i think this visit was in the planning staging for quite some time. it is important to distinguish between the decision he made in syria and in iraq. it was a visit he wanted to make anyway but it just hit a whole new number of imperatives given his decision in syria and everything that has happened in the wake of that. elise, president trump talked a lot about the middle east during his campaign. he certainly removed himself from the neoconservative wing of the republican party in talking about his foreign policy. i want to play for you a statement that he made about president obama and isis during the campaign. take a listen to this. isis is honoring president obama. he is the founder of isis. he s the founder of isis. he s the founder.
before we go to break, we have a new piece of information from the pool traveling with the president. the pool traveling says that the president did not meet with the prime minister of iraq during his visit to the country, which we ve been talking about was an important part of this trip, not just meeting with the troops but meeting with the political leaders there. nima, what does this say about this process if the government didn t get the opportunity to talk to one of the iraqi leaders about these decisions he s made regarding the troop withdrawal and his commitment to keeping american troops in the country? that immediately speaks to this being for domestic u.s. n consumpti consumption. if this is going to be one of your key allies in the remaining fight against isis, to not meet with the prieps me minister of
he founded isis. and i would say the co-founder would be crooked hillary clinton. co-founder. so if you can follow the president s logic during the campaign, he essentially said it was president obama s decision to pull out of iraq that led to the founding of isis and that s why he was the creator of isis. elise, is history repeating himself to a certain degree with president trump s decision here in syria? couldn t this lead to the same sort of situation that he criticized president obama for? well, i think that s a big concern, ryan. when he said that he founded this was like a glib remark about president obama and hillary clinton. there was, if you remember, a lot of criticism of the obama administration for failing to see the signs of this group that kept gaining steam and gaining strength and before you knew it, they had amassed power of a
after all, isis has radicalized people in the united states who have killed americans and obviously killing citizens in europe, our fellow allies and others in the region. there s no doubt, i believe, the american people will support the president s efforts and he explains the situation. why we need x number of troops, why it s going to take this amount of time to do it and gives them a sense of what the end-state is i think they ll support him. shannon: let s talk about north korea and missile launches and saber rattling and what nikki hayes had to say in response. we have to see a positive action taken by north korea. they ve given us enough reason to think they re irresponsible and we re not dealing with a rational person. shannon: china also saying the military exercises with south korea are provoking north
and an airstrike west of raqqah cutting off a key supply route. we have live in our middle east bureau with more. connor, is america s involvement in syria growing? what s it mean? without a doubt that s what we re beginning to see. we re increasingly seeing more and more troops sent to syria to help support the anti-isis groups there and to battle isis as this battle for raqqah is set to begin in the next couple weeks. we re seeing more and more conventional troops not just special forces troops. several hundred marines from the 11th marine expedition air unit are arriving to provide support and we re seeing the deployment of army rangers there. we re seeing more and more of them and the trump administration is also weighing the possibility of sending even