Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 2

So President Erdogan  sends troops, tanks and warplanes into Syria at will to attack the Kurds while President Trump and Secretary Tillerson look on numbly like rabbits caught plumb in powerful headlights. It does not really matter that Syria is supposed to be a sovereign state, the country had long been partitioned among Russians, Iranians, The Gulf States, Saudis, Turks, Kurds and just anybody that could arm a miscreant with a rifle. This inaction, even silent acquiescence, on the part of the US is even more baffling in the sense that the Kurds remain the only sensible option for securing the porous borders and crossing points  from Syria to Iraq and even to Turkey itself. Hence the decision of the US to convert the YPG to a border force is a well thought out policy, the only effective way to stop the IS from regrouping. After all, Turkey with all its huge army and security paranoia was unable to prevent would-be militants from Europe and elsewhere from using the country as transit points to join  the shitty caliphate in Syria and Iraq at the height of IS ascendancy. Hordes of them were crossing the borders in broad daylight and Turkish officials were looking the other way as a result of compromise or sheer incompetence. The Kurds represent the only credible and capable buffer force in those climes, a fact Trump well recognizes. Hence shrugging helplessly while Erdogan attacks and decimates the forces required to carry out the all-important policing can only be as a result of a foreign policy that is at best, formulated in tweets. Trump is horribly incoherent in his foreign policy and in no instance is this more demonstrated than his inertia in coming to the defense of his most dependable allies in the Middle East. It seems as if he had gathered the Kurds in a police compound for training and then he sends in a bomb-laden suicide truck to blow up the whole place. When policies are set out in tweets, or on a glib tongue, the obvious victims are organization, logic and unity. Senselessness supplanting sense and vice versa.
Maybe Trump thinks that it is a choice between NATO and the Kurds. Then it is equally a choice between where he could put his two feet in and a place that could, in all honesty, admit in other feet. It is leaving immediate, pressing certainty for a long-term certainty, if we can even qualify it as such. It is the Kurds that are in the demand books of the US now, not the Turks. A country that the EU would not even allow in.
Someone said he was confused as to what the US could have done when Turkey sent in its forces into Afrin. Very simple, a couple of US soldiers stationed in very visible places in the enclave. There was no need to do anything combative. No need to unleash warplanes to protect her allies. Something very symbolic would have stopped the tanks. Erdogan's attack on Afrin was no more than a diplomatic test of will, just like Hitler's re-militarization of Rhineland. He was really expecting a firmness from Trump that an attack on YPG and Kurds would be an attack on US troops itself. A couple of  unarmed Green Berets placed on Afrin roads would have driven that home quite trenchantly.
Just like Hitler, all he got in response was sordid appeasement.
After Rhineland, Austria was next and then Czechoslovakia. After Afrin, Manbij, Raqqa and other Kurdish enclaves.
Appeasement is defined as letting a bully have his way always. 

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