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:
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.
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.
