The battle over U.S. policy in Syria appears to have heated up over the past 24 hours, ahead of the expectation that Joe Biden will take office in January 2021 with a different policy from that of President Donald Trump’s stated intention over the past two years, of getting U.S. troops out of Syria. The nomination of Antony Blinken as Biden’s Secretary of State suggests possible preparation for a regime-change war in Syria, instead.
The New York Times reported yesterday, with obvious indignation, that the official at the Pentagon in charge of the anti-ISIS war was fired, the implication being that this was done to disrupt the transition to the Biden Administration. The Times, citing three unnamed sources, claimed that Christopher P. Maier, the head of the Pentagon’s Defeat ISIS Task Force since March 2017, was fired after a White House appointee told him the United States had won that war and that his office had been disbanded.
According to the Times, the Pentagon issued a statement late on Monday (Nov. 30) which said that Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller had accepted Maier’s resignation and that his duties would be folded into two other offices that deal with special operations and regional policies. The Pentagon statement also said the transition reflected the success of the U.S.-led effort to crush the terrorist state that ISIS created in large swaths of Iraq and Syria. But Maier’s supporters claim he was summarily forced out of an important but low-profile job that required navigating the shoals of Washington’s counterterrorism bureaucracy as well as flying off to combat zones, including northeast Syria and Iraq, to work with precarious partners on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State. Brett McGurk, who resigned in a huff as the special envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition the first time Trump tried to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, is among those trotted out to defend Maier.
