Why Trump is right on Syria

The Washington chattering class is once again stunned that President Trump is keeping a campaign promise. Like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and building the wall, the president is following through, and Washington elites don’t quite know what to make of it. Remember, it was Nancy Pelosi who told Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office that the border wall was just a campaign promise. Unfortunately, this is the attitude of most elected officials. You say what you have to say to get elected, then you do only what’s popular with your Washington colleagues.

Syria is a real head-scratcher. Not that President Trump is pulling troops out, but that so many want to keep the troops there. We are uninvited guests in a hostile country. Not that we didn’t have a right—even an obligation—to rout ISIS. That mission has largely been accomplished. That’s not to say that ISIS won’t rise again. If they do we should reserve the right to rout them again, but a prolonged presence in a sovereign nation that doesn’t want us there should not even be an option.

The usual Russia conspiracy freaks wasted no time in claiming more collusion with Russia since Syria’s strongman is a Russian ally. It’s not as if Trump hasn’t been tough on Bashar al-Assad. The United States has attacked Assad’s military ten different times since Trump took office. Syria is basically in the midst of a civil war. Our only interest is ISIS and its accumulation of land and power stretching across the Iraqi border. Outside of that we have no business in Syria.

It was President Obama who drew a red line in August of 2013 saying if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people we would retaliate with military action. He did and we didn’t. It wasn’t until Donald Trump became president that we actually punished Assad for chemical weapons attacks. But punishing Assad was never the primary mission. The American-led coalition in Syria, which included the UK, France, Jordan, Turkey, Canada, and Australia, was specifically forged to defeat ISIS, or ISIL, as Obama so puzzlingly called them. That mission has been largely accomplished. 

According to The Guardian, ISIS has lost over 95 percent of the territory it held before the coalition was launched against it. The coalition has started to unravel. The Kurds have been the principal fighters on the ground against ISIS. Turkey attacked Kurdish militants in northwestern Syria. We did nothing to intervene. It’s becoming clear that, like most disputes in the Middle East, Syria is far more complicated than simply backing the good guys against the bad guys.

The Kurds have been staunch allies of the United States, but only because they want their own country carved out of sections of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The U.S. failing to come to their aid against the Turks indicates that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Many of the Democrats who supported military action in Syria only did so because it was a Democrat president who wanted it. Many Republicans were opposed for the same reason. Now it’s as if everyone wanted to fight Assad all along, even though that was never the mission. President Trump seems to be the only one who remembers the mission, and now everyone in Washington is against him because his name is Donald Trump.

Thank God for people like Sen. Rand Paul. He was against military intervention in 2013 and he’s against it now. Not that he’s necessarily right. He’s just consistent, something sorely missing in Washington these days.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Why call them fake news? Because they are.

Temperature. The left seems to be obsessed with it. No, not the global temperature, although they still flog that dead mule from time to time. The political temperature. They want you to believe pipe bombs and synagogue shootings are all the fault of President Trump. They’re not. And they use these mentally disturbed people to try and stifle his pointed concerns with inaccurate reporting in the media. Even Fox News has wondered aloud why the president won’t tamp down his criticism of ‘fake news.’ The reason is because fake news stories are one of the biggest threats to our country.

On the same day that Jim Acosta berated White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders for not having the “guts” to name names in the fake news media, a commentator on his own network was saying that Donald Trump had “radicalized more people than ISIS.” Think about that statement for a moment. The insinuation was Trump is responsible for the pipe bombs and the synagogue shooting. He’s no more responsible than Bernie Sanders was for one of his campaign workers shooting Steve Scalise on a baseball field. And, by the way, the synagogue shooter hated Trump because of Jews in his administration. That alone should put to rest accusations of anti-Semitism against the president. But it won’t.

Even before the pipe bomber was caught, the liberals were using the hashtag MAGABomber on Twitter. No one used #BernieShooter when Scalise was shot. Why? Because we understand that mentally deranged people on either side are not representative of those they supposedly support.

Eric Holder has said, “When they go low, we kick them.” Maxine Waters has encouraged her followers to hound and harass people they disagree with “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station.” She screams, “They’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” And they talk about the political temperature.

When crazy people scale the White House fence and try to enter the mansion carrying a dangerous weapon there’s no call from the left to tamp down the rhetoric against Trump.

He has called the fake news media the enemy of the people, and they are. No, not all the media, and not every reporter at every left-leaning network. Those who pose as journalists, but in reality are activists, are doing the public a grave disservice. The reason Sarah Sanders didn’t take the bait from Jim Acosta and list the fake news media is because she would’ve been there all day.

Reporting that Trump instructed Michael Flynn to meet with the Russians before the election was fake news. In fact, the entire Trump/Russia collusion story has been fake news. After two years there’s nothing to show for it. George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the FBI about communications with a Russia-linked professor. After meeting behind closed doors with Congress, it now appears the professor was set-up from the government to try and link him with Russia. Papadopoulos is now considering withdrawing his agreement with the government concerning his case.

Justifiably criticizing your opponents has no connection whatsoever with deranged people who resort to violence. For President Trump to refrain from pointing out what his opponents are doing wrong just because of some crazy people would be admitting that his words have some connection to their actions. They don’t.

If the mainstream media want to lower the temperature, they can start with telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about President Trump. If they want him to stop calling them fake news then stop running fake stories.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.