(Jerusalem Post) – US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria but added that if needed, they would be prepared to use military force against Turkey, even though “we prefer peace.”
In an interview that aired on CNBC on Monday, Pompeo was asked how the recent move by the administration was consistent with his previous criticism of former US President Barack Obama. In the past, the secretary attacked Obama for failing to act over the violation of the red-line the president himself had drawn against Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
The interviewer Wilfred Frost also quoted to Pompeo a speech he gave saying that “West Point taught me a basic code of integrity: if we commit American prestige to an action our allies depend on us to follow through.” Pompeo claimed that the case was “fundamentally different.” “Turkey didn’t — the country that Turkey invaded, they conducted an incursion into, is Syria, a sovereign nation. We worked with Kurdish friends, the SDF up and down the Euphrates River,” he responded. READ MORE
