Sen. Lindsey Graham claims that Trump backed down on removing troops from Syria after having lunch together. President Trump has indicated no such thing. Meanwhile polls show support for the troop withdrawal? Is this a case of neocon wishful thinking?
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Sen. Lindsey Graham claims that Trump backed down on removing troops from Syria after having lunch together. President Trump has indicated no such thing. Meanwhile polls show support for the troop withdrawal? Is this a case of neocon wishful thinking?
Please remember to support the Liberty Report with a tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/
Sen. Lindsey Graham claims that Trump backed down on removing troops from Syria after having lunch together. President Trump has indicated no such thing. Meanwhile polls show support for the troop withdrawal? Is this a case of neocon wishful thinking?
Please remember to support the Liberty Report with a tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/support/
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, on New Year's Eve, we're having a program by audio since our studio is not at full level right now.
And co-host, Daniel McAdams, is on the other line.
Daniel, nice to have you with us, our program today.
How are you doing today, Dr. Paul?
Well, I'm doing fine.
The family had a little bit of cold and things like that over the holidays, but we did very well and had a good holiday.
I hope all went well with you.
That's great to hear.
We had a lovely time, sir.
Good.
Well, what we're hoping today is to convince the people that we want to continue for our president to have a lovely time.
Because last week, we were pretty happy, you know, but we've been disappointed at times.
And what we were happy about last week was, of course, his announcement, time to come home, bring the troops home, get out of Syria.
But just as we suspected, a lot of people didn't like that.
I don't quite understand this is why people don't like to end war, especially at Christmas time.
Oh, we're ending a war, first time in many, many years.
And a lot of people get hysterical.
I wonder if it has anything to do with money and selling weapons and a lot of other things.
Anyway, he got a lot of grief on it.
The neocons were hard on him.
And the chief neocon, Lindsey Graham, got into his office to try to persuade him.
Wrong thing, Mr. President.
Don't leave.
You're deserting our allies.
You're deserting Israel.
You're deserting the Kurds.
On and on.
And so Sergio comes out.
And he's very positive.
It was almost like, I converted him.
I converted him.
He changed his mind.
He's not going to leave.
And I guess our job, Daniel, is to try to sort out, you know, is there a bit of distortion going on?
We do know that Trump will shift gears, but he's also one that we believe in his heart that he wouldn't mind getting credit for ending a war.
So right now, he may be thinking things over and soften his stand.
But he also might have his views distorted by Graham because, you know, the things that he quoted the president on were pretty general, like, oh, you won't desert our allies.
Oh, no, we would never desert our allies.
You still hate the Iranians.
Oh, yeah, we've got to watch the Iranians, all that.
And we've got to protect our Kurds, and we will make sure ISIS never comes back.
So I can imagine the president just sort of feeding it to him.
I guess maybe this is a little bit of wishful thinking on my part that he's not changing his policy.
But these vague terms, and when you get it translated, you know, through Senator Graham, he can make it sound like I converted him.
We eliminated that libertarian influence that the president has on foreign policy.
There's no way we're going to accept this.
So I think that's our job, Daniel, to try to sort this out and see if we can remain optimistic.
I don't think it will hurt for us to keep talking about it, to participate in the public aspect of this debate.
We have to try to see things through President Trump's eyes.
You know, here he is.
He's forced to have lunch with Lindsey Graham.
Can you imagine how miserable that would be, you know, with Graham yapping at his ankles about this Syria thing?
But, you know, my first reaction to Graham's tweets yesterday were a little bit despair because the president has at times backed down from some of the things that he said.
But then, of course, after talking to you, I rethought things.
And you're right, a close look at what Graham was tweeting yesterday, it really does not go against what the president has said already.
He said the president assured him that we're going to make sure that ISIS is permanently destroyed.
Well, that's already happening.
It may not be the U.S. that's doing it, but it's happening right now.
That Iran doesn't feel in the back end, which is not going to happen because the Syrian government is filling in the back end.
That's already happening in places in Syria where the U.S. is ready to pull out.
And three, that our Turkish allies are protected.
Well, that's already happening, too, because the Kurds are already in negotiations with the Syrian government, with Damascus.
As a matter of fact, they've allowed the Syrian government flag. to fly in places like Manbij, where it hadn't flown in quite some time.
So all of these things are happening.
So I feel a little bit better that Lindsey Graham, as a consummate neocon, is really trying to establish false facts on the ground, trying to make the world as he thinks it is.
So at least that's the story I'm sticking with.
Well, you know, we feel like we're alone, and we're not alone.
There are others out there talking about what we talk about.
But one thing for sure, it's not on the mainstream media.
You know, we're pretty lonely on getting our message out.
But I would have to say we did very, very well, our message at least, because there were a couple of polls down.
And Trump still has the majority support of the people in spite of all the propaganda.
The world's coming to an end.
We've sold out to the Iranians.
We've deserted Israel and on and on.
And yet the American people are still with us.
And this is in spite of the fact there's no draft going on, no body bags at this particular time.
And yet the people say enough is enough.
And even the polling, when they expanded it to include Iraq and Afghanistan, even a few more percentage points say, you know, it's time to leave.
So I think there's a fertile field out there for our message if we can feed into that and try to encourage people to let their members of Congress and the senators know that their support out here in supporting the president on this issue.
And that is remarkable, Dr. Paul.
I mean, of all the uniformly negative press from the left, right, center, neocon, everyone, it seems but a small group of us, still the American people support, according to a new Harvard Harris poll, a majority of American people are in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
And I think that's got to be some encouragement to the president.
And in fact, I think really bolstering our sort of hopeful theory is that President Trump seems to have doubled down on withdrawing troops in a few tweets just this morning.
He tweeted, I campaigned on getting out of Syria and other places.
And then he went on to blame the fake news.
And then he said, if anyone else but me did what I did in Syria, which is, you know, get rid of ISIS, you know, get our troops home, they'd be viewed as a hero.
So I think he's kind of doubling down a little bit this morning, which is nice to see.
I don't see in his tweets today any capitulation to the neocons.
So hopefully he'll hold.
You know, and this was described as a token victory for Bolton.
He's there.
He's staying there.
Some of the classical neoconservatives have not gained total control, although that was the reason Graham went to that office to show that the neoconservatives were alive and well.
That doesn't mean that we should be complacent about Bolton surviving.
But the only difference with him, he's an authoritarian conservative interventionist, and yet he doesn't believe in nationbuilding.
I think that's the way I understand the difference.
A liberal won't like Bolton because he's not willing to nation build and produce a one world government under one government at all.
So I think that in some ways the division is good, but I don't think Bolton is good.
But it looks like the president might be able to stand up against him alone rather than having so many advisors in there that are in the classical neoconservative.
But he sure has had a lot of stuff thrown at him in this last week.
So I still think, though, it's worth the effort for us to do our very best to explain what's going on.
We do have a few people in Congress and in the Senate that agree with us, and we have to encourage them.
And I hate to jinx anything, but I'm reading a piece in the American Conservative magazine this morning by Kurt Mills.
The title is Secretary of Defense Jim Webb with the question mark.
And it goes on to talk about Webb, who is a mixed bag on some things, but very impressive on others.
He's been in battle.
He knows what it means.
But it also goes on down the line and talks about our old friend Colonel Doug McGregor being considered for Bolton's job.
So I guess this is the New Year's Eve, Dr. Paul.
We can have our fantasies and our wishes for the new year.
And those two things would be pretty high on my list, I think.
Well, you know, and I think the best weapon is, you know, whether it's cultural Marxism, which is easy to attack and ridicule and make fun of.
You know, some of the things, especially cultural Marxism, it is so absurd.
We ought to just be laughing them off the stage, and yet they do pretty well.
Same way in foreign policy.
I mean, all we have to do is present the facts.
Well, how many trillion more dollars?
We're up to $6.7 trillion over this last decade, and we really haven't won anything.
We're still in the middle of a fight, and yet there are some people saying, well, the world is coming to an end.
We're bringing 2,000 troops out of Syria, and therefore the end of the world is there.
And we can't give up our moral responsibility to spread American exceptionalism and teach the world how to love democracy and freedom and liberty and obey our constitutional principles.
They need a little bit of ridicule because I don't think that's what they're promoting at all, of course.
And you're absolutely right.
And in fact, we just put an article up on the Roman Paul Institute's website by Max Blumenthal, which is a terrific piece I highly recommend called Trump Critics of Syrian Withdrawal Fueled the Rise of ISIS.
And essentially what Max goes through is everyone who is screaming the loudest, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and all of the others about the Trump plan to withdraw, they're the ones whose policies in the Obama administration directly led to the rise of ISIS.
They're funding these groups that they said, oh, no, no, these are moderates when they knew all along that they were extremists.
So you talk about ridicule.
When everyone's talking about how bad Trump is for taking them out, so much you ridicule these people for helping create the problem.
Right.
And, you know, we did hear from our senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, because he was somewhat critical of Graham.
He thought Graham was way too soft.
You mean you were talking to the president?
You believe the president is still going to do it?
And I guess if you're going to compare some of these hawks, I guess there's all degrees, but I guess Rubio, it probably is hard to believe, but he probably qualifies for being more hawkish than Graham.
Well, I think what we can take a little bit of comfort in is look what happened when Rubio and Graham tried to run for president.
You know, I think about five people supported them, and that's about it.
So I hope the president feels confident he did campaign on getting us out of unwinnable wars.
And of course, that would include Afghanistan and certainly would include, in some ways, Iraq, although that's a little bit different.
But that's what he ran as.
That's what people supported.
Graham and Rubio ran on endless wars, and so did Hillary, and people didn't want it.
So we have to hope that he's paying attention on that.
Okay, Daniel, if you have a closing thought, go ahead.
Well, I would just thank our viewers once again, our listeners once again, for listening to the Ron Paul Liberty Report over the year.
We hope to continue to grow.
I would just gently remind everyone, this is the 31st of December.
This is the last day to make your tax-deductible donation to the Ron Paul Institute.
Keep the Liberty Report alive and have that count toward your 2018 taxes.
So if you just go to the Ron Paul Institute website, ronpaulinstitute.org, and then slash support or click on support on the menu, make a donation, you'll do an awful lot of good.
You'll keep a little bit of money out of the warmongers' hands and you'll get a tax break.
So it seems like a win-win-win to me, Dr. Paul.
Right.
And I want to thank our viewers, of course, for the strong support they've given us over the years.
And I would like to suggest that somebody do this.
Maybe we can do it, Daniel.
I'd like to know what the statistics show with Trump's first two years versus the first two years of so many other presidents in the last 10, 15 years and measure it by the amount of people who were wounded or killed in military action.
You know what?
It may be that Trump has the best record if you measure things by having less Americans killed.
And even Obama was not exactly a peacenick.
Comparing Military Casualties00:00:16
So someday we'll look that up because I quite frankly think that I'm looking for things that I can cheer the president on and that he comes closer to a non-interventionist foreign policy.
But I think that is the case.
But I do want to thank everybody for tuning in today on this New Year's Eve.