Mayor Pete Decries Trump's Decision to Withdraw Troops from Northern Syria

Mayor Pete Decries Trump’s Decision to Withdraw Troops from Northern Syria
“[This] is the president systematically destroying American alliances and American values.”
Jamilah King


Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg excoriated President Donald Trump and his administration Sunday morning for the decision to withdraw the remaining US troops out of northern Syria in the coming weeks. On CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper, Buttigieg said, “This isn’t even a strategy or a policy—it is the president systematically destroying American alliances and American values and that makes America worse off.”

Link to tweet

Buttigieg is speaking from experience on the ground. He’s a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan as a Navy intelligence officer and has openly criticized Trump for avoiding service in the Vietnam War. “This is somebody who, I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact that he was the child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place,” he said, according to NBC News.

Now, Turkey has launched a military offensive against neighboring Syria just days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke with Trump on a call that has been described by officials as including “various diplomatic exchanges.” In the call, Trump reportedly made a spur-of-the-moment decision to pull out of Turkey, which surprised his advisers.

The situation in Syria has deteriorated steadily since that call. Brett McGurk, who has served as a national security advisor in the last three White House administrations, outlined on Twitter that hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced and ISIS is moving into the newly vulnerable part of Syria.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/mayor-pete-decries-trumps-decision-to-withdraw-troops-from-northern-syria/