Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.
President Donald Trump’s latest deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles means that there are now more troops carrying out Trump’s anti-protest crackdown in southern California than in both Iraq and Syria, regions where the U.S. has executed some of its most intense and inhumane military campaigns in recent decades, according to official counts.
Trump has dispatched roughly 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to respond to L.A.’s protests of his immigration raids, for a total of roughly 4,700 troops. Meanwhile, according to publicly reported Pentagon figures, the U.S. has roughly 2,000 troops deployed in Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq, for a total of 4,500.
The comparison between the two figures was first noted by ABC News on Tuesday.
Stay in the loop
Never miss the news and analysis you care about.
Notably, the U.S. often obfuscates the number of U.S. troops stationed in countries around the world— potentially in hopes of quelling questions over U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.
However, the figures are still a potent show of the administration’s willingness to leverage extreme military force on its own population. The U.S.’s presence in Syria has been built up over the course of more than a decade of intervention and American-fueled devastation in the country; while the U.S. fought a decades-long war in Iraq and continues its occupation there.
The presence of troops is supposedly under the guise of fighting terrorism — often against militias that only exist due to U.S. and Western interventionism. Left-wing analysts who have read between the lines say that the ultimate goal is seemingly to empower some of the worst human rights violators and foment violence and unrest in the Middle East in order to solidify U.S. military force and power.
The U.S. has a long history of troop deployments against protest movements, from the U.S.’s crackdown on the civil rights movement to the infamous shooting and killing of anti-war protesters at Kent State.
However, while the National Guard has been deployed against U.S. activists numerous times throughout history, historians say that the deployment of active duty Marines against Americans is unprecedented, and an escalation of anti-protest tactics at a time when Trump is grasping at every opportunity to seize power, suppress dissent and push the U.S. toward martial law.
Trump has said that his troop deployment in Los Angeles is necessary in order to suppress the supposed “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
According to a report by ABC News, the Pentagon is considering a plan crafted by the Department of Homeland Security to deploy more than 20,000 additional National Guard troops to aid with Trump’s immigration raids.
This would cost $3.6 billion over the course of a year, and would represent roughly half of the number of troops deployed across the entirety of the Middle East. It would also be an escalation of the Trump administration’s use of the U.S.’s colossal military capacity attack and subdue the American public.
Keep the press free. Fight political repression.
Truthout urgently appeals for your support. Under pressure from an array of McCarthyist anti-speech tactics, independent journalists at Truthout face new and mounting political repression.
We rely on your support to publish journalism from the frontlines of political movements. In fact, we’re almost entirely funded by readers like you. Please contribute a tax-deductible gift at this critical moment!