Syrian, Afghan troop withdrawals long overdue

The Trib Editorial Board brought out every discredited canard from the past 17 years to argue against President Trump's announced troop pullouts from Syria and Afghanistan in 'Trump's risky haste in Syria and Afghanistan', today. Rather than be hasty, he's been signaling them since his campaign, the one sensible policy he's hinted in a sea of misguided policy positions. It should be a badge of honor that the foreign policy establishment opposes the withdrawals. These experts lied us into senseless military involvement in the Middle East for 17 years now beginning with the pivot from 911 perpetrator Saudi Arabia to innocent party Iraq to remake the region as an American protectorate. Hundreds of thousands dead, including over 5,000 Americans is the result. And America is no longer the leader of the free world as Defense Secretary James Mattis claimed in his resignation letter. We are the greatest perpetrator of senseless, failed warfare in at least seven countries and the largest supplier of weapons of civilian destruction worldwide. If our prosperity and values are based on those twin distinctions, we have no right to claim greatness. President Obama's partial pullout from Iraq did not give rise to Islamic State; it was President Bush's smashing Iraq into a failed state eight years earlier. Calling the pullout a boost to making Syria the romper room of Russia and Iran is ludicrous. They are Syria's neighbors and siding with elected Syrian President Assad is the surest way to prevent the rebels, including ISIS from further destabilizing the region to their peril. If we'd have allowed President Assad to defeat the rebels five years ago, instead of keeping the civil war going to depose Assad, hundreds of thousands would still be alive. The argument we must get militarily involved in every failed state is preposterous. It ignores the truth we've either turned those countries into failed states as is the case with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or have worsened their failed state status as in Syria. The Trib is correct to advise remembering why we went to war in Afghanistan and Syria. The former was the easy target in our effort to gain control over the region, following the Saudi enabling of 911. That failed. The latter was our effort to depose Syrian President Assad to weaken our arch enemy Iran. That also failed. The Syrian pullout and the Afghanistan drawn are not hasty. They are long overdue and cannot come soon enough.