donald trump s decision to pull american troops out of syria last week following the call with a leader of turkey and the catastrophic consequences therein, this story broke over the last few hours. washington post reports giuliani urged donald trump to follow through on a type priority of turkey. erdogan blames for an attempted coup against him. ept another instance in which he appears to have been pushing a shadow foreign policy from his purge outside the government. michael flynn who lasted all of 27 days in his job in 2017 and who now awaits sentencing on charges he lied to the fbi about his context with russian officials also tried to persuade
around. of course syria, the democrats finally had a moment to get on one of the main issues that s going on in the news right now that has been dominated by trump and that they have not been getting any oxygen in on. in this moment where they had to really show themselves as commander in chief, i think spoch of that conversation, obviously pete buttigieg was able to use that as a moment to assert his foreign policy credence shls, but tulsi gabbard took a lot of that away. i think as the field narrows, there ll be more opportunity. i think it is weird that people did not take the opportunity to challenge her on that. quickly before we go, carine, this is for you. i want to play a person who took good advantage of this debate for himself. this is julian castro. the folks this week that saw those images of isis prisoners running free, to think about how absurd it is that this president
syria. we had lost about ten american soldiers i believe but it wasn t an active conflict. we played to a stand still and that was the least bad option. trump has created a situation where every option is worse than it was before. and in those moments you look to a commander in chief. i don t know that we saw that moment from any single candidate tonight but i give the edge to mayor pete among the others. this is from the producers. this is one of the moments in which he was discussing the issue. here it is, mayor pete. look, i didn t think we should have gone to iraq in the first place. i think we need to get out of afghanistan. but it s also the case that a small number of specialized special operations forces and intelligence capabilities were the only thing that stood between that part of syria and what we re seeing now which is the beginning of a genocide and the resurgence of isis. meanwhile, soldiers in the field are reporting that for the first time they feel ashamed asha
in syria. why didn t any of the moderates challenge her. none of the other 11, including mayor pete, no one said what regime? she has been somebody who is seen to defend bashar al-assad. and not blame assad at all for this. this isn t iraq. syria is a completely different situation but she seemed to be merging it. i think a lot of us were opposed to the iraq war. every debate she s had an interesting dynamic. as the field narrows, it s not clear whether she ll qualify for the next debate. there s so many candidates in each debate we have sort of different personalities, marianne williamson, andrew wang, tulsi gabbard who can change the tone or the mood of the debates. they re thinning out. i think that will create less of a distraction on stage for what some of the core issues are that we see the candidates going
done in such a kind of a high school way. it just was horribly inappropriate and i feel sorry for everything we ve done. martha: so how do you interpret that latest bit of what the president said where we are going to leave enough people there to make sure that isis doesn t resurge, which i know general mattis has talked about he s concerned about that as well. first of all, i think that all the retired generals who urged us to intervene in syria are responsible for what happened. the military-industrial complex that there s not a war they don t want to fight, the neocons and so forth. there was no reason we should have gotten involved in syria in the first place. i think that what the president did is allow natural allies to cement themselves martha: they ve already brokered a deal. great. what turkey did was unconscionable. i get that they don t like the kurds, the kurds in their country are considered terrorists, but to invade syria