Lindsey Graham to ask Trump to reconsider Syria troop withdrawal during lunch Sunday – Washington Examiner

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he hasn’t given up on trying to convince President Trump to rethink pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East and will broach the topic when he has lunch with Trump on Sunday.

“I’m going to ask the president to do something that President Obama would never do: Reconsider. This is being done by President Trump against sound military advice,” Graham said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I’m going to ask him to sit down with his generals and reconsider how to do this,” the South Carolina Republican, who served in the U.S. Air Force, said. “Slow this down, make sure we get it right, make sure ISIS never comes back. Don’t turn Syria over to the Iranians. That’s a nightmare for Israel. At the end of the day, if we leave the Kurds and abandon them and they get slaughtered, who’s going to help you in the future? I want to fight the war in the enemy’s backyard, not ours. That’s why we need a full deployed force in Iraq, and Syria, and Afghanistan for a while to come. Here’s the good news: If we play our cards right, we can reduce our footprint in all three countries.”

Trump announced earlier this month the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria. The decision earned him swift rebukes from lawmakers and was a catalyst for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ to tender his resignation effective February.

Graham, a former Trump critic who has become one of the president’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, said he would press Trump on foreign policy, despite the commander in chief so far not heeding his advice on Syria or Saudi Arabia. Graham was a member of a bipartisan group of senators who in December introduced a resolution urging the Trump administration and the international community to officially blame Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist and U.S. resident.

“I’m generally very pleased,” Graham said Sunday of Trump. “All I’m asking him to do is make sure we don’t fumble the ball inside the 10 yard line.”