Why an understanding of history is important.

They (the Kurds) didn't help us in the Second World War; they didn't help us with Normandy.

Donald Trump on the Kurds.

Of course they didn't. 

In 1944-45 the Kurds were where they are now, which means that they were unwilling citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey.  Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey also didn't help us in the Second World War.

Indeed, the Turks were courted by the Germans throughout much of the war but wisely stayed out, having learned their lesson by siding with the Germans during World War One.  Turkey was a neutral power, lead by the aggressively secular military man Ataturk,. 

Syria was a French possession going into World War Two, a League of Nations mandate from World War One.  It became independent in 1946 basically as the British forced a weakened France to depart.  Iraq became independent in 1932 but following a pro fascist coup at the start of World War Two, the British defeated it in a short war in 1941.  Iran was a neutral during the war, but a neutral that leaned heavily towards the Allies and which allowed transportation of supplies from the Western allies to the Soviet Union across its territory.

So what does one make of all of this?

Well not much. 

World War Two was the single most significant event of the modern era, but it's now 75 some years ago.  All of the nations that were our allies, or perhaps more accurately that we became allied to, are still our allies. But the two major nations we fought in World War Two, Germany and Japan, are also our allies.  One of the nations that was a major ally of ours during World War Two, the Soviet Union, would be our major opponent for decades thereafter.  Russia, its predecessor and successor, can hardly be called our friend.

And bizarrely, perhaps World War One now has more to do with what's gong on in that region than World War Two, at least in some ways.  World War Two, followed by the Cold War, put the issues that the Great War's peace shoved into prominence back on the back burner.  The major wars were too big and the ideologies too deep for the rights of small peoples to take the place that seemed so prominent in 1918.

Now those issues are back.

Yes, the Kurds didn't fight at Normandy.  How could they?  But the Western Allies didn't save the Armenians from the Ottomans.  How could they?  The Allies didn't save the Turks from the Greeks nor did they save the Greeks from the Turks.  They probably could have done something about that.

In 1918 the European powers that carved up the Ottoman Empire, as well they should have, imagined a much smaller Turkey.  That Turkey would have suffered injustices. Greek claims to the interior of Turkey were unjust.  Italian claims to some of Turkey were absurd.  But the imagined Kurdish and Armenian states that some saw were not. And Armenia did manage to emerge. Kurdistan did not. We didn't do anything about that.

Maybe we couldn't have. But we could have kept this from breaking out.