How To Pressure Donald Trump Into Staying At War

It’s easy:

While Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to bring troops home before Election Day, various defense officials and confidants on the Hill and in GOP circles have repeatedly insisted to Trump that such large-scale withdrawals would risk creating an election-year mess that would dwarf the fallout that came after President Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal from Iraq, two of the sources said.

It’s a strategy of “scaring the shit out of the president,” as one former senior Trump administration official characterized it. It plays on his fears of possibly getting tagged as “weak” like Obama was. Trumpworld and Republican hawks have used the stratagem to great success in earlier years of this administration. The tactic helped convince Trump to embrace the Afghanistan surge of summer 2017, and got him to quickly back off withdrawals from Syria in both 2018 and 2019. About 900 troops will remain in Syria, a number unchanged by the Iraq drawdown.

Which is why the headline is essentially correct: Trump’s Troop Withdrawal Is a ‘Disingenuous’ Election Year Ploy, Officials Say

Author: Scott Horton

Scott Horton is editorial director of Antiwar.com, director of the Libertarian Institute, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan and editor of The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019. He’s conducted more than 5,000 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, investigative reporter Larisa Alexandrovna Horton. He is a fan of, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper’s. Scott’s Twitter, YouTube, Patreon.

2 thoughts on “How To Pressure Donald Trump Into Staying At War”

  1. Essentially, our President has been playing the bring the troops home card while pumping up the Department of Defense, allowing Israel to bomb Syrian targets, pushing sanctions which invite military responses, keeping troops in Syria to deprive it of badly needed oil revenues provoking China to deflect the blame for the spread of covid-19 and defying international law and opinion on the Golan Heights. Then there is the strangulation of Venezuela, again an act of war. Nothing wrong with bringing the troops home, though. If he can.

    1. I like most of your reasoning here save that Trump or the US military “allowing Israel to bomb Syrian” is not a reasonable claim. The US has little to no control over who the government of Israel chooses to bomb or not to bomb. You might make such a claim about the military of Saudi Arabia but not Israel.

      C’mon man.

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