In 2013, I was one of the people who opposed Obama's pre-stated plan for a "pinprick strike" in Syria. Today, I'm not so sure that's as bad as it could have been, and I think we can all agree that a strike on Syria would have been a bad idea. But what s different between 2013 and now is that Trump is a man of mystery on foreign policy, and a coherent plan of action can help reshape the map in Syria in ways that Obama could not have imagined. And that's why I think a strike in Syria will be much better than a pinned-down attack on a Syrian airfield, even if it doesn't accomplish what Obama had hoped it would accomplish. I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that Obama's plan was, in fact, much worse than the one Trump is pursuing now. I mean, look at the map of Syria, and you'll see that there's a lot more to the conflict than there was in 2013, and that's a good thing, given what's happened in the past four years, and what's going to happen in the future, and in the years to come in Syria under President Trump. I think you're going to agree with me that the map has changed since then, and it's better than it was four years ago, which is why a pinprick attack in Syria is not only better than Obama's idea of a strike, but it's a much better idea than what we did in 2013. . . . I hope you enjoy this episode, and tweet me what you think of it! ! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's better? 2:30 - What have you thought of Obama's Syria strategy in 2013? 3:20 - What changed? 4:10 - What has changed in Syria since then? 5:15 - What are your thoughts on Obama's strategy? 6:40 - Is there a better plan in Syria now? 7: What would you like to see the United States do in Syria? 8: What's the best option? 9:30 11:00 12:00 -- What are you looking for? 13:30 -- What is the best strategy in Syria's strategic interests in the Middle East? 14:40 -- What s your point of view? 15:20 -- What do you want to see?
00:00:00.000Last night, as news emerged of President Trump's missile strike against a Syrian airfield, Twitter quickly began examining Trump's old tweets from 2013, many of which opposed the possibility of action in Syria by Barack Obama.
00:00:37.000Now, Cruz is silent on Trump's airstrikes, adding, quote, I look forward to our commander-in-chief making the case to Congress and the American people.
00:00:44.000In 2013, I was one of the people who opposed Obama's pre-stated pinprick strike.
00:01:14.000First, Trump can re-establish American credibility.
00:01:17.000Obama had already blown American credibility out of the water for four years by the time Assad gassed his own people.
00:01:23.000It was obvious to everybody, Democrats and Republicans, that not only did Obama lack a plan in Syria, he was looking to launch a few missiles to silence criticisms of his pathetic foreign policy.
00:01:32.000As I tweeted then, hitting a few donkeys in the rear in Syria wouldn't do anything but make Assad look stronger and the United States weaker.
00:01:40.000He's a brand new president, a man of mystery on foreign policy.
00:01:43.000A coherent plan of action following a strong immediate response to a chemical attack can help reshape the map in different ways than Obama could in 2013.
00:01:52.000The Russian-Iranian axis is now operative in Syria.
00:01:55.000After Obama hands it over control of Syria to Russia in 2013, I wrote this, quote,
00:02:08.000Do nothing in order to prevent Al Qaeda from taking over the country.
00:02:11.000Or, as John Kerry advocated, push for an unbelievably small action in order to reinforce America's credibility.
00:02:17.000The third option was probably the worst.
00:02:18.000But in a truly awe-inspiring display of his foreign policy genius, Obama has found a fourth option.
00:02:23.000Appeasement, complete with international weapons inspections it rejected just a week ago.
00:02:28.000In 2013, our geopolitical interests in Syria were significantly less important than they are now, thanks to Russia's aggressively reshaping of the Middle East.
00:02:35.000Obama handed over power to Russia in Syria, thereby helping complete an Iranian-Russian axis that now spans from Iran to Lebanon, and then backed Iran through his idiotic and evil nuclear deal that made Iran a regional power again.
00:02:46.000All of that is creating a safe haven and base of strength for Iranian-backed terrorists, strengthening Putin's hand as an expansionist dictator, and even creating an incentive for countries who oppose Iran and Russia to covertly support ISIS.
00:02:57.000Blunting Russia's ambitions in Syria without drawing us into a war with them is a worthwhile goal.
00:03:02.000Third, the map does not look like it did in 2013.
00:03:05.000Here's a graphic of control of Syria in 2013.
00:03:08.000You can see those blue dots up in the top, those are the Kurds, then you see the red dots, that's the opposition, and the black dots are the government.
00:03:25.000Note also the new clarity about the identities of some of Assad's rivals.
00:03:28.000In that first map, you didn't know who his rivals were.
00:03:30.000Here, you know a lot of them are ISIS.
00:03:31.000This means that America's strategic goals have changed.
00:03:34.000Now it's no longer about deposing Assad, per se, which was always a questionable goal given his terrorist rivals.
00:03:40.000America has no interest in intervening in the middle of the Syrian civil war.
00:03:43.000We do have interests regarding Assad's dominance and fighting ISIS.
00:03:47.000Russia and Assad are not interested in fighting ISIS.
00:03:50.000That was always a fantasy of pro-Russian isolationists.
00:03:52.000Our best policy at this point is to contain the region without serious intervention, kill as many ISIS members as possible along with friendly countries, and to deter major human rights violations, if possible, while emboldening the Kurds in that yellow northern region.
00:04:06.000That's why Trump's first strike matters.
00:04:08.000But it won't matter unless he has some sort of strategy to back it up.
00:04:11.000If he doesn't, it will be precisely the same as Obama's proposed pinprick strike, and will have been a counterproductive rather than a first blow toward restoring American interests on the world stage.
00:05:10.000I don't know that much about thread count.
00:05:11.000What I do know is what feels good and what breathes at night and what is comfortable.
00:05:15.000You know, people always say things like, well, this has 1,000 thread count.
00:05:18.000Okay, the thread count apparently doesn't mean anything.
00:05:20.000That's just talking about the density of the threads within a certain amount of space.
00:05:24.000But what you do is you drive past a gas station in L.A., they have a sheet set, and they'll say it's 1,000 thread count, and you buy it, and it's just actually like a plastic tarp.
00:05:31.000Bull and Brandt sheets are the best quality sheets.
00:05:33.000There are three ex-presidents that sleep on them.
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00:05:50.000The set of sheets is like $200 there, which is significantly less than it would cost for a real luxury brand, and Bull & Branch is indeed a luxury brand.
00:05:57.000You get $50 off your first set of sheets, $50
00:06:12.000The Gorsuch thing, we can wait till later to discuss, but it's not huge news because we knew all week that they were going to confirm Justice Gorsuch.
00:06:27.000I don't think it's as huge a thing as some people make it out to be, because I don't think the Supreme Court is as huge a thing as some people make it out to be.
00:06:32.000I've said that in the past, I will continue to say that, but it is big that Scalia's seat is maintained for originalism, as opposed to being converted over to a leftism activist seat, as it would have under Hillary Clinton.
00:06:42.000So, I got that one totally wrong during the election cycle.
00:06:45.000I said I thought that Trump would appoint somebody who is not conservative, or at the very least, Mitch McConnell, would not ram Trump's pick through over the filibuster, and obviously I was wrong.
00:06:55.000Good for Trump, good for Mitch McConnell, that's great stuff.
00:06:57.000But the big news, obviously, is that we are now involved in a war in Syria.
00:07:04.000Last night, about, it would have been about 6 o'clock Pacific time, we get the news that the United States has launched 50 plus, I think it was 59, Tomahawk missiles from the Mediterranean Sea to a Syrian base, an air base that was apparently the source of the gas attacks that happened earlier this week on Syrian civilians that Trump saw
00:07:56.000But it was a sign that Trump is not going to sit there and do nothing.
00:07:58.000And it was a marked contrast to President Obama, who after a Syrian gas attack in 2013, he basically sat around and did nothing, dithered, tried to blame Congress, and then finally handed over control of the whole situation to the Russians.
00:08:10.000But it has raised a number of really important and interesting questions.
00:08:14.000The first question, I think, is was the strike worthwhile?
00:08:40.000That obviously not only had no impact, it actually was counterproductive.
00:08:43.000It convinced bin Laden that the United States was a paper tiger, we weren't going to actually do anything, and led to 9-11.
00:08:48.000If you just do these sort of symbolic measures that aren't followed up on with any sort of real cohesive policy, then nothing actually matters here.
00:08:59.000David French, I think, gets this exactly right in National Review.
00:09:01.000He says, if this is the only strike, unless it was extraordinarily and unusually effective, it has little chance of materially impacting the Assad regime or the course of the civil war itself.
00:09:09.000Even if it persuades Assad to refrain from dropping gas bombs, he'll doubtless continue his campaign of mass murder with barrel bombs, cluster bombs, area bombing, and mass executions.
00:09:53.000People like Cernovich, well, you seem very concerned about Pizzagate, why don't you go join the DC police force?
00:09:57.000You know, the idea that you are concerned about something happening in the world, and this is the rationale, you must join the military if you care about persecuting a war, or prosecuting a war, or you must join the police force or the border force if you want people to do their jobs, that's silly.
00:10:11.000The reason that so many people are upset is because there are a lot of people who bought into the original concept of Trump as sort of a Ron Paul isolationist, and what Trump actually is, is an isolationist who, if he gets pissed off, fires missiles at things.
00:10:23.000That's all the evidence we have so far.
00:10:25.000We don't know that he's now an interventionist, we don't know he's somebody who plans, and this is the great debate.
00:10:30.000What Trump did in Syria last night, was that something where Trump is actually now going to shift his entire policy on Syria and pursue something that's more coherent and cohesive?
00:10:39.000Or is it going to be a situation where Donald Trump basically, earlier this week, said, everything is fine in Syria, don't care what Assad does, Assad gasses a bunch of people, he sees it on TV, he says, oh those poor babies, and then he goes and he shoots off a bunch of missiles, and then that's it.
00:10:53.000If that's it, that's not going to be good, but we don't know the answer yet.
00:10:56.000You know, that seems to me the most plausible solution here is that he doesn't have a coherent strategy.
00:11:00.000The only reason I say that is because they're members of the Defense Department who are already saying this was a one-off, that this isn't going to be something that is repeated, and they've yet to roll out what their strategy actually is.
00:12:07.000If you look at a lot of his supporters, they have a reason to be upset with him today, because obviously that was not his position.
00:12:12.000He saw something on TV, he heard intelligence reports, and then he decided to act.
00:12:17.000And we'll have to see how, you know, we'll have to see how much he ends up acting.
00:12:21.000Bob Corker, Senator from Tennessee, he says that he was excited that this happened because he was worried Trump might just make a cheap deal over Russia.
00:12:53.000I was very concerned in the beginning that there may be an attempt to do some cheap deal with Russia relative to Ukraine and Crimea.
00:13:02.000In Syria, and I don't think there's any chance of that now.
00:13:05.000I think the president is, the longer he's in office, the more he has people coming in to see him from other countries.
00:13:11.000I think that he's developing a body of knowledge and experience that will keep anything like that from occurring, and he'll have an opportunity to see firsthand right now.
00:13:28.000We just don't know what's going to happen.
00:13:30.000But you can see the flip happen in real time.
00:13:31.000So earlier this week, Tillerson said that Assad could stay in power.
00:13:35.000Then he added, now he's saying after that gas attack, that Russia was complicit or incompetent in preventing the Syria gas attack.
00:13:41.000There's information that Russian agents were on the ground as they were organizing the Syrian gas attack.
00:13:46.000He also is now saying that there are steps underway to remove Assad altogether, which is precisely 180 degrees polar opposite of what he said earlier this week.
00:13:54.000Assad's role in the future is uncertain, clearly, and with the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.
00:14:05.000And so what steps is the United States prepared to take in order to remove him from power?
00:14:11.000The process by which Saad would leave is something that I think requires an international community effort, both to first defeat ISIS within Syria,
00:15:00.000My mom has always said that if the house was on fire or underwater or falling into the San Andreas Fault, my dad would probably be inside the house trying to save every box of family photos and every film he could find.
00:15:12.000We don't have to worry about my dad burning or drowning or falling into the abyss with an armful of boxes, trying to save all the family memories.
00:15:18.000You just send your old pictures, films, videotapes to Legacy Box, they put them on a DVD or a thumb drive, and that saves them forever, makes it convenient, they're preserved, they're ready to watch, they're ready to reshare and relive, if you're sentimental.
00:17:39.000There is some irony to this, if you're a Trump follower, and Trump spent his entire campaign ripping on George W. Bush, saying that George W. Bush was a warmonger.
00:17:47.000If you recall, what was George W. Bush's excuse for going into Iraq?
00:17:50.000It was use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein on his own people, the possibility of future use of weapons of mass destruction on Americans and others across the world, upholding UN sanctions against all of this.
00:18:02.000And that's exactly the same template that Trump is using here.
00:18:04.000So people have a right to be upset with Trump if they were against the Iraq war.
00:18:08.000And now they say, well, what happened to the Trump that we knew and loved here?
00:18:11.000The fact is that isolationism runs up against reality, not only because you see nasty pictures on TV, but because it turns out that there are nasty forces in the world from Iran to Russia who are interested in maximizing their own power at the expense of U.S.
00:18:23.000And that's really where America's interest lies here, not in the human rights violations, which are terrible but exist all over the world.
00:18:28.000It really lies in the idea that a strengthened Russia that has an impact in broadening the sphere of influence for Iran
00:18:34.000And for places like Lebanon and Syria and Assad.
00:18:40.000When you do all of this, you're heightening the chance of war against America's allies, war against citizens of the West, and terrorism against citizens of the West.
00:19:21.000And if you become an annual member, you get a free signed copy of Michael Mulls' Reason to Vote Democrat, a comprehensive guide, a masterwork of political thought about leftism.
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