Betrayal (2)

Stung by widespread condemnation of his betrayal of the Syrian Kurds, Trump recently observed that the Kurds didn't help the US during the Normandy invasion or World War II in general -- implying that they aren't really much of an ally and we shouldn't worry about standing by them.

This has got to be his most asinine statement yet.  The Kurds have never had a recognized independent state of their own which could develop the capacity to project military power at a distance; their territory has always been ruled by others.  During World War II, Iraq and Syria, including the Kurdish areas within them, were mandatory colonial possessions of the British and French empires respectively.  There was no independent Kurdish state or government that could have participated in the war.

In fact, the British recruited soldiers from their colonized peoples, so it may well be that some individual Kurds did fight in World War II under the British flag.

(Turkey, which was an independent sovereign state during World War II, remained neutral until the war was almost over.)

If the US were to support an independent Kurdistan in the Kurdish lands which are now part of Iraq and/or Syria, it would undoubtedly become a close ally.  Unfortunately the US prefers to make a fetish of preserving existing borders, even when those borders were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers after World War I in total disregard for the wishes or identity of the native peoples.

Congress is considering a bipartisan package of sanctions against Turkey to pressure it to halt the invasion -- a package which hopefully will pass by big enough margins to override a veto, if needed.  This is the only effort I've seen to actually do something to help the Kurds, as opposed to just turning this episode into yet another iteration of "look how terrible Trump is" for the purposes of US domestic politics.  Well, there is one other such effort -- Iran is holding military maneuvers on its border with Turkey and demanding that it abandon the invasion.  But Turkey is too powerful for Iran to intimidate.  If there's any hope of stopping this disaster -- which is already triggering a mass exodus of Kurdish civilians -- it will probably require action from the US.  Congress needs to get those sanctions passed.

One final note -- the Kurds fighting Dâ'ish (ISIL) today are not the first among their people to lead a resistance against bloodthirsty religious fanatics.  Salâh ad-Dîn (known in the West as Saladin), the heroic general who successfully defended the relatively civilized Middle East of the 12th century against the murderous barbarians known as the Crusaders, was a Kurd.