Trump is eager to get American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Just ... no.
Trump will reduce American troops in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,000 by the end of the month:
The U.S. is preparing to reduce its troops in Iraq to 3,000, down from 5,200, by the end of this month, the top commander in the Middle East announced Wednesday.
The announcement makes public plans that have been in the works for months, as President Trump has sought to make good on campaign promises to withdraw troops from foreign entanglements before the 2020 election.
But Iraq can't stand on its own yet, so I sure hope we continue to help Iraq enough to defeat battlefield enemies and keep Iran at bay.
Or will we pull a Obama 2011 that led to a disaster in 2014 and Iraq War 2.0? Ditto for Afghanistan on that issue, of course.
The issue of whether those wars were necessary and worthy of defending as victories is one that I strongly disagree with Trump over. We won in Iraq and we won in Afghanistan.
And those victories are part of the reason that the war on terror is tamped down enough to think about withdrawing American (and allied) troops from both countries to rely on the locals to fight our common enemies.
Mind you, the situation now is different than it was earlier under Obama. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have endured the enemy and hopefully are more capable of standing with less American and allied support.
But it would be immensely stupid to pull out so much that our local allies lose and stop fighting enemies, and instead be yoked to the jihadi effort as allies--as they once were.
