Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
President Trump says he wants to get our troops out of the “blood-stained sand” of the Middle East.
Most sane Americans would agree with that goal and hope he’s successful.
Unfortunately, the people in charge of our foreign policy are not sane, as they proved after Trump yanked a few dozen U.S. soldiers out of Northern Syria.
Trump’s sensible decision to let the Turks, Syrians and Russians figure out how to police their own backyards without our help brought him strong criticism from every political side.
Democrats and the liberal media’s pundits railed against it, but so what? They’re automatically against anything Trump does.
The president also got heavy bipartisan grief for allegedly betraying the Kurds, our trusted and state-less allies who lost 11,000 of their soldiers while helping us and Syrian democratic rebel forces defeat Isis.
Retired military leaders — many of the same ones who’ve been mismanaging our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 — and the neoconservative hawks in the Republican Party blasted Trump.
They said what he did was a naïve, stupid, irresponsible move that will empower Russia and make other countries distrust America’s word and its will.
As usual, the professional interventionists in Washington whom Democrat congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard calls “warmongers” are predicting that many terrible things will happen in Syria without American soldiers present to keep the peace.
Isis supposedly will regain its strength. The Kurds living in northern Syria — the ones Turkey considers terrorists — will suffer greatly.
Plus, our troop withdrawal will supposedly spark new fighting between the countries, kingdoms, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, tribes and street gangs that have been slaughtering each other in the Middle East for at least 3,000 years.
It’s hard to take last week’s hysteria about Trump’s decision seriously, especially when it comes from the Democrats and the liberal media who watched quietly as Barack Obama and his team made bloody messes of Libya and Syria and mismanaged our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight years.
It’s been clear for many decades that America will never fix what’s wrong with the Middle East.
About 20 years ago I asked Col. David Hackworth, one of the country’s most decorated soldiers and an expert on warfare and the structure of the U.S. military, “When will there be peace in the Middle East?”
“When they’re all dead,” was his answer.
What did he think America’s policy should be in the Middle East?
We should arm everyone to the teeth, build a 100-foot wall around the region, go away and wait till everyone there kills each other.
Michael Reagan is the president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Contact him at:
