Brett McGurk on ISIS

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You did resign. To be fair, you were going to plan to leave mid-February but you brought that up to the end of December. And in your letter to your colleagues you said, “The recent decision by the president came as a shock and was a complete reversal of policy that was articulated to us. It left our coalition partners confused and our fighting partners bewildered.” You’ve explained a little bit about that. But when you say — what was your — what came out of your mouth? What was the first thing you said when you got the call that this was going to happen?

BRETT MCGURK: Well, there are two ways to look at it. One was, “OK. The president has asked us to leave Syria. Let’s try to figure out a way to orchestrate this in a way that can still achieve all of our objectives in Syria.” And all of our objectives in Syria include — and again, these are the instructions from the White House, so this is not policy, it’s just cooked up in the State Department. Our policy in Syria articulated by the White House national security adviser, John Bolton, and others, was that we would stay in Syria until, number one, the enduring defeat of ISIS, that was the primary mission, that was my mission. Number two, we’ll stay in Syria until all Iranians are out of Syria, whether or not that was realistic, that was the stated policy articulated again from the White House. And number three, we would stay in Syria until there was an irreversible momentum, was the phraseology, to the U.N.-backed political process in Geneva, which dealt with the Assad regime in a civil war. I frankly believe that if we are leaving Syria, as the president has now very clearly instructed, those objectives simply are totally unachievable. Another thing that really concerned me, Christiane, is that asking a military force to withdraw under pressure or from a combat environment is one of the most difficult things you can ask a military force to do. So, if the orders are — and these are the orders from the president to withdraw, that has to be the mission. The mission cannot be withdrawn and do a number of other things, complete the ISIS campaign, which, of course, we want to do, keep the Russians and the regime out of the territory we could — we now influence, try to do some sort of engineering to allow Turkey to come in to replace us and another number of other things. that’s impossible to ask the few Americans on the ground to do. So, it’s really a mission impossible.