and say you ve got to pull back or was it to d during the campaign he talked against our engagement in these wars and we needed to disagree. i m with you. the president said it correctly. we have 2200 troops in syria. does anybody really think that s going to make any significant difference? from my perspective the president inherited a flawed policy from the obama administration and now that they hold just 1%, he will turn to the american people and say he was able to accomplish. i have a lot of respect for second mattis. he was an advocate. he said that during the campaign in 2008.
specific narrow mission was to inflict pain against the assad regime because of the chemical weapons attack and to degrade seriously his ability to launch further attacks. whether or not that compels assad not to do it again, i think that s important. and president trump, second mattis said we don t want to do this again, but the ball is in assad s court and in russia s court. if it wasn t for russia, we would not be here today. russia was supposed to get this on a leash, get it under control. remove the chemical weapons with assad. they failed to do so. the obama administration, i m sorry to say, gets some of the blame for this, they fell for this even though they said that assad is not going to? do this and he didn t. neil: and a ranking member of the house armed services committee. the democratic congress joins us from shth with a. thanks washington. thanks for taking the time.
second mattis, and chief of staff kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos. that was wednesday. three weeks ago, corker questioned the president s stability and competence after he assigned blame for the violence in charlottesville to quote both sides. senator corker es vote will be critical for many of the president s goals. he is a retiring senator, yes, but, he s going to be around for some time here, and the president will need him for that very, very splim margin he has in the senate. you can only lose two republicans if you have no democratic support. any issue is going to be tough. good thing he didn t insult john mccain. who knows, joining us now cnn alum. eugene scott. she brings up a good point. he wouldn t attack john mccain,
problem, so no one should be under any illusion that this is going to have easy answers. if we had a chance to have easy answers to fix this problem, it would have been fixed a long time ago. with that being said, we have to understand that a military surge is not going to work unless we have a diplomatic surge. in order for the military to be successful, we have to have diplomats who understand the strategy, have a very specific plan of action, and they have two surge as well. we have to have a diplomatic surge at the same time. the military is ready. the military is always ready and i think second mattis is showing us that they are ready to move in and do what needs to be done. all the ideas we have implemented from a diplomatic standpoint and afghanistan have failed. we need to be honest about that. we run out of ideas at the
one who is requesting more soldiers to go into afghanistan. that s being considered by second mattis, is that a good idea? he requested and were advisors, but that will not be decisive. to change what s happening on the ground, will have to get the army, we stripped them of all of the helicopters. we re talking thousands more, but not tens of thousands. as we ve spoken before, and pakistan are two sanctuaries that the afghan taliban jenna: we know where the bad guys are. and to question of political will to go in this area and get them out. it s frustrating to underscore, but i want to underscore that for our viewers. also at the u.n. right now, is not connected directly to this, but russia is connected to a lot of different things. we know about russian mischief