Blog 4

                   

This past week's events have reinforced how bad President Trump's foreign policies are. Pulling troops out of the middle east has resulted in the hundred's of people dying these past few days. Dan Lamothe explains in his article, "I can’t even look at the atrocities’: U.S. troops say Trump’s Syria withdrawal betrayed an ally", the view from veterans that served in the middle east. The veterans that have been speaking out lately on the topic have shown their disapproval and how in doing this we have broken off an ally and killed innocent people in the process.

President Trump says that we should let Turkey and the Kurdish fight it out like a couple of kids. He could not be any farther from wrong, even though we should not have gone into the middle east in the first place retracting now will not solve anything. It will only resolve in innocent civilians dying in the crosshairs of war and ISIS re-emerging as an imminent threat.

After Trump pulling our 1,000 troops out of Northern Syria, ISIS members have escaped imprisonment and now we will be stuck fighting the same ravaging war that we finished five years ago. Even after constant officials and military forces from the middle east have confirmed that ISIS is rebuilding in the shadows, the President refuses to acknowledge believing that they are our problem because they are not at our own border. In the article, he explains how contradictory it is for the U.S. to say they will not stand in the way of a Turkish military offense which is what our troops have been there for the past two years guarding against just that. It would be different altogether if the President were to say, “6 months from now we will evacuate our troops from the middle east”, then all parties will have time to configure solutions to us leaving. All the U.S. did was reach an agreement with Turkey for a 48-hour ceasefire, which resulted in the tragic deaths of bystanders from the attacks from Turkey. 

Dan Lamothe’s article speaks mostly on the point of view from speaking with veterans and the view on how bad of a decision it is to retract forces from Northern Syria, which I agree 100% on. Dan spoke with Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, he says that all the soldiers have an opinion of war but ultimately, when national policy decisions are made, we salute and move out. Even though the President’s whole backing of pulling troops out of Northern Syria was to bring our troops home, it was really a lie. He is redeploying them into other parts of the middle east which is contradictory to what his campaign was built on from the start. So that begs the question, does he really have the soldier’s best interest at heart?