Trump's Syrian move in 3D

President Trump's withdrawal of our 2,000 troops from Syria and half our troops from Afghanistan has Washington a-twitter.

Jim Mattis was hailed as a hero for standing up to the president. If he had done this in the previous regime he would have been called a racist.

The MacArthuresque exit of General Mattis drew an explanation from James Durso, a military expert on supply chain. He also seems to know politics.

"Mattis did not understand, or did not want to understand, he was a political appointee, and that meant executing the policy of the elected officials. He never discerned that Trump is clearing the decks before the looming contest with China, ridding the U.S. of legacy conflicts like Syria where we won’t win, and Afghanistan where we’ve already lost," Durso wrote in a column in The Hill.

Durso gave many examples of Mattis slow-rolling the president rather than carrying out his orders.

"Mattis spent much of his time telling whoever would listen that he was at the Pentagon to protect it from the Commander-in-Chief, which is pedestrian Washington, D.C. image management, at odds with the selfless, soldier-scholar image he cultivated. Mattis the man is not the Mattis of myth," Durso wrote.

There is a lot of that going around in Washington because the place is a swamp.

But the capital has been a swamp for some time. President Lincoln nearly lost the Civil War because the denizens of Washington had deemed him unfit for office. General McClellan slow-rolled the army Lincoln gave him.

I bought into the Mattis myth. So did The Donald. We are not perfect.

Durso's calling out Mattis for not being a good soldier who carried out his orders was delightful. Durso wrote, "It’s not clear why Mattis volunteered to be Trump’s Secretary of Defense — we’ll have to wait for the book deal and speaking tour to learn that — but he was ill-equipped to serve a President who arrived at the White House uninterested in being beholden to the ways of the national security bureaucracy: 'the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.'"

That's hot.

But it was the last line that was the illumination: "He never discerned that Trump is clearing the decks before the looming contest with China, ridding the U.S. of legacy conflicts like Syria where we won’t win, and Afghanistan where we’ve already lost."

A closed society, Red China is open about one thing. It wants to depose the United States as the top dog in the world.

Red China has given its target date: January 1, 2025.

That just happens to fall 19 days before President Trump completes his second term.

If you think Donald Trump is going to leave that nightmare to his successor, you are a fool.

And if you think the Washington Establishment is not siding with Red China, you are a double fool.