We can send aid to refugees, we can arm the Kurds, and we can bomb the sophisticated US weapon systems abandoned by the Iraqi army.
I think there are possibilities for propping the Kurds, who may know how to fight. We’ll see. Maleki in Baghdad is another matter: smart US strategic thinkers won’t get into an open ended commitments with Iran’s cats paw.
The Kurds aren’t going anywhere, within Kurdish Iraq there’s basically no grassroots movement against them, instead it’s a strong support throughout the population for keeping the Kurdish Autonomous Region strong and resistant to outside conquerors like ISIS or anyone else who would care to invade.
That is why I think it makes sense to disrupt ISIS’s efforts to launch their invasion on Kurdish Iraq, you can in fact disrupt stuff like that with air power. Without the indigenous support inside of Kurdish Iraq, the sort of guerrilla warfare that can drag on forever will be almost impossible for ISIS to conduct. It’d be more like Americans trying to conduct guerrilla warfare inside Iran. Yes, some special forces could engage in sabotage activities for awhile until getting caught, but they’d have no support from any civilians, there’s no long term game plan where that sort of thing plays out well.
It’s also why I think Obama was right not to act when it looked like ISIS as just a threat to Maliki’s power; Maliki is akin to Thiệu in Vietnam, not really wise spilling a lot of blood to try and keep that guy in power.
Good lord, I agree with Martin Hyde.
(No offense, man. It’s just kinda rare. :))
The thing I don’t get is the US, along with pretty much everyone else, is opposed to an independent Kurdistan. Why? From where I’m sitting, Kurdistan seems pretty cool, compared to all their neighbors. I know the previous US admin invaded, occupied and regime-changed Iraq so we’re kinda sorta committed to that for no particular reason other than saving face, but let’s be real. Kurdistan sounds pretty cool, comparatively speaking. Why can’t we go all-in for an independant and strong Kurdistan? Who cares what Iran & Turkey think? They’re dicks.
Turkey is a member of NATO. That’s part of the price we pay to keep them in that organization. Realpolitik.
Well, if you ask the Kurdish nationalists, any Kurdistan would have to include Kurdish territory in Turkey. Even if it didn’t a Kurdish state carved out of Iraq would still piss Turkey off.
Fuck them? Maybe. But I think it’s a really dumb idea. They’re a constitutional republic, a powerful regional player, a small island away from being a full EU member, a valuable US trade partner, a useful buffer against Russian adventurism in MENA, and an important US ally. Turkey’s in NATO, for og’s sake. We’re not gonna cheese them off unless desperately necessary. And a Kurdish state would assuredly do that.
ETA: IOW, what John Mace said.
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Because the EU and US really do care about what Turkey thinks. Turkey is a major trading partner of the EU and a major strategic partner of the United States. While they’ve taken a step away from their secular state in the last few years, Turkey is by far the Islamic majority state with overwhelmingly both the best relationship with the West and probably the best all around society. This is also why we sort of looked the other way when Turkey invaded Northern Cyprus in a Putinesque move. We don’t recognize Northern Cyprus as a legitimate country (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), and I think only a handful of very minor states do, but we also didn’t do much about it either. Turkey was a major strategic ally of ours during the Cold War as well, when that went down.
Turks/Turkey/the Turkish State really really doesn’t want an independent Kurdistan, and sadly they are far more powerful and important than the Kurds particularly to the powers that would be necessary in order to protect the existence of an independent Kurdistan.
There’s a real risk Turkey would immediately invade northern Iraq if the Kurds declared an independent country.
Only if the declaration included Turkish territory. If the new Kurdistan respected Turkey’s border, then there would be no invasion.
Theoretically, an independent Iraqi Kurdistan could exist peacefully alongside of Turkey, but more likely you’d get something like what is going on in Ukraine now.
Who’s in charge of NATO? The US or Turkey? Do we need them more than they need us?
We need them more then they need us because we like to play in their backyard. They have no interest in military adventures in Europe or North America.
I don’t understand. If we told Turkey to stuff it what would they do? Cut off Facebook access? Do they give us oil at cheap rates or something? Can’t remember the last time I bought anything Turkish, including cigarettes. Would Turkey invade Europe? Would someone else invade Turkey? If someone wants to invade Turkey it seems to me Turkey would be our bitch, which they should be anyway. Does Turkey ensure stability in the Middle East? If so, they suck at it.
There are several US military bases in Turkey. We use Turkish airspace for military flights over the Middle East, North Africa and for spying on Russia. They’re right next door to Syria. They have a modern, secular military that largely respects the rule of law and generally likes us.
The could shut down Thanksgiving!
Friedo got it, pretty much, by fleshing out what I meant when I said that we like to play in their backyard. We don’t have to play int he backyard, and probably a lot of us on this MB would prefer that we didn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact our leaders like to continue a policy of US military presence in the Middle East, and Turkey is a key link in that chain.
Making new countries isn’t magic. All of the problems that existed before don’t magically disappear, and often you end up with a whole wrack of new problems related to the new and not-entirely-worked-put border. And that is before the fact that state building in general is a long and usually bloody process, and it’s a process that the US is exceptionally bad at shepherding along.
-Sven, who knows South Sudan pretty well.
To be fair the Greek military junta was just as Putinesque at the time. They quietly backed/ordered a military coup that displaced the president of Cyprus with a fellow in favour of enosis ( union with Greece ). This provoked the Turkish invasion and quickly led to the collapse of said Greek junta who were preparing to walk into a war which they had almost certainly already lost.
No clean hands in that mess.
Cut the strait of Dardanelles? 
You have to look at it from a comparative realpolitik POV. Who’s a potentially more reliable, stable, powerful, strategic and wealthier ally in the region? An independent Iraqi Kurdistan or Turkey? The answer is Turkey by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s not even close. The Iraqi Kurds aren’t getting you any closer to a stable ME either - to the contrary.
The U.S. State Deparrtment fears the destabilizing factor of a balkanized Iraq and with good reason. They’re probably going to get one anyway, but there is no reason to spit in Turkey’s face over it. The U.S. may end up quietly recognizing such an entity after the fact, but they’re not going to be the ones that call for the dismemberment of a country in being that they’ve been trying to prop up for years. It’s just bad politics.
Realpolitik:
It is in the interest of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq to have good relations with Turkey. And the KRG indeed has played their hand well: they have better relations with Turkey than Maleki does. There is no reason for the US to stir this pot. None.
Interestingly while Turkey strongly supports a unified Iraq, the ruling party has made some noises that are sympathetic with an independent Kurdish state in Iraq should matters head south. Nationalist movements take note: it pays not to be a geopolitical dick.
[INDENT]Comments in the Financial Times on Saturday by Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling AK Party, have been interpreted as suggesting Ankara would tolerate an independent Kurdish state if Iraq were to fall apart.
“If Iraq is divided and it is inevitable, they are our brothers… Unfortunately the situation in Iraq is not good, and it looks like it is going to be divided,” Celik was quoted as saying.
However another Turkish official at the prime minister’s office last week appeared to pour cold water on the idea, telling Reuters that “the integrity of Iraq is very important to Turkey”.[/INDENT]
I know I’m getting in a little late here and it may have been said already, but if you learned anything over the last decade-plus it should be that you can’t destroy an idea with bombs and weapons. We didn’t create the idea but our actions have gone a long way to making it possible for them to force it on their victims. What are a few more bombs going to do other than forestall the inevitable?
Keep Kurdish Iraq from being invaded. Explain to me how ISIS can achieve that without artillery or heavy equipment. There will be no grassroots insurgency supporting ISIS within Kurdish Iraq.
I find it weird so many people don’t get this. If Obama (who I criticize at every turn) was doing this to save Maliki he would have acted long ago, it’s obvious he’s doing this to save the Kurds, who are not under an internecine, ideological threat from ISIS. To the Kurds, ISIS are straight up external conquerors, and if their conventional heavy weaponry is destroyed they aren’t conquering anyone. They can of course fight their insurgency (and probably see Maliki toppled and the rest of Iraq shatter) regardless, but if Obama was wanting to “save” Maliki he would have acted months ago. I think all indications are Obama doesn’t feel he can save Maliki and he probably wouldn’t care to if he could.
Basically–this was a stupid question. It’s like asking what the British Navy is going to do against Nazi Germany–the answer is keep Britain from being invaded, and it didn’t have to “kill the idea” of Nazism to do it.
These two things are inherently different, the most obvious reason being that the English Channel is considerably easier to defend than a connected land mass. Nazi Germany wasn’t stopped by the British Navy, they were stopped by a natural barrier, and it took the Allies with virtually infinite resources more than 3 years to cross that barrier themselves.
So we drop a few bombs, we kill a few people, and then we leave again. What have we done? A few more people die, a few more people adopt the idea, and we buy the Kurds some more time. But that’s not a solution, and in fact there really isn’t a solution that will end with anything but a reinvestment of US soldiers or an ISIS victory.
A comparison with Vietnam is more apt. Ho Chi Minh (attributed): “You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.” When we walked away from Vietnam it was all over and everybody knew it. We tried for more than a decade to destroy an ideology and failed. We’re doing it again. That’s where it is at right now.