Six or so on Syria: How the War Party Lost the Middle East; Withdrawing US Troops From Syria Is the Right Thing to Do—Even if
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But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get slaughtered."
Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed our intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get slaughtered"?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden."
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"But without a U.S. military presence to ensure Iraq’s stability, the Shiite-led government of then-prime minister Nouri al-Maliki presided over a resurgence of sectarian violence that facilitated the emergence of the Sunni-led Islamic State. By 2014, IS had driven Iraqi forces out of several cities and moved across the border into Syria, which was engrossed in its own civil war.
Mr. Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria then – despite having threatened to do so if President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, which he did – had much broader consequences than Mr. Trump’s move to withdraw U.S. troops is likely to cause now.
Had Mr. Obama ordered U.S. air strikes, he might have driven Mr. al-Assad from power and wiped out IS. But, he was rightly concerned about what might happen following Mr. al-Assad’s demise, having presided over the disaster that unfolded in Libya after the United States and its NATO allies, including Canada, intervened to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi in early 2011."
"Support and betrayal
The U.S. has a history of supporting and betraying the Kurds. After the First World War, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson backed the idea of autonomy for non-Turkish minorities of the Ottoman Empire. But the Allied Powers never pushed for it. When the post-Ottoman boundaries were redrawn, the Kurds were split among four countries — Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. In all these countries, they have been a persecuted minority. In the 1970s, the U.S. backed the Iraqi Kurds in rebelling against the pro-Soviet Baathists. But they abandoned them after Iran, an American ally, signed the Algiers Accord to settle border disputes with Iraq in 1975. In the next 15 years, the Kurds in northern Iraq would see the worst form of repression by Baghdad, including a chemical attack in 1988. The U.S. looked away when thousands of Kurds were slaughtered by Saddam’s regime. They would come back to Iraqi Kurdistan during the first Gulf War.
Unfortunately, the Syrian Kurds face the same fate. Syrian Kurdistan is not a constitutionally recognised autonomous entity like Iraqi Kurdistan. They are surrounded by enemies, the remnants of the IS, a vengeful, insecure Turkish military and the blood-soaked Syrian regime. In theory, the U.S. pulling out of an illegal war is fine — the American intervention has neither congressional approval nor the UN Security Council’s nod. But in practice, since the U.S. intervention has already started shaping the reality on the ground, the pull-out should have been an orderly one. The U.S. has the moral obligation to ensure the safety of the Syrian Kurds. It could have used the pull-out as a bargaining chip to get concessions both from Ankara and Damascus. Instead, Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision to pull out of Syria leaves the Kurds twisting in the whirlwind."
