To spurn Kurds is an absurd turn spurred by stern but blurred concern.
It always seems like a great idea to give the sympathetic minority an ethnic state, but in practice you end up with an unfixable headache into perpetuity, and foreign involvement just makes it even less likely that the outcome will be sustainable.
Kurds? No whey.
But they essentially have their ethnic state already, and in many ways we gave it to them with the no fly zone we enforced. Saying that now we want to keep them weak is exactly the hypocrisy we shouldn’t be exhibiting. Again that is, after we left them out to dry after the first Gulf war.
Well, some of the Kurds have a semi-autonomous ethnic statelet, comprising a fraction of their population and cultural territory.
Semi autonomous in some ways, only on paper in others and that paper is slowly burning away.
OK, but even a true independent Kurdish state cut out of the former Iraqi borders still excludes most Kurds.
So we do what? Once the neighborhood settles down, how comfortable do you think the Middle East is going to be with an explicitly American-backed ethnic state that poses a direct and real threat to their territorial integrity? How much fun is it going to be to watch the decades of intractable war and ethnic massacres? How much money are we willing to spend to keep them propped up, for how many generations?
Ethnic statehood is a poisonous idea. A distant foreign power drawing up boundaries basically anywhere is a poisonous idea. Trying to intervene in basically anything in the Middle East is a poisonous idea. These have all been shown to fail over and over again. I’m sympathetic to the Kurds, but we aren’t the ones to engineer a new state for them-- this isn’t something that is in our power to do, and the consequences of failure are huge.
I don’t know. But they don’t seem to be imploding into some hellhole and are holding their borders. Are you against having any explicit allies at all? Saudi Arabia and Israel seem to survive despite being explicitly backed by America.
You know these sentences almost contradict each other. Or rather taken together they exclude most of reality from the non evil pile. Yes, there’s the third option that people all gather together because they all have some similar philosophy, but most people are bundled together today by family/ethnic groups or arbitrary boundaries. So how we define a Nation is going to be based on one of those. IMHO. What say you?
Among other things, what’s one state’s ethnic minority quickly becomes the new state’s ethnic majority, while smaller ethnic minorities are still minor and the majority of the old state is now a minority. You can bus people through the border forcefully, but this second option doesn’t tend to go down well.
There is a difference between being an ally, and being a state whose day-to-day ability to exist is entirely dependent on foreign involvement. And with Turkey, Iran, and Iraq all feeling extremely threatened by an independent Kurdistan, that’s what happened.
Independence doesn’t solve problems. Whatever problems were there keep being there, except now they become international conflicts rather than civil ones. And while civil wars can be nasty, interstate conflicts are much more destabilizing and much more likely to become a headache for us.
Last time we did this was South Sudan. It seemed like a great idea- these sympathetic Christians were getting a raw deal by the Sudanese Arabs, and everyone thought if they just had their own homeland, bolstered by ample development aid, they’d do fine. Independence w as peacefully brokered and the world celebrated.
Five years later we have non-stop civil war, 1.5 million people displaced, and 3.8 million people who cannot grow enough to eat because of the fighting. It’s cost billions just to manage the immediate humanitarian needs. And there is no end in sight. The borders still aren’t entirely agreed upon, and when that fight happens it won’t be pretty. And this is an independence that didn’t face hostile neighbors!
Not evil, just poisonous. Much of the world inherited a set of lines on the map that don’t reflect their realities, and that has caused no end of trouble. But trying to redraw all of those lines now–in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East-- according to ethnic lines is going to be a bloody, horrific, atrocity-filled exercise that will take generation after generation of war to settle.
The only way out of this mess are modern, multi-ethnic states. That’s the option. There are some good examples in Africa and Latin America of how that can happen.
I did not think about that. Maybe that is why these governments are reduced to complaining - they have reason to believe their supply of U.S. weapons would be shut off if those weapons were used to arm Kurds. I imagine there must also be many other ways to obtain weapons for the Kurds if they are serious about arming them.
During the 2nd Iraq War, there was a lot of noise made in Turkey about PKK being found with American weapons. Whether true or just conservative or far left propaganda, such articles are a symptom of how worried the Turks are that these weapons supplied to Kurdish forces will eventually get to those who will use these weapons against them.
I think those who want to arm the Kurds are basically saying everyplace else in Iraq and Syria is a lost cause. There are probably very few who supports supplying them with arms and also believes they will march into Ramadi.
They made an exception for Syrian rebels then. Or at least that is my guess from what I read about the legislation to arm the Kurds. How we work with or work around our laws for group X doesn’t change the fact that our current level of military support of the Kurds is sufficient to keep prevent ISIL from controlling their territory in both Syria and Iraq. Considering the analysis in John Mace’s article and the replies of many of the other participants in this thread about allied nations’ concerns, there is no added advantage to providing the Kurds with better weaponry.
We don’t get to choose that and the region is well on it’s path of bloody war. Your idea is to aid the Iraqi government fend off ISIL, retake all the land it’s lost and then expect Kurdis to join back up? Kurds at the very least are going to expect to keep a lot of autonomy and resist strongly the idea of disbanding the Peshmerga.
We don’t want to piss off the Turks, despite their largely being useless and annoying turds.
I like the idea of upping support to the Kurds, a rare (if not the only) group in the Middle East that has its shit together.
Kurdistan (the Iraq part of it) sits atop a huge pool of oil. Kirkuk alone probably has oil reserves on par with Nigeria. plus, it is low sulphur (“sweet”) crude that refiners like. Iraq has already broken apart, no matter how much we pretend. Turkey itself is the next multi-ethnic state to experience breakup. Erdogan is now a dictator, his embrace of islamic law reveals his desperation. look for a new war in Turkey, probably in the next 24 months. Once the Kurds get oil exports up and running, they will be able to buy all the weapons they need.
I don’t have an idea of how to fix this. I don’t think it is in our hands, anyway.
Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you.
Oh.
All of this is completely wrong.
Erdogan is not a dictator, and just took a beating in the latest election. Turkey won’t “experience breakup,” or descend into civil war, anytime soon.
That’s just what I was going to say. In addition, he’s always been an Islamist so I don’t get why anyone would say it indicates desperation for him to embrace Islamic law.
Right now, the choice seems to be between ethnic-based states and ISIS. It would be nice if there were a liberal multi-ethnic choice in the works, but there isn’t.
A phrase occurs to me in this context: “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. Or in this case, the perfect is the enemy of helping the locals to prevent the worst.