Saladin, the Kurd who conquered the Middle East (and who spent more time fighting fellow Muslims than he did Christians, although he certainly fought Christians too). He lived in the last era in which things were on the downside for the Kurds, 800 years ago.
Hmmm . . . all for humanitarian reasons you see.
The endless spins that the current situation in Northern Syria creates are mind boggling. We armed a Syrian rebel group composed of Kurdish militias to take on the Syrian government under the quixotic belief that disparate light infantry bands could take on a modern armored army back by the Russians without direct U.S. involvement. That was naive in the extreme, and no less of military expert (and I mean that sincerely) as John McCain lobbied for it.
We should have know that was absurd from the onset.
Toppling the Syrian Baathist regime was always going to require direct western military involvement to be followed by at least a decade, if not more, of western occupation of the country.
No matter, we ended up committing some troops and, beyond that, we gave moral and material support to the one entity in the war that wasn't either comprised of Islamic extremist or incompetents, the Kurds.
The Kurds can't be blamed for rising up in rebellion on their own ground. They now have a quasi state in Iraq and they've been where they are on the ground in Syria for eons. They'd have their own country now if Woodrow Wilson's alterations of the map of Turkey that ended up in the Treaty of Sevres had come into full fruition. That would have required more American involvement in diplomacy in 1919-20, more military backbone for an already tired France and Britain at the same time (heck, they were both already bogged down in Russia and the British were fighting a war in part of its own "united" kingdom, who can blame them for not getting tied down in Turkey), less greed and blood lust on the part of Greece, and less bizarre territory avarice on the part of Italy.
That would have been asking for a lot.
So, the Ottoman's fell and the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire as they saw fit, splitting the Ottoman Kurdistan into three separate state administered by three different sovereigns, to which we might add that a World War One neutral, Persia, already was another entity they had to deal with.
And so now, one of our NATO allies is invading a region occupied by one of our Syrian rebellion allies, which we armed, with the invading army using military equipment designed by us and our ally, Germany (most Turkish weapons, but not all, are produced in Turkey) because our President decided to stand aside after we'd already made all the inconsistent commitments. Added to this, this means that Turkey is now effectively the military ally of the Syrian government which will come in and occupy northern Syria as soon as the Turks have subdued the Kurds.
What can be done about this now?
Well, maybe not much.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trumps most solid supporters, is outwardly outraged and has sponsored a bill to sanction Turkey. It'll pass. Wyoming's Congressman Liz Cheney, who has been more independent regarding Trump than we might suppose, is also supporting it.
But what will sanctions do now? It won't force Turkey out of Syria and it won't stop their invasion. Shoot, by the time any sanctions come into effect, the Turks will be out and the Syrians back in.
Just how successful have our sanctions in the region been anyway? Iran hasn't collapsed. Syria's government is going to win its civil war.
No, what the sanctions will likely do is to drive Turkey into the arms of the arch conspirator Vladimir Putin. And we don't need that. It'll be a marriage of convenience, but Putin will be just fine with that.
A better proposal, now that we have blood on our hands and have allowed this mess to occur, would be to require the Turks to remain where they are supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force. That would be a direct UN intervention in the Syrian civil war and it might be hard to bring about. Absent that, as Turkey remains a NATO ally, the next best proposal would be for a joint NATO force to occupy the region until a real peace settlement can be reached. Failing that, we should see about occupying it in place of the Turks, which the Turks probably wouldn't be too keen on now. And failing all of that, the Turks should just stay there in a supervised fashion until Syria joins the 21st Century with it being made clear that should they screw up, they'll have no friends in the west at all.
But none of this will occur.
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