FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Backers of Trump’s Troop Pull-Out from Syria Refute the Warhawks’ Lies
Dec. 26, 2018 (EIRNS)—Right around the Christmas holiday, three articles from qualified observers appeared on alternative media outlets, all blasting the lies from officials and media against President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.
Philip Giraldi, executive director of the Council for the National Interest and former CIA official, wrote an article entitled “Syria Withdrawal Enrages the Chickenhawks” in the Unz Review, Dec. 25. Giraldi castigates the neo-cons and their media mouthpieces for lying about and supporting an illegal U.S. invasion of Syria. He doesn’t spare outgoing Defense Secretary Mattis and the generals, and suggests that if you really want to know what the military thinks of war, ask the sergeants and the privates. “They will tell you that they are sick of endless deployments that accomplish nothing,” he writes.
Giraldi disposes of the neo-con arguments for keeping U.S. troops in Syria one by one, but his most important argument in favor of a U.S. withdrawal is this: that it would eliminate a flashpoint between U.S. and Russian troops that could lead to a bigger war. “As Russian and American soldiers only confront each other directly in Syria, U.S. national security would in fact be greatly improved because the danger of igniting an accidental war with Russia would be dramatically reduced.”
U.S. Army Maj. Danny Sjursen, in his Dec. 23 article “The World According to the ‘Adults in the Room’: A Year of Forever War in Review,” in Tomdispatch, takes on the assertion that the job of the “adults in the room” was to keep Trump on course and on an even keel. “[W]hat those adults guided the president toward was yet more bombing, the establishment of yet more bases, and the funding of yet more oversized Pentagon budgets,” Sjursen writes.
“And here was the truly odd thing: Every time The Donald tweeted negatively about any of those wars or uttered an offhand remark in opposition to the warfare state or the Pentagon budget, that triumvirate of generals (John Kelly, James Mattis, and H.R. McMaster) and good old Rex (Tillerson) went to work steering him back onto the well-worn track of Bush-Obama-style forever wars.”
Sjursen is happy that now Trump “now appears ready to change course, at least in Syria and Afghanistan, perhaps out of frustration with the ever-so-conventional mess the adults left him in.”
The third article, by American journalist Robert Bridge and published Dec. 26 in the Online Journal of the Strategic Culture Foundation, entitled “Did Trump Put the Deep State on Notice with Syrian Withdrawal?” argues that Trump really is something different from his two immediate predecessors Bush and Obama, under whom “indiscriminate death and destruction was America’s calling card around a shell-shocked planet.” Trump’s Syria decision
“strongly suggests that the real estate magnate from Manhattan just might be the real deal, a rabble-rousing populist delivered to the White House by an army of voters across an angry and divided country that are tired of traveling snake-oil salesmen deceiving them with empty promises.”
Bridge considers the desperation of the so-called “Deep State,” which he describes in some detail, as a measure of just how different Trump is from the business as usual which has dominated Washington over the last few administrations. “In other words,” Bridge writes,
“the Trump phenomenon is an open window of opportunity to salvage what is left of the American political system, and the elite, fully aware as to what is at stake, is doing everything to destroy it.”
Bridge is not confident that Trump will act on the Ukraine-Russia confrontation as he has on Syria, but “one thing looks certain right now, and that is Trump’s new-found desire to unilaterally call the shots in his Presidency,” he writes. “Everything is now on the table as far as Trump’s options go, and that must certainly be of no small concern to the powers-that-be in Washington, D.C.”
