The President has given the green light to Turkey's bombing of the Kurds, the only effective resistance to ISIS in Iraq except for the Iranian-backed Shia militias. US and British veteran volunteers are fighting alongside the Kurds, and will now be at risk of being killed by NATO bombs.
Why? Turkey was just struck by a major ISIS bombing attack this week. Of course, it struck the secular opposition party, not the ruling Islamist party.
9 comments:
Well, this might have something to do with it:
"On Wednesday, the PKK claimed responsibility for the killing of two Turkish police officers near the Kurdish majority city of Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border."
Look, I'm no big fan of the Turks in general, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the Kurds in general. But at what point do you get to do stuff like this and then claim foul when they hit back?
OK, at least there's a proximate cause for Turkey's action. There's still no justification for our approval of it. If they were responding with a police crackdown on Sanliurfa, to catch the killers or break up PKK cells, I'd understand. They're treating this with military force, not police force, and that means we should consider the military context.
There's a war on, and our enemies are not the Kurds. In fact, the NATO alliance notwithstanding, the Kurds are more properly our allies in this region than the Turkish government as it stands. Our citizens are out there with them. They're the only thing approximating a good guy in this fight as it currently stands. We should help the Turks catch the killers, perhaps, but we shouldn't be endorsing military strikes.
There's a timeline here. The Turks bombed Kurdish positions in Iraq(!) on Friday. The Kurds then bombed two Turkish soldiers on Saturday.
It's not clear to me that the Kurds started this latest round.
Eric Hines
Well, and the Kurdish car bomb hit a military position -- the Turks are shelling and bombing towns. The ISIS bomb, which killed not two but dozens, hit an opposition political rally.
They're treating this with military force, not police force, and that means we should consider the military context.
The Turks have a different view of police and military than we do. We need to consider this in the Turkish context, not ours.
Our citizens are out there with them.
I don't see this as particularly relevant. Our citizens are also out there with the Daesh. And with al Qaeda.
Eric Hines
The Turks don't have a single view of the military and police. Recall the recent, and massive, protests in Istanbul over the abusive and heavy handed use of authority. It's the same reason to mention the opposition party: the Islamist government is using this to crush its domestic opposition, the educated urban classes, and not just the PKK but the Kurds. There is a political tie here between the opposition group, which was socialist, and the PKK, which considers itself a 'worker's party.'
Our citizens who join the Daesh and al Qaeda are traitors, but the ones who fight with the Kurds are honorable men. Many have gone to help with the Christian refugee problem, and others because they made friends with the Kurds during the war.
And yes, I get it: 'treason' is a hard matter these days. I'm walking a fine line myself where that is concerned. I'm committed to the project, the thing the Founders were after. I wonder if it's still possible to stand committed to that project without being in danger of treason to the current Federal government.
We'll sort that out.
treason to the [...] government
No such thing. There's treason to the United States, but the federal government is just a tool the United States has created to serve its ends.
In any case, here's the Center for Security Policy on the deal we've apparently made with Turkey.
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