You are putting words in my mouth.
I have had no problems helping the Kurds, but the time is past to get out.
The stuff you accuse me of is what you do, too. And you still haven’t justified your need for our continued involvement there. You think it comes down to simply “They are an ally we have fought and died with.” So, to you, that appears to mean we need to keep troops there and continue to fund and protect them.
I don’t think you have to pay off your friends. I think you teach a friend to fish rather than give them the fish. With the Kurds, we have more than done both. You think it’s no where near enough.
“I have had no problems helping the Kurds, but the time is past to get out.”
Some agree, some do not. I accept that you think it is time. I do not.
“The stuff you accuse me of is what you do, too. And you still haven’t justified your need for our continued involvement there. “
It is still too unstable, and Turkey’s incursion is going to make it more so, not less. It will weaken the Kurds and strengthen the ISIS types in Syria that we have defeated, with the Kurds, so often. Kurdish and American lives will have been spent to create an ISIS free area in northern Syria, just to throw it away to please Erdogan.
We did not really scale down in western Europe until the fall of the Soviet Union. Leaving western Europe sooner could have made the Soviets stronger and taken more years for them to fall apart. Our continued physical presence in Europe made them spend themselves into the ground.
“I don’t think you have to pay off your friends.”
I don’t tbink it is paying off a friend. I think it is being a friend, and ally, and continuing to be a friend, not a fair weather friend or mere friend of convenience. That we have more resources is not suppose to make us less of a friend, just because they are not our equal. You, wrongly, call that paying off a friend.