Suddenly President Trump's no longer the fool, the dupe of his generals. His latest, historic tweets are bombshells. "Getting out of Syria was no surprise. I've been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer. Russia, Iran, and Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS" and the US was "doing there [sic] work."
Only Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is happy, telling CNN's "State of the Union" he is "very proud of the president. The American people are tired of war," arguing "roads, bridges, schools" are what we should be spending money on.
The naysayers are getting fake-news time:
*Senator Marco Rubio: "It will haunt this administration and America for years to come."
*The National: "Donald Trump has destroyed America's credibility with one tweet."
Really? Now why was Obama's one brave move, his Iraq policy, wrong? Who will Trump's action 'haunt'? Is America's credibility based on illegal, unwanted occupation and violence? As for retired secretary of defense Mattis, Trump shot back: "Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world."
The Pentagon can still fight ISIS using small teams of Special Operations forces in Iraq. And work with the Russians and Syrian government, if it can get off its regime-change high horse.
Let Mattis eat his words along with his Christmas pudding. If Trump survives the slings and arrows until the next election and wins a second term, maybe we'll get our peace dividend promised in 1991, and he'll take the next step and scuttle NATO, finally empowering the UN as the world's peacekeeper.
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*This hotline was established in 1963 and links the Pentagon with the Kremlin (historically, with Soviet Communist Party leadership across the square from the Kremlin itself). Although in popular culture it is known as the "red telephone", the hotline was never a telephone line, and no red phones were used. The first implementation used Teletype equipment, and shifted to fax machines in 1986. Since 2008, the Moscow-Washington hotline has been a secure computer link over which messages are exchanged by a secure form of email.
**Reuters news agency was established by a German Jew, Paul Reuter, in 1851 and came to specialize in swashbuckling, sensational British imperial news, enthusiastically supporting empire (doesn't matter whose), in line with the interests of Jewish financial capital (both German and British) at the time. By the 1870s, while 1% of Germany's population, Jews controlled 13 out of 21 daily newspapers and had strong presence in four others.
***In 1990, people just assumed NATO would disband along with the Warsaw Pact. French president Mitterand coined the slogan "US out and Russia in", meaning, of course, Europe. Czech Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier in 1990 proposed replacing NATO and the Warsaw Pact with the OSCE European Security Commission. (Walberg, Postmodern Imperialism, 2011, p150.)
****See Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)