Quote source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?465417-1/vice-president-pence-announces-us-turkey-reach-ceasefire-agreement-syria

Vice President Mike Pence announced an agreement for a temporary ceasefire in Syria after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Today, I'm proud to report, thanks to the strong leadership of President Donald Trump and the strong relationship between President Erdogan and Turkey and the United States of America, that today the United States and Turkey have agreed to a cease-fire in Syria," Pence said from the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey.

Last week, the White House announced that the U.S. would pull troops out of an area near the northern Syrian border ahead of an anticipated Turkish offensive into the area. President Trump said it was “time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” The move has drawn criticism from both Republicans and Democrats alike, particularly because of Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish forces in the area.

Pence explained Thursday that Turkey's military would pause its military offensive in northern Syria for 120 hours in order to allow Kurdish militia forces to exit the roughly 20-mile-wide "safe zone" near the border. He also added that Turkey's operation would be "halted entirely upon completion of the withdrawal." Pence said that the administration has also begun to facilitate the withdrawal of Syrian forces from the area.

"Also Turkey and the United States agree on the priority of respecting vulnerable human life, human rights, and particularly the protection of religious and ethnic communities in the region," Pence explained.

The news came just moments after a bipartisan group of U.S. senators in Washington, D.C., led by Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced new legislation imposing sanctions on Turkey over its actions in Syria. During his remarks from Ankara, Pence explained that the agreement stipulates that the United States would impose no new sanctions and would lift the sanctions currently imposed on Turkey once a permanent cease-fire takes effect after the "orderly withdrawal" of Kurdish militia forces from the contested area.

Graham told reporters said that while he's "encouraged" by news of the cease-fire, he still plans to forge ahead on the sanctions legislation for now, in case Turkey doesn't follow through on its end of the bargain.

President Trump took to Twitter to praise the cease-fire agreement, saying, "This deal could NEVER have been made 3 days ago. There needed to be some 'tough' love in order to get it done. Great for everybody. Proud of all!"

"This is a great day for civilization," Trump added in a subsequent tweet. "I am proud of the United States for sticking by me in following a necessary, but somewhat unconventional, path. People have been trying to make this 'Deal' for many years. Millions of lives will be saved."

The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s daily Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

As Congress returns to Capitol Hill and the impeachment debate pushes onward, the other big question is what to do about the situation in northern Syria.

Monday afternoon, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing sanctions on Turkey over the country’s offensive in Syria, which he said “is endangering civilians and threatening peace, security and stability in the region.” His statement concluded, “I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path.”

The president, however, stood behind his decision to withdraw troops from the Syrian border, tweeting that he “would much rather focus on our Southern Border” than the “7,000-mile-away Border of Syria, presided over by Bashar al-Assad, our enemy.”

The same day, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met to discuss efforts to overturn Trump’s troop withdrawal decision. “Our first order of business was to agree that we must have a bipartisan, bicameral joint resolution to overturn the President’s dangerous decision in Syria immediately,” Pelosi said. There are also currently multiple possible frameworks for Congress to impose its own sanctions on Turkey (CQ paywall). A bipartisan rebuke of the president’s actions is likely to pick up support from the list of Republican lawmakers publicly critical of the decision.

Out in Syria, Turkey’s invasion has progressed, prompting the Syrian army return to the country’s northeast.

A simple analogy vividly depicts the lesson lost on most in the Republican foreign policy establishment who believe we need American soldiers left precariously and indefinitely on the ground in tribal civil wars in order to keep us safe. When there are killer whales, sharks, snakes, and scorpions in a cesspool fighting each other, you don’t dive head-first into the tank to try to fight one of those dangers without understanding how you will survive the others or avoid tipping the balance of power to the other beasts. You stand outside from a position of strength, define your interests, and zap any one of the adversaries that comes out of the tank and inside your zone of interest.

President Trump is well on his way to learning the lesson of not diving head-first into the cesspool. He should follow up with strong action to protect our interests, using the right soft power tools to deter our enemies. That will go a long way toward framing his move out of Syria as a more effective means of deterring a complex web of multiple enemies – often at war with each other – and putting our interests first.

As I’ve noted many times, there is simply no reason for us to have a ground presence in Syria at this point. That is a position I’ve maintained since the beginning of the civil war, regardless of who was president.

The tangled web of alliances and enemies is dizzying just to articulate. There is the Sunni insurgency, representing the Sunni tribes in the east, that is constantly fighting the Shiite powers backing the Assad regime. Assad himself has outside help from Iran and Hezbollah, all supported by Russia, which makes the Sunnis resent Assad even more. Putin himself only backs Assad for his own strategic reasons and is not necessarily happy about the Iranian presence there.

Thus, in order to effectively advocate for intervention there, one needs to craft an ever-elusive solution to deal with all of the differently interested powers in the region. But people like Lindsey Graham who want our soldiers engaged in Syria don’t have a plan. The same people who demanded we be the ones to fight ISIS (the Sunni insurgency in its most recent, but certainly not final, iteration) are the ones who also complain about Iran and Assad. But nobody has explained how, since we fought the Sunni insurgency, we were not the ones who empowered Iranian hegemony in the region for free. With our troops out of the region, Russia and Iran would have to face the Sunni backlash without us keeping it in check for them.