The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

World War Two, for obvious reasons, looms large in our imagination as the biggest event of the 20th Century.  The biggest, and the most significant.

But are we wrong?  

It seems lately that the echos of World War One are resounding pretty loudly.

World War One smashed the old order and demolished the borders of centuries.  The interbellum tried to reconstruct them, but did so in a metastasized and imperfect form, giving rise to new malignant orders that sought to fill the voids left by the death of the old imperial ones.  World War Two pitted three forces against each other, fascism, communism, and democracy, with democracy and communism ultimately siding with each other against fascism. After the war, the results of the Second World War gave rise to a contest between the two victors, communism and democracy, against each other until the vitality of free societies and free markets drove the rigidness of communism to and beyond the breaking point.

And now that communism is dead and gone, buried alongside its evil cousin fascism, the old unsolved questions of the Great War are back.  The rights of small nations, including those with out countries, against the possessions of older larger ones.  The demise of great empires giving rise to smaller ones.  Nationalism of all stripes against everything else.

It's 1919 all over again.

Turkey didn't sign the Treaty of Sevres.

Indeed, rather than do that, it fought it out.

It can't be blamed.  The Greeks had a quasi legitimate claim to Smyrna, but only quasi. A lot of ethnic Greeks lived there, which is no surprise as Anatolia had been Greek. The Ottoman's were invaders to the region, finally taking it in the 1450s.  But it had a large Ottoman population that they were bloodily brutal towards and they engaged in conquest, with the help of their Western allies, in Anatolia proper, seeking in a way to reverse what was lost centuries prior.

The Italian claim, moreover, to islands off of Turkey was absurd.

But the Armenian claims to their lands weren't.

The region sought of Armenia marked for a plebiscite is Kurdistan.  The Syria that ran to the sea and down to Palestine was an Ottoman province carved away from the Empire.  So was the Mesopotamia, i.e., Iraq, that appears on the map.

In 1990, the United States intervened in the Middle East to force Iraq, the British post World War One creation, out of Kuwait, a desert province that the British had protected during their stay in the Middle East, launching operations, with the assistance of others, from that region of Arabia named for the Sauds, that Arabian family that spent the Great War and the immediate interbellum consolidating power at the ultimate expense of the Hashemites, that Arabian noble family who had made war on the Turks.  The British dolled out kingdoms to that family as consolation prizes, with the Hashemites taking Iraq and the Transjordan.  The French got to administer Syria, a region that it claimed an historical affinity to, with the British taking administration of Palestine and Egypt, both of the latter having been Ottoman provinces although Egypt was long administered by the British in an arrangement that nobody can possibly grasp.

And so now, the old fights, and the interbellum struggles, reappear.  The peoples not accorded nations would like to have them. The old empires would like to keep their domains.  Borders drawn by European nations, with the help of Woodrow Wilson, are treated as real, when perhaps they were never correct.

Blood on our hands

The fate of prisoners taken in war uniformly depends upon the views of the captors, combined with their capacity to act in compliance with their ideals.

It's never been an enviable fate to be a prisoner taken in war.  And by that, I don't just mean prisoners of war, those combatants taken in battle, but also those individuals who become captives because of war.

In the Old Testament the Law modified the custom of the pagans in providing that women who were taken as prizes in war were allowed to morn their dead  husbands and were to be treated fairly by those Jewish captors who took them as prizes.  This is often misunderstood to mean that the Old Testament sanctioned taking widows of combatant opponents as forced brides.  It did not.  It restrained an existing universal custom by putting some elements of kindness and humanity into it.

And so commenced a long tradition in the Jewish world, and then the Christian world, of trying to treat prisoners of wars humanely.

It's not a universal norm, and it hasn't been even among those peoples who Christianity has reached.

During the Revolution, at least at the start, the British kept American prisoners, who after all were rebels, in horrible condition contributing to their high death rate.  A way out was to switch sides and join the British, which more than a few did.

During the American Civil War both sides, for much of the war, paroled enemy prisoners, simply sending them home on the promise not to fight again.  Some did fight again, and eventually both sides stopped the practice.  In the prisoner of war camps on both sides the conditions were awful, with those in the resource starved South the most horrific.

During the Boer War the British found it expedient to depopulate the countryside and make prisoners of the Boer women and children. The British have generally been decent, post 18th Century, to captives in war but these concentration camps had appalling conditions and many of the prisoners died.

During the Great War the Allied nations treated the prisoners it took fairly well, as they did those that they interned during the war. The Germans less so, but still not like what was to come.

During World War Two a soldier surrendering to the Allied in Europe, who survived the tense first moments of that experience, were treated quite well.  The Germans were less kind, once again, to western Allied POWs in their hands, ultimately shooting quite a few in one spectacular instance of mass escape from Stalag Luft III.

In the east, it was different.  The Germans were brutal to Russian prisoners, assuming that they survived the experience in the first place.  The Soviets reciprocated as the war went on.  Civilians on either side ran great risks from the enemy in their midst.  Civilian foreign prisoners of the Germans faced dreadful uncertainties.

Of course, anywhere, prisoners falling into the hands of the SS risked death for that reason alone.

In the Pacific, the Japanese tried to avoid surrendering, and as the war went on the Allies didn't make much of an effort to take them prisoner.  Allied soldiers falling into Japanese hands were horrifically treated, and civilians weren't treated much better.

During the Korean War prisoners of the United Nations forces were fairly well treated.  UN POWs were not well treated by the Communists.  ARVN and US troops who fell into North Vietnamese hands were horrifically treated by the North Vietnamese.  Treatment of NVA and VC prisoners by the South Vietnamese was mixed.

The point?

All of this points out the difficult nature of this question to start with.

And now the Turkish army is set to overrun the areas of northern Syria held by the Kurds.

And he Kurds are holding a lot of ISIL prisoners, including a lot of women and children of ISIL combatants.

Under the Christian world view the west possesses, whether it is willing to admit the origin of that view or not, these people are people, and they should be allowed to live as humanely as possible. And while I suppose its possible that the Kurds have been acting in this manner is due to their own views, I sort of doubt it.  My guess is that prisoners of war of one Middle Eastern combatant who fall into the hands of another, or just prisoners in general, aren't treated really well.

I could be wrong, of course.

In any event, in very quick time, the Kurds will have to leave these prisoners.  I don't think they'll hang around to do a change of flag ceremony.

So, what will become of them?

Well, we're not going to take them.

The Kurds might simply kill them.  That's horrific, but its expedient, and the Kurds have plenty of enemies, don't need any left alive, and don't have a lot of time. 

Or they might let them go, in which case these still very radical ISIL adherents will see their situation as a just perseverance vindicating their views, and go on to be trouble for us, Syria, and Iraq. Trouble we don't need. 

President Trump has suggested that its a European problem as they were "headed to Europe". Maybe some would head to Europe, but trouble for Europe doesn't help us.  And disregarding a problem and suggesting its a European problem will come back to haunt us.

Or perhaps they Turks will overrun them. They don't want to deal with them either, however, and what happens next isn't clear.  They won't hold them for years.

Maybe they'd turn them over to the Iraqis, or the Syrians.  It'd certainly be better to be turned over to the Iraqis.  The fate of people turned over to the Syrians would be grim.

All of this, of course, is something we wouldn't have to face if we hadn't have gone into Syria in the first place. But we did. And we supported the Kurds whom we're now abandoning. By doing that, we encouraged the Kurds to hold the prisoners we did.

So we are responsible for whatever occurs.

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.

Turkey's grievances against the United States (according to the Wall Street Journal)

Turkey is about to invade northern Syria in order to take on the Kurds, our allies, there. (I started this before the in fact did do just that)  They have a green light in this from President Trump.

Most people who have looked at this have been horrified.  The Kurds have put up an admirable successful fight against long odds, aided in party by their long martial history obtained while trying to secure a state of their own.

A few pundits, however hold the opposite view and feel that Trump is correct. Very few, and most of them put their opinions in much different terms than Trump has.  But, giving them their due, what could be the basis for pulling out and handing over an ally to their enemies.  Well, no less of journal than the Wall Street journal has declare has declared that the Turks have a point in being upset with the Untied States.

But do any of them justify stepping aside and allowing Turkey to invade northern Syria in order to put down the Kurds.  Only one, and only if you agree with the logic of taking sides.

The Journal notes that the Turks cooperated with the U.S. effort in Syria in spite of having misgivings, but that the U.S. didn't rally to its defense when it shot down a Russian combat aircraft. That action, which occurred during the Obama Administration, is very shoddy treatment of an ally, but it doesn't justify an invasion of Kurdish Syria.  The Journal also notes that the United States has been harboring an odd religious figure who is in opposition to the Turkish government and whom some believe is associated with a recent coup attempt.  That also is plenty reason for the Turkish administration to distrust the US but it's also no reason to invade Kurdish Syria.

The real reason to take that position, and the only one that makes sense as an argument, it that the US, in order to combat ISIL in Syria, armed one of the Kurdish militias which we've formerly branded as a terrorist organization and which has caused lots of deaths in Turkey in the past.  That would be a shocking proposition for Turkey and hard for it to accept. And defeating that militia, which is aligned against it, is something that the Turks would wish for.

But here's the rub.

There's no justifying terrorism in any sense. But there's also no good justification for occupying the lands of another people. The Turks are occupying part of Kurdistan and some Kurds are reacting with violence, and have been for a long time.  Neither position is acceptable.

But quite often we excuse one or the other.  People will glorify Michael Collins, the Irish terrorist leader, and refuse to accept he was a terrorist who was seeking Irish Independence by illegitimate, if successful, means.  Irish desires for independence were legitimate and the British occupation became illegitimate. But one doesn't excuse the other in either direction.  Likewise some have glorified any other number of terrorist organizations along similar lines or those opposing them.

So Turkey has a legitimate beef about the U.S. again under President Obama, arming the Kurds. But then the Kurds have a legitimate beef with Turkey for occupying their territory when they are not wanted there, particularly in light of the fact that its a historical accident that Kurdistan is not a state while Syria is, even though both were Ottoman territories until 1918.  If Turkey has been our ally since more or less 1945 (it really wasn't in any sense before that), it still doesn't excuse this oddity any more than the United Kingdom being our ally meant that we should have opposed Irish independence.

And on the status of Turkey being an ally of the United States, it is, in a formal sense.  It's a member of NATO.  But it's an ally because it was an opponent of the Soviet Union, the dangerous Communist state that was once on its border.  Being a democratic state was not a requirement for being a member of NATO.  Turkey often was, but it sometimes wasn't, a status it ironically shared with Greece, which fought a war with Turkey, while both were members of NATO, over Cyprus.  It was a minor war, but a war none the less.

NATO membership is still important, to be sure, but the dynamics that lead Turkey into the western alliance have changed.  The United States was allied to more than one less than democratic nation during the Cold War.  Since the end of the Cold War the necessity for such alliances had diminished, and with it the necessity that an allied power meet certain standards should have risen.

The problems begin when those standards start to be applied here.  Turkey is our long time ally, as noted above, and is using some American armor in its invasion.  The Kurds are largely left wing socialist in orientation. But the Kurds are fighting for what we said we were for in 1917-18 and claim to have been for every since, the right to national self determination.  Turkey is a state that retains remnants of its Ottoman past principally in the form of having a large Kurdish territory within its borders.  

In the end, the Turkish fight with the Kurds is over that.  They'd like out, the Turks would like to keep them in, whether they like it or not.  They're not a small group that can be ignored like some other ethnicities that are too small to form a viable state.  And a Kurdish state right now would likely be among the most western and most secular in the region.  The fact that there isn't such a state is itself a remnant of 1918, when the European powers carved up the region based upon their own ideas, and apparently none of those ideas reflected an independent Kurdistan.

Anyway its looked at, if we'd stayed in, the Turks likely would have stayed out.  If that would have weakened our relationship to the current Turkish government, that frankly likely wouldn't have mattered much.  It likely also would not have lead to a Kurdish state. But it might have kept the bloodshed we see now from occurring.

"shortsighted and irresponsible."

So says Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump's stoutest defenders, about Trump's decision to betray the Kurds and leave them to the mercy of the Turks.

And it is an outrage.

To be clear, I opposed the United States intervening in Syria militarily.  This isn't because I think the Baathist regime there is nice. Rather, I was, I think realistic about the nature of the combatants there.

When the civil war broke out in Syria, the United States, both its population and its government, Americanized it in their minds.  To us, all revolutions against are by the good guys against the bad guys.  Indeed, it's summarized that way in the 1960s movie The Professionals, with the follow up line by Burt Lancaster's explosive expert characters adding; "the question is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."

Well, it's not that simple.

In Syria there was one main westernized force set for overall control of the nation, realistically, and then there were Islamist theocrats.  One or the other was going to be the one that prevailed.  Trouble was, the westernized force their was the government, and the western ideology it had adopted was fascism.  Fascism is a western creation, and the Baath Party are fascists.  Indeed, the Middle Easter fascist party, the Baath Party, is the most successful fascist party of them all by some measures as its been in power far longer in various places, principally Iraq (formerly) and Syria, than any other fascist party was anywhere else.

The prime opponents of the Syrian government were Islamic radicals who sought to impose a theocracy. Oh, sure, there were other forces, but they were disorganized and inept.

Really effectively intervening in that situation would have required creating a Syrian rebel force out of something while also wiping out the Islamic elements.  That would have required the commitment of thousands of troops, probably 20,000 or more.  And it would have required a long occupation.

We weren't going to do that and it was obvious from the first.

Instead, over time, when we realized what was going on there we supported efforts to quash ISIL and support regional rebel forces where possible. In the meantime, Russian backed Syrian forces with quite a bit of support from actual Russian troops of one kind or another (not officially Russian, but clearly supported by the Russians and made up of Russian military men) crushed the rebellion.  Overall, our small scale intervention was much more effective than I would have supposed, although the winner overall is the Syrian regime which is now closer to Russia than ever.

And then there are the Kurds.

The Kurds are claimed to be the largest ethnicity in the world with a distinct territory that lacks a state. Their territory is spread over Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. All of those nations have suppressed the Kurds. Right now, probably ironically, the Kurds are best off in Syira and Iraq.

That's about to end in Syria.

The Kurds deserve a country. They've long demonstrated that and they're fairly politically adept and cohesive.  By and large, politically, the Kurds would make most American politicians wince as they're on the Marxist end of the scale without being full blown Communists.  They're basically what we hoped the Castro lead Cuban revolutionaries would be and what we still like to pretend the Spanish leftist combatants, who were really Communist, in the Spanish Civil War were.  They've been fighting for political independence for decades.

Now they're running a quasi state in northern Syria where they successfully threw off the Syrian government and defeated ISIL.

Let me note that again, they defeated ISIL.

Central Intelligence Agency map of Kurdish regions.

And they're running their own state, uneasily and quasi officially, within the Iraqi state.

The number of American servicemen in norther Syria, supporting the Kurds, is quite small.  The exact numbers are likely unknown publicly, but President Trump claims its only fifty men.  Maybe, but at least as of a couple of years ago there were at least 4,000 Special Forces troops in Syria and additionally there was a small contingent of U.S. Marine artillerymen. Indeed, at one point American troops and unofficial Russian troops engaged each other with the Russian unit being utterly destroyed.  And this doesn't include the air contingent.

If its small, does it matter?

It certainly does. The map tells the reason why, as well as the history of the region.

American troops in the Kurdish region keep the Turks from going into that area.  The Turks would, and now will, as the Kurds are there.

Turkey is a patch quilt country created in part by ethnic cleansing.  The Turks invaded Anatolia during the 15th Century, completing their conquest of the Greek Byzantine Empire in 1453.  Coming out of Asia Minor, where many of the Turkish culture remain, the Ottoman Turks ruled from Constantinople until the Empire fell under the stress of the Great War.  At its height it threatened Europe before being contained by efforts in the 1500s which coincided with the Reformation and which constituted the one thing that fractured Christianity could agree upon.

The Ottoman Empire was just that, an empire, a conglomeration of peoples and nations which, in its case, were ruled by one nation, the Ottoman Turks.  The Empire was vast, stretching into Europe and over North Africa, but unable to spread into Asia Minor, ironically, where the Turks had their ethnic base.  Even on Anatolia the population was far from uniformly Turkish, but included substantial populations of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds.  World War One changed that.

During the war the Turks slaughtered gigantic numbers of Armenians in what may be legitimately be regarded as the first ethnic holocaust of the 20th Century.  Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the surrender of the Ottoman state to the Allies, the Greeks intervened in Anatolia and proved to have a grasp that exceeded their reach. In the areas of Anatolia that they occupied, atrocities occurred against the Turkish population, often the majority in these areas, that were both horrific and inexcusable, and which are now largely forgotten. This caused the Turks, who beat the Greeks in the Greco Turkish War, to do the same to the Greeks in the areas that they came back into control of, as they did so, and in the peace the Greeks were basically expelled.

The Kurds and the Armenians remain, and the Kurds have been fighting for their own country ever since.  The Turks want no part of that for the reason that the map makes plain.  If the Kurds secure their own country, Turkey will be considerably smaller.

Well, so be it, and the same for Iran, Syrian and Iraq.  Putting aside all old rights and wrongs, the Kurdish part of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran is Kurdish. A Kurdish state should be there.

But we're pulling out, and the Turks are coming in.

And by coming, let's be clear. They intend to invade northern Syria to deal with our allies the Kurds.

That is what Graham had to say:

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

 · 6h

Replying to @LindseyGrahamSC

The most probable outcome of this impulsive decision is to ensure Iran’s domination of Syria.

The U.S. now has no leverage and Syria will eventually become a nightmare for Israel.

Lindsey Graham

✔@LindseyGrahamSC

I feel very bad for the Americans and allies who have sacrificed to destroy the ISIS Caliphate because this decision virtually reassures the reemergence of ISIS. So sad. So dangerous.

President Trump may be tired of fighting radical Islam. They are NOT tired of fighting us.

1,284

7:49 AM - Oct 7, 2019

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Exactly right.

The Kurds have been our allies and now we're betraying them.

Flat out betraying them.  We're literally stepping aside so that an enemy of theirs, Turkey, can put them down.

And in doing so, we're doing that by way of what appears to have come about in a telephone call between President Trump and President Endrogan.

In fairness to Trump, he signaled a desire to pull out of Syria earlier, and was backed down by opposition within the GOP and his own administration.  He apparently returned to his earlier views in his phone call with the Turkish president.

And that president, Endrogan, is an Islamist himself, the first one to really rule Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans (and they weren't terribly Islamist in their final years, even though the Turkish Emperor claimed the title of Caliph).  Those following Turkey have been nervous ever since Endrogan came to power as he's sidelined his opponents and seems from time to time set to take Turkey in a non democratic, Islamist, directly, and away from the strongly secular government it had featured (not always democratic by any means) since 1919.

That's not a direction the Kurds would go in.

And beyond that, while I didn't think we should go into Syria, once you do, you have an obligation to the people who you are allied to, and who are allied to you.  Graham, who has been a strong supporter of Trump, is exactly correct.  We're abandoning our allies.

We have a history of doing that. We set the South Vietnamese up for betrayal with horrific results.  Our messing around in Cambodia lead to a Cambodian disaster in a country we never intended to become directly involved in.

Now we're doing that in Syria.

That's disturbing in and of itself, but the President's reply is disturbing as well.

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...

8:38 AM - 7 Oct 2019

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15,382 replies7,567 retweets21,692 likes

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1. 1. Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 37m37 minutes ago
      

      ....the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!

First of all, let's deal with the blistering absurdity of the proposition we'll punish the Turks if their invasion gets out of hand.

What the crud would that mean? An armed invasion is out of hand in the first place.  When you send in an army it's not the same thing as a local church coming to your door and asking you to convert or something.

Secondly, we haven't ever "obliterated" the economy of Turkey.  If that's a reference to Iran, well we've badly damaged the Iranian economy, but the regime there is still keeping on keeping on and probably diligently working on acquiring an atomic bomb. The economy of North Korea is a rampaging mess and has been for a long time, but it's Stalinist court is still in power and they have the bomb.

And using the phrase "great and unmatched wisdom" is amazingly inept for a man who must know that there are those who seriously question his mental stability.  That this came about by way of a phone call, where the individual in question is already in trouble due to a phone call, is stunning.

Of course this may mean nothing more than Trump has returned to his isolationist view of the world, one in which the consequences do not so much matter as long as U.S. troops are involved.

If that's so, or in any event, this decision is flat out wrong.

September 23, 1919. Trips and foreign lands.

President Wilson, travelling on the Union Pacific was planning stops for Wyoming towns along the way, and the press was reporting on them a day ahead of his scheduled arrival.

Wilson, as we've noted here already, was making a hectic tour across the United States in support of the Versailles Treaty.  On this day, he delivered speeches in Ogden and Salt Lake City Utah, before traveling on to Wyoming. The Laramie Boomerang noted it, with that "1:50" time being 1:50 a.m., very early in the morning.  In other words, after leaving Utah, he was traveling through Wyoming in the evening and nighttime hours.

One of the Cheyenne papers noted that children wouldn't be allowed at the event.

We haven't checked in on the world scene here for awhile, and we'd note that while President Wilson was touring in support of a treaty that he was confident would end wars, wars were raging, including a war in Turkey. The Red Cross was still active there.

"On the road - Sept. 23, 1919 - near Kurds' camp after being fired upon--Col. beeuwkes attending the sick".  LoC title.

And while the President was away, Congress remained in session.

Arizona Senator  Henry F. Ashurst.  I don't know much about Ashurst but I've linked this both for the reason that the photo was taken on this day in 1919, and for the dress he is affecting.  It's common to depict Western Senators dressed in a Western fashion, and Ashurst here has affected a fairly typical and even modern style of cowboy hat to go with his Edwardian suit.  Note the extremely high waistline however, and the stiff collar.

While Woodrow Wilson was traveling, Walt Wallet was cleaning up due to the recent Gasoline Alley gang camping trip.

If you were thinking, hey, I think I recognize that. . . "Lex Anteinternet: The M26 and its children"

while you were watching or reading the news, perhaps its because you had previously read Lex Anteinternet: The M26 and its children:  

And you recalled this part of that:

The M60 "Patton".

 

M60s at Ft. Carson, 1986

Maybe.

Anyhow, the news articles on this story show how widespared the old M60 really is.  Even the Reuters article about Germany cancelling updates on Turkish Leopard IIs due to their user by Turkey in Syria featured a photo of an M60 in Syria.

Oh great. A new war in Iraq?

The news reports today the following:

Iraqi government forces have captured key installations outside the disputed city of Kirkuk from Kurdish fighters.

A military statement said units had taken control of the K1 military base, the Baba Gurgur oil and gas field, and a state-owned oil company's offices.

Baghdad said the Peshmerga had withdrawn "without fighting", but clashes were reported south of Kirkuk.

The operation was launched a month after the Kurdistan Region held a controversial independence referendum.

The Kurds are the most politically competent group in the region and also the largest stateless people on earth. They're light infantry, in terms of military force, however.

And they also ran a decades long guerilla war against the Turks.

This would not appear to bode well.

Boots on the ground. . . doesn't that include artillerymen?

Because it sure should.

Somehow, it's gone almost unnoticed that Marine Corps artillery units are serving in Syria.  Consider this item from the Military Times from just a couple of days ago:

U.S. Marines are conducting around-the-clock artillery support for American Kurdish partners battling ISIS in its de facto capital of Raqqa. That support has become vital as Kurdish forces have hit fierce resistance as they inch closer to the city center, according to on the ground fighters.

If American infantry was on the ground (other than the special forces, which you can bet are on the ground, and probably providing the artillery spotting for the Marine Red Legs), you can bet you'd have heard about.

But artillerymen?  Apparently we just don't count.

Elsewhere on May 11, 1917. . . .

Kurdish girls, carrying water.