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
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  1. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    EJHill (View Comment):
    We have a lot of vets here, and the fellow mothers and fathers of current members of the armed forces. Maybe you can tell me if I’m out of line here, but I think my son is willing to die for his country if that’s what’s needed for the preservation of our liberty. I’m not sure policing the mess of ancient ethnic hatred half way around the world or “sending the right message” or jockeying with Vladimir Putin is high on anyone’s list. (Putin’s Russia, however mischievous, is not on par with the Soviets.)

    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.

    • #61
  2. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Zafar (View Comment):

    EJHill (View Comment):

    How many troops are we moving? According to one of the President’s National Security Advisors the answer is 50. Is that all that really stood between the Kurds and the Turks? 50?

    Their presence was a deterrent. Turkey is very wary of killing US soldiers by mistake. Hence the phone call and the delay.

    It is a deterrent, but if it fails to be a deterrent they’ll be slaughtered. 

    I’d rather have more or none. 

    • #62
  3. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Zafar (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Thought Leader (View Comment):

    How much blood and treasure should we spend? What’s the endgame look like? What’s the exit strategy? How do we know when we’ve reached “Mission Accomplished”?

    IMHO the objectives seem to be:

    Keep Turkey and Syria locked in low level conflict qua occupation – keep Syria from getting too stable but also keep it from falling apart – keep the Kurds destabilising (but not too much) Syria, Iraq and Turkey.

    I don’t think the objectives include strong, stable states or a stable and peaceful Middle East.

    Good, ’cause that ain’t happening anytime this century and probably the next. 

    • #63
  4. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Skyler (View Comment):

    TBA (View Comment):

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

     

    Do our nukes still work? It’s been a while. Has anybody checked?

    I tried, but the Marines got all fussy.

    Did I tell about the time in 1987 when I was put in charge of delivering a nuke to a squadron for a QAST (Quality Assurance Subject Test, or something like that)? They would take a nuclear weapon from the inventory, remove the fissable material, and drop it on a target to test everything along the process, but mostly to test if the darn thing would have gone boom.

    My job was to guard the weapon during delivery from Coronado to El Toro and from the ordinance crews at Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron 11 to prep the bomb, and then to VMA(AW)-242 (an A-6E TRAM squadron) for hanging it on an aircraft before it took off. The pilot would fly as fast as he could and then make a steep climb as he released the weapon, slinging it miles ahead of his plane. He was graded on accuracy, I think he had to hit within 100 feet or some such crazy number.

    My guard crew had to fly to Coronado in helos, provide a security perimeter while taking delivery of the weapon, reboard the helos, etc. We were escorted by armed AH-1T Cobras, and I think some fixed wing aircraft were also along.

    This was a big deal, as any commander with the nuke mission could tell you. Except we had recently transitioned from being part of an attack air group to a fighter air group, and fighter guys hated bombing. They were quite snobbish and wanted nothing to do with the headache of nukes.

    Well, long story short, after weeks of intense training despite lack of support from most of the group headquarters, I was told on the day of the mission that they sent a guy to pick up our small arms ammo that didn’t have an ammo license, so we had no bullets.

    The adjutant rummaged in his desk and strangely came up with 15 rounds of .45 and 30 rounds of 5.56mm. I gave a bullet to each rifleman, and my SNCO and I split the pistol ammo.

    I’m really glad Khaddafi didn’t attack that day.

    Definitely a laugh-or-cry story. 

    • #64
  5. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    danok1 (View Comment):
    ETA: One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, but should probably be taken into account, is that as far as I know, the U.S. has a military alliance, with an honest-to-God treaty that was ratified by the Senate, with only one country in this whole mess. That country happens to be…Turkey.

    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.

    • #65
  6. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    danok1 (View Comment):
    changed our objective to creating another Western-style nation in Iraq.

    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.

    • #66
  7. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie(View Comment):
    Preventing the rise of ISIS and an all-out war between Russia and a NATO ally isn’t enough?

    That’s two reasons that sound reasonable for someone to be there but it sounds as if it should be NATO.

    It’s not NATO’s job. Look, the downside of being one of the few adults in the room is that we are expected to knock this s**t off when it comes up. Nobody else is reliable. The UN? Please. They’ll send in some rice and penicillin after the refugees have already fled. It falls to us because we’re the only ones who have the stones to step up. Or at least we did. Obama wasn’t keen on having any balls. This mess is on him more than Trump.

    Our troops supporting the Kurds against the Turks has no visible endpoint.

    My God people like you are insufferable.

    Well, there’s insufferable and there’s insufferable. Do you know for how long your above answer (I bolded) has been the standard?

     

    Standards exist for a reason. I’m not interested in hearing more Pollyanna babble from the Ron Paul wing of reddit Enjoy your noninterventionist fantasyland.

    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.

    • #67
  8. Reformed_Yuppie Inactive
    Reformed_Yuppie
    @Reformed_Yuppie

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie(View Comment):
    Preventing the rise of ISIS and an all-out war between Russia and a NATO ally isn’t enough?

    That’s two reasons that sound reasonable for someone to be there but it sounds as if it should be NATO.

    It’s not NATO’s job. Look, the downside of being one of the few adults in the room is that we are expected to knock this s**t off when it comes up. Nobody else is reliable. The UN? Please. They’ll send in some rice and penicillin after the refugees have already fled. It falls to us because we’re the only ones who have the stones to step up. Or at least we did. Obama wasn’t keen on having any balls. This mess is on him more than Trump.

    Our troops supporting the Kurds against the Turks has no visible endpoint.

    My God people like you are insufferable.

    Well, there’s insufferable and there’s insufferable. Do you know for how long your above answer (I bolded) has been the standard?

     

    Standards exist for a reason. I’m not interested in hearing more Pollyanna babble from the Ron Paul wing of reddit Enjoy your noninterventionist fantasyland.

    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. 

    • #68
  9. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    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?

    • #69
  10. Reformed_Yuppie Inactive
    Reformed_Yuppie
    @Reformed_Yuppie

    EJHill (View Comment):

    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. 

    • #70
  11. Gary Robbins Member
    Gary Robbins
    @GaryRobbins

    Roderic Fabian (View Comment):

    One will look in the mainstream media in vain to find a description of what Trump actually did with troops in Syria. Turns out we’re talking about only 50 to 100 soldiers.

    So these guys would make the difference if Turkey attacks? What were they even doing there?

    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.

    • #71
  12. Gary Robbins Member
    Gary Robbins
    @GaryRobbins

    danok1 (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    I won’t pretend to know what course we should take.

    However, those making the case that we need our troops in Syria supporting the Kurds, etc., need to make clear:

    1. Our objective, i.e., what would “victory” look like (I note that there can be more than one objective).

    2. How much treasure and blood we should expend to achieve this objective. To put it crudely, how many American troops need to die for this objective.

    3. Debate items 1 & 2 in the Congress and pass a resolution (or whatever passes for a Declaration of War these days) authorizing military action in Syria.

    If they’re not willing to do this, then get our troops out of there.

    1. I doubt binary choice between winning and losing exist. But one goal is stop a new ISIS.
    2. What is a more stable, ISIS free mideast worth? Consider what the 9/11 attack led to.
    3. Honest debate in this congress????
    1. Well, that is an objective, and probably a decent one. But is that all we’d want to accomplish? And what is the endpoint? Are we to keep troops there for decades, as we’ve done in Europe and Asia?
    2. No one has established the cost of “a more stable, ISIS free mideast.” Assuming such a thing is possible (which has not been established), we still don’t know if “the game is worth the candle.”
    3. That’s their job; they should do it.

    ETA: One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, but should probably be taken into account, is that as far as I know, the U.S. has a military alliance, with an honest-to-God treaty that was ratified by the Senate, with only one country in this whole mess. That country happens to be…Turkey.

    Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?

    • #72
  13. Gary Robbins Member
    Gary Robbins
    @GaryRobbins

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    I won’t pretend to know what course we should take.

    However, those making the case that we need our troops in Syria supporting the Kurds, etc., need to make clear:

    1. Our objective, i.e., what would “victory” look like (I note that there can be more than one objective).

    2. How much treasure and blood we should expend to achieve this objective. To put it crudely, how many American troops need to die for this objective.

    3. Debate items 1 & 2 in the Congress and pass a resolution (or whatever passes for a Declaration of War these days) authorizing military action in Syria.

    If they’re not willing to do this, then get our troops out of there.

    1. I doubt binary choice between winning and losing exist. But one goal is stop a new ISIS.
    2. What is a more stable, ISIS free mideast worth? Consider what the 9/11 attack led to.
    3. Honest debate in this congress????

    Our troops supporting the Kurds against the Turks has no visible endpoint.

    Leaving our allies to get slaughtered does have a visible endpoint, but it’s not one we really want to reach. In that part of the world the best we seem to be able to hope for is an ending that stinks slightly less than some other alternative. I don’t know how you even win over there. And here I was promised that Jared has this under control.

    What ally are we leaving?

    If you don’t know the answer to that then why are you commenting? Seriously, it’s in the first graph of pretty much every news story regarding this issue.

    I want you to say it.

    The people we trained and funded to fight ISIS for us so that we could keep our hands clean. Those allies. The ones who did our dirty work while we abdicated responsibility and let the region become one giant proxy war with Iran and Russia. Those allies.

    Do we have any other reasons to keep or forces there or is that it?

    Preventing the rise of ISIS and an all-out war between Russia and a NATO ally isn’t enough? Because that seems like a good enough reason to keep 150 advisors in the region. That’s a relatively low cost way of keeping things from getting even worse.

    Trump’s removal of these troops is why Jim Mattis resigned in protest.

    • #73
  14. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    Gary Robbins (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    I won’t pretend to know what course we should take.

    However, those making the case that we need our troops in Syria supporting the Kurds, etc., need to make clear:

    1. Our objective, i.e., what would “victory” look like (I note that there can be more than one objective).

    2. How much treasure and blood we should expend to achieve this objective. To put it crudely, how many American troops need to die for this objective.

    3. Debate items 1 & 2 in the Congress and pass a resolution (or whatever passes for a Declaration of War these days) authorizing military action in Syria.

    If they’re not willing to do this, then get our troops out of there.

    1. I doubt binary choice between winning and losing exist. But one goal is stop a new ISIS.
    2. What is a more stable, ISIS free mideast worth? Consider what the 9/11 attack led to.
    3. Honest debate in this congress????
    1. Well, that is an objective, and probably a decent one. But is that all we’d want to accomplish? And what is the endpoint? Are we to keep troops there for decades, as we’ve done in Europe and Asia?
    2. No one has established the cost of “a more stable, ISIS free mideast.” Assuming such a thing is possible (which has not been established), we still don’t know if “the game is worth the candle.”
    3. That’s their job; they should do it.

    ETA: One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, but should probably be taken into account, is that as far as I know, the U.S. has a military alliance, with an honest-to-God treaty that was ratified by the Senate, with only one country in this whole mess. That country happens to be…Turkey.

    Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?

    Nonsense. Non-responsive nonsense.

    • #74
  15. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):
    changed our objective to creating another Western-style nation in Iraq.

    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.

    Can I like this a million times?

    • #75
  16. Skyler Coolidge
    Skyler
    @Skyler

    Gary Robbins (View Comment):

    Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?

    That’s sophomoric.  Trump loses money and goes bankrupt all the time.  Why would that be affecting him now?

    • #76
  17. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Listen to the fourth hour of Red Eye Radio and Michael Rubin on Examining Politics. This is an enormous mistake. 

    • #77
  18. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    DonG (View Comment):

    Joe Biden was right. We should have divided up Iraq in to 3 chunks (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) the day Saddam died. It would have prevented ISIS and the mess in Syria. Turkey would have been pissed, but they’d be over it by now. Any efforts we make in this area should work towards a remaking of the British map that puts borders between different peoples rather than the mis-groupings made a century ago.

    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. 

    • #78
  19. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Barry Jones (View Comment):

    From what I have read, the Syrian Kurds are rather hard line communists and cuddle up to the Russians given the opportunity. As for “abandoning the Kurds” we still have a rather large and active embassy in Iraqi Kurdistan (the Kurds that aren’t communists and don’t suck up to the Russians). Could be wrong but food for thought.

    This is pretty much accurate. Listen to the Michael Rubin interview on the Examining Politics Podcast.

    Trumps lack of experience is killing him.

    • #79
  20. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):
    Preventing the rise of ISIS and an all-out war between Russia and a NATO ally isn’t enough?

    That’s two reasons that sound reasonable for someone to be there but it sounds as if it should be NATO.

    It’s not NATO’s job. Look, the downside of being one of the few adults in the room is that we are expected to knock this s**t off when it comes up. Nobody else is reliable. The UN? Please. They’ll send in some rice and penicillin after the refugees have already fled. It falls to us because we’re the only ones who have the stones to step up. Or at least we did. Obama wasn’t keen on having any balls. This mess is on him more than Trump.

    This is what they were saying on red eye radio.

    • #80
  21. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    Clifford A. Brown (View Comment):
    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.

    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.

     

    • #81
  22. Suspira Member
    Suspira
    @Suspira

    DonG (View Comment):
    Turkey would have been pissed, but they’d be over it by now.

    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.

    • #82
  23. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    It’s time for GOP Congressmen to get on the impeachment bandwagon.  Trump needs to go.  Now.

    • #83
  24. ToryWarWriter Coolidge
    ToryWarWriter
    @ToryWarWriter

    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…

    • #84
  25. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    ToryWarWriter (View Comment):

    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.

    • #85
  26. danok1 Member
    danok1
    @danok1

    Gary Robbins (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    I won’t pretend to know what course we should take.

    However, those making the case that we need our troops in Syria supporting the Kurds, etc., need to make clear:

    1. Our objective, i.e., what would “victory” look like (I note that there can be more than one objective).

    2. How much treasure and blood we should expend to achieve this objective. To put it crudely, how many American troops need to die for this objective.

    3. Debate items 1 & 2 in the Congress and pass a resolution (or whatever passes for a Declaration of War these days) authorizing military action in Syria.

    If they’re not willing to do this, then get our troops out of there.

    1. I doubt binary choice between winning and losing exist. But one goal is stop a new ISIS.
    2. What is a more stable, ISIS free mideast worth? Consider what the 9/11 attack led to.
    3. Honest debate in this congress????
    1. Well, that is an objective, and probably a decent one. But is that all we’d want to accomplish? And what is the endpoint? Are we to keep troops there for decades, as we’ve done in Europe and Asia?
    2. No one has established the cost of “a more stable, ISIS free mideast.” Assuming such a thing is possible (which has not been established), we still don’t know if “the game is worth the candle.”
    3. That’s their job; they should do it.

    ETA: One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, but should probably be taken into account, is that as far as I know, the U.S. has a military alliance, with an honest-to-God treaty that was ratified by the Senate, with only one country in this whole mess. That country happens to be…Turkey.

    Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?

    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.

    • #86
  27. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    danok1 (View Comment):

    Gary Robbins (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    GFHandle (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    I won’t pretend to know what course we should take.

    However, those making the case that we need our troops in Syria supporting the Kurds, etc., need to make clear:

    1. Our objective, i.e., what would “victory” look like (I note that there can be more than one objective).

    2. How much treasure and blood we should expend to achieve this objective. To put it crudely, how many American troops need to die for this objective.

    3. Debate items 1 & 2 in the Congress and pass a resolution (or whatever passes for a Declaration of War these days) authorizing military action in Syria.

    If they’re not willing to do this, then get our troops out of there.

    1. I doubt binary choice between winning and losing exist. But one goal is stop a new ISIS.
    2. What is a more stable, ISIS free mideast worth? Consider what the 9/11 attack led to.
    3. Honest debate in this congress????
    1. Well, that is an objective, and probably a decent one. But is that all we’d want to accomplish? And what is the endpoint? Are we to keep troops there for decades, as we’ve done in Europe and Asia?
    2. No one has established the cost of “a more stable, ISIS free mideast.” Assuming such a thing is possible (which has not been established), we still don’t know if “the game is worth the candle.”
    3. That’s their job; they should do it.

    ETA: One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, but should probably be taken into account, is that as far as I know, the U.S. has a military alliance, with an honest-to-God treaty that was ratified by the Senate, with only one country in this whole mess. That country happens to be…Turkey.

    Isn’t it interesting how Trump likes authoritarians who rule where he has hotels, such as Turkey?

    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. 

    • #87
  28. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    danok1 (View Comment):

    @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.

     

    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?

    • #88
  29. Reformed_Yuppie Inactive
    Reformed_Yuppie
    @Reformed_Yuppie

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    @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.

     

    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. 

    • #89
  30. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Reformed_Yuppie (View Comment):

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    danok1 (View Comment):

    @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.

     

    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?

    • #90
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