Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday rejected reports that said senior-level members of President Trump’s administration were not consulted before the president decided to pull troops out of Syria this week.
“This was a decision that was made with lots of consultation between all the senior-level officials, including myself, with the President. So yes … I had more than a heads-up,” Pompeo said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” Thursday.
On Wednesday, Trump declared victory over the Islamic State and announced he was ordering a full withdrawal of military personnel from the war-torn middle eastern country.
The move, which surprised U.S. lawmakers and much of the international community, almost immediately drew comparisons to former President Barack Obama’s 2011 decision to pull troops out of Iraq. That decision, Obama-critics say, ultimately led to the rise of ISIS in the Middle East.
“Remember the mission statement there. The primary reason — and the president’s talked about this — was to take down the caliphate,” Pompeo said of Trump’s strategy in Syria. “The United States of America intends to continue that counterterrorism campaign, continue the fight against ISIS, whether it stems from Syria or other places.”
One of the loudest critics of the president’s decision has been Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
“If these media reports are true, it will be an Obama-like mistake made by the Trump administration,” Graham said. “While American patience in confronting radical Islam may wane, the radical Islamists’ passion to kill Americans and our allies never wavers.”
It’s unclear how quickly the 3,000 military personnel stationed in Syria will come home, and Pompeo conceded that the Islamic State has not been totally defeated worldwide.
“The primary mission was to go take down the ISIS caliphate,” he said. “That is at the very tail end of completion. And we have ISIS remnants in lots of pockets around the world.”
