three groups have this week ever so briefly united in crying "hypocrisy" against erstwhile anti-interventionist leftists (like moi) who have supported previous U.S. troop withdrawals from the Middle East, but who are now condemning Trump's betrayal of the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

The Trumpians, of course, think this anti-interventionist "hypocrisy" is bad because we ought to support everything Trump does. The liberal hawk and neoconservative view, of course, is that people like me are right in this instance, but that we ought to have supported a robust U.S. military presence in Syria all along, and that we also ought to have opposed previous troop draw-downs as well.

Even the usually beloved Brookings folks at the Rational Security podcast were sticking the boot in on this score, in this week's episode. How can the same people who defended the Obama administration's Syria policy -- or his decision to precipitously leave Iraq -- now be crying foul that Trump is pulling people out? they wanted to know. Why didn't they make the same degree of fuss the multiple other times that Trump has threatened a similar withdrawal?

This argument is annoying but in no way difficult to overcome. There is a difference in circumstances between the cases people are citing, and we need not succumb to MacDiarmid's "curs'd conceit of bein' richt" by insisting that every situation must call for precisely the same response.

In most cases, when the neoconservatives and liberal hawks oppose troop withdrawals, they point to some fairly distant potential negative consequences that may result from doing so. If we leave, such and such bad group x may come to power. 

These prophecies may turn out to be true in the end, but then too, they may not. They are speculative, and they always leave unanswered the questions of: might not an even worse group come to power through our staying? Are we certain that our presence is actually making things better rather than worse? Might staying longer not exacerbate conflict, lead to more violence, risk plunging us into a further protracted and indefinite war?

And might we not in fact be the bad group ourselves? Or our autocratic client states in the region?

The evidence on these scores is often not in our favor. To see that we are more than capable of being the bad guys, we don't need to look to the past for examples: just turn to what we and our "allies" in Saudi Arabia are inflicting right now upon the people of Yemen. Come and see the blood in the streets, as Neruda put it.

It is in fact a different matter of judgment, however, when the threatened consequences of withdrawal are not far-off and speculative. When they are not counterbalanced by a host of other potential negative consequences that may just as well follow from staying.

In this case, the case of Turkey and the Kurds, it is not as if we faced a choice as to whether or not to risk war with another country by staying put. It's not as if we were warned that a Turkish invasion might happen in future, and might one day negatively impact our allies.

Instead, there was a phone call in which Turkey's autocratic leader told Trump he was planning an invasion! Like - immediately! And we could have prevented this incursion, not by anything so dangerous and harmful as taking up arms against Turkey - but simply by sitting there and doing nothing! We did not have to start another war. We did not have to expend more of the military budget apart from what it takes to continue to feed and house the handful of troops we have stationed in the area.

And yet, for some unholy reason, we decided to pick up and leave, and give the green light to an invading army that was explicitly, premeditatively, and with direct advance notice to us already mounting an invasion of our allies within the next few days - an invasion that has now begun! And that is already driving thousands of people from their homes!

It's a decision the madness and cruelty of which almost defies comprehension. The worse the resulting violence gets each day since it was announced, the more the mind stretches to try to encompass the magnitude, the gratuitousness, the sheer depravity of this betrayal.

To oppose this decision, but not other troop withdrawals that were made under very different circumstances, is not an act of hypocrisy. It is the simplest sort of exercise in rational discernment. The mature human mind ought to be capacious enough to hold it as true that there are some circumstances in which pulling troops out of an area is a good idea, and others in which it is a manifestly bad -- indeed, evil -- one. We should allow ourselves, like Whitman, to contain multitudes. To do otherwise - to simply assert that a troop presence is always good or always terrible, no matter the facts of the individual case, would be the most basic dereliction of the responsibilities of the human intellect.