Trump defends Syria pullout plan in Baghdad, says US troops to stay in Iraq
Iran Press TV
Wed Dec 26, 2018 09:43PM
US President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, have made a surprise visit to Iraq, meeting American troops fighting one of the many wars that he has mocked in the past as costly blunders.
Fifteen years into America's invasion of Iraq, the unstable security situation in the country forced the Trump to depart Washington on a clandestine flight that landed at the Al Asad Air Base in west of Baghdad on Wednesday.
The trip came amid Trump's many problems in Washington, ranging from a partial government shutdown over the funding of his border wall to an unsteady economy and a controversial decision to end US military presence in Syria.
The American head of state has in the past sought to distance himself from the Iraq War and other foreign conflicts left behind by his predecessors.
In a surprise decision that put his security team at odds and prompted Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to quit, the president ordered a complete withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria and a substantial reduction of the 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan.
For Iraq, however, the president said he had no such plans for the 5,000 or so American troops in Iraq, who have been redployed to the country since 2014 to aide a US-led campaign against Daesh.
"In fact we could use this as the base if we wanted to do something in Syria," he told troops at the Al Asad base.
Talking to reporters, Trump defended his Syria decision and said people were going to eventually understand his reasoning.
"I think a lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking. It's time for us to start using our head," said the president.
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world," he added, saying his his generals have had "enough time" to fight the war and that they have been told to leave Syria without any delays.
Iraq trips by US presidents and other high-level Western officials to Iraq are usually shrouded in mystery.
Bush made only four trips to Iraq after ordering his forces to invade the country in 2003. His successor, Barack Obama, visited the war-torn country only once.
A decade-and-a-half later, the US-led war on the false pretext of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and some 5,000 American troops without yielding any meaningful results.
Trump said Obama's rushed decision in 2013 to leave Iraq paved the way for Daesh terrorists to gain power.
Faced with growing criticism on his failure to build his anti-immigration wall on the border with Mexico, trump wants to score positive headlines and buy himself more time by delivering on his other key campaign promises, including returning troops back home.
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