Skip to main content

Yes, Let's Get the Troops out of Syria

Image result for Syria


From the presumption that Trump must be wrong, fallacious inferences follow.

Yes, Trump is a horrible President on too many levels to enumerate. But remember what they say about a stopped clock?

The US has no business having troops in Syria. If Trump is in fact intent on withdrawing them: good for him. [ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT NARRATIVE VOICE -- he is not in fact intent on withdrawing them.]

If Mattis resigned over that: Mattis was in the wrong, and this is so EVEN IF it is true, as some reporting has it, that Mattis has been a check on some of Trump's worst impulses on other occasions.

This is John Glaser, of CATO, on the subject: https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-right-withdraw-syria

-------------

The latest news on this front, of course, is that the Trump administration wasn't serious. The troops are staying in Syria after all. It was all a diversion, presumably a way of drawing attention away at least for a brief spell from the new House of Representatives, the Mueller probe, etc. Now new distractions are on display and that one, having served its purpose, has been discarded.

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJanuary 11, 2019 at 6:30 AM

    I quibble with your phrase "Trump administration." I do not believe that one exists in the ordinary sense of a group of people, working together, under the president's leadership. Trump makes all decisions himself, without consulting cabinet members or other so-called experts in his administration, except when these people are able to act behind his back to avert a stupid decision. Trump is too stupid and too insecure to acknowledge to himself that he is not the most informed person about everything. Rather than "the Trump administration wasn't serious," you might say, "Trump's whim of the moment changed." In the case of the withdrawal from Syria, I believe that Trump made the decision on his own, without consulting foreign policy experts, and Bolton apparently talked him out of it, perhaps by telling him that it would make him look weak or by telling him that we would withdraw troops, but slowly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherJanuary 11, 2019 at 8:30 AM

    This morning news organizations are reporting that US troop withdrawals have begun. Everything i still vague as of this morning. No numbers and no timetable are available so far as I can tell -- but it seems the withdrawal will be divided into waves and the first wave is leaving.

    https://thehill.com/policy/defense/424873-us-has-begun-troop-withdrawal-from-syria

    After the administration's zig-zagging on this point, I'm not all that surprised that they've zigged again, and am ready for them to zag again: that is, for all we know next week the withdrawal might turn into an escalation. But the world is everything that is the case, and right now some degree of withdrawal is the case.https://thehill.com/policy/defense/424873-us-has-begun-troop-withdrawal-from-syria

    The timing may be coincidental BUT this happens just as POTUS is touring the southern border of the US, talking up the possibility of using his emergency powers as commander in chief to build his wall from out of the Pentagon budget. It is possible that the two developments are related -- that he would use Syrian deployment money for wall building. Just a thought....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more