Who served under the coalition to defeat isis. he resigned in december of last year after president trump announced his decision to withdraw troops from syria. we re lucky to have you. i remember when you resigned, brett, i was covering the white house. if you hadn t resigned then, would this activity now trigger you to resign? we ve seen this movie before. it s a bad movie and it s going to get worse. in december president trump, all of a sudden said everybody get out and then he revisited it, that limit our options and influence. as we speak now, we are abandoning all of our basis that we controlled and blowing up the basis as we leave. the population that supported our forces for four years are throwing potatoes and tomatoes at our trucks as we leave. this is shameful and humiliating and now we re going to collapse down to a little zone in the southwest part of the northeast
So you can enjoy it even if you re sensitive. delicious. now, i ve heard people say lactaid isn t real milk. ok, well, if it isn t real then, i guess those things over there can t actually be cows. must be some kind of really big dogs, then. sit! bad dog. way out of syria and into iraq. but not all of them. this morning we re learning some will stay behind. according to the secretary of defense, mark es sper, he says a residual force will remain in syria to protect the region s oil fields. something president trump supports, of course. all these new movements are happening as the house speaker, nancy pelosi and other lawmakers come back from the region trying to reassure allies. i want to bring in brett mcgurk
Peace. these are about putting american troops in harm s way. there s no process here. these are spasms. so perhaps they can work something out that makes sense, but we re only in this position because president trump on october 6th, two weeks ago, again on a whim, told everybody to leave. two follow-up questions for you. did president trump talk about this issue back when you were serving in the administration? the fields were under our control because we took them from isis. the question is what do you do with the oil? this is something secretary tillerson knew quite a bit about. it s illegal for the united states to exploit that oil. that said, we do not want that oil to get in the hands of terrorists or others. but to stay in syria for that purpose alone, i think that raises some pretty profound questions. and you if a national security process, the secretary of defense would not be out there over his skis talking about this. you would have deliberation, consultation and you wo
Those are the words that you used. one word that you didn t use is surprising. isn t it response something that experts in this field could have seen coming for miles? when i resigned i wrote a piece just to lay out the facts. and the facts are that donald trump does not want to be in syria. and so i was very troubled by the fact that, despite him saying in december get out of syria and then cutting the force by 50%, that we kept all of our objectives in syria, the max al mallist objectives the same. when you have objectives that are not backed by resources and the commander in chief has people in harm s way that he doesn t know they re there or doesn t support them being there, because when you run into a problem, as happens, the president then pulls the rug out. that s exactly what happened. this is kpj what i feared was going to happen. before i let you go, i wanted to get your response. the cease-fire that is set to be ending soon, turkey is sending
Here. reporter: that s really been the case with syria since the december announcement that the president was going to pull all 2,000 out. so you ve seen this back and forth, almost this public negotiation between the president and his pentagon on how many troops are ultimately going to stay. it seemed as though 1,000 was a number that was acceptable, until the president had that phone call with erdogan. then they initially said they would be withdrawing and just keep a few at a garrison in a special operations base right along the border in iraq. the interest thing here is where they re going to be located and they re likely to be located, if it s in conjunction with the oil fields, near the middle of the valley, but in the center of the country, at least the center of that part of the country where they re at. so they would be staying there and working with kurdish partners potentially and they would be there to protect the oil, which doesn t seem to be one of the articulated natur