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Yes, Let's Get the Troops out of Syria

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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

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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.

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  1. HenryJanuary 11, 2019 at 3:30 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.

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  2. ChristopherJanuary 11, 2019 at 5:30 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

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