{"id":1316237,"date":"2019-10-29T20:20:01","date_gmt":"2019-10-30T02:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/reagan-column-madness-in-the-middle-east\/"},"modified":"2019-10-29T20:20:01","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T02:20:01","slug":"reagan-column-madness-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/reagan-column-madness-in-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"Reagan column: Madness in the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

President Trump says he wants to get our troops out of the \u201cblood-stained sand\u201d of the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Most sane Americans would agree with that goal and hope he\u2019s successful.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the people in charge of our foreign policy are not sane, as they proved after Trump yanked a few dozen U.S. soldiers out of Northern Syria.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s sensible decision to let the Turks, Syrians and Russians figure out how to police their own backyards without our help brought him strong criticism from every political side.<\/p>\n

Democrats and the liberal media\u2019s pundits railed against it, but so what? They\u2019re automatically against anything Trump does.<\/p>\n

The president also got heavy bipartisan grief for allegedly betraying the Kurds, our trusted and state-less allies who lost 11,000 of their soldiers while helping us and Syrian democratic rebel forces defeat Isis.<\/p>\n

Retired military leaders \u2013 many of the same ones who\u2019ve been mismanaging our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9\/11 \u2013 and the neoconservative hawks in the Republican Party blasted Trump.<\/p>\n

They said what he did was a na\u00efve, stupid, irresponsible move that will empower Russia and make other countries distrust America\u2019s word and its will.<\/p>\n

As usual, the professional interventionists in Washington whom Democrat congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard calls \u201cwarmongers\u201d are predicting that many terrible things will happen in Syria without American soldiers present to keep the peace.<\/p>\n

Isis supposedly will regain its strength. The Kurds living in northern Syria \u2013 the ones Turkey considers terrorists \u2013 will suffer greatly.<\/p>\n

Plus, our troop withdrawal will supposedly spark new fighting between the countries, kingdoms, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, tribes and street gangs that have been slaughtering each other in the Middle East for at least 3,000 years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to take this week\u2019s hysteria about Trump\u2019s decision seriously, especially when it comes from the Democrats and the liberal media who watched quietly as Barrack Obama and his team made bloody messes of Libya and Syria and mismanaged our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for eight years.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been clear for many decades that America will never fix what\u2019s wrong with the Middle East.<\/p>\n

About 20 years ago I asked Col. David Hackworth, one of the country\u2019s most decorated soldiers and an expert on warfare and the structure of the U.S. military, \u201cWhen will there be peace in the Middle East?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they\u2019re all dead,\u201d was his answer.<\/p>\n

What did he think America\u2019s policy should be in the Middle East?<\/p>\n

We should arm everyone to the teeth, build a 100-foot wall around the region, go away and wait till everyone there kills each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cHack,\u201d who died in 2005, was not kidding.<\/p>\n

Based on ancient and modern history, it was easy for him to predict what the Middle East would look like today \u2013 a perpetual war zone ruled by brutal dictators and Muslim extremists and crawling with lunatic terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Isis.<\/p>\n

Trump claims pulling U.S. soldiers from Syria and letting the Russians sort things out between the Kurds and the Turks will bring peace in the long run.<\/p>\n

He obviously has no idea what will actually happen. But no one else in Washington does, either.<\/p>\n

Our military doesn\u2019t know. Our state department doesn\u2019t know. Lindsay Graham doesn\u2019t know. Neither do Liz, Joe and Bernie and their anonymous foreign policy experts.<\/p>\n

So far, the blood and treasure America has spent trying to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to the political chaos and religious madness of the Middle East has been tragically wasted.<\/p>\n

Col. Hackworth believed fighting and making war is part of the Middle East\u2019s DNA and America can do nothing with our military or economic power to change that.<\/p>\n

President Trump seems to believe that too.<\/p>\n

In any case, whatever he has done or not done correctly in a small corner of Syria won\u2019t matter in the long run. The Middle East will be a bloody and uncivilized part of the world for another hundred years, at least.<\/p>\n

Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com<\/a>. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Trump says he wants to get our troops out of the \u201cblood-stained sand\u201d of the Middle East. Most sane Americans would agree with that goal and hope he\u2019s successful. Unfortunately, the people in charge of our foreign policy are not sane, as they proved after Trump yanked a few dozen U.S. soldiers out of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 15:32:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}