Before President Donald Trump was scheduled to leave office after the dubious election results were tallied and investigations were stonewalled, Trump wanted to remove troops from various third-world hellscapes as a final love letter to the American people.
The military-industrial complex snapped into action to prevent this from happening.
It reportedly began when influential Trump advisor John McEntee handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor a piece of paper with a checklist of foreign policy directives from the president that read as follows:
“1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.”
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.”
Macgregor was brought into the administration because of his noted opposition to America’s interventionist foreign policy. He had become a favorite of the Trump base after appearing repeatedly on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to call for troop withdrawal overseas.
One of Macgregor’s appearances can be seen here:
Let the Fox News interviews for Trump's national security adviser begin!
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 11, 2019
Tucker Carlson's first guest tonight was Douglas Macgregor, who is on Trump's shortlist to replace John Bolton. Tucker's interview was basically just to have Macgregor explain what he'd do as NSA pic.twitter.com/R3KMRHf9ns
McEntee, who had risen up the ranks due to his loyalty to the president, had been tasked with bringing Macgregor on board as a Trump advisor in the final days of the administration.
“Colonel, the president wants to know if you’ll come in and be senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense,” McEntee said during a meeting between the two men in the White House.
“Why is that?” Macgregor asked.
“The president thinks that you can help extricate us from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and potentially other places,” McEntee replied.
Macgregor showed some hesitancy due to the scope of the request. He told President Trump that he needed an official order, and the memo came on Nov. 11 formalizing his policies of immediate withdrawal.
Acting United States Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller immediately sprung into action to prevent Trump’s will from being realized. Assisted by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, the plot would soon come into focus.
“Many would rally to push back — sometimes openly and in coordination, at other times so discreetly that top Trump administration officials had to turn to classified intercepts from the National Security Agency for clues,” Axios wrote, admitting that Trump’s various peace plans had been “subdued, slow-rolled, and detoured by military leaders” throughout his presidency.
Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, an opponent of forever wars in the Middle East, describes the institutional barriers he encountered preventing the troops from coming home.
“They literally would not give you any information. And the information they gave you was bullsh*t,” Bannon said. “In every presentation, they say you’re 18 months away from turning the war around. Always. You’re always 18 months away.”
Jim Jeffrey, Trump’s special envoy to Syria and the anti-ISIS coalition, proudly boasted about he and other colleagues committed treason throughout Trump’s presidency so troops could keep dying for the profits of defense contractors.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told DefenseOne after the Biden coup, adding that the troop number in Syria is “a lot more than” the approximately 200 that Trump authorized to stay there in 2019.
