# So - why does US spurn Kurds? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 2, 2015, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016 "2015-07-02T02:37:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/81 "2015-07-05T15:55:32Z")
> [@Steken](#): > > I can easily imagine a situation where religiously moderate Kurds decide to wipe out, say, a potentially troublesome Arab village. I can point out a situation where non-extremist United States decided to wipe out, say, a potentially troublesome Vietnamese village. Does that make United States extremist and thus dangerous to support? ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/82 "2015-07-05T16:13:59Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > I can point out a situation where non-extremist United States decided to wipe out, say, a potentially troublesome Vietnamese village. > > Does that make United States extremist and thus dangerous to support? If I were Vietnamese, I’d probably say so. The point is, “they seem like nice enough guys” tells as jack about the future. By all accounts, South Sudanese are nice folks without any unappealing features. That wasn’t enough to make South Sudan work. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/83 "2015-07-05T16:23:56Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > If I were Vietnamese, I’d probably say so. > > The point is, “they seem like nice enough guys” tells as jack about the future. By all accounts, South Sudanese are nice folks without any unappealing features. That wasn’t enough to make South Sudan work. Kurds are already running, under pretty harrowing conditions, what basically amounts to a state of their own, and it seems pretty stable. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/84 "2015-07-05T17:43:23Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > [Israel is] a modern multi-ethnic state that is saddled with an unfixable problem stemming from the idea of ethnic homelands. This is a curious way to see a state that was itself established explicitly _as_ an ethnic homeland. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/85 "2015-07-05T18:00:24Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > I can point out a situation where non-extremist United States decided to wipe out, say, a potentially troublesome Vietnamese village. > > Does that make United States extremist and thus dangerous to support? Yes. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2015, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/86 "2015-07-05T18:46:16Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > You can’t “have a state back” if that state never existed, in the history of the world. > > As for Kurds - they will not “have a state back”. Again, it never existed. No, it never did. Not unless you take it all the way back to ancient Corduene, located in the heart of the Kurdish region along what is now the Turkey-Iraq border. Corduene was independent in the 2nd century BC, and was apparently named for the Kurds. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2015, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016/87 "2015-07-06T14:36:02Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > No, there was not. **Terr** is quite correct there. Any created Kurdistan would be similar to creating a country out of Basque country in France and Spain. Not completely implausible an an entity, but hardly the recreation of some pre-existing state. It would just as artificial a creation as Iraq. Not that that matters much to me - I have never given much credo to the “historical state” argument anyway. If so might as well re-create the Mongol Empire and be done with all this foolish squabbling ;). If I may be circular for a second Israel deserves to exist because it _exists now_ and is accepted by the majority of its inhabitants, not because it has some quasi-farcical connection to some ancient backwater kingdom. > > Theoretically I agree with **even sven** - ethnic nationalism generally sucks IMESHO. I regard the breakup of the former Yugoslavia as a preventable tragedy. However we live in the real world and in that world ethnic nationalism is an organizing principle that works after a fashion and is a powerful attractant. Iraqi Kurdistan is de facto heading towards a functional independence, which I think is a crying shame. Just because it would be more pro-American in the short term than Iraq doesn’t mean we should laud the dismemberment of the Iraqi state. But it is moving in that direction and is dysfunctional as Iraq continues to be and as much as I’m opposed to the idea in principle, I can’t honestly say it will be worse off ( though it might ). > > But the fact of the matter is that it is not independent right now, nor is it in a civil war for independence with the Iraqi central government where we might take a side. Arming the Kurds in Syria is one thing - that’s picking sides in the Syrian Civil War, good luck with that. Arming the Iraqi Peshmerga directly is another entirely. We should not be in the business of arming _any militia_, Sunni Arab, Shi’a Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian Christian - whoever. We should be arming the _Iraqi central government forces only_. Anything else is a deliberate sabotage of the Iraqi state. If Iraq is stupid and corrupt enough to arm extra-governmental actors, that’s their business. We shouldn’t be funding their own self-destruction. > > As for a united ethnic Kurdistan of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, I’ll just mention again what a Kurdish acquaintance of mine ( Iranian nationalist by the way, anti-Kurdish state ) once told me. He’s a Sorani-speaker and once tried to have a conversation with a Turkish Kurd who spoke Kurmanji. He says the other guy might as well have been speaking martian. They had to resort to German to make each understood. No one should make the mistake of thinking that because they share a common ethnonym that all Kurds are automatically “one people.” It’s a pretty arguable point, really. What makes a people a “people” is a complex matter - often, it is a case of self-identification; sometimes, it is pushed on a ‘people’ by outsiders. Israel is a good example of that - the various persons who self-identify as “Israelis” these days have very little in common with each other before self-identifying as “Israeli”, even among the majority Jews - not language or race, certainly (they range from lilly-white Polish Ashkenazim, though Arabic looking Mizrai, to Black Bene Israel from Ethiopia). Essentially, ethno-nationalism is fully capable of creating its own definitions of ethnicity - for good or bad. The problem in the modern West is that we have become convinced that none of that applies to us - that we have created states that are truly above all of that, states that anyone, regardless, can join by an act of will. However, the immigrants to Western countries often find that, for various reasons, this is not true - that “neutrality” is simply defined as ‘accepting the majority culture in its totality’. Canada and the US are better in this respect than Europe, but still - it’s a spectrum I think, not a binary state. It is slightly disingenous of us in the West to absolutewly reject states simply because they are based on some form of ethno-nationalism. Better to see how they behave towards ethnic minorities in actual practice. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-why-does-us-spurn-kurds/724016.md?page=4)