Last for this time out, we take A Longer Look at the US and the Kurds.The big news of the week, of course, has been the Turkish invasion of northern Syria with the goal of genocide against the Kurds there, an invasion green-lighted by Tweetie-pie who told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the US would get out his way.
Turkey wasted no time, attacking soon thereafter. Hundreds are dead, well over 100,000 have fled, and the carnage continues at this moment despite Tweetie-pie's risible proposal that he mediate a cease-fire.
But what we need to know now is that this is pretty much business as usual - not for Tweetie-pie but for the US. And I want you to know that in what follows I am very heavily indebted to John Schwartz at The Intercept, a news site I strongly encourage you to check out.
Okay. The morning after His High Orangeness said in effect "the Kurds? Who cares?" New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked on Twitter why Tweetie-pie made this decision:
So did Trump just betray the Kurds becauseWhat Krugman left out, however, is the most likely explanation: (d)Trump is president of the United States. It is a repetition of an old and established pattern - because this is not the first time we betrayed the Kurds. In fact it is at least the eighth time since World War I.
(a) He has business interests in Turkey
(b) Erdogan, being a brutal autocrat, is his kind of guy
(c) His boss Vladimir Putin told him to
Remarkable that all three stories are perfectly plausible.
The Kurds are an ethnic group of about 30 million people ranged across Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. They have lived in the region for over 1000 years and have long aspired to their own state. On a few occasions over the centuries there have been short-lived Kurdistans, but they have always been brutally repressed. Still, the desire for an independent state persists, something that the countries in which they live do not want to happen.
Which means that on the one hand, the Kurds are a perfect tool for US foreign policy because we can arm the Kurds in whichever of these countries is currently our enemy, to make trouble for that country’s government or for some other objective. But on the other hand, we don’t want the Kurds we’re exploiting to get too powerful. If that happens, the other Kurds - the ones living across the border in whichever of these countries are currently an ally - might get ideas about pursuing their own freedom and independence.
Here’s how that dynamic has played out, over and over and over again since World War I.
One: Like many other nationalisms, Kurdish nationalism blossomed during the late 1800s. At this point, all of the Kurdish homeland was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, centered in present day-Turkey. But the Ottoman Empire collapsed after fighting on the losing side of World War I. This, the Kurds understandably believed, was their moment.
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres dismembered the Ottoman Empire, including most of what’s now Turkey, and allocated a section for a possible Kurdistan. But the Turks fought back, wanting as much as they could get, and making enough trouble that the US gave in and supported a new treaty in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne. The Treaty of Lausanne allowed the British and French to carve off present-day Iraq and Syria, respectively, for themselves: Iraq for the UK, Syria for France. But it made no provision for the Kurds.
This was America’s first betrayal of the Kurds. However, at this point, the main Kurdish betrayals were handled by the British, who crushed the short-lived Kingdom of Kurdistan in Iraq during the early 1920s. A few years later, the British were happy to see the establishment of a Kurdish “Republic of Ararat,” because it was on Turkish territory. But it turned out that the Turks were more important to the British than the Kurds were, so the United Kingdom eventually let Turkey go ahead and extinguish the new country.
Two: After World War II, the U.S. gradually assumed the British role as main colonial power in the Mideast. We armed Iraqi Kurds during the rule of Abdel Karim Kassem, who governed Iraq from 1958 to 1963, because Kassem was failing to follow our orders.
We then supported a 1963 military coup that removed Kassem from power. We immediately cut off our aid to the Kurds and, in fact, provided the new Iraqi government with napalm to use against them.
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| Where the Kurds live |
The plan wasn’t for the Kurds in Iraq to win, since that might encourage the Kurds in Iran to rise up themselves. It was just to bleed the Iraqi government. But that's not what the Kurds were told; they were encouraged to continue fighting.
Then the US signed off on agreements between the Shah and Saddam that included the US severing aid to the Kurds. The Iraqi military moved north and slaughtered thousands, as the US stood by. When questioned, a blasé Kissinger said “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
Four: During the 1980s, the Iraqi government moved on to actual genocide against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons. The Reagan administration was well aware of Saddam’s use of nerve gas, but because they liked the damage Saddam was doing to Iran during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), it opposed congressional efforts to impose sanctions on Iraq.
Five: As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush famously called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Both Iraqi Shias in southern Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq heard this and tried to do exactly that.
It turned out that Bush was - of course - lying. Bush never supported the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions or for that matter any democracy movement in Iraq. Saddam’s “iron fist" held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. What the US wanted was for the Iraqi military, not regular people, to take charge. Then Washington would have what it regarded as the best of all worlds: the Saddam Hussein regime, just without Saddam Hussein. So having called on them to rise up, the US military stood down as Iraq massacred the rebels across the country.
Nevertheless, the dying Iraqi Kurds looked so bad on international television that the Bush administration was forced to do something. The US eventually supported what was started as a British effort to protect Kurds in northern Iraq.
Six: During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, these Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, were the good Kurds. Because they were persecuted by Iraq, our enemy, they were worthy of US sympathy. But the Kurds a few miles north in Turkey had been getting uppity too, and since they were annoying our ally, they were the baaad Kurds. The US sent Turkey huge amounts of weaponry, which it used - with US knowledge - to murder tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of villages.
It's worth noting here that the Turkish constitution does not even acknowledge the existence of the Kurds, who make up 20% of the population, and from 1924 until 1991 it was illegal in Turkey to speak Kurdish and until 2012 it was illegal to teach it in schools. The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the group that Turkey and the US claim is "terrorist," did not spring out of nowhere.
Seven: Before the Iraq War in 2003, right-wing pundits were saying we had to do it, had to got to war, to help the Kurds. But post-war, Kruds in northern Iraq gained some regional autonomy, which disturbed Turkey, so in 2007, the US allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds inside Iraq. By which time, the right wing was declaring that this betrayal was exactly what America should be doing.
With Trump’s thumbs-up for another slaughter of the Kurds, America is now on betrayal number eight. We are nothing if not consistent.
The Kurds have an old, famous adage that they “have no friends but the mountains.” Now more than ever, it’s hard to argue that that’s wrong.
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