President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 Japan Summit Saturday, June 29, 2019, in Osaka, Japan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Pat Buchanan strikes hard at the neocon branch of the Republican Party in a recent piece published on LewRockwell.com.
Pat hits out at critics of President Trump’s decision to pull back from Syria, namely Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, and Mitt Romney. Graham and Romney are old school neocons, while Cheney, Rubio, and Haley are the next generation of warmongers in Washington, D.C.
“Among those objecting most loudly to an American withdrawal from the forever wars of the Middle East,” writes PB, “are those who were the most enthusiastic about plunging us in.”
Lindsey Graham: A disaster in the making,” says. “To abandon the Kurds” would be a “stain on America’s honor.”
Rep. Liz Cheney: “A catastrophic mistake”
Marco Rubio: “If reports about US retreat in Syria are accurate, Trump will have made a grave mistake.”
Nikki Haley: “The Kurds were instrumental in our successful fight against ISIS in Syria. Leaving them to die is a big mistake, we must always have the backs of our allies.”
But of our NATO ally of almost 70 years, Haley said, “Turkey is not our friend.”
Sen. Mitt Romney: A “betrayal.” “The President’s decision to abandon our Kurd allies in the face of an assault by Turkey is a betrayal. It says that America is an unreliable ally; it facilitates ISIS resurgence; and it presages another humanitarian disaster.”
Not Main Street Conservatism
This crowd has gotten foreign policy wrong at every opportunity, and their big government globalist agenda is the exact opposite of the Main Street conservatism American voters asked for, and championed by The American Conservative when they elected Donald Trump.
Pat writes (abridged)
The backstage struggle between the Bush interventionists and the America-firsters who first backed Donald Trump for president just exploded into open warfare, which could sunder the Republican Party.
At issue is Trump’s decision to let the Turkish army enter Northern Syria, to create a corridor between Syrian Kurds and the Turkish Kurds of the PKK, which the U.S. and Turkey regard as a terrorist organization.
If Trump’s decision risks throwing the region into “further chaos,” what, if not wholesale U.S. intervention, created the “present chaos”?
Consider. Today, the Taliban conduct more attacks and control much more territory than they did in all the years since we first intervened in 2001.
Sixteen years after we marched to Baghdad, protests against the Iraqi regime took hundreds of lives last week, and a spreading revolt threatens the regime.
Saudi Arabia is tied down and arguably losing the war it launched against the Houthi rebels in 2015. Iran or its surrogates, with a handful of cruise missiles and drones, just shut down half of the Saudi oil production.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is awakening to his nation’s vulnerability and may be looking to negotiate with Tehran.
Among those objecting most loudly to an American withdrawal from the forever wars of the Middle East are those who were the most enthusiastic about plunging us in.
And, yes, there is a price to be paid for letting go of an empire, but it is almost always less than the price of holding on.
Read more here.
Rand Paul slams GOP ‘war caucus’ criticizing Trump for Syria
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