There’s A Disconnect Between Washington And Heartland On Syria/ Turkey Clash

Outside of Washington and the hyper-political watchers, does anyone really care?

Tom Bevan: Rally response shows a ‘disconnect’ between Washington and the heartland regarding wars, military

There is a “disconnect” between Washington, D.C. and the rest of America regarding Syria, this according to RealClearPolitics.com co-founder Tom Bevan who was reacting to President Trump’s rally.

“I was just in Washington yesterday and we spent all week talking about Syria and the Kurds,” Bevan said on “The Ingraham Ingraham” Thursday. “And you saw the disconnect on display with Trump out in the heartland, now making his case and the response that he got about bringing troops home, rebuilding the military to keep it strong.”

During the rally the president addressed his decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria a decision that many Republicans have been critical of.

“Endless wars, they don’t stop. They don’t stop. They go on forever,” Trump told the rally crowd. “These wars brought mass chaos, instability, destruction and death. Today, we choose a different path.” (snip)

“It’s something that he did run on. It’s something that has widespread support across the country. I think the only thing that Trump, you know, runs the risk of here is if ISIS reconstituted itself and starts creating some havoc before his election next November,” Bevan said. “But just if that doesn’t happen, there is widespread support and it’s a definite disconnect between what what people in sort of the heartland think, a real America, versus what everybody is talking about inside the Beltway.”

At the end of the day, does pulling the small number of U.S. troops out of Syria and giving Turkey, a NATO member, the green light to intervene move the needle with most outside the Washington bubble? Is this something they are thinking about, caring about, talking about, reading about? A lot of people were probably surprised we had that many military members in Syria, considering Obama was saying there would be no boots on the ground, that Democrats were against putting boots on the ground. Now you have crazy Dems like Wesley Clark, the general who became a darling of the Democrats over the Iraq War, when the Dems wanted us out of Iraq, telling us to stay in Syria.

(Real Clear Politics) But wait a minute. Turkey is a NATO member. Were we prepared to go to war with an ally to defend this strip of land held by the Kurds? Even if the Turks had an ulterior motive of seeking to punish their traditional enemy, the Kurds, were we willing to sacrifice American lives to take sides in that conflict?

Also, how exactly do we distinguish between the U.S. invading Syria several years earlier for our “national interest” and what the Turks are doing now for their own perceived “national interest”?

But then there are the Kurds…

We don’t want them to become the victims of genocide the way the Armenians were at the hands of the Turks in the last century, but what kind of commitment can Americans make to police Syria into the foreseeable future? Are we supposed to keep our soldiers at risk forever to prevent war between enemies who have irreconcilable differences?

What were a few dozen soldiers going to do? And do the people outside of the Washington bubble really care what’s going on, despite the media drumbeat? Nope.