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WASHINGTON - In a late-night speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham railed against President Donald Trump's decision to pull troops from Syria, calling the decision "disastrous" and a "stain on the honor" of the U.S. 

The South Carolina Republican said the president's claim, which Trump included in a video to his Twitter on Wednesday, that the Islamic State had been defeated was "fake news." Graham said he'd just gotten back from a trip to the Middle East and knew for a fact that it was "inaccurate." 

Graham, a key ally of Trump, has taken a vocal approach as of late to combat some of the president's decisions, most recently with how the administration handled Saudi Arabia and the regime's role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. He was part of a bipartisan chorus of lawmakers who objected to Trump's decision and warned the president that it would lead to disaster and a new wave of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East. 

WASHINGTON – U.S. troops may have driven the Islamic State from a swath of territory in Syria – allowing President Trump to declare mission accomplished on Tuesday – but experts say that America’s years-long involvement in Syria has ended in near-complete failure.

Syria’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, remains in power despite U.S. demands for his ouster. Syria’s deadly civil war remains unresolved, with a mounting death toll and millions of refugees displaced. Russia and Iran’s influence in Syria has grown, while U.S. leverage has diminished. And while ISIS may not have a patch of land to call its own, the terrorist group remains a menacing threat in the region.

“We empowered Russia, we empowered Iran, we discredited the U.S. in terms of its ability to support the Arabs (fighting Assad) and its credibly on the ‘red line’ involving gas warfare,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security and defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

“We are leaving an extremely unstable Syria, and we have no clear strategy announced for what we’re doing in (neighboring) Iraq,” where ISIS also has a significant presence, added Cordesman, a one-time national security adviser to the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Defense Department intelligence official. “That is obviously a very undesirable way of trying to shape the future.”

Cordesman and others say the U.S. never had a clear strategy for its involvement in Syria, starting with President Barack Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes in 2014 and continuing into Trump’s tenure. Although both presidents said they wanted Assad out, neither aggressively pursued that goal.

“We lightly pursued a regime change policy by helping the weakest side of a civil war, and I don’t think that ever made sense,” said Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a libertarian-leaning foreign policy advocacy group.

Obama’s ‘red line’

Obama always seemed uncomfortable with the U.S. role in Syria – reluctant to get involved in a new Middle East conflict after having campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. But he dispatched special forces to the region in 2015 and the U.S. military footprint grew from there, with approximately 2,000 troops in Syria now.

Even before those boots American boots hit the ground in Syria, Obama warned Assad’s regime not to cross a “red line” by using chemical weapons against his own people. In 2013, Assad’s forces unleashed a sarin gas attack that killed as many as 1,400 people.

Obama prepared for a military strike but could not muster enough support in Congress for authorization. Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry worked with Russia to remove Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile. The result: while 600 metric tons of chemical weapons were destroyed, the Assad regime has continued to use such weapons in the conflict, with horrific consequences.

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Obama missed an opportunity to arm moderate Syrian rebels who could have ousted Assad and bolstered America’s strategic interests in the region.

“The time came and went when we could actually do something like that,” he told USA TODAY on Tuesday. And neither Obama nor Trump were willing to use American power to help end the humanitarian crisis or to challenge Russia and Iran as they stepped into the void, he said.

Over the last two years, the Trump administration has articulated an evolving set of goals in Syria: Defeating ISIS, ending Syria's civil war, protecting the allied Kurdish and Arab forces, and forcing Iran and its proxy fighters out of Syria. But while senior administration officials – including Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton – said the U.S. would remain until those objectives were achieved, Trump himself never seemed sold on the policy.

And with his announcement Wednesday that he had ordered all troops home immediately, Trump essentially short-circuited his own administration's policy.

“We have never had a very clear strategy and vision about Syria other than to say that Assad can’t stay,” Menendez said. “Now we’re at the end of it where everything we said we didn’t want has happened. Assad is in power, Russia is empowered in a part of the Middle East that it didn’t have a foothold in before, and Iran has a foothold to attack Israel. It’s a bad result all the way around.

Menendez and other lawmakers said Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. forces is yet another misstep. It will sow further chaos in the region, they said, and leave the Kurdish forces who have fought alongside the U.S. vulnerable to attack from Assad and Turkey. Worst of all, some suggested, it would give ISIS an opportunity to reemerge.

"The biggest winners are going to be Iran, ISIS (and) Assad," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "The biggest losers are going to be the people of Syria, eventually Americans if ISIS comes back ... our allies."

Cutting U.S. losses

Others said Trump's decision would cut American losses before things got even worse.

The rationales to stay are "awful," said Friedman, who argued that the U.S. should embrace its defeat of the ISIS caliphate in Syria and "not stick around long enough" to become even more deeply embroiled in the conflict, particularly with Russian forces who are propping up the Assad regime.

"The consequences of getting into a fight with Russia are not just terrible. They’re essentially catastrophic," he said.

One thing both liberals, conservatives, and centrists seem to agree on: U.S. involvement may have made Syria’s civil war worse - not better.

“America’s military presence in Syria has always been too little to make a decisive difference but just enough to prolong the fighting," said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. "Our half-hearted military commitment made no sense from the start - we went into this war without legal authorization or realistic objectives, and discounted the American people’s clear aversion to getting involved in another quagmire in the Middle East."

Justin Logan, director of programs at Catholic University's Center for the Study of Statesmanship, agreed that the U.S. role seemed to extend a conflict that Assad was guaranteed to win.

"The country has been turned into a charnel house," he said. "There’s an awful lot of carnage for not that much payoff."

“It’s the most sweeping reform in a generation,” said Kevin Ring, president of the advocacy group Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It’s also very modest … If people think we are even close to scratching the surface of the inequities in the federal criminal-justice system, they’re kidding themselves.” The bill, in fact, would affect only the federal prison population of about 180,000, which accounts for less than one-tenth of the more than 2 million inmates nationwide, a sum that makes the United States the world leader in incarceration rates. And as recently as a week and a half ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was saying there wasn’t enough time to consider the bill, which was “extremely divisive inside the Senate Republican conference.”

For decades, the left sought to dethrone the idea of truth. Truth was not an absolute. It was a matter of power. Of perspective. Of narrative. “Truth is a thing of this world,” wrote Michel Foucault. “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”

Then Kellyanne Conway gave us “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani said, “Truth isn’t truth” — and progressives rushed to defend the inviolability of facts and truth.

(...)

To an audience of nearly 500 new graduates and their families at the historically black college, the Massachusetts senator laid out a bleak vision of America. “The rules are rigged because the rich and powerful have bought and paid for too many politicians,” she said. “The rich and powerful want us pointing fingers at each other so we won’t notice they are getting richer and more powerful,” she said. “Two sets of rules: one for the wealthy and the well-connected. And one for everybody else,” she said.

“That’s how a rigged system works,” she said.

It was a curious vision coming from a person whose life story, like that of tens millions of Americans who have risen far above their small beginnings, refutes her own thesis. It was curious, also, coming from someone who presumably believes that various forms of rigging are required to un-rig past rigging. Affirmative action in college admissions and aggressive minority recruitment in corporations are also forms of “rigging.”

(...)

Trump’s claim that the system is rigged represents yet another instance of his ideological pickpocketing of progressives. From C. Wright Mills (“The Power Elite”) to Noam Chomsky (“Manufacturing Consent”), the animating belief of the far left has been, as Tom Hayden put it, that we live in a “false democracy,” controlled by an unaccountable, deceitful and shadowy elite. Trump has names for it: the globalists; the deep state; the fake news. Orange, it turns out, is the new red.

Of course, Warren and Trump have very different ideas as to just who the malefactors of great wealth really are. Is it Sheldon Adelson or George Soros? The Koch brothers or the Ford Foundation? Posterity will be forgiven if it loses track of which alleged conspiracy to rig the system was of the far-right and which was of the far left.

(...)

"I know you are, but what am I?"
-what passes as witty rejoinder for followers of 45

Read Chomsky—and look around you.

people of Bahrain

Supporters of US President Donald Trump have turned on him after he was yet again denied funding for a border wall.

Late on Wednesday, the US Congress approved a spending bill to keep federal agencies funded until February.

The Republican president was foiled in the Senate by members of his party, who refused to grant him any of the $5bn (£4bn) he wants for a US-Mexico wall.

Two years on, Mr Trump has been unable to deliver on the central campaign pledge that electrified his rallies.

Congress faces a Friday midnight deadline for averting a partial shutdown of the federal government.

Failing to agree a longer-term spending plan, the Senate has only been able to approve a seven-week extension of funds.

The House of Representatives is expected to act on the legislation later this week.

President Trump was quick to voice his displeasure, saying on Twitter on Thursday that he would not sign any legislation that does not include the wall.

But he has repeatedly threatened to veto budget bills that do not include funding for his project, only to sign such measures once they reach his desk.

Members of the ultra-conservative House of Representatives Freedom Caucus were up in arms.

North Carolina congressman Mark Meadows, a key Trump supporter, said: "He [Trump] campaigned on the wall.

"It was the centre of his campaign. The American people's patience is running out."

He called on the president to veto the bill and renegotiate.

Ohio congressman Jim Jordan noted in exasperation that plans to build a wall will only get more difficult from next month once Democrats become the majority in the House.

"Let me get this straight," Mr Jim Jordan tweeted. "Our chances of getting the Wall will be better in February when Nancy Pelosi is Speaker than now when we have the majority?

"Give me a break."

Mr Trump's champions in the media were also up in arms.

Breitbart News called it a "cave". The Drudge Report used the headline, "Trump in Retreat".

Radio host Rush Limbaugh said Mr Trump is going to "get less than nothing".

Right-wing columnist Ann Coulter - author of In Trump We Trust - recently warned the president will not be re-elected.

"Without a wall, he will only be remembered as a small cartoon figure who briefly inflamed and amused the rabble," she wrote.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham also posted a critical tweet.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Mr Trump is weighing his options and will be meeting with Republican House members on Thursday.

"At this moment, the president does not want to go further without border security, which includes steel slats or a wall," Mrs Sanders said in a statement.

While the wall debate continues, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday that migrants who illegally enter the US - including asylum seekers - will be forced to wait out the process in Mexico.

Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement that the "historic" new policy would prevent immigrants "trying to game the system" by disappearing into the US and skipping their court summonses.

The Mexican government has said it will offer migrants support, including work visas and protections, while they await their asylum proceedings, US media report.

Meanwhile, some among Mr Trump's base have decided to take matters into their own hands, launching a $1bn online fundraiser to build the wall.

A GoFundMe has amassed more than $4m in the last three days, and a Facebook page for the campaign has tens of thousands of followers.

Brian Kolfage, the Iraq War veteran behind the fundraiser, said raising the money was achievable if every Trump voter pledged $80.

"This won't be easy, but it's our duty as citizens," Mr Kolfage said. "We can help President Trump make America safe again!"