Ever have that uncomfortable feeling when you agree with someone you loathe? Andrew Sullivan may be having that in connection with Trump’s surprise announcement of withdrawal from Syria:
Or consider what a shocked Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of the Marines, the incoming commander of Central Command opined after hearing the news of Trump’s withdrawal of 7,000 troops from Afghanistan yesterday: “If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe [the Afghan forces] would be able to successfully defend their country. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think that one of the things that would actually provide the most damage to them would be if we put a timeline on it and we said we were going out at a certain point in time.”
Get that? After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane. Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them.
We could just conclude that Trump, like a broken clock, is at occasionally, if accidentally right. I have little opinion on what to do about Syria, which is just another example of the lethal politics the inhabitants of those parts seem to indulge in far too casually.
But, more importantly for the United States, is the lack of leadership that President Trump has once again demonstrated. At heart, he’s an autocrat, the last thing America needs. He should have initiated and led a national debate on just what sort of intervention, if any at all, we should be engaging in, using the debate to inform the electorate as to what costs we might expect to incur, both tangible and intangible, and how intervention, or lack thereof, fits in with our strategic goals and moral character.
Trump did none of this. Perhaps this is just a maneuver on his part to force Mattis out. Maybe he had heartburn. Maybe … pick your random reason of choice. The point is, Trump has lost the confidence of everyone outside of the Trump Echo Chamber in any wisdom he has in anything. Even real estate.
Andrew may be completely correct in condemning our troops presence in Afghanistan and Syria. Maybe Trump is doing the right thing. But he did it absolutely in the wrong way, and therefore does not deserve any real credit, no matter how much historians praise the move 50 years from now.
This is why the instrumentality of government must move in approved ways, for otherwise confidence is lost.
