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Thread: Trump Pledges to Stop ‘Endless Wars’ in Syria and Afghanistan

  1. #1

    Thumbs up Trump Pledges to Stop ‘Endless Wars’ in Syria and Afghanistan

    President Donald Trump pledged to bring home U.S. troops from Syria with Islamic State nearly defeated and to negotiate an exit from Afghanistan after almost two decades of war, saying in his State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars.”

    “Today, we have liberated virtually all of that territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty monsters,” Trump said in his speech on Tuesday. “Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.”

    Trump and his aides have scaled back the president’s vow in late December to withdraw forces “now,” saying the move would be more measured and that the U.S. will continue to strike at Islamic State.

    More
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...nd-afghanistan



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  3. #2
    Sounds legit.
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    Pinochet is the model
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    Liberty preserving authoritarianism.
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    Enforced internal open borders was one of the worst elements of the Constitution.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Warlord View Post
    “great nations do not fight endless wars.”
    and what is 18 years of war ??

  5. #4
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    I am glad we have a president speaking against endless war. I hope he sticks with the plan.
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  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Cleaner44 View Post
    I am glad we have a president speaking against endless war. I hope he sticks with the plan.
    He has the whole establishment against him

  7. #6

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Warlord View Post
    He has the whole establishment against him
    The MIC doesn't like it one bit. Notice how the liberals are all for war now?

    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

  9. #8
    Pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan is a good thing.

    However TPTB have decided that it is time to move on to other pastures, such as Latin America. And then Iran.
    ____________

    An Agorist Primer ~ Samuel Edward Konkin III (free PDF download)

    The End of All Evil ~ Jeremy Locke (free PDF download)



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  11. #9

    Don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

  12. #10
    But lets stay in Iraq and keep an eye on Iran.
    "It's probably the biggest hoax since Big Foot!" - Mitt Romney 1-16-2012 SC Debate

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by tfurrh View Post
    But lets stay in Iraq and keep an eye on Iran.
    We will leave Iraq as well.
    Trump can't do everything all at once or he will be impeached and Pence will stop the pullouts and probably invade Iran.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  14. #12
    Here it is finally. The time has arrived for the fabled, confused and precarious US troop withdrawal from Syria despite the best efforts of neocons and interventionistas to permanently stall and alter course, per a new Wall Street Journalreport that dropped late in the day Thursday: "the military plans to pull a significant portion of its forces out by mid-March, with a full withdrawal coming by the end of April."

    According to the WSJ report, some 2,000 US service members would withdraw as follows:
    Under the working military plans, the U.S. would pull all troops out in the coming weeks — including about 200 Americans working out of a base in southern Syria [al-Tanf] that has served as an informal check on Iran’s expansionist ambitions in the region, the current and former U.S. officials said.


    More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...awal-syria-wsj
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  15. #13
    https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/03/polit...sis/index.html

    Trump says he would send US troops back to Syria should ISIS regain strength


    Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump acknowledged the possibility that ISIS and other terror groups could regain their strength in Syria and Afghanistan if he withdraws or reduces troops in those countries and noted that he would send US forces back if they did.

    Trump, who announced in December that he was ordering staff to execute a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of US troops from Syria, made the comments in an interview taped Friday with CBS's Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation."

    "Because the concern in here by your intelligence chiefs, though, is that you could in that vacuum see a resurgence of ISIS," Brennan said.

    "Sure," Trump replied.

    "See a resurgence of terror groups like Al-Qaeda," Brennan continued.

    "And you know what we'll do? We'll come back if we have to," Trump said.

    "We have very fast airplanes, we have very good cargo planes. We can come back very quickly, and I'm not leaving," he said. "We have a base in Iraq and the base is a fantastic edifice. I mean, I was there recently, and I couldn't believe the money that was spent on these massive runways. And these -- I've rarely seen anything like it."

    On Friday, CNN reported that the Pentagon believes that ISIS could re-emerge and take back territory in Syria within months if the US does not maintain military pressure on the terror group, according to an official familiar with the latest assessment. Another US official said that some military and intelligence officials are concerned it could happen even sooner.

    The President noted the military is still fighting ISIS from its base in Iraq, adding that some of the troops in Syria will be shifted to Iraq.

    "They're starting to, as we gain the remainder, the final remainder of the caliphate of the area, they'll be going to our base in Iraq, and ultimately some will be coming home," Trump said when asked when the troops in Syria would be returning.

    During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump attacked former President Barack Obama for his decision to draw down troops in Iraq, dubbing his predecessor "the founder of ISIS" because, he argued, the Islamic State flourished in the vacuum left by American forces.
    Withdrawl from Syria supposedly started January 11th. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...al/2545735002/ It was to be finished by the 20th.
    Last edited by Zippyjuan; 02-07-2019 at 09:13 PM.

  16. #14
    Pulling out of Syria will get a thumbs up from me. As long as its legit, and not the "government shutdown" kinda speak.

    Gulag Chief:
    "Article 58-1a, twenty five years... What did you get it for?"
    Gulag Prisoner: "For nothing at all."
    Gulag Chief: "You're lying... The sentence for nothing at all is 10 years"



  17. #15
    Indeed, the reaction to Trump’s decision was so overwhelmingly negative that Washington pundits speculated that it was only a matter of time before Trump “walked back” the decision by slowing the withdrawal—a deferential nod, it was said, to wiser and more seasoned foreign policy veterans.
    In fact, that not only hasn’t happened, the president has dug in his heels, issuing eyeball-to-eyeball orders to military commanders that are anything but ambiguous.
    The first such order, according to a senior officer of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, came during Trump’s surprise Christmas visit to the al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. There the president (and First Lady Melania Trump) not only joined U.S. soldiers in a high-profile meet-and-greet, but, along with national security adviser John Bolton, huddled with the U.S. high command in a tent set aside for the meeting. Among the team that met with Trump was U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Douglas Silliman and Lieutenant General Paul LaCamera. Of the two, LaCamera was the more important, as he is the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), the military organization established in October 2014 to “degrade and defeat” ISIS.
    After an extended question and answer session with the press on December 26, Trump was privately briefed on the anti-ISIS effort by LaCamera, who told the president that only a few pockets of ISIS militants remained in Syria’s Euphrates Valley. Trump praised the effort, I was told, but then issued his order.
    “I want us out of Syria,” the Centcom officer with whom I spoke quoted Trump as saying. “There wasn’t anything ambiguous about it,” the Centcom senior officer added.
    “There were no qualifiers, no conditionals, and so far as I know, nothing about that conversation has changed.”
    Put another way, while any number of civilian Pentagon officials speculate that the military has been given leeway in implementing the president’s directive, that is not the understanding among senior Centcom officers. “Nothing has changed since that meeting,” I was told. “We’re out.”
    Trump’s decision provides a window into what actually constitutes a direct order from a president and how it is implemented—while also separating fact from noise. On December 30, four days after his visit to Iraq, Senator Lindsay Graham told reporters that he would try to persuade Trump to rethink his decision, to “sit down with his generals and reconsider how to do this.” His goal, Graham said, was to “slow this down. Make sure we get it right.” Graham’s effort came the next day, during a lunch meeting with Trump and General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the White House. Graham emerged from the meetingreassured, hinting that his efforts had been successful.
    “After discussions with the president and Dunford, I never felt better about where we are headed,” he said triumphantly.
    “I think we’re slowing things down in a smart way.”
    Triumphant or not, Graham had not, in fact, persuaded Trump of anything, outside of an agreement that the Syria withdrawal would not be immediate but could take at least 90 days to implement. But that was already in the cards—as it takes at least 90 days to withdraw 2,200 troops from anywhere.
    “You don’t just back up a truck and throw in some boxes,” retired Colonel Kevin Benson says.
    “It’s a huge job."
    Benson would know. A West Point graduate and former director of the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies, Benson developed the plan for the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003, before eyeballing the final U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011. That pullout, which involved extracting the final 50,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, took one year to carry out. Benson adds that it will not only take 90 days to withdraw from Syria, it is likely the withdrawal will include a temporary increase in the number of troops deployed in the country.
    “You actually have to add to subtract,” a civilian Pentagon official told me, “which means deploying logistics personnel onsite to implement, catalogue, and coordinate the withdrawal. We’re at 2,200 right now, but as the withdrawal accelerates, we’ll be adding people. It’s the nature of the beast.
    Which is only to say that, while Trump’s Syria withdrawal decision has been derided by a cross-section of the foreign policy establishment, the announcement was greeted with a collective shrug by most senior military officers. A planner at Centcom headquarters in Tampa was puzzled by the controversy over the Trump announcement, saying that the only response he received was from officers “whose immediate reaction was not whether this was a good or bad decision” but how quickly and effectively it could be implemented.
    “It was more like, ‘fine, but you know, how many trucks is it going to take? What do we need to do? When do we start? What do we need to move?'”


    More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...generals-syria
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  18. #16



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  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Warlord View Post
    He has the whole establishment against him
    Awesome, if your taking flak. Your over the target.

    We're being governed ruled by a geriatric Alzheimer patient/puppet whose strings are being pulled by an elitist oligarchy who believe they can manage the world... imagine the utter maniacal, sociopathic hubris!

  21. #18
    So according to the WSJ the pull out will be towards the end of April. That is fantastic

  22. #19
    Hope it ends up happening but I'm a skeptic when it comes to these kind of things.
    "Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration is minding my own business."

    Calvin Coolidge

  23. #20
    The top U.S. commander in the Middle East said the military is pulling equipment out of Syria in preparation for a troop withdrawal that comes as the U.S.-led coalition has entered what it says is the last stages of its fight against Islamic State in Syria. Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, temporarily moved additional security and logistics forces into Syria to prepare for the eventual withdrawal of the more than 2,000 American troops who have been helping to fight Islamic State.
    President Trump announced in December that those troops, working with coalition forces and local fighters, had all but completed their work and that he would pull all troops out.
    The U.S. will begin to pull those troops out of Syria in coming weeks, Gen. Votel said. More than three-quarters of the troops could be drawn out by the end of March, according to a senior official familiar with the planning efforts. Remaining forces will be redeployed throughout April, officials have said.

    More at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mid...ck-11549858241
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  24. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Globalist View Post
    Hope it ends up happening but I'm a skeptic when it comes to these kind of things.
    Its not going to happen. Trump probably said these things just to calm down his supporters. But even his supporters hopefully aren't so stupid.

  25. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by AngryCanadian View Post
    Its not going to happen. Trump probably said these things just to calm down his supporters. But even his supporters hopefully aren't so stupid.
    It is going to happen.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  26. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by AngryCanadian View Post
    Its not going to happen. Trump probably said these things just to calm down his supporters. But even his supporters hopefully aren't so stupid.
    EM.

    There seems to be some fracturing of his support lately and some alianation related his delivery on pre-election pledges/promises. A good chunk seems to be still sticking with him but some hard right conservative voices have started to peel off begrudgingly. In some cases going from blind support to blind loath:


    From :Trump stops following Ann Coulter on Twitter after 'joke presidency' comments

    The Washington Post loves to find the one crazy, trailer park lady who supports Trump because she's had religious ecstasies about him, but most people who voted for him did so with a boatload of qualms.

    The basic factory setting on the perception of Trump is: gigantic douchebag. This is a man who manufactured fake Time magazine covers featuring himself with the headline, "Donald Trump: The 'Apprentice' is a television smash!" so that he could put framed copies of it on the walls of his clubs.

    His business is convincing people with lowbrow taste to give him their money.
    Some Far Rightists have gone much farther and have subscribed to conspiracy theories that MAGA was 'a puppet of jewish lobbies' without any concerete evidence.



    Net effect, early signs of trouble for GOP-Adelson wing in 2020/2024 are on the horizon.

  27. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by enhanced_deficit View Post
    EM.

    There seems to be some fracturing of his support lately and some alianation related his delivery on pre-election pledges/promises. A good chunk seems to be still sticking with him but some hard right conservative voices have started to peel off begrudgingly. In some cases going from blind support to blind loath:


    From :Trump stops following Ann Coulter on Twitter after 'joke presidency' comments



    Some Far Rightists have gone much farther and have subscribed to conspiracy theories that MAGA was 'a puppet of jewish lobbies' without any concerete evidence.



    Net effect, early signs of trouble for GOP-Adelson wing in 2020/2024 are on the horizon.
    Problary not a trouble in 2020 but for 2024 for sure.



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  29. #25
    Seasoned neocon Lindsey Graham is fuming.
    Graham had a heated confrontation with acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan over the Trump Administration’s Syria strategy.
    At the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, Graham claims that he cursed at Shanahan and “declared him an adversary.”
    Graham had choice words for Trump’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria telling Shanahan that it was “the dumbest f—ing idea” he has ever heard.


    Graham doubled the down on his opposition to Trump’s withdrawal plan:

    “Well, if the policy is going to be that we are leaving by April 30, I am now your adversary, not your friend,” Graham told Shanahan.

    More at: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/lindse...ia-withdrawal/
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  30. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Seasoned neocon Lindsey Graham is fuming.
    Graham had a heated confrontation with acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan over the Trump Administration’s Syria strategy.
    At the Munich Security Conference this past weekend, Graham claims that he cursed at Shanahan and “declared him an adversary.”
    Graham had choice words for Trump’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria telling Shanahan that it was “the dumbest f—ing idea” he has ever heard.


    Graham doubled the down on his opposition to Trump’s withdrawal plan:

    “Well, if the policy is going to be that we are leaving by April 30, I am now your adversary, not your friend,” Graham told Shanahan.

    More at: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/lindse...ia-withdrawal/
    +
    'These things I command you, that you love one another.' - Jesus Christ



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