encourage the president to his point of view. yeah. it looks to me, i don t know enough to say this, but one has the suspicion the president was rolled. i m sorry, but the president of turkey wants something. he says can i have this? and the president of the united states says sure. and there are repercussions and implications on this decision that were perhaps not imagined. i m going to put up something susan glasser in the new yorker wrote. sorry, i m just here to amuse cornell. let me put up what susan glasser wrote, because it sort of merges the two issues of impeachment and the syria situation. add this particular moment, the republican fury at the president over the decision seems like an almost incomprehensible act of hypocrisy, how is it different than trump s threatened abandonment of ukrainians and his apparent blackmailing of them for personal political reasons? they are and aren t different. the images you saw today, you have militias executing people
than he s looking at what leader mcconnell says, frankly. what group of people are most important to donald trump right now? the senate republicans. you think this is a big deal? but why do you ask them to carry more for you? those are the people that stand between trump and the end of impeachment. that s it. there s no more mueller. there s nothing else. you know what the house democrats are going to do. so why ask more of them in the situation? it s an odd thing. i can tell you, also, i think it is legitimate to be asking why did this happen? how did this happen? a phone call with turkey s leader erdogan. peggy, this is twice now. it was right after an erdogan phone call. the first time, he announced that it was after an erdogan i asked general mattis, what is it about erdogan. he said that s politics, i m not going to get into that. but erdogan clearly has he has the playbook on how to
it was exactly 50 and all of that, but it does seem as if our soldiers being there was serving as a deterrent to erdogan for a period of time. they were until they weren t. they were until the turks decided they were coming. they gave us forewarning they were coming and the president made a judgment that i think most military commanders would agree with, that you don t go to war with 50 soldiers. they don t deter anything. once the turks said they were coming, it would have been foolish to leave 50 soldiers in the wakes of tens of thousands of people coming across the border. this is a 100-year-old war between the turks and kurds. realize, the president is asking is it in our national security interests to somehow figure out how the kurds can live with the turks? the other interesting thing that people don t mention is all the kurds aren t the same. the iraqi kurds are cooperating with turkey to turn in kurdish worker party officials they see as terrorists. the iraqi kurds are turnin
the leader of turkey. but that is not what the united states should be doing. two things. is turkey turkey s technically a nato ally, so it s technically an american ally. are they asking like an american ally? they re acting just the opposite. they re acting like a russian ally. they are buying russian missile systems. not buying the united states missile systems. should we kick them out of nato? i think it s something that needs to be considered. how do you have a nato ally who is in cahoots with the russians when the russians are the adversaries of nato? if you go back to the end of world war ii, the united states prevented all these countries, including turkey, from falling into the soviet orb. and so how ironic now, 75 years later, turkey is looking at the russians like they re the best friends in the world. erdogan is a bad guy. and i m disgusted at the american president would feel comfortable with someone like
i m glad you brought this up. when you were running for president, you actually you had a proposal on how you would handle the situation at the time, and i want to play it for you. because i m curious if you still hold the same view. take a listen. i would provide armaments to the kurds as well. in fact, i would go one step further. i would promise them a homeland and a state, but i would do it in congentian with talks with turkey. it would be a three-way discussion, but i would like to get the turks involved as well. an interesting proposal. you re not alone in that. a lot of folks would argue at some point the kurds need a home. have you shared that idea with the president? i haven t talked specifically about it, but they kind of do have a homeland. there s a kurdish region in iraq. what i was referring to iraq, and i do agree with that sentiment, but here s one of the interesting things. as we have gotten stability in iraq and the kurds have