Trump & Syria: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Donald Trump the first president elected without any prior experience as a human being now this this morning Trump actually had some major news for us that Abu Bakr al-baghdadi the head of Isis had been killed and in classic Trump fashion he was able to take something fundamentally positive and express it in the weirdest imaginable way because here is how he described the operation they did a lot of shooting and they did a lot of blasting even not going through the front door you know you think you go through the door if you're a normal person you say knock knock may I come in the fact is that they blasted their way into the house they had a beautiful big hall and they ran in and they got everybody by surprised what are you doing only just learn how soldiers work listen these guys are amazing they got these chameleon suits and big shooties and blast ease they don't say knock knock no they don't do that like a normal person they go through big beautiful holes and they shout surprise a lot of people are learning about this for the first time this is new to a lot of people but wait because you haven't yet heard Trump pay tribute to one crucial member of the team or a canine as they call I call it a dog a beautiful girl a talented boy I call them dogs not like other people who call them furry lizards or barking cats or elephants but smaller and different to me they are and forever will be dogs that's my term for them that I made up and what I look what Baghdady being gone is clearly great news I'd actually like to focus tonight on a different decision Trump recently made in the same region and one that I would argue could have more long-term ramifications and which tells us much more about his decision-making as commander in chief it's a move that alarmed many even his cheerleaders on Fox and Friends the United States is going to start pulling troops from Turkey's border in Syria that announcement last night stunning the White House says it's clearing the way for Turkish troops to invade a disaster a series of events I hope the president will rethink this Wow you know things are bad for Trump when he's even lost the support of Fox & Friends a show whose actual slogan is president Trump's dick is 17 inches long and thick as a true tire that's the real slogan now very basically what happened here was Trump suddenly and against the Council of nearly all his advisers pulled back troops along the syria-turkey border here who had been working with Kurdish LED forces to contain Isis and it wasn't just that our presence there also helped protect Kurdish civilians from Turkey Isis and the Syrian government and our troop withdrawal has had immediate consequences Turkish forces moved in almost as soon as we left and over a hundred civilians have been killed with nearly 200,000 displaced it has been a catastrophe and this move has been nearly universally condemned it's been criticized by everyone from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham the last of whom did not mince his words to abandon these people is a real show and I'm hoping President Trump will reconsider he's about to make the biggest mistake of his presidency hope he adjust a show although to be fair Lindsey Graham always looks like he's just said that exact phrase you know I come into this Bojangles every Sunday the read Sunday and I have never seen service like this magic in his damp my biscuit is cold my day is ruined people this is a real show right here I will take my order to go and when when the consequences of a decision of that dire and the condemnation that widespread it feels like it might be worth asking what exactly happened why did Trump decide to do it and what might the ramifications be going forward and let's start with what happens now obviously the situation in Syria is incredibly complex you can be forgiven for not fully understanding it what is much less forgivable it's pretending to understand it when you clearly don't say very semi complicated not too complicated if you're smart but it's a semi complicated problem oh good it's only semi complicated is it I'd forgotten that Trump spent the 90s is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and not as I clearly wrongly remembered losing all his dad's money and trying unsuccessfully to bang Madonna I forgot that because clearly are not smart like him look there are more factions involved here than we have time to cover but the important group to know about are the Kurds there are about thirty million of them in the region spread mostly across Syria Turkey Iraq and Iran they are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own so they're their own minority wherever they live putting them in a precarious situation but it's important to know that they have been close military allies with America in the past which is why it was so odd to hear Trump justify abandoning them like this somebody wrote in a very very powerful article today they didn't help us in the Second World War they didn't help us with no Normandy as an example they mentioned names of different battles they were there but they're there to help us with their land and that's a different thing hold on let me let me let me just get this straight you aren't mad because the Kurds didn't help the u.s. fight in Normandy quick question the does that have to do with anything there were also no Kurt at the Battle of Gettysburg or helping us get to the moon Oh suspiciously Kurdish missions where were the cards Neil could have used their help holding his ladder that were all busy were they all of them the fact is the Kurds have fought multiple times to help America including in both the Gulf and Iraq Wars meaning by the way the Kurds fought with the US military in at least two more wars than Donald Trump ever do we turn to the curse in 2015 to help us contain Isis in Syria we provided training and air support and they were the frontline troops doing the close fighting and it was a very tight partnership the US military trusted their allies so completely that the Kurds were soon calling in American airstrikes it's true the Kurds would point at something and we would blow it up that's an incredible level of trust if I had that power to put it mildly there would be no more Applebee's they know what they did they know what they did now that the Kurds sacrifice in that fight was significant while at least six Americans died fighting in that region the Kurds suffered 11,000 casualties and that Alliance is one of the reasons why Isis which controlled this much territory in Syria in 2015 has since lost all of it in fact a key reason that we were able to take out al Baghdadi was thanks to intelligence from the Kurds so they fought bravely with us and the situation in northeastern Syria was relatively stable and then in an instant Trump threw that all away so why why did he do that well to hear him tell it it's actually pretty simple I don't want to be in Syria forever it's sand and it's death okay first since when does Trump avoid areas of sand and death he owns a golf club in Florida where the average age is opposed the Civil Rights Act the guy loves sand and death but that is part of his reductive argument that in America should not be stuck in endless wars and that the troops should come home which is at least a real coherent foreign policy position the problem is the troops aren't actually coming home since May we've actually increased the number of them deployed to the Middle East by 14,000 and just days after his Syria decision Trump made a big announcement we are sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia but are you ready Saudi Arabia at my request has agreed to pay us for everything we're doing that's the first okay so one it's probably one surprise you they have not agreed to that and so even if they had that would be a weird thing to brag about the US military doesn't charge for protection because it isn't a mercenary force it's the reason the eagle on the US seal carries arrows and an olive branch not arrows and a credit card reader but but the idea that we'll send troops to a country that pays us is definitely in keeping with Trump's short-term purely transactional worldview it's the same philosophy that's led him to suggest withdrawing troops from South Korea because he thinks they're not paying us enough or to threatened to pull out NATO because he thinks other countries aren't contributing their fair share so look I'm sorry kurds unless you can give Donald Trump something he wants like I don't know hunter Biden's email password or Melania Trump's phone number you can apparently expect fuck-all from him so if this wasn't done out of some grand principle why did it happen and happened so suddenly well it seems Trump's decision followed a phone call with President Erdogan of Turkey and a little context here for years Turkey has struggled with a Kurdish militant group called the PKK who are unquestionably extreme the State Department considers them a terrorist group and Iran firmly believes that a Kurdish group we've been working with are basically the same as the PKK and he wants them either dead or nowhere near the Turkish border but this isn't actually a new problem we've been basically managing to balance our interest in containing Isis with our needs to manage our ones concerns for years now it has been difficult but we've basically done it until it seems her Dewan got on the phone with Trump earlier this month and told him he wanted to move against Kurdish forces in Syria and Trump essentially said fine we'll run away then and that is a decision that has baffled many including MIT Romney air Dewan basically said we're coming in get out of the way and America blinked is am i reading that wrong no MIT you're actually not much like the rest of America discovering this week that your secret Twitter account was named Pierre de lecto that's real you are very much not reading that wrong incidentally Pierre de lecto sounds like a name that would have come up in pulp fiction if that conversation about French McDonald's had kept going in France they called the quarter-pounder a Royale with cheese and they call grimace piel de Lecter but it is truly troubling the sheer extent to which Trump has just rolled over for Dewan he called the Kurds who remember have repeatedly fought and died alongside the US military no angels and while at one point Trump did apparently try to prevent a Kurdish slaughter other one seems to feel pretty comfortable ignoring him yesterday a letter surface from President Trump to erdowan he warned against a Turkish military offensive and said in decidedly undiplomatic language don't be a tough guy don't be a fool Derwin reportedly threw away the letter and launched the assault into Syria the same day holy he didn't just ignore him other one threw away a piece of mail that day that alone is ice-cold he probably also throws away birthday cards directly after reading them like a monster instead of keeping them on the kitchen counter for a week out of a sense of irrational guilt and then throwing them out because what else are you going to do frame it of course not it's a piece of trash but not for a week but even even if you think Trump was right to withdraw troops from the area it clearly makes sense to do it in a way that will cause the least damage to the region your alloys and your own interests but Trump did none of that a withdrawal was so rushed we had to leave a lot behind just watch this Russian reporter wandering around a US base just hours after the troops had left but even through ordinary left here yesterday at 4 a.m. look here I am currently at the u.s. kitchen American soldiers used to eat here the fridge is full good cooler what so not only did we dump our alloys without warning we left a refrigerator full of free coke for whoever took our place although maybe the most interesting part of that video is watching the reporter blatantly ignore the fridge full of Pepsi right next to it because even two Russian reporters the answer to is Pepsi okay is a resounding yet so so basically America left the region the same way you leave a party right after you clog to the toilet quickly leaving everything behind and forcing someone else to deal with all the and the consequences to this have been dire for starters Kurdish led forces were in charge of guarding many Isis prisoners and by leaving so abruptly we forced them to abandon their posts to fight for their lives and the thing that any six-year-old could tell you what happened next happened next the White House has tried to downplay how many of the 10,000 Isis prisoners in Syria may have escaped there were a few that got out a small number relatively speaking and they've been largely recaptured but that's not what the president's special envoy for Syria James Jeffery said on Wednesday we would say that the number is now over a hundred we do not know where they are it's true over a hundred Isis prisoners escaped and we don't know where they are or at least they don't know where they are because I have a surprise for everyone here tonight ladies and gentlemen the Isis prisoners [Applause] [Music] why didn't we give them shovels just doesn't make any sense anyway as I was saying over a hundred Isis prisoners have escaped and we have no idea where they are and the thing is it gets even worse here because when you give a green light to an authoritarian terrible things can happen and terrible things very much did we saw for the first time alleged atrocities carried out by Turkish backed Arab militias this video today appears to show Arab militias executing occured by the roadside as they shout Allah Akbar and proudly saying film me film me that is horrifying a potential war crime and completely completely avoidable yet astonishingly even in the face of scenes like that and over a hundred civilian deaths remember Trump was actually tried to spin the carnage as evidence of his tactical genius it was unconventional what I did I said they're gonna have to fight a little while sometimes you have to let them fight a little while then people find out how tough the fighting is sometimes you have to let them fight it's like you kids it a lot you gotta let him fight and then you pull them apart so are you talking about that is not true for Syria and it's also not true for kids you weird monster some just revealed what we've essentially always known he's not just a shitty president and a shitty person he's a shitty dad thank God he never had to raise any children now so faithfully faithfully the worst of the violence appears to have abated at least for the moment but that is largely because after the u.s. left a power vacuum in the region another major player stepped in Russia's Vladimir Putin tonight became the new kingmaker in Syria as he and Turkey's president air21 carved up the country between them exactly Putin now has a larger foothold in the region and the Kurdish fighters who were once allied with us for so long have now flipped sides and struck a deal with Syria's Bashar al-assad to avoid being wiped out so Trump has made a snap decision where the big winners are Putin uh dawuan Assad and Isis and that is a group that you do not want to be friendly with although actually believe they will all know the Cowboys game with Ellen this weekend look look we're all different and that's okay but but Trump but Trump may not be bothered particularly that he's empowered so many authoritarianism or for them in fact even after earned Awan disregarded Trump's warnings and launched a bloody campaign once he'd agreed to a temporary ceasefire Trump went straight back to effusive ly praising him I just want to thank and congratulate though President Erdogan he's a friend of mine and I'm glad we didn't have a problem because frankly he's a hell of a leader and he's a tough man he's a strong man and he did the right thing yeah he's a strong man he's a strong man that's not a compliment that's a synonym for dictator and that image might actually sum up the insanity of this whole situation the president thinking he's projecting strength obsequious ly fawning over an authoritarian thought deigning to pause a slaughter that the President himself had enabled and look I know that it is it is so easy to criticize anyone's policy in this region it is very complicated any move is going to have ripple effects intended or otherwise Syria was one of the biggest problem spots in Obama's foreign policy so I'm not saying that it is easy or even possible to get a situation this difficult completely right but it's genuinely hard to get it this wrong we took a fundamentally stable situation betrayed a strategically vital alloy and immensely damaged our reputation just watch how the Kurds treated a u.s. convoy leaving the country Kurdish civilians until now close US allies throwing potatoes and yelling insults at American troops ordered out of Syria these images tonight show one of the lowest moments of America's reputation in the Middle East in years think about what he just said there one of the lowest moments of America's reputation in the Middle East and remember a guy in the Middle East once took off his shoe threw it at the president and then while the people around him watched took off his other shoe and also threw that at the president look the more you look at all of this the more worried it gets because this was an unforced error Trump chose to do something this sudden this impetuous and this damaging and he's just not going to change to imagine what he might do in a crisis not of his own making that is one of the many terrifying things about the prospect of a second term or indeed the remaining year of this first one because there is nothing more dangerous than someone with a massive amount of power a dictator fetish and an inability to think in anything but transactional terms and who is stupid enough to think that this is all not too complicated if you are smart you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 8,385,303

Keywords:

Id: 2u_pZ-SgACk

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/didntevenwarmupdho]

mirror?

[u/flipperforever]

For those who wrote John Oliver said nothing about Obama's drone strikes https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-oliver-drones-last-week-tonight_n_5899716 https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/09/29/watch-john-oliver-take-on-obama-and-drones/

[u/[deleted]]

I went from laughing to hopelessness throughout the video

[u/inksmudgedhands]

"I call it a dog." (1:10)

Wait, did Donald Trump just learn about the term "K-9?" Did a 73 year old man just accidentally admit that he had never heard that term before? How? Seriously.......how?

[u/IceDragon77]

I hate that YouTube doesn't let us Canadians watch John Oliver.

[u/CnlSandersdeKFC]

"The Kurds have fought in 2 more American wars, than Donald Trump ever did." Damn... got'em.

[u/LordElfa]

People often ask how in the hell dictators come to power. Here you can see it first hand. All it takes are followers who have been manipulated to rage against the opposite political side and the support of party officials afraid to counter those followers. Now nobody is a dictator here yet but the same things are happening that have happened in countries where dictators did rise.

[u/paradoxologist]

Contrast Trump's blitheringly stupid and embarrassing monologue with Obama's dignified announcement of bin Laden's death. Trump is not equipped to be president, either intellectually or morally. Impeach that corrupt orange traitor. Enough is enough.

[u/rovinja]

It’s because he cares more about his personal interests, which he never fully divested from, than the interests of Americans and our allies

SNL’s scathing ISIS joke this week-

I was a prisoner in Syria until last week when you freed me, so I just wanted to say, thank you for bringing jobs back to ISIS.

-was equal parts funny and terrifying