I have one national interest item for staying in Syria.
The Kurds.
It's in our national interest to support our allies.
However, it's against our national interest to start a war with... Jeebus there's a long list of nations who don't want the Kurds to exist at all, let alone have their own nation.
A nation that they kind of used to have.
There were no nations in that area when it was a region called Kurdistan.
The Ottomans introduced the nation-state to them.
Then the French and English started drawing lines on the map willy-nilly after World War One.
Kurdistan became part of Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. None of whom want to lose the territory to form (reform) a nation of people who're none-too-happy about being second class citizens this past century.
I don't think it's in our national interest to help them recreate a land-locked nation surrounded by enemies, except as we share some enemies. But some of their enemies are our allies.
My support of the Kurdish peoples is tempered by the suspicion that they'd turn on us in an instant.
While we might be confused about what our national interests are at times, people from this region rarely are. The moment there was a conflict between our interests and theirs, BANG!
The peoples of the region are bad at loss-leader.
I could be wrong, but we'd have to fight a war against Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey to secure the geography and that would certainly bring in others against us; like Russia.
On the plus side, if we start killing Turks we will have the wholehearted support of Greece.
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One of the big Kurd movements, the PKK, is about as Marxist-Leninist/Socialist as, well, a Marxist-Leninist can be.
ReplyDeleteSo, well, the enemy of my enemy is just that, the enemy of my enemy. We tried to play that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" bullscat with the USSR during WWII and all it did us is leave us with huge debt and a larger, more powerful enemy. We shoulda let the USSR and the Nazis pound the stuffing out of each other totally unsupported by us, but, well, FDR never met a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-communist-socialist he didn't like.
We had a chance at Kurdistan after GHWB initiated the GWOT, but the Dems and then Okobungo frucked everything up. Coulda done it. Shoulda done it. And another failure to lay on the DNC and the powers behind the DNC.
Yikes! I'm starting to sound all conspiracy theory. Next thing you know, I'll stop believing that one can shoot three shots really quickly with a nice mid-powered bolt-action rifle...