What were U.S. Troops even in Northern Syria to begin with?
What are we doing there? We are defending our National Security Interests.
Syria is not really a country. You will have to ask the UK what on earth they were thinking while they were playing pin the tail on the donkey with maps in the ME and decided that Syria was sustainable. It was not then and is less so now. Another result of the UK's hasty retreat from the ME too broke to do otherwise, a retreat they executed twice for that matter, once in the early 20th century when they exited militarily and then again by relinquishing its management of ME oil and western oil imperialism to us in the mid-20th century.
So, Syria is wide open. While it is obvious that Saudi cannot defend its airspace, too busy suppressing women under their hot, sweaty bodies and in other ways I guess. All the Saudi's do is buy a bunch of military crap from us, resist the temptation to learn to use it and then wait for us to bring more equipment and our own troopers over to defend them. Must be nice. Whereas we raped Iran for their oil, we made partners out of the Saudi's for theirs and I guess both they and us think this is still part of the deal. We raped Iran for their oil because those people actually have tradition, pride and they would not just lift their robes and bend over to us as the Saudi's did. Iran is ancient Persia. Screw with those people at your own risk.
Syria cannot control its own borders, cannot defend its own ground let alone its airspace. It is wide open. Yet all you need do is look at a map and know how to read one to tell why it is strategically valuable territory. All it really is at this point is excellent ground from which to threaten Israel, and Saudi and the other oil bearing ME states and open territory for terrorists. The UK should have come up with a better idea for that land while it was playing pin the tail on the donkey with maps as they seeded the ground for the growth of geopolitical problems, just about the only thing that will grow there as they are virtually one of the first real casualties of climate change induced famine. That speaks volumes to how tenuous Syria's circumstance was even before climate change.
Why is ME oil still important even to us in the US? Because most of the known reserves of Light/Sweet Crude are there, NOT HERE. We are not energy self sufficient or certainly not as energy self sufficient as the heraldry of fossil fuels would have you believe. Fracking does not produce Light/Sweet crude. It produces Heavy/Sour crude. Nice that we have a way to get at it. But its not optimal for many uses and is in other cases, not usable at all.
So we are stuck on the horns of Anglo-Saxon oil imperialism. We got to be the guy left standing with no chairs when the music stops. We could have done a better job of actually embracing renewable energy. But NOOOOOOOOO!!!. The fossil fuel industry is still way too powerful politically for that to happen. Sure lets just keep sending people down in those coal mines instead of making even the slightest effort to train them to do something less hazardous and lets just keep drilling and fracking and drilling and fracking while we just tell Americans that we are "energy self-sufficient". What the heck, most Americans are gullible enough to buy that story.
This could have all worked out differently mainly if we were not so owned by the fossil fuel industry and if the UK had been a little more thoughtful about what they were doing. We are the guys left standing with no chair when the music stopped because we willingly took over management of Anglo-saxon oil imperialism in the ME from the UK who had been managing it for themselves, the French, the Dutch and the USA before they simply could not do it any longer.
Could have worked out differently if:
- the UK was more thoughtful about how they exited and gave up power in the ME
- the US managed western oil imperialism more thoughtfully and carefully than the Brits did. Instead we were even more thoughtless and careless
- we had converted more and faster to renewable energy
