US soldiers in a Syrian oilfield. File photo.
US intervention in Syria is part of the “flawed status quo” of US foreign policy instigated by warmongers, US Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said.
“Frankly I’m tired of hearing, ‘if we don’t fight them there, they’ll come here,'” Florida Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna wrote in an article published in the US magazine Newsweek on Thursday, March 16, while referring to the recent resolution to withdraw US troops from Syria, presented in US Congress by Congressman Matt Gaetz, which failed to get approval from Congress.
For her, leaving Syria is one of the “necessary steps to redirect” US foreign policy “away from a failed internationalist foreign policy consensus—on both sides of the aisle—that for a quarter century has wasted our resources and carelessly spilled the blood of our soldiers across the globe.”
“The argument that keeping Americans overseas is necessary for stopping terrorist attacks is absurd,” she acknowledged.
As regards to Syria, “a few hundred troops will not change anything on the ground,” Luna said.
Former US President Barack Obama’s “naĂŻve campaign for regime change in the Middle East fundamentally misunderstood the region at large and was a futile experiment,” the Congresswoman opined. Especially when Obama launched the slogan “Assad must go,” it only prolonged the war in Syria and made Russia to get involved because of the risks looming over its own security.
“Worse, it resulted in a civil war which directly resulted in the rise of ISIS,” Luna stated.
“Local terrorism in distant countries is not an existential threat to America and can be effectively managed by long distance capabilities and prudent alliance strategies,” she continued. “The threat of ISIS is currently minimal and if it rises again as a functioning state, it will not take us much time to return and crush it. In short, nothing in the region demands constant troop deployment and endless war.”
Luna acknowledged that US “nation-building” in West Asia was “not a prudent policy.” “It took billions from our own citizens and funneled them to NGOs, militaries, failed governance programs and foreign aid waste while leaving many regions destabilized” and detonating hostility of the people of those regions toward US citizens.
“The Middle East is a region with ancient tribal rivalries and various dormant social issues that are not for Americans to fix, either through blood or treasure,” she added, thus demonstrating the internalized “Orientalism” of Westerners when referring to any place outside of the purview of “Western civilization.”
Anti-migrant and anti-China stance
Congresswoman Luna also exposed her anti-migrant posture in the opinion piece she wrote for Newsweek. She called for militarizing the US southern border, branding poor Central American migrants as “terrorists.” In addition, she advocated for a hard stance against China.
“Terrorists quite literally walk across our southern border, a national security crisis that our current president’s policies deliberately facilitate. Why aren’t the billions of dollars spent in the Middle East being invested in guarding our own border?” she questioned. “Why are American forces patrolling distant nations yet not our own, which is under threat? Why was the equipment left behind during our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan not sold or shipped to Taiwan?”
She went on to call China a “peer rival” for the United States, and that “the Chinese government would love to see us bankrupt, militarily vulnerable, wasting our tax dollars, and draining our weapons in Middle Eastern or Eastern European backwaters.”
“America’s job is not to police the streets of Aleppo,” she asserted. “It is to focus on American borders, and law and order in American cities.”
Congresswoman Luna has selective memory
While correctly blaming Obama for the destabilization of West Asia, Congresswoman Luna forgot to mention the role of the next US president, Donald Trump, in prolonging and escalating the proxy war in Syria. Trump even confessed that the United States is in Syria “for the oil.”
Although the Syrian government, with military assistance from Russia and Iran, has managed to expel US forces and US-funded and armed terrorist groups from most parts of Syria, US troops still occupy a third of the country, precisely in the north-east where the majority of Syria’s oilfields are located, to do exactly what Trump wanted them to do.
The Syrian Oil Ministry announced in a statement that US forces and their mercenaries are stealing about 66,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the occupied areas of Syria, which produces 80,000 barrels daily.
After smuggling the oil from Syria to Iraq, US soldiers sell the oil on the black market in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, and transfer some of it to the US bases in Iraq and Syria for their own use.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry, in a statement issued in December 2022, announced Syria’s estimated economic losses due to the ongoing US invasion to be $111.9 billion.
According to the statement, direct losses are estimated at $25.9 billion: $19.8 billion due to US theft of oil and gas, $3.2 billion in damage to infrastructure, and $2.9 billion in damage to oil and gas facilities. Indirect losses stand at about $86 billion.
The Syrian government has also repeatedly denounced the US government for continuing to train terrorists in its bases in the occupied regions of Syria.
Congresswoman Luna failed to acknowledge the suffering of the people of Syria, and the peoples of all the countries of West Asia that the US invaded over the years, under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
(HispanTV) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/AF
