U.S. Stabs the Kurds In The Back Yet Again

For the third or fourth time, the U.S. has double-crossed the Kurdish people.

For almost two decades now, the U.S. has used Kurdish militias as their proxy forces in Iraq and Syria, to fight groups the U.S. regards as terrorist, such as Al-Qaeda and especially ISIS. These Kurdish forces have frequently been referred to by U.S. elites as the U.S.' "boots on the ground."

Now the U.S. has suddenly pulled the rug out from under the Kurds, removing U.S. forces embedded with the Kurds in Syria in the dead of night. This frees Turkey to launch a long-threatened military offensive against the Kurdish fighters in Syria, whom Turkey brands "terrorists." Turkey is eager to wipe out the Kurds' militias.

The Kurds had cleared ISIS from Turkey's border. ISIS had laumched lethal rocket attacks into Turkish villages.

So much for gratitude.

Some background is necessary here. The Kurds in Turkey inhabit the eastern portion of Turkey. For many years they have been subjected to cultural genocide by Turkey, which banned their language, symbols, etc, among other repression. This prompted some Kurds to launch a guerrilla movement.

Turkey responded in the way that regimes virtually always do when faced with popular armed resistance movements, with repeated gross atrocities against defenseless civilians. Tens of thousands of Kurds died at Turkish hands.

Then a truce was reached, and the repression of Kurds was eased.

However after the current Turkish strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came to power, he apparently was unhappy with the new arrangement, and reverting to the old policy of trying to force Kurds to be "Turkish." Once again Turkey instituted harsh repression and military attacks on the Kurds.

Erdogan has been chomping at the bit for several years to wipe out the Kurdish militias in Syria. Now that the protective U.S. umbrella has been removed, he's getting his chance.

This is the second time in recent years the U.S. has betrayed the Kurds, and there
were other times in the past. A few years ago, the Kurds of northern Iraq held a referendum and voted in favor of autonomy for themselves. The Iraqi regime responded with a military attack, driving the Kurds out of territory they had recently fought to take back from ISIS. The U.S. didn't back the Kurds at all.



The current betrayal has an awful antecedent which occurred in the 1970's. The Shah of Iran, at the time the world's worst dictator and who was installed as ruler of that nation by the CIA in 1953 in a coup that destroyed democracy in that country, had a spat with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Shah used the Kurds of Iraq as a proxy force to fight the Iraqi regime. The Shah enlisted the help of president Richard Nixon and Nixon's evil henchman Henry Kissinger to supply arms to those Kurds. Israel also supplied weapons.

Then in 1975 the Shah cut a deal with Saddam Hussein, and the Kurds became expendable. President Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, and Kissinger (now working for Ford) allowed the massacre of Kurds by Saddam Hussein to proceed, coldly brushing aside pleas for help by remarking  that “One should not confuse undercover action with social work.” [1]

There have been other U.S. backstabbings of the Kurds, which I am not going into now because I want to get this out in a timely fashion.

The Kurds are an oppressed minority in all the countries they inhabit. They are spread out among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, none of which will ever cede an inch of territory to a Kurdish state, nor treat Kurds as equal citizens. Unsurprisingly, the Kurds have long desired their own nation. But what's good enough for Jews isn't good enough for Kurds, it seems. The U.S. has long strung them along, using them as cannon fodder, while the Kurds hope that eventually the U.S. will enable them to achieve statehood.

But the U.S. has never intended any such thing, no more than it intends to force Israel to grant the Palestinian peoople statehood.

Being against a people's self-determination is the same as being against democracy. The most fundamentally democratic thing is self-determination.

The Kurds have been fighting the U.S.' wars in Iraq and Syria. Today Trump stood reality on its head, cynically saying he doesn't want America fighting other people's wars. But it has been the Kurds fighting America's wars. The U.S. screeches a lot about "terrorism," but won't shed its own blood to fight the terrorists. It gets others to fight and die for it, them abandons them, leaving them in the lurch.

And every day brags about how it's The Greatest Country On Earth, the most moral, the most humane, the freest, the blah blah blahest.

If the U.S. really believed in the values it professes ad nauseam, the Kurds would be its most cherished allies in that region. They are democratic, and so non-sexist that Kurdish women form all-female combat units that fight ISIS.

But the U.S. is much tighter with the likes of Saudi Arabia instead.

By your friends shall ye be known.

Herr Doktor Heinz "Henry" Kissinger of Death.

 1]  See "Kissinger and the Kurds," Kurdistan Commentary, Feb. 4, 2010, and "Telling It Like It Is: Kissinger and the Kurds," Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 18, 1996.

Turkish Tyrant Erdogan Creating Another Islamic Theocracy, In Turkey

To the list of states taken over by Islam, it's time to add Turkey.

Also add it to the list of repressive theocracies backed and armed to the teeth by the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms in the orbit of Saudi Arabia. And then there's Pakistan. And Indonesia too, increasingly Islamist.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incessantly power-grabbing ruler of that increasingly repressive land, has unilaterally changed the curriculum in Turkish schools to create "a pious generation." A generation of religious zealots, like in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other lands.

The new curriculum eliminates natural selection (aka "Darwinism"), the science of the biological evolution of life on earth, for starters. It also teaches Jihad as a righteous defense of the nation, a "love of the homeland." (The obvious corollary- those who criticize Erdogan hate the homeland and thus are traitors.) No claiming that jihad means "inner struggle to be a better person" as those self-appointed Muslim spokesMEN- always men- in the West- maybe ONLY in the West, or at least mostly- insist is the "real" meaning of the term jihad, because Islam Is A Religion Of Peace, as their slogan goes. Perhaps they should trademark that so they can sue people like me who use it ironically.

To ensure "a pious generation," prayer rooms are to be installed in all schools.

Meanwhile, scholars are being tried as "terrorists," 180 journalists are in jail, part of 50,000 prisoners arrested as "coup plotters," along with another 150,000 people fired from their jobs as alleged co-conspirators in the recent failed military coup. Must be the largest conspiracy in history!

Erdogan, who fancies himself as a latter-day Sultan and dreams of recreating something like the Ottoman Empire, recently rammed through by referendum (with many irregularities and a campaign of suppression against opponents) a revision of Turkish constitutional provisions that grants greatly increased powers to himself. He has already spent several years unilaterally firing and replacing judges, police, and prosecutors, successfully squelching corruption cases against himself and his minions.

Recently some of Erdogan's bodyguards were indicted in the U.S. for assault. On a previous visit, Erdogan was offended by protesters yelling at him, so he sicced his goons on them, hospitalizing 9 protesters, as Erdogan watched. Now he complains that the American police failed to stop the protesters from yelling "insults" at him, clearly something he regards as intolerable. (What the police should have done, but didn't, was arrest Erdogan's "security" thugs.)

Turkey has only had a brief period of relative democracy and freedom. After the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I (1914-1918), during which the Turks committed the Armenian Genocide, killing over a million Armenians (which emboldened Hitler to carry out the Holocaust: Hitler said "Who, after all, remembers the Armenian massacre?"), Turkey was ruled by the autocrat Ataturk, who forcibly secularized and modernized the country. Since Ataturk, torture and police abuses, and the repression of the Kurdish minority, have been near-constant feature of Turkish society. The military frequently seized overt control, with U.S. blessing.

With the successful political dominance of Erdogan's Islamist party, Turkey is back again to being a repressive place. A key NATO ally, which the U.S. has long relied on for military air bases, and during the Cold War as a spy base against the SovIet Union (including flying U-2 spy planes from Turkey), and now needs to wage its aerial campaign against ISIS in Syria, Turkey largely gets a pass from the U.S. Erdogan has leverage over the EU because Turkey is damning up the flood of Syrian refugees from trying to get to Europe, and the Europeans are desperate to continue that arrangement.

There is some friction over the fact that the U.S. is using Kurdish fighters as its army on the ground against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, while Turkey seeks to annihilate all armed Kurds. The U.S. agrees that one Kurdish resistance group, the PKK, is "terrorist," and tolerates Turkish airstrikes and artillery bombardment of the PKK in Syria. The U.S. has repeatedly used, abused, and double-crossed the Kurds, and is currently doing so again, deporting Kurds from the U.S., and opposing the creation of a Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq. That's the gratitude the U.S. shows for the Kurds spilling their own blood to be the U.S.' army against ISIS.