The Kurds

The other evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson appeared to be on the point of literally tearing out his hair as he railed against the relentless and near-universal negative reaction to President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate a few hundred US troops in northeastern Syria. At first glance, it is indeed baffling, even perhaps hinting at a kind of mass psychosis. On the ground in Syria, after all, the fallout thus far has been anything but catastrophic. The Kurds are now protected by the Syrian and Russian armed forces. These countries’ leaders, on the back of US sanctions against Ankara, are negotiating a ceasefire with Turkey.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Whenever neoconservatives and liberals chant in unison about American policy in the Middle East — as when they championed the Iraq invasion, for example, or the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, or the thwarted attempt to topple the Assad regime in Syria — it means we are being told a pack of lies. Par for the course is the hysterical response to President Donald Trump’s ‘betrayal’ of the Kurds in the wake of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria. Turkey’s goal was to repatriate at least two million of 3.6 million Syrian refugees inside Turkey in a border zone controlled, until the invasion began, by the US-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The White House’s decision to move aside and allow a Turkish assault in northeast Syria highlighted the morass that is the US’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Criticism of the decision, rebuked as ham-fisted and reckless, was bipartisan. This is the kiss of death for the Kurds (the US’s allies, who are left defenseless),  the largest ethnic minority in Syria, and one of the victims of Turkey’s human rights abuses that have spanned centuries. Lost in the turbulent tangles of the news is another one of Turkey’s victims, a population of Christians who are a distinct ethnic group that has been historically targeted by the Ottoman Empire.

In pronouncing this morning in his 'great and unmatched wisdom' that it is wise for America to abandon the Kurds, Donald Trump has just slightly increased the possibility that the Senate will vote to impeach him. Fooling around in Ukraine is one thing. But dissing the Kurds is another for congressional Republicans. A chorus of Republican hawks has emerged to decry Trump’s move.Mitt Romney called it a 'betrayal'. Susan Collins told Politico, 'This is a terribly unwise decision by the president to abandon our Kurdish allies, who have been our major partner in the fight against the lslamic State.' Terribly unwise? For Collins, who usually confines herself to expressing 'concern', those are fighting words. Still, Romney and Collins have been mildly critical of Trump all along.