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What About the Kurds?
So Turkey is bombing the Kurds in Syria. The Kurds in northern Iraq are (were?) very friendly to the U.S. Of course most of our allies fight for their own reasons and values and not as a favor to us. Same with the Syrian Kurds. Still, this looks like another case of our having a “that was then, this is now” attitude toward those we ‘befriend” in tough times. Memories of the fall of Saigon recur.
It is not our job to police the world or right every wrong. But what sort of deal have we made with Turkey and why? What is worth risking our credibility with those we will want to enlist for aid in the future?
Or is this anxiety just further proof that my neo-con impulses are madness, that Lindsay Graham knows nothing of geopolitics, that Bill Kristol still has no reason to mistrust Trump so much, and that I should just relax and be glad that “Hilary is not President” while the Donald plays 3d chess?
(If I had to say, I guess I would go with those who said more than a year ago that there are no good options in Syria, that we had been outfoxed by the Russians, etc. and that this is just the horrible, horrible price some must pay for Great Power mistakes.)
What say ye, Ricochetti?
Published in Foreign Policy
Yeah, it’s time to end it. We chose to fight a war half-assed again, and we institutionalized the war, giving no commander an incentive to win it and end it. It will never end unless we exert a very powerful force or we just leave. It is time to finally leave and look after our interests again. If the muslims get dangerous again, we can do what we need to do, but we don’t need to hang out there.
I wish we had a better presence in Iraq and done a better job of establishing peace before allowing Iran to establish a government there. We could have had a strong ally by now, but we blew it big time. I like the Iraqis, in a way, but if we’re not going to keep bases there to threaten Iran, then we have no business being there anymore.
It is a deterrent, but if it fails to be a deterrent they’ll be slaughtered.
I’d rather have more or none.
Good, ’cause that ain’t happening anytime this century and probably the next.
Definitely a laugh-or-cry story.
I am a bit surprised this did not come up at the very beginning.
Now, it is true that the current strongman in Turkey has almost entirely undone Ataturk’s reforms, which made Turkey attractive as a NATO ally holding the southeastern flank and helping keep the Soviets bottled up in the Black Sea.
Talk of supporting Kurds against Turkey is talk of supporting a stateless ethnic group against an actual, legal ally. Until we break up NATO, we’re not going to war with Turkey.
It is also true that there are no “Kurds,” as a single identity. Rather, there are a number of rival groups, each ethnically Kurdish.
There is no such thing as effectively defeating the Taliban, let alone Al-Qaeda, with a strategic raid. We learned from WWI that you had to occupy and force change to take (see democratic Germany and Japan). South Korea also worked, as did Taiwan (protected by our fleet).
The failure was in complete failure by George W. Bush to require and enforce all agencies supporting a Jeffersonian, not a Wilsonian government plan. We tried imposing centralized power because our senior State and Defense officials were trained in college and grad school to believe in this. We should, instead, have sought to return Afghanistan to a relatively stabile coalition of traditional regions, while prohibiting adoption of an Islamic republic constitution. Likewise, we should have enforced a republican government on Iraq, with most power reserved to the provinces, preventing the series of grudges and reprisals that created the vacuum into which Sunni and Shia extremists moved.
You are engaged in fact free Pollyanna babble yourself.
Understand that we and Turkey are actual, no kidding, for real, allies within NATO. So, tell us about your plan to expel a member from NATO. Be sure to include the phase, early on, where we safely extract all our military personnel currently stationed in Turkey, along with all our equipment.
I guess I also missed the part where Russia and Turkey were actually going to go to war. Absent our presence, the two national leaders would have sorted out their interests short of war, in part because Russia would be at a severe logistical advantage if they decided to start a shooting war with Turkey in Syria, a shooting war that would have triggered the NATO mutual protection requirement, which Russia has no intention of doing.
I like how the belief that this gets sorted out by magic is somehow not a Pollyanna worldview. By your logic we already kicked Turkey out of NATO. I mean, we have had advisors and SF in Syria for a while now and oddly enough it’s kept our ally from invading that particular region. All of that happened without a single mention of Turkey being kicked out of NATO. Almost as if you created a straw man so you could burn it…
If you’d like to debate the things that I have actually said I’d be happy to hear your perspective. But if your plan is to simply write my part and then respond to it then I don’t need to be here.
Isn’t this about the time in the process that some politician says we need to have a “national dialogue” about this and then proceeds to do whatever it is they wanted to do all along?
I think that’s only after school shootings. I’ll have to check the handbook, but I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be used only in certain situations.
That is exactly the point. As long as we had that small group of 50 to 100 soldiers, Turkey did not attack the Kurds, who killed off most of ISIS and were guarding ISIS prisoners. Just as a token number of warriors in Iraq kept the peace, only to have Obama throw it away, Trump’s allowing for the slaughter of the Kurds, and the freeing of their prisoners will go down as one of the most shameful acts in our history.
Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?
Trump’s removal of these troops is why Jim Mattis resigned in protest.
Nonsense. Non-responsive nonsense.
Can I like this a million times?
That’s sophomoric. Trump loses money and goes bankrupt all the time. Why would that be affecting him now?
Listen to the fourth hour of Red Eye Radio and Michael Rubin on Examining Politics. This is an enormous mistake.
This is exactly what a special forces guy was saying last night. He also said that special forces is completely burnt out but we shouldn’t be leaving it’s a terrible situation. They had another military guy on that was really good too. (I said it was the fourth hour in the above post, it might of been a repeat of one of the other three.)
Instead of invading Iraq we should have just built a freeway from Tehran to southern Lebanon.
This is pretty much accurate. Listen to the Michael Rubin interview on the Examining Politics Podcast.
Trumps lack of experience is killing him.
This is what they were saying on red eye radio.
Kind of funny when you think about it. Remember when all the right-thinking folks were running around screaming that Trump was going to destroy NATO? Pretty sure they’re the same crew that wants us staying with the Kurds.
Biden may well have been right about partitioning Syria, but there’s no way Turkey would be “over it” now. A brief grudge in the Middle East lasts two or three hundred years.
It’s time for GOP Congressmen to get on the impeachment bandwagon. Trump needs to go. Now.
Hey if were looking to stop some real genocides that are going on in the world, we should look into Africa. Oh wait those people dont count…
There’s a moral difference between not looking for dragons to slay and giving dragons a jump start.
As @cliffordbrown has noted, you’re not even addressing what I said. You just want to take a shot at Trump
@garyrobbins Let me note that I’m not necessarily against helping the Kurds. What I’m saying is that we deserve an actual debate, complete with objectives and costs in both blood and treasure, before committing our troops. Then Congress should vote on authorizing any military action.
And our troops deserve it more than we do.
This is my point.
I just don’t remember ‘protecting or helping the Kurds’ as being a germane point of consideration in deciding to put US forces in Syria. Did I miss this?
Yes.
Was that purpose distinct from helping the Syrian people by eradicating the ISIS problem?