The successful U.S. military operation to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “is a vindication” of President Trump’s strategy in the region and his controversial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, Fox Nation host Steve Hilton said on the latest episode of “Deep Dive” on Monday.
“President Trump has always said that he wanted to go into Syria to get rid of ISIS and then get out and that’s what he’s doing,” said Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen.
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“That’s absolutely true,” agreed Fox News contributor and investigative reporter Sara Carter. “The president said we’re not going to be in there forever. He had told the Pentagon over and over again, ‘Give me a plan. Tell me how we’re going to go into Syria and how we’re going to pull out. What does it mean to win? How do we balance out this in the Middle East?’ And they couldn’t bring him a plan.”
“But then they brought him a plan to get Baghdadi,” she continued. “And he said, ‘Great, let’s do this.’ And he gave the full force to those Delta Force commandos and to those generals and said, ‘when we have them in our line of sight — when we have actionable intelligence, let’s get him and let’s take him out.’ And that’s exactly what they did. And that’s far better than what we’ve seen with past presidents.”
The parents of slain aid worker and ISIS prisoner Kayla Mueller echoed that sentiment on Sunday. Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother, told the Arizona Republic that she believes if “Obama had been as decisive as Trump” her daughter may still be alive.
However, President Trump’s critics did not express the same praise for the commander-in-chief.
Former Vice President Joe Biden released a statement commending, “our special forces, our intelligence community, and all our brave military professionals,” but he criticized Trump’s Middle East strategy, by writing, “the chaos of the past few weeks in northern Syria has jeopardized years of hard work and sacrifice by American and Kurdish troops to evict ISIS from its strongholds in Syria.”
Olsen said Trump’s critics want him to endorse the status quo.
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“The status quo is that America should be the mediator in conflicts between allies and between enemies and allies in these sort of kaleidoscope of interests that ends up involving us in something where we can’t win,” he said. “The president has always said, ‘I’m not interested in that. That’s not in our interests. It bogs us [down] in things that we can’t do.’ And so I look at what the president is doing as being completely consistent with what he said he was going to do.”
“What we’re seeing here seems to be a really good example of what the establishment has completely derided,” concluded Hilton, “which is the America first strategy applied to foreign and security policy.”
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