Book Description

"A war within a war; that is how history will record the U.S. military's leadership of the Global Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS) Syrian campaign, Operation Inherent Resolve. For four years, from late 2014 until the March 2019 declaration of victory over the so-called physical ISIS caliphate, significant and focused military efforts in Syria may have briefly obscured the persistent fact that the military instrument has always been secondary to the political process, but the drumbeat of time and the relegation of ISIS in Syria to a low-level insurgency has only made the case clearer. Two administrations' worth of policy towards the Syrian civil war and regime of Bashar al Assad have relied heavily upon a meandering and highly fractured political and diplomatic track. In order to understand this course, and therefore place the military campaign in its proper context, one must perceive policy not simply through the lens of presidential transitions, United Nations Special Envoys, or even the relative rises and falls of forked or parallel political platforms. One must view the Syrian Civil War through the lens of a December 2015 inflection point. Up until December 2015, policy debates and diplomatic energies involved sifting and working with the Syrian opposition forces, wavering on chemical weapons, stating that "Assad must go,"2 and three UN Special Envoys all failing to achieve lasting ceasefires or bring the parties to the negotiating tables. Then, with the triplicate rise of ISIS, Russian and American interventions, and refugee crisis, December 2015 represented a singularly distinct moment of international unity. This moment handed American diplomats the passage of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2254. Since then, even through the shattering and freezing of the country from the continued Syrian Army advance, Turkish military incursion, and persistent Israeli-Iranian conflict in the southwest, subsequent policy has doggedly chased a clear but difficult roadmap to conflict resolution in accordance with UNSCR 2254. This has been especially visible of late through the Syrian Constitutional Committee meetings and a mostly effective nation-wide ceasefire since March 2020, but should be expected to persist going forward as the official U.S. policy for the resolution of the Syrian conflict. If the military in the foreground perceives stalemate and waning influence, it should alternatively look through the lens of the nine-year diplomatic process which led to, and now relies upon, a singular moment of unity five years hence reflected in UNSCR 2254. From this perspective, stalemate is not losing. It is winning--slowly."--Abstract.