| Liz Cheney rebukes Trump for saying U.S. doesn’t need to worry about terrorists ‘7,000 miles away’ | |||||||||||||||||
THE BIG IDEA: On his 1,000th day in office, President Trump downplayed the threat posed by the Islamic State fighters who have reportedly escaped since he abandoned the Kurds who were holding them and ordered U.S. troops to evacuate northern Syria. America, he insisted, doesn’t need to worry about terrorists who are “7,000 miles away.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the House Republican Conference chair, spoke up during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to remind Trump that the terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans in on Sept. 11, 2001, “came from 7,000 miles away,” according to three people familiar with the exchange.
Trump’s takeover of the GOP has been well documented, but this exchange offered a revealing window into the fundamental differences that remain between how Trump and traditional conservatives see the world.
Cheney didn’t say this, but she could have also pointed out to the president that the distance from the White House to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was killed, is 7,037 miles.
Saying Americans don’t need to worry about bad guys who are 7,000 miles away represents a repudiation not just of the Washington consensus that has existed since 9/11 – but since the Japanese sneak attack against Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
After the trauma of the Great War – that was before they had the sense to number them – the American people were leery of getting involved as the Axis powers marched across Europe and Asia. The “America First” movement of that era turned a blind eye to Adolf Hitler. After that approach failed and World War II still came, the Greatest Generation recognized how essential American leadership is to global stability.
Americans have always, collectively, had relatively short historical memories. And those who don’t remember the past are always doomed to repeat its mistakes. After the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, the electorate once again grew leery of deploying troops overseas. Trump, born a year after World War II ended, got elected in 2016 after promising to end the “endless wars” and embracing the “America First” slogan that had gone out of vogue three quarters of a century earlier.
On Wednesday, Trump pointed to his 2016 victory as an electoral mandate for his decision to retreat. “We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria. Syria’s not happy about it. Let them work it out,” Trump said during one of several public appearances. “They have a problem at a border. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”
Trump clearly wants to wash his hands of the whole situation. “They know how to fight,” he said of the Kurdish fighters who fought side by side with U.S. forces to put down the Islamic State. “And by the way, they’re no angels.”
Trump added it’s “fine” by him that Russian troops are occupying positions held just days ago by Americans. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So, there’s a lot of sand that they can play with,” the president told reporters. “Let them fight their own wars.”
Cheney’s comment in the Cabinet Room came after she voted for a resolution broadly condemning the troop withdrawal. It passed 354 to 60. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by other Democrats, walked out of the meeting about Syria after Trump called her a “third-grade politician.” But the meeting became tense at several other moments as well, Seung Min Kim and Mike DeBonis report.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) read aloud comments made by Jim Mattis on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend that “ISIS would resurge” if the United States doesn’t keep up the pressure in the region. Trump cut Schumer off to say that Mattis is the “world’s most overrated general” and that he wasn’t “tough enough.” Schumer and Pelosi also pressed Trump to explain his strategy for the region, per Seung Min and Mike. When he responded that his “plan is to keep the American people safe,” Pelosi retorted: “That’s not a plan. That’s a goal.” When Democratic leaders walked out, Trump repeatedly called out, “See you at the polls.”
THE GROUND TRUTH:
-- “U.S. officials acknowledged this week the difficulty of preventing an Islamic State resurgence in Syria once the bulk of American forces withdraw, as the military scrambles to assemble a plan for battling the militants from afar,” Missy Ryan reports from the Pentagon. “The Pentagon had hoped to keep a small number of troops in the area to contain what it says is a still-potent militant threat. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, stressed that the planning has not reached its final stages. They said the discussions centered on arrangements that would permit the United States to continue some level of air attacks and surveillance from outside Syria, relying in part on an expanded footprint in Jordan, and transferring Special Operations forces to Iraq.
“The challenges start with obtaining adequate intelligence about Islamic State activities now that the partnership with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is in danger of shattering. … ‘It’s a lot more complicated having to do this over the horizon,’ a U.S. official said, using a term for military operations conducted from outside a targeted country. Ensuring that the militants don’t regroup, the official said, would now be ‘a lot harder.’”
-- Vice President Pence arrived today in Turkey’s capital on a mission to persuade President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to halt the military offensive that set off the hasty U.S. troop withdrawal. Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are scheduled to meet with Erdogan in the next few hours. Kareem Fahim, Erin Cunningham and Dan Lamothe report: “Erdogan has rebuffed appeals for a cease-fire and chided Western allies for suggesting he negotiate with ‘terrorists,’ as he refers to the Syrian Kurdish militias … Erdogan said Wednesday that Turkey would ‘never declare a cease-fire’ and vowed to forge ahead with plans to enforce a buffer zone as deep as 20 miles into Syrian territory. The swath of territory would stretch more than 280 miles from the northern city of Manbij to the Syrian border with Iraq.”
-- Pence and Pompeo are there a day after the White House released a letter Trump sent to Erdogan on Oct. 9 urging the Turkish leader to make a deal with the Syrian Kurdish militias instead of invading. “You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering people,” Trump wrote. “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” The letter was written on the day that Turkey’s military operation started.
-- Turkish officials told the BBC and other news outlets that Erdogan threw the letter in the trash.
-- “On Wednesday, the U.S. military said two F-15E jet fighters carried out an airstrike to destroy an ammunition-storage facility, latrines, tents and other parts of the Syria headquarters of the American campaign to destroy Islamic State after pulling its forces from the base,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Col. Myles Caggins, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition overseeing the fight against Islamic State, said the airstrikes were intended to ‘reduce the facility’s military usefulness.’ The decision to target the base, which included warehouses used to train-and-equip the Kurdish-led fighters, came after Turkish-backed forces moved on the facility on Tuesday.
“As the Turkish-backed forces moved closer to the LaFarge Cement Factory facility south of Kobane, the Kurdish-backed forces set fire to their part of the base and fled, Col. Caggins said. The U.S. used Apache helicopters and F-15 jet fighters to intimidate the Turkish-backed fighters and deter them from getting closer to the base, U.S. officials said. After the show of force, the U.S. military pulled its forces out of the base and carried out what it called a ‘pre-planned precision airstrike’ before Turkish-backed fighters could take control of the facility.’”
-- The U.S. military has also withdrawn from Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the Islamic State, Caggins tweeted.
-- Bigger picture: “The blow to America’s standing in the Middle East was sudden and unexpectedly swift,” Beirut bureau chief Liz Sly reports from the region. “Within the space of a few hours, advances by Turkish troops in Syria this week had compelled the U.S. military’s Syrian Kurdish allies to switch sides, unraveled years of U.S. Syria policy and recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East. As Russian and Syrian troops roll into vacated towns and U.S. bases, the winners are counting the spoils. The withdrawal delivered a huge victory to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who won back control of an area roughly amounting to a third of the country almost overnight.
“It affirmed Moscow as the arbiter of Syria’s fate and the rising power in the Middle East. It sent another signal to Iran that Washington has no appetite for the kind of confrontation that its rhetoric suggests and that Iran’s expanded influence in Syria is now likely to go unchallenged. It sent a message to the wider world that the United States is in the process of a disengagement that could resonate beyond the Middle East …
“Images shared on social media underscored the indignity of the retreat. Departing U.S. troops in sophisticated armored vehicles passed Syrian army soldiers riding in open-top trucks on a desert highway. An embedded Russian journalist took selfies on the abandoned U.S. base in Manbij, where U.S. forces had fought alongside their Kurdish allies to drive out the Islamic State in 2015. ‘Only yesterday they were here, and now we are here,’ said the journalist, panning the camera around the intact infrastructure, including a radio tower and a button-powered traffic-control gate that he showed was still functioning. ‘Let’s see how they lived and what they ate,’ he said, before ducking into one of the tents and filming the soldiers’ discarded snacks.
“On Arab news channels, coverage switched from footage of jubilant Syrian troops to scenes of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish receptions by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Washington’s most vital Arab allies in the Persian Gulf. The visits had been long planned, but the timing gave them the feel of a victory lap.”
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