FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Americans Back President Trump against Senate War Caucus

Feb. 5, 2019 (EIRNS)—American Conservative editor W. James Antle III, responded to the Feb. 1 Senate vote, by calling on President Donald Trump to “call Congress’s bluff” in his State of the Union address.

“He should dare legislators to do their jobs and vote to authorize continuing these wars—or he will end them. Put the onus on the House and Senate to fulfill their constitutional duties.... Trump’s call to bring the troops home has left him isolated in Washington. If he makes withdrawal a priority in the State of the Union, he may find that he has more company throughout the country than he thinks,”

Antle wrote on Feb. 1.

He points to the broader battle within and over the administration, cautioning:

“Much is riding on whether a course correction is possible in Afghanistan and Syria. Trump has heeded the hawks in his party—and inside his own administration—on Yemen, Iran, and perhaps soon Venezuela. Breaking free of their stranglehold could help put his presidency back on track. Otherwise he will end up ceding foreign policy to the progressives who want to usher him out of office either by impeachment or electoral defeat.”

Michigan’s Rep. Justin Amash retweeted Antle’s article, after his own reaction to the Senate vote:

“What an embarrassing move for the Senate—condemning the precipitous withdrawal from one war that is the longest in U.S. history and another war that Congress never authorized. It doesn’t get much more pathetic. Do your jobs and vote *for* war if that’s what you want.” [Emphasis in original]

Sen. Rand Paul retweeted a blistering article in The Federalist on Feb. 4, by Jesse Kelly, a former Marine combat veteran with a talk program on Houston’s KPRC-AM 950 radio station. Kelly is furious that a Senate so mired in partisan gridlock that a resolution declaring the sky to be officially the color blue would fail along party lines, could agree that after 17 years,

“we haven’t spilled enough blood, broken enough soldiers (mentally and physically), or spent enough money. All for a now-aimless conflict in a part of the world Americans don’t even care about.... [Afghanistan] has now become a generational conflict where sons are patrolling the same areas as their fathers did. This no longer a war. This has become a hopeless mission to tame a part of the world that has never been and will never be tamed.”

Kelly calls this foreign policy “un-American,” quoting George Washington on the U.S. freedom to stay neutral, James Madison vs. standing armies, and John Quincy Adams’ famous warning against seeking monsters abroad. “Let us finally send neo-conservative interventionalism to the death it wishes upon our troops,” he wrote.

Concerned Veterans for America Executive Director Dan Caldwell issued a statement on Feb. 1 backing Trump against the Senate. He references polls from last November showing that 49% of U.S. veterans want the U.S. less militarily engaged around the world; 61% do not believe it is our responsibility to ensure that Afghanistan has a liberal democratic system of government; and that 69% would support the President if he withdrew all troops from Afghanistan.