Posted on 11/13/2023 12:36:06 PM PST by ConservativeInPA
The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it has started the process of withdrawing all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria after the White House confirmed President Donald Trump had given the surprise order to leave because ISIS there had been "defeated."
The announcement was met with backlash from Capitol Hill, especially from Republican senators, and Wednesday afternoon Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was headed to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with the president.
President Trump's decision followed a phone call with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last Friday which triggered the decision, a U.S. official told ABC News. During that call, Trump told Erdogan that he was planning to pull U.S. troops out of Syria, a senior Turkish official said.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
ISIS was growing in power the entire 8 years Obama was in office. Trump eliminated them in less than a year. What does that say?
Send those 2000 south to Israel, to help rescue American hostages in Gaza.
On NO! Pedo Jo! is going to be doing another victory lap. The boy “won”! USA, USA, USA, LOL.
If it weren’t for bad ideas, you would have no ideas.
Because 2000 troops are the same no matter training?
These 2000 are SpecOps trained in CQB?
Were these “Americans” Americans on Oct 6th, or did they consider themselves Israeli Jews?
I know of zero American tourists that go to the Southwestern desert of Israel.
Send your boy Byron Donalds to get the hostages…
It says Trump accomplished the mission and got out. He had to do that because he inherited the problem from Bush and Obama. We shouldn’t have had any troops in Syria or Iraq. The same should have been true with Afghanistan after about three to six months after our initial attacks. You destroy the enemy and leave. No rebuilding.
You just watch the calls for American taxpayers to pay for rebuilding Gaza. Let Israel destroy Gaza and the Arabs can pay for rebuilding. You know the Arabs will never do that.
The Middle East is the eternal tar baby.
GTFO!
StayTFO!
Don’t fall for any attempt to get sucked back into that craphole. We have all the oil we will ever need. We don’t need the problems. Eff neocons.
They disobeyed orders
“Trump orders US troops to leave Syria as White House declares victory over ISIS”
Biden orders US troops to surrender in Syria as White House allows ISIS to be reborn
There, fixed it
Why is this posted today.
We never left Syria. We have bases to transport oil we have stolen from Syria, terrorist training facilities.
Probably because we didn’t leave Syria and we just bombed a supposed weapons cache for Iranian backed terrorists in Syria.
Because US soldiers have been attacked over 50 times since 10/7 with multiple casualties, including over 12 traumatic brain injures. Add to the fact, Biden in CinC and our military is filled with woke generals, plus Congress is still filled with neocons just itching to start WWIII. It’s not a winning proposition and it would be needless since there is zero reason why we should be in Syria, or Iraq for that matter. Trump did the right thing and tried to withdraw.
Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers from Trump
Defense One ^ | November 13, 2020 | Katie Bo Williams
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/
Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers; Praises Trump’s Mideast Record
‘We were always playing shell games,’ says Amb. Jim Jeffrey, who also gives advice to President-elect Biden.
Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.
But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.
Trump’s abruptly-announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps the single-most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office, and for Jeffrey, “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.” The order, first handed down in December 2018, led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump’s special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.
For Jeffrey, the incident was far less cut-and-dry — but it is ultimately a success story that ended with U.S. troops still operating in Syria, denying Russian and Syrian territorial gains and preventing ISIS remnants from reconstituting.
In 2018 and again in October of 2019, when Trump repeated the withdrawal order, the president boasted that ISIS was “defeated.” But each time, the president was convinced to leave a residual force in Syria and the fight continued.
“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.