back to the senate. i m talking to you in new hampshire right now. does that mean you would then end up in washington for a senate vote? i think there are a lot of senators who have gone home. last night we were told we could go home. the house and the president were going to be onboard with this continuing resolution, so i assume we would go back. but we would go back, i hope, if we had a solution. but i don t think the votes are there in the senate to put $5 billion in for the wall. and by the way, the president s campaign promise was for mexico to pay for the wall. correct. it wasn t for american taxpayers to pay for it. so if he s really going to stick to his promise, he should make mexico pay. senator, you were in syria a few months ago. what do you make of the president s unannounced and sort of surprising call to take the 2,000 u.s. troops out of syria, that s meeting with opposition kind of everywhere he looks? i think this will be
considered one of the worst foreign policy blunders of this century. certainly of this century to date. isis has not been completely defeated. we know there is a stronghold where there is still active fighting going on. we know there are thousands of isis fighters who have melted back into villages, who if we withdraw and the kurdish syrian democratic forces who have been our great partners in this fight are don t have the support that they have the opportunity to come back, either as isis, again, or another configuration of the terrorist organization, that s what happened in iraq. we don t want history to repeat itself here. and we don t want to give iran and russia and assad, we don t want to seed influence in syria to them, which we will do if we totally pull out. and real quickly, the president tweeted that russia and iran are really upset about
this idea. it s actually you re on the foreign relations committee. it would be the opposite of that. they would be most pleased if we ceded influence by leaving syria. that s right. they ve already indicated they would be pleased about the prospect that we would leave. when i was there in july with senator graham, we talked to kurds, to arabs, to the syrians all along the northeast corner. and they were so grateful for america s being there. and they begged to us stay, not to pull out because they were concerned about what would happen if we left. as we drove along with our service men and women in the cars, the syrians we saw along the roads flashed us a victory sign, because they were so pleased to have americans there supporting them. and to pull out now would say, not just to the kurdish partners that we have and the syrians, that they can t count on the united states, but it would say to any future partners who we might want to have work with us that they can t trust the unit
our members. we want to keep the government open, but we also want to see an agreement that protects the border. all right, democrats, for their part, are holding firm in their opposition. democrats are not budging on the wall. we favor smart, effective border security, not a medieval wall. there are not the votes in the republican house for a wall. they are not the votes in the senate for a wall. not now, not next week, not next month or beyond. all right. that s not the only battle that president trump is waging with congress. the president s defending his pronouncement that isis has been defeated in syria and that 2,000 u.s. troops stationed in the country will be coming home. some of the harshest criticism has come from his fellow republicans. this is an akin to surrendering. we can be successful only if we partner with others.
recovering. i want to keep an eye on that and cover this other big story we ve got, syria and the president s tweet that we re getting out of syria and his comments and a video we re getting coming out of syria. i just showed you why we re in syria in the first place. i m joined now by retired mayor general bob skaicales, a former commandant of the war college. let s talk about this for a second. there are a lot of military people, a lot of strategists, a lot of experts on the middle east who say this is ill advised, to get out of there and create a country in which there remains a power vacuum. add to the list of countries in the world where there is a power vacuum, and in particular one in which iran and russia ascendant and powerful doesn t make any sense. do you have a good argument on the other side? do you have some argument that what donald trump is doing does make some sense? you know, i guess in a sort of perverted way, one of the things that he says is that isis is substant