Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to make a horrible bill even worse.
 
The horrible bill is Marco Rubio’s S. 1. Rubio’s bill already attacks the First Amendment right of Americans to participate in boycotts. It already enacts sweeping sanctions on Syria, Iran, and Russia that would make it more difficult to end the Syria war and more difficult for Syrian civilians to rebuild their livelihoods.
 
But now McConnell wants to amend the bill to make it more difficult to withdraw U.S. soldiers from Syria and Afghanistan.
 
CNN reports:
 
[…] 
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing an amendment to a Middle East policy bill that would acknowledge "al Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates in Syria and Afghanistan continue to pose a serious threat to us here at home," a move seen as a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump's push to withdraw US troops from Syria. "It would recognize the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal from either conflict and highlight the need for diplomatic engagement and political solutions to the underlying conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan," McConnell said Tuesday from the Senate floor, announcing the amendment to the bill, which is currently being debated.
[…]
 
McConnell attempted to mislead by claiming that his amendment merely opposes a “precipitous withdrawal.” The actual intent of McConnell’s amendment is to prevent any withdrawal whatsoever. The actual text of McConnell’s amendment “calls upon the Administration to certify that conditions have been met for the enduring defeat of al Qaeda and ISIS before initiating any significant withdrawal of United States forces from Syria or Afghanistan.”
 
What exactly would “enduring defeat” mean? Would it mean that there must be zero probability that at some point in the future, somebody who identifies with Al Qaeda can carry out an act of violence in Syria or Afghanistan? If that were the goal, we could never withdraw our troops. But that standard would be preposterous. If “zero risk” were the standard, we would never get behind the steering wheel of a car or approve a new drug for the market. The right question is: is keeping U.S. troops in Syria and Afghanistan in the interests of the majority of Americans, given that keeping them there is dangerous for the soldiers, dangerous to foreign civilians, and costly to the U.S. taxpayer?

Putting McConnell’s unachievable burden of proof on withdrawal would turn the world upside down, as if keeping our troops in other people’s countries is the normal state of the world, and only the certification of extraordinary, unimaginable circumstances would justify disturbing the world’s “normal” state.
 
Given the risk to soldiers and civilians and the cost to taxpayers, the burden on proof is on those who insist that U.S. soldiers must stay, particularly given that the Syria war was never authorized by Congress, and that the Afghanistan war that exists today is not the war that Congress and the American people were sold more than seventeen years ago.  
 
Urge Congress to reject McConnell’s effort to attach an unachievable goal as a barrier to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan by signing our petition.