Syria & the Kurds. Did President Trump make the right decision?

Let’s start with a little review.
Who are the Kurds?
Kurdish nationalism emerged after World War I with the fall of the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey). Kurdish fighters joined with British and other Arab forces to defeat the Turks. (Lawrence of Arabia).
Western powers (particularly the United Kingdom) fighting the Turks also promised the Kurds they would guarantee Kurdish freedom after the war, a promise they subsequently broke. Just like they did with the Arabs over Palestine after WWI.
During the relatively open Turkish government of the 1950s, Kurds gained political office and started working within the framework of the Turkish Republic to further their interests but this move towards integration was halted by the Turks.
The Kurds eventually formed a militant separatist group of fighters who identified themselves as “local self-defense” units.
They are generally considered an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party _ known as the PKK, its Kurdish initials _ a group that’s been fighting for Kurdish independence in Turkey for three decades and that the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization.
This is the group we have been arming and supporting in Northern Syria.
After World War I
After WWI the Kurdish groups still sought independence and Kemal Atatürk, president of Turkey, prevented such a result.
Kurds backed by the United Kingdom declared independence in 1927 and established the so-called Republic of Ararat in Eastern Turkey.
Turkey put down Kurdist revolts in 1925, 1930, and 1937–1938, while Iran did the same in the 1920s.
From 1922–1924 in Iraq a Kingdom of Kurdistan existed. When Iraqi administrators stopped Kurdish nationalist ambitions in Iraq, war broke out in the 1960s.
In 1970 the Kurds rejected limited territorial self-rule within Iraq, demanding larger areas including the oil-rich Kirkuk region.
About half of all Kurds live in Turkey. According to the CIA they account for 18 percent of the Turkish population.
They are predominantly distributed in the southeastern corner of the country.
Kurds make up around 17% of Iraq’s population. They are the majority in at least three provinces in Northern Iraq which are known as Iraqi Kurdistan.
During the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, the Iraqi government implemented anti-Kurdish policies and a civil war broke out.
Iraq was widely-condemned by the international community, but was never seriously punished for oppressive measures such as the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the wholesale destruction of thousands of villages and the deportation of thousands of Kurds, many of whom fled to Northern Syria and Southern Turkey.
To alleviate the situation, a “safe haven” was established by the UN Security Council.
It was at this point that the US sent troops in to arm and protect the Kurds in Northern Iraq and Syria.
Now to the current situation.
President Trump’s decision to withdraw our few troops from the Syria-Turkey border area earned him a lot of criticism from allies.
Senator Lindsey Graham said the decision is “a catastrophe in the making.” Representative Lin Cheney said it’s “a catastrophic mistake.” Former UN Secretary Nikki Haley said, “We must always have the backs of our allies.”
President Trump has answered these critics. His position is that the Kurds were engaged in a contractual relationship helping us fight ISIS.
They were well paid and equipped for their fighting, much like any mercenary group. Further, they were given three years to consolidate eastern Syria to achieve their long-held desire to form an independent Kurdistan with other Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. They failed.
The Kurds’ problem, and by association that of the U.S., is that regional powers like Turkey, Iran and Syria hate the Kurds.
Turkey considers all Syrian Kurds to be allies of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or (PKK), who are the Turkish Kurds and terrorists who have been fighting for independence for the last 35 years.
Basically, the Kurds used our fight with ISIS to feed their regional civil war to earn independence from Turkey.
President Trump is aware of that agenda and getting out was the right move.
The Kurds did not sacrifice their fighters out of love for America; rather, they hoped to harness U.S. power to help protect Kurdish territory and guarantee autonomy in a future Syria.
Washington and the Kurds formed a marriage of convenience to defeat ISIS, but over the longer term there would have been a reckoning over separate goals.
The territory the Kurds controlled was roughly the size of West Virginia and it is sandwiched between a deeply suspicious Turkey and an Assad regime equally resolved to bring all of Syria under its control.
Consequently, survival of the Kurds would have depended on Washington’s willingness to help protect the Kurds from Turkey and likely a long-term U.S. presence and security guarantees as well as support for Syria’s stabilization and reconstruction.
Perhaps a future U.S. administration would have accepted these responsibilities in order to contain ISIS and gain leverage over the Assad regime.
But the Trump administration was not about to get drawn into the Syrian mess and it is an open question whether the next administration that follows Trump would be prepared to foot the bill of not just fighting jihadists but getting drawn into what would have been a nation-building exercise as well.
Since Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria, the foreign policy establishment has been complaining that his move benefits Russia more than thinking about its actual effect on U.S. interests.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did what the Obama and Trump administrations would not—intervene in the Syrian civil war.
Instead of fighting that war by proxy, Putin and his generals stepped in with air power, boots on the ground, and unexpected skill, determination—and yes, unspeakable brutality—and changed the course of the civil war.
Putin saved Assad and by doing so reemerged as a major power broker in the Middle East. Putin won the Syrian civil war and he deserves its spoils.
And what spoils they are—a war-torn society, a ruined economy, bombed-out cities, and millions of refugees. If Putin wants to take on the burden of rebuilding Syria, fixing what his air force destroyed, brokering peace among Syria’s many factions, and propping up Assad—in addition to balancing the interests of Russia’s regional partners Turkey, Iran and Israel—then we should let him.
If there’s a downside to letting Russia manage the Syrian mess, it has more to do with U.S. pride and the understandable hatred toward Putin that exists in Washington these days.
But the idea that Putin’s Syria gamble will allow him to take over the Middle East is just wrong.
Some will argue that giving Russia free rein in the region is an unacceptable risk. But at this point the United States is not giving anything to Russia.
Moscow is taking what it wants and the United States is not in a position to stop it unless it is prepared to escalate the confrontation with Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Assad regime, which even the most committed advocates of a more vigorous U.S. posture in Syria don’t want.
America’s opposition to dealing with Syrian President Bashar Assad is understandable.
He is a mass murderer and has committed war crimes, including using chemical weapons on his own people. But moral outrage, however justified and emotionally satisfying, is not a substitute for policy.
It has been apparent for some time, except for those in denial, that Assad isn’t going anywhere—Russia and Iran have assured that. His regime now controls over 60 percent of Syrian territory.
He is committed to seizing the rest and now stands to control, if he can manage, 75 percent of Syria’s oil resources and a good deal of fertile agricultural land.
Assad and his allies constitute the most powerful array of forces on the ground in Syria and even though the Syrian military is weak and stretched thin, it will likely extend regime control over additional territory committing war crimes and killing civilians in the process.
Whether Assad will be able to establish control over the entire country is not the point: He controls the capital, Syria’s major cities, airports and seaports.
Rather than chase unrealistic ambitions, the U.S. should remain focused on what its core interest in Syria has been since 2011: countering the threat from ISIS. That will be harder now with the end of the U.S. partnership with the Kurds but it is certainly not impossible. Coping effectively with this challenge requires accepting several propositions.
First, as long as Syria remains a broken country, ISIS cannot be destroyed or even defeated because the conditions that created ISIS are not going to go away. But the threat it poses can be contained.
Second, ISIS is not solely an American problem; it poses a more serious danger to most of our friends and allies in the region and beyond. As Trump has argued, these countries should pull their own weight in dealing with this common threat.
Third, Washington should assume that at some point Assad and his allies will act in their own self-interest—and they all want to prevent a resurgence of ISIS.
Finally, the ability of ISIS and its affiliates to wreak further havoc in Syria and Iraq and carry out terror attacks in the region and in Europe is unquestionable.
Indeed, the ISIS insurgency was gaining ground even before Trump’s retreat from Syria. ISIS fighters could take over some towns and villages and put pressure on others, but another caliphate is probably not in the cards if the U.S. and the other anti-ISIS actors in Syria take military action against it.
The U.S. has plenty of options to keep ISIS down. The military has substantial combat aircraft, drones, intelligence platforms and logistics support around Syria, and would face no serious air defenses from ISIS, and it is doubtful that the Russians would interfere to defend ISIS fighters from American attacks.
Remember that Trump frequently said during his 2016 campaign that he wants to escape from endless wars and bring our fighters home.
Also, we need to ask ourselves whether the withdrawal of 1000 American troops really matters in the conflict.
A key point to remember in all of this is the media’s total lack of knowledge about the Middle East, which is locked in a constant cycle of war in part because of the English and French fools that redrew the maps of the middle east after World War I.
Trump’s critics can learn about Middle Eastern culture by watching Lawrence of Arabia. Remember the first time that Lawrence goes into the desert and his guide stops at some oasis?
As the guide drinks from the well, a dark figure on a camel rides towards them and then shoots dead Lawrence’s guide. Lawrence is stunned and asks why the Arab killed the guide. The Arab responds, “He is Hazzami. He is nothing. He knew that he could not drink from our well.”
That scene says a lot. Most of the Middle East is locked in tribal wars and they don’t want democracy.
As President Trump stated, we need to get out and let the regional players fight it out and leave the larger security challenges like China and Russia to the United States.
Since the start of Turkey’s offensive in north-east Syria on October 9th, at least 20 civilians have died in the seemingly indiscriminate shelling in Turkish towns near the border, according to officials in Ankara.
Support for the invasion by Turkey was high from the outset.
For many Turks, and for their president, Recep Erdogan, the deaths will offer a chance to show that the invasion, seen as another chapter in the endless war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was a matter of necessity, not choice.
Turkey says it is acting in self-defense. Such claims, however, are not true.
Until the start of the fighting, the country had not suffered any cross-border attacks from the YPG, as the Kurdish armed groups in Syria are called.
As I stated earlier, the Kurdish fighters have been great partners, in our war against ISIS in Syria and parts of Iraq.
However, to most Turks, they are no more than a terrorist group responsible for dozens of deadly attacks, including several suicide-bombings, across Turkey since 2015.
America’s decision to team up with the group and to arm it has always been seen in Turkey as an act of betrayal.
Aside from Turkey’s biggest Kurdish party, known as the HDP, few people have opposed the offensive or expressed any sympathy with its victims.
Those who do so risk ending up behind bars. In the past week at least 121 people have been detained on terrorist charges for social-media posts critical of the invasion.
“People who classify this as a war”, as opposed to a counter-terrorism operation, Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, has said, “are committing treason.”
Turkey’s media, already squirming under Mr Erdogan’s thumb, have done their share to whip up support for the war.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 71 Syrian civilians have died in the fighting so far.
More than 160,000 have been displaced, says the UN.
Syrian mercenaries, mostly Arab Sunni fighters operating alongside Turkish troops, have been accused of executing 11 people, including a local politician, Hevrin Khalaf. Several of them were filmed shooting prisoners by the side of a road.
No main Turkish news channel has dared to report any of this, just as none could cover the army’s brutal suppression of the PKK insurgency in south-eastern Turkey a few years ago.
Mr Erdogan’s government insists that no civilians have been harmed in the fighting, and dismisses suggestions to the contrary as PKK propaganda.
Condemnation has been pouring in from all corners. Several European countries have suspended weapons exports to Turkey, the latest being Britain.
For almost a decade, Washington has not found a sustainable or effective policy in Syria and part of the reason is that we rightly don’t consider Syria a vital national interest.
Two administrations have now made that fact clear by the choices they have made to minimize if not end the U.S. role there.
Neither Congress nor the American public has the appetite to commit American blood and treasure in Syria.
Iran, Turkey, Russia and the Assad regime are prepared to make these sacrifices and Syria is a much higher priority for them than it is for the United States.
Syria is a complicated place that offers no one a complete win.
Instead, it is a land where the majority of Syrians pay a terrible price at the hands of external powers while ruled by a brutal government determined to survive at any price.
It will remain a money pit where plans for peace, good governance and stability go to die. And right now, there’s little Washington is willing or able to do about it.
I think President Trump made the right call.