View attachment 8323
This will effectively put the region into Turkish control, and cast the fate of thousands of captured ISIS prisoners into doubt.
I don't know what options the Kurds have here.
This statement doesn't read like there was consultation with either the State Dept, or DoD, the language is very Trumpian.
I'm getting a wag the dog kind of vibe from it.
Well, maybe we should turn ISIS prisoners over to the Syrian government, which was doing a decent job of keeping the extremists in check until Obama -- with the blessing of neocons -- undertook a policy of encouraging the overthrow of President Assad. Assad's crime, as near as I can tell, was his willingness to accept Russian aid, which pissed off our generals and neocons hugely.
Is Assad a kind and benevolent ruler? Absolutely not, the guy is a tyrant. I suspect our reasons for going into Syria wasn't to protect the Kurds (who had been instigating terrorist attacks in Turkey!) but to have forces in place to fill the vacuum when Assad and the Russians were kicked out -- a dumbass idea that would have involved us in another endless war we couldn't win.
Does anyone remember the Shah of Iran? He was another tyrant that the USA supported, who ruled Iran with an iron fist. But Carter didn't like the bad press he got for supporting a dictator, so he threw him under the bus, turning Iran over to a Muslim cleric, who hated us. That turned out well.
The Afghan war was handled poorly. We should have gone in, kicked the Taliban's ***, then got out. Leaving them with the message that if they allowed Al Qaida to set up another training base, we'd be back. Rumsfeld's quote, "If you break it, you own it!" has got to be the stupidest guiding principle for spending blood and treasure in US history.
If we had left Saddam Hussein in power, we wouldn't still be fighting an endless war, 18 years later.
Momar Khadafi caused us trouble in the 80's, until we bombed his palace, regrettably killing his 5-year-old son. But he learned a valuable lesson and (excepting an airliner bombing) stopped poking the tiger. But that wasn't good enough for Hillary and Obama, who had to see him overthrown and executed. Same with President Muburak.
But let's feel bad for Kurds, certainly they are the allies we've spent 50 years searching for. (If only they had an actual country, with borders.)
Or we could just quit fertilizing the ground in the Middle East with the blood from our sons and daughters.