Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today to speak briefly about the President's announcement today that he is going to be withdrawing 2,000 American troops from Syria. Let me be clear. I thought this was a bad idea from the start, primarily because our troop presence in Syria is not authorized by Congress. We have had that debate in many forums here, but I believe this Congress has never authorized the U.S. military to engage in hostilities against ISIS. I think it is an extrapolation of the 2001 AUMF. It simply belies common sense. So we should never endorse military activity overseas, no matter what we think about the merits, if it is not authorized by this body. But we have also seen over and over again that our relatively meager military presence in the Middle East has never been enough to change the political realities on the ground. The training mission was a disaster. The weapons we gave to the rebels ended up in the hands of the people we were fighting. Ultimately, we never had enough firepower there to be able to meaningfully change the balance of power. But I will concede that the way the President went about making this decision makes our country an even bigger laughing stock than it already is in the region, and, frankly, that is pretty hard, because everybody is asking questions right now about why we pretended we were going to protect our Kurdish partners in the region if, on the eve of the Turkish offensive against the Kurds, we decide to pull out.…”