they were absolutely wonderful. i would take you, your family, anybody there to drink some chi with them. they were our best allies on the ground. they have common purpose. and to be frankly honest, when you talk about training kurds, it makes baghdad and damascus and ankara nervous because people are always afraid they ll become too powerful. and when isis came back into iraq, the second and third army divisions capitulated, and they were literally all we had. and specifically on the syrian side of the border, they stepped up in an unprecedented way. this is certainly a black mark for anybody who served on the ground with them like i did in iraq. jon, good to see you again. jon soltz joining me tonight. just ahead, trumps are looking to sell that brand-new hotel in washington, d.c. the reason why and the ridiculous price, next. d.c the reason why and the ridiculous price, next of the ivory billed woodpecker. what??? no, no no no no. battery power runs out.
iraq or kuwait to people at the white house, to people over at the pentagon, and nobody had any idea he was going to do this. and so, we ve made one bad decision after another, and some of it is process. i mean, obviously, we ve got troops in syria that aren t really you know, there s no congressional authorization for them to be there. i think that s something democrats would have taken up, but not at the abandonment of the kurds, and certainly not at the international perception that the u.s. military s job is to invade countries to take their oil. these are just fundamentally large problems for frankly people on both sides of the aisle for members of the military, for soldiers. that s not something that s a very different mission to sign up for than freedom and liberty and protection of america. that almost feels mercenary. right. it is mercenary. and to be frankly honest, last year or the year before, we had mercenaries protecting oil fields in syria and we had, you kno
not what we signed up for. i think the issue, though, is that the president, he s swayable when you talk about things in this way. right. and so, we really have an agent actor issue at the civil military level with him. and so, when lindsey graham and jack keane, neo cons, go back into his office, there are some bases in syria we don t want to give up, and convince him with this argument that he was, to be frankly honest, he stood up and trashed the iraq war in the republican debates but also said we should invade and take the oil, so this is a message he s been on since a candidate. we had a general in earlier today talking about this, and he said there is a problem for members of the military because they fought alongside those kurdish fighters for a long time, and a lot of those kurds died in support of a mission that america was a big part of. the idea of pulling out in betrayal of them is something that a lot of members of the forces are not going to abide by. it s heart a
kurds, or to save human life or to honor our promises as a nation. instead, we will leave those u.s. troops there to secure the region s oil. as trump tweeted out today what are we getting out of the deal? i simply say, the oil. here with me, former u.s. army officer and veteran of the iraq war, john saltz, chairman and co-founder of vote vets, an advocacy organization for veterans, an odd vocation organization that has had a lot more to do because of the amount of time that america has spent in the middle east. donald trump has some audience when he says we need to get out of there, but this is not what a lot of people in the military are saying is the way to do it. you know, if donald trump came up with a plan to leave syria, i think that there would be a lot of cross-partisan support for it. and i think overall what we ve seen in the last two weeks was foreign policy by tweet. and you could look at the data point from people that work at central command in tampa to people th