Days after predicting that President Donald Trump would soon resign from office, MSNBC host Chris Matthews came to his defense, slamming critics of his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, Business Insider reported.
During an airing of his show Hardball With Chris Matthews on Wednesday, December 19, host Matthews touched on President Trump’s decision yesterday to spend the next month removing ground troops from Syria, where he also declared that ISIS had been defeated.
The decision was met with a considerable amount of criticism, and Matthews took on those critics during his segment yesterday, noting that the outrage from those who he dubbed the “country’s brigade of armchair hawks” was “predictable,” which he alleged was because they were largely in favor of military interventions in the Middle East or “wherever they can find a broadcastable case.”
“The timing of the withdrawal from Syria should be subject to on-the-ground factors, but one easily gets the idea that the proponents for an extended U.S. stay will not accept any deadline,” Matthews said.
He further explained that he believed these people strongly support American military presence in the Middle East “permanently” and have been wanting that “long before 9/11,” even going as far as to liken them to members of the “clique” of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who were proponents of going to war with Iraq.
Matthews reminded his audience that President Trump “ran against stupid wars” and accused those not in favor of the withdrawal as the ones who “cheered” them into existence in the first place.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops was something he had made clear for a while that he intended to do and was met with a considerable amount of criticism, particularly from a group of top Republicans that include Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio among others, Business Insider reported. These officials all signed a letter to the president expressing their concern that the decision was a “premature and costly mistake” and urged him to reconsider.
Not everyone, however, was against the decision to remove troops from Syria, including Democratic Representative Ted Lieu, who served on active duty himself and voiced his support of the withdrawal on Twitter.
“The first rule of the Commander in Chief is that he should never send troops to a war zone without Congressional authorization and without a strategy,” Lieu wrote in response to a tweet sent from the account for Chris Matthew’s MSNBC show. “@realDonaldTrump is right to withdraw our troops.”
Source: Read Full Article