VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish Ironies

NationalReview ^ | October 16, 2019 | By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

[Jim Robinson]

Outrage met Donald Trump’s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan’s expeditionary forces.

Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding and abetting Kurdish terrorist separatists inside Turkey. But what they say they can so easily do and what they really can do inside Syria are, of course, two different things.

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Otherwise, our presence in the firing line could raise the specter that we’d either refuse our Article V (collective defense) commitments to Turkey that Erdogan might cynically invoke in a larger war in Syria, or we’d find ourselves actually killing Turks to save Kurds. Either of these scenarios is theoretically quite possible, and both would be far more injurious to the spirit and cohesion of the presently composed NATO alliance than asking Germany and its followers to pony up the contributions that they had long promised.

As I understand the present outrage, the logic goes like this: It is a sellout to leave the Kurds vulnerable to the Turks, and it undermines our noble promises and our credibility in a way that ignoring our ignoble, legal commitments to Turkey do not. That may be a legitimate assumption that we all would like to embrace, but it is not yet the policy of the United States.

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Any current critics calling for the use of American trip-wire soldiers to protect Kurds from the Turkish military — in the current stated mission to defeat ISIS and keep it defeated — should at least make the case that de facto fighting against Turkey means that it is therefore no longer a friend and should no longer be a NATO ally, and thus, in extremis, can be opposed militarily...

[Homer_J_Simpson]

bttt

[etcb]

It seems you are more accurate than I am on this subject of size. (Each B61 is 11.8 feet long, 13 inches wide and weighs approximately 700 pounds.). Not too big to move but too big to conceal. They only have to detect one being moved without clearance. Another one of those Cold War good ideas that doesn’t look so good in light of changed circumstances.

[volunbeer]

The Kurds are no different than the west and you correctly point out the putrid stench of the PKK. They are not any more of a monolithic entity than we and are quite divided among tribes and different regions/ideologies.

The American “left” saw the opportunity to try and damage Trump again. The GOPe represented their important constituency with a typical knee-jerk reaction - military contractors and the military industrial complex.

Trump is 100% correct in this action, which is NOT an abandonment of the Kurds. He correctly sees that diplomatic and economic action is much more effective than a few dozen troops placed in harms way to act as some trigger against a NATO ally.

As usual, his enemies don’t care and his “allies” (like Graham and the usual cast) fail to see the bigger picture. However, we must keep in mind that the money quotes from his “allies” are being processed by the enemedia who are making it appear far more critical than it is. Graham backed off pretty hard on Sunday Morning Futures this morning - much different than what has been reported.

[Eagles6]

Yep.