After Syria airstrikes, what is the US endgame?
Daniel DePetris
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In the overnight hours on Thursday, two United States F-16 fighter jets dropped their payloads on two locations in Eastern Syria. The targets: an ammunition and a weapons storage facility operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian-backed militia proxies. The precision airstrikes were retaliation for a series of rocket and drone attacks against U.S. military positions in Iraq and Syria (19 at the time of writing).
The Biden administration is holding Iran ultimately responsible.
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The strikes come as the Israel-Hamas war continues to rage, with Israeli aircraft hitting hundreds of targets in Gaza every night and Hamas continuing to send a bevy of missiles into Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli forces are ready to launch a ground operation in the Hamas-ruled enclave as soon as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives the order. When that order comes is difficult to say; the U.S. has persuaded Israel to delay a ground operation until it can rush air defense systems into the region and accelerate negotiations with Hamas over hostage releases.
U.S. officials such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have been the face of the administration’s policy on the war, explaining that Israel has the right to prosecute its military campaign against Hamas but also has an obligation to do so within the laws of war. Yet, in the grand scheme, the fighting in Gaza is a sideshow to the main event: preventing a wider escalation that would draw the U.S. and Iran into a direct conflict.
Thursday night was the closest Washington and Tehran have gotten to a confrontation since the Israel-Hamas war erupted three weeks ago. U.S. bombs hitting Iranian assets might sound like a big deal, but it’s not unusual. The U.S. and Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq long ago settled into a strange but dangerous pattern: rockets and one-way attack drones slam into a U.S. base, only for the U.S. to respond with airstrikes. It happened in February 2021, June 2021, August 2022, and March 2023.
The purpose of the U.S. strikes is to make the militias think twice before engaging in another round of hostilities. That objective, however, has failed based on the number of times we’ve gone through this all too familiar cycle. After a few weeks or months of calm, more rockets and drones are aimed at U.S. positions, only for President Joe Biden to order more strikes in a seemingly endless tit-for-tat.
For now, the U.S. and Iran have been able to limit the volleys of fire. But it’s a precarious game. While it’s easy to discard most of the war-like rhetoric emanating from the likes of Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, U.S. officials with actual responsibility on their shoulders don’t have the luxury of acting like a pundit opining in their living rooms. When a militia with a formidable stockpile of rockets and missiles threatens to unleash fury on American soldiers, U.S. officials have to pay attention and prepare for the worst.
Thus far, Washington has done this by projecting power in the region. Two carrier strike groups, F-16s, A-10s, Patriot missile defense systems, and a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, have either been deployed or are on their way. Biden has warned Iran not to get involved in the Israel-Hamas war and has reiterated that the U.S. will not hesitate to penalize any attacks on its troops.
Self-defense is, of course, legitimate. If American troops are attacked, they have the right to respond. This isn’t up for debate.
But at some point, one must ask why those Americans are in harm’s way in the first place and whether the risks of keeping them there are commensurate with the perceived benefits. More than four years after the ISIS territorial caliphate was destroyed, one gets the sense that U.S. policy in Syria and Iraq is governed more by inertia than by a set of objectives that are clear, measurable, and achievable.
The only clear, measurable, and achievable objective the U.S. had was the destruction of ISIS’s proto-state. But with this having been accomplished long ago, U.S. forces have since been dual hatting as trainers, advisers, and protectors of a de facto Kurdish state in Syria’s northeast. Meanwhile, the counterterrorism mission has evolved from the destruction of ISIS’s territorial caliphate into the destruction of ISIS as an organization, which, as far as I can tell, equates to killing every lunatic who considers himself an ISIS fanatic.
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The U.S. can deploy as many air defense systems as it wants. But let there be no mistake: The rocket and drone strikes will continue, airstrikes or no airstrikes.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.