A group of conservative veterans is preparing to visit Washington to laud President Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria and to urge Republicans to back his intention to pull out of Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East.
Wyoming House Majority Whip Tyler Lindholm, who was in the Navy on 9/11, is helping organize the mid-November gathering featuring speeches at the National Press Club and lobbying visits to Congress.
“If you listen to the sound clips of the war hawks who say you can’t pull out now because a vacuum will be created, and we can’t pull out in future because a vacuum will be created, and you are tired of that bullshit, contact you congressional delegation,” Lindholm said.
Trump faced broad Republican criticism for his withdrawal from northern Syria after Turkey attacked formerly U.S.-allied Kurds and received limited public support from allies such as Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Lindholm said a cease-fire brokered Thursday by Vice President Mike Pence shows that U.S. troops aren’t needed to prevent border clashes and Islamic State-exploited pandemonium.
“If you didn’t go this unconventional tough-love approach, you couldn’t get it done,” Trump said Thursday after the deal was struck. “Your friend, President Obama, lost more than a half-million lives in a very short period.”
“It seems someone is actually pursuing diplomacy rather than boots on the ground,” Lindholm said. “It almost seems like the Left has embraced the neocon war hawk ways — everyone except for Tulsi Gabbard.”
Lindholm is seeking to pressure his state’s Republican Rep. Liz Cheney during the Nov. 12-13 visit, which was planned before Trump’s Syria announcement. He said participants from states around the country are organizing under the group bringourtroopshome.us.
James Lechner, a former Army Ranger and security consultant who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, is joining the group in Washington and will speak on the failure of military leadership to plan for troop withdrawals after conflicts end.
Lechner, a South Carolina resident, said there was a lack of long-term strategic purpose to keeping troops in northern Syria. “Those 1,000 troops are there for the next 75 years? No, that’s ridiculous,” he said.
Lechner, who refers to Obama as “Barry Hussein,” stressed that the anti-war gathering was of conservative supporters of the president. “It’s not Code Pink or any crap like that,” he said.
“Everybody gets their handkerchief out for the Kurds. Well, that’s baloney,” he added. “The Kurds are like the American Indians, there are a bunch of tribes of them … they aren’t all good.”
On Wednesday, Trump defiantly cast the Kurdistan Workers Party, a group based in Turkey and associated with the U.S-allied YPG militia in Syria, as “worse at terror” than ISIS.
Trump accused Kurdish fighters of releasing some ISIS terrorists to make him look bad politically and to trigger a return of American troops.
[Read: Trump: Kurds ‘know how to fight’ but are ‘not angels’]
The withdrawal from Syria is incomplete, according to some of Trump’s America First allies, who point to a remaining CIA outpost in southeast Syria. They also expressed unease with Trump’s deployment of 2,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, though they said it was better than sticking them in a war zone.
Trump’s pullout comes at a transitional time for his White House team, with national security adviser Robert O’Brien serving less than a month in the role, replacing the famously hawkish John Bolton.
“The new national security adviser is still getting his sea legs,” said a person close to the White House. “I don’t think they are as assertive in the process as they would normally be … I think O’Brien will be a change from Bolton in not undermining the president’s position.”
Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser at the Koch-affiliated Concerned Veterans for America, said removing troops from conflict zones is “inherently going to be messy.”
But Caldwell, an Iraq veteran not currently involved in the November gathering, said he believes Trump ultimately will be vindicated.
“Once the hysteria around this action settles down, I think people will look back it as the beginning of a new approach to the Middle East,” Caldwell said. “It’s good the troops are coming out of Syria … The president could seize on momentum [and] withdraw from Afghanistan.”
