Reason Roundup

Trump Doubles Down on Withdrawing Troops From Syria Despite Freakout From Warmongering Establishment: Reason Roundup

"Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East?" the president asks-and gets a resounding yes from Republicans and Democrats.

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RODI SAID/REUTERS/Newscom

Bringing troops home from Syria angers conservative and liberal leaders. Following President Donald Trump's Wednesday announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled from Syria, political establishment types on the left and right promptly rebuked him for being insufficiently committed to Forever War in the Middle East.

Policing the world's politics and bombing brown people is one of the few things that mainstream Republicans and Democrats can come together on, and now here's Trump, the big meanie, spoiling their fun! Quick, cue rampant paranoia and a lot of Henny-Penny huffing…

But Trump isn't backing down in the face of criticism from his usual allies as well as Democrats. This morning, he tweeted that it was Russia, Iran, and Syria's job to take care of ISIS now.

"Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing?" Trump tweeted. "Do we want to be there forever? Time for others to finally fight….."

Loathe to let up on world-policing even a little, Democrats and Republicans have been flinging around words like "reckless" and "premature," even though none of them can make a coherent case for why we're still in Syria or what it's accomplishing. Meanwhile, "reasonable" centrist pundits took the tack that sure, Syria withdrawal would be good someday—just not now. First, first…well, there's always something else that comes first isn't there?

Trump's announcement also presented a prime opportunity for attention-seeking politicos to call attention to their pet Boogeymen. Hence, we've heard all about how bringing American men and women home from Syria is a "gift" to Iran, or Russia, or Islamic militants. How it's a sign Trump is beholden to Vladimir Putin. Or that he's acting too much like President Barack Obama—a point that in this case makes no sense. As my colleague Robby Soave wrote yesterday:

A predictable chorus of hawkish Republicans assailed Trump for making, in the words of perpetually bloodthirsty Sen. Lindsey Graham (R­–S.C.), a "huge Obama-like mistake." (Barack Obama made many mistakes; one of the costliest, of course, was his disastrous intervention in Libya, which quickly became a haven for terrorists.) Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) lamented that pulling out too early would "haunt this administration and America for years to come." But as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, America is also haunted by doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on open-ended commitments that cost innocent lives and billions of dollars while doing nothing to fundamentally improve the war-torn Middle East.

Soave adds that, "every now and then, the fact that Trump feels unconstrained by conventional politics" is a good thing:

Norm-smashing is good if the norm in question—perpetual war—violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and democratic principle.

Alas, not ones to be outdone in paranoid warmongering by their conservative counterparts, liberals like "information warfare expert" Molly McKew insist that "the president is lying about ISIS" being debilitated as part of "backchannel deals" with Turkey and Russia. This was a common refrain in left-of-center crowds online.

The mainstream liberal response to Trump's Syria announcement was so overwhelmingly negative that it suggests any anti-war wing of the Democratic Party is clearly dead. This shift was of course already underway during the Obama years, when policies that would have provoked outrage under President George W. Bush drew soft sighs at best.

Now, it seems abundantly clear that a lot of the left's anti-war momentum under Bush was actually just rooted in anti-Bush or anti-Republican sentiment. And with a Republican president that is ever-so-slightly opposed to endless war, Democrats are emboldened to openly embrace their own ignorant, authoritarian, world-policing ways in full form. (A pox on all their goddamn glass houses.)

Among the few members of Congress to comment positively about the president's decision was Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who declared he was "proud of the president today to hear that he is declaring victory in Syria."

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