The Kurds, Turkey, and Attack of the Swamp Jonathan Moseley
https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-kurds-turkey-and-attack-of-the-swamp
So it’s getting absurd again. The Kurds were fighting Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran long before President Donald Trump was even born. And The Donald has been on the public scene for a while. But he was not yet born when this war was raging.
Yet, in typical dishonesty, the liberal news media and the Democrat/Republican establishment is (as always) blaming President Trump for problems that the establishment actually created themselves or they failed to solve decades before Trump announced his candidacy.
President Trump pulled around 28 special forces troops out from near the Syrian border with Turkey. Trump did not explain any of this. Public relations matters. Trump’s roll out of his decision was a blunder. Trump has still not explained fully. But for critics to argue that moving 28 soldiers caused a war is just delusional.
The Kurds earned a place in our hearts when these brave but lightly-armed warriors, without a professional standing army, fought the ISIS Caliphate. The Kurds did the job that Barack Obama just wouldn’t do. While the Obama Administration pretended to fight ISIS, and actually strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood, the Kurds (also Muslims in most cases) fought the radical Islamic Jihadis for real. Americans love the underdog.
So America’s political world is stirred by the cry that the Kurds were our allies in the war against ISIS. That’s confusion. Turkey is also our ally…. and by binding treaty.
Around Syria and Iraq everyone was fighting everyone. Advocates for moral outrage wanted to over-throw the evil Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But the Obama Administration repeatedly supported Muslim Brotherhood extremists to overthrow secular and moderate Middle Eastern leaders. Others would stop breathing because Russians breathe air, and we wouldn’t want to do anything that Russians do. Some would cut off their noses if Russia told them not to. The free-for-all was nowhere near as simple as suggested now.
There were 81 countries allied with the United States against ISIS (called “Daesh”). The Global Coalition Against Daesh was not just the Kurds. Should we go to war on behalf of all of the 81 allies who fought ISIS? Why only the Kurds?
Turkey became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952. The United States is legally obligated by treaty to fight on the side of Turkey. Thinking people may have serious doubts about the wisdom of having a Muslim Brotherhood hot bed in NATO. But it is a reality. There is no U.S. treaty with the Kurds.
I’m not saying the Middle East was ever a sea of tranquility and stability. But when the Western Allies fought the first truly global war in World War I, the combatants included the massive Turkish or Ottoman Empire.
Kurdistan was an informal region of the Ottoman Empire. That territory was lived in by the Kurds for over 1,000 years, long before the Ottoman regime. But the Kurds never had an actual country or even any province of the Ottoman Empire.
Not only did the Allies win the first world war, but the conflagration precipitated the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk government led by Enver Pasha had collapsed in the days leading up to the armistice with the Ottoman Empire on October 31, 1918. A series of governments amid chaos were propped up by the Allies. The Allies invaded and seized Constantinople and other cities. The Greeks invaded.
Eventually, Turkish nationalists convened a Grand National Assembly in Ankara and elected Mustafa Kemal as its first president. This set up a clash with the interim Ottoman government that the Western Allies supported. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 began the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire.
The Allies, primarily the United Kingdom and France, promised the Kurds a homeland—which the Kurds had never had. But then the UK carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire with random, arbitrary borders. The UK’s borders for these new countries have sparked even more wars in the Middle East ever since. The British borders made no sense.
So the UK and France created a mess almost 100 years ago, but that is Trump’s fault? How is this the USA’s problem? Can you remember an international problem that Europe has ever solved in the last 200 years? Europe has regressed because the United States never requires Europe to stand on its own two feet and take responsibility. It is always the USA’s problem.
Can we go to war for everyone in the world who wants their own country? The Kurds are fighting Turkey—and Iran, and Syria, and Iraq—to carve out territory for a new country, Kurdistan. Maybe we should like the Kurds. But they are at war with our NATO ally. They are trying to seize, control, and carve out from Turkey’s territory an independent country as a homeland for the 30 million Kurds. The territory the Kurds claim also spills over into parts of Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
So Donald Trump finally provided the Kurds with lethal military weapons. But the Kurds were fighting to rip away parts of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq away to form their own country. They were not doing the USA a favor.
Maybe the Kurds should have their own country. They would probably be better friends to the USA than the alternatives. But the Kurds were in a war of territorial conquest. A motto of the Kurds is that they have “no friends but the mountains.” But perhaps that is because they have been attacking their neighbors for almost 1,000 years.
Whatever is this weeks’ leftist attack on the current conservative target ask yourself: “Wasn’t that already a problem long before (fill the name in here) became a threat to the swamp?” Blaming reformers for the sins of others that they are working hard to fix is a favorite dishonest tactic of the establishment.
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