Bill Nelson: “Syria has been a mess and a concern for quite a number of years. By putting in a small footprint now of a little over…”

“Syria has been a mess and a concern for quite a number of years. By putting in a small footprint now of a little over 2,000 special operations troops, the United States has been considerably successful when you think of what a chaotic place it was and still is and that it was especially inimical to the interests of the United States just a few years ago. Remember the horrible images of U.S. citizens being executed by ISIS. Remember all of the trauma we have seen the Syrian Government perpetrate on its own people. Remember the successful efforts of a combination of forces that ultimately took on ISIS, that removed it from its headquarters of its caliphate and caused it to disperse if it were not eliminated at the time. A lot of that was led with Kurdish fighters who were fighting alongside U.S. special operations advisers. Even though complicated because of the Russians' being there and the Turks' having interests and Assad's trying to hang on to power, the United States has been successful in not eliminating but in lessening the influence of ISIS. Then came the shocker--the shocker of the President's announcing unilaterally that, all of a sudden, he was going to pull the special operations troops, as advisers, out of Syria. This would likely cause immediate instability.…”