Lindholm website urges Cheney: "Bring our troops home"

State Representative Tyler Lindholm has launched a new website, WyBringOurTroopsHome.com, that will focus public attention on urging Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., to abandon “nation building” in the Middle East and support bringing American troops home from war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

Lindholm, a three-term lawmaker who served five years in the U.S. Navy as a helicopter electronics technician and now serves as majority whip of the Wyoming House of Representatives, authored a guest opinion published last month in multiple major newspapers in the state, in which he wrote that “legitimate aims such as suppressing specific threats to America’s homeland or safeguarding essential national interests abroad are no longer the objective of our self-sacrificing military.”

“Instead, Congress passes nebulous ‘use of force authorizations’ that assign our troops the dubious and undefined task of ‘making the world safe for democracy,’ an obligation that doesn’t fall to the United States, its military or its taxpayers,” Lindholm wrote.

“In pursuit of this malleable objective, American military personnel are stationed in 80 nations on six continents. Such interventionism is unsustainable for a country drowning under $22 trillion in federal debt.”

Lindholm says the overwhelmingly positive public response to his commentary prompted him to push the issue further in an attempt to demonstrate to Cheney and the state’s two U.S. senators that there is broad support among the state’s military families and the general public for withdrawing American troops from the Middle East.

“My hope is to persuade Rep. Cheney and our U.S. senators that the people of Wyoming, especially the military families and taxpayers who bear the burden of continuing our military presence in the Middle East, believe that after 18 years of war, it’s time to bring our troops home,” Lindholm says.

“President Trump says it’s time. A neighboring state’s U.S. senator who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says he’s through with nation building. The purpose of the new website is to give Wyoming voters a voice in urging our congressional delegation to join them.”

Lindholm says, in taking on the issue, he is following the lead of a fellow veteran, former Sgt. Dan McKnight of the Idaho Army National Guard, who served in Afghanistan 15 years ago and in January began organizing a bipartisan movement to persuade Risch and Idaho’s Congressional delegation to bring American troops home.

“I took note of Sgt. McKnight’s efforts online and, on behalf of my fellow veterans and their families, want to help get the word out as broadly as possible, including here in Wyoming,” Lindholm says.