As President Donald Trump seeks to wind down American military efforts in Syria and Afghanistan, he said he wanted to maintain a troop presence in Iraq to “watch Iran.” Speaking on "Face the Nation" Sunday, the president voiced his distrust of Iran, particularly when it came to its nuclear program, and implied stationing troops in neighboring Iraq will strengthen U.S. surveillance capabilities.
“We’re going to keep watching and we’re going to keep seeing and if there’s trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we’re going to know it before they do,” Trump said on Sunday.
In May, Trump followed through on one of his campaign promises by withdrawing the U.S. from a deal then President Barack Obama forged with Iran in 2015 with seven other nations that limited Iran’s nuclear capabilities to strictly civilian. At the time, the Iranian government said they would still remain in the deal, but some observers are concerned Trump’s withdrawal and his bellicose rhetoric towards Iran could motivate them to pull out and move forward with a nuclear weapons program.
“This administration has said it sees Iran as a mortal enemy,” WGBH News Analyst and CEO of the GroundTruth Project Charlie Sennott said on Boston Public Radio Monday. “To step away from that deal it is widely seen as a miscalculation and a mistake. I think he’s going to need to keep a close watch on Iran because we reneged on a deal with them, and we don’t know what that could mean.”
While Trump fights to keep a watchful eye on Iran, members of the military and Congress have grown concerned that he’s more concerned with Iran’s nuclear problem than fighting ISIS, a group the president declared defeated despite the Pentagon saying they are still active within Syria. Last week, Trump was rebuked by one of his strongest allies, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who advanced an amendment that warned against a “precipitous withdrawal” in the Middle East. The amendment passed 68-23, and is seen as a response to Trump’s abrupt announcement in December to pull 7,000 troops out of Afghanistan and 2,000 in Syria.
“Congress is going to test its limits on what it can do to slow this presidency down on substantive changes in foreign policy,” Sennott said. “We now have a check and balance more in Washington where the president isn’t just going to stumble and careen into things he thinks he can do without checking in with the wider institutions like the intelligence community, which he’s called stupid.”
Members of the Iraqi Parliament have also warned Trump not to increase the troop presence in Iraq, saying that it could inspire more opposition groups to take up arms against the Americans, similar to what happened in 2003 following the American-led invasion. In December, following a surprise visit by Trump to troops in Iraq, an Iraqi official said the visit was an affront to Iraqi sovereignty and called on Parliament to formally demand American troops leave the nation.
“[Parliament should] play its role and adopt a national, historical attitude and put an end to the frequent violations to the Iraqi sovereignty by the American government and to issue a decision to get the American forces out of Iraq,” Hamad Allah al-Rikabi, the official spokesman for the Al-Ahrar Bloc in the Iraqi Parliament told The New York Times .
Last week’s vote is the second time the Senate has voted on a formal condemnation of Trump’s Middle East policy. In December, the Senate voted 56-41 to end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led incursion on the War in Yemen despite Trump’s steadfast support for the Saudi government and their policies.
