A “precipitous” withdrawal of U.S. troops from Sryia would be “devastating" to America, its Kurd allies and Israel, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said Sunday.
In an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” Cheney, a member of the House Armed Forces Committee, said she’s “hopeful… that we are now going to slow that down.”
“I’ve said that the administration… should not pull out of Syria,” she said of President Donald Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal, adding. “,I’ve been very hopeful … that we’re now going to slow that down.”
“We’ve got about 22,000 special operations there performing crucially important work,” she said. “It would be really devastating if we were to pull out precipitously” and create a situation “to give Iranians free reign to establish a land bridge there” and ultimately “allow ISIS to again form safe havens again potentially.”
“I’m hopeful that will we will slow that down and look at conditions on the ground and not make a precipitous withdrawal,” she added.
The lawmaker also chided new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as “very much just completely captive to the far left of her party,” deriding her remark that a border wall to stem illegal immigration is immoral.
“What’s immoral is not to secure our border,” she said. “We absolutely have got to secure the borders. And at this point the Democrats continue to play games.”
“We’ve got to see the games stop… the border has to be secured, that’s what the people want to see,” she added. “And they want the partisanship to end.”
Asked her assessment of President Donald Trump’s assertion that Russia was right to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s, and that it went bankrupt fighting there, she bluntly replied, “No.”
“Obviously I disagree with the president's assessment of the history there,” she said, declaring that the old Soviet Union was “determined to spread communism around the globe and what bankrupted the Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan.”