Trump’s Middle East Strategy and the Kurds

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Kurdish security forces ride in a military vehicle in Erbil, Iraq, July 23, 2018. (Azad Lashkari/Reuters)

There’s a problem with getting too close to Turkey.President Trump is right to dismiss the “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. Long experience has disproved that idea that, under the umbrella of U.S. military might and with American encouragement, tribal Muslim societies with medieval and theocratic cultures and institutions will transform themselves into free democratic republics. Instead of an Arab Spring, we got years of jihadi civil war, culminating in the ISIS scourge of violence and terror.

With the ISIS fanatics largely (though not entirely) brought to heel in Syria, and all other reasons for having U.S. troops in the Middle East exhausted, Trump aims to bring the troops home. As Hudson scholar Michael Doran argued in a recent, widely read Mosaic article — with Walter Russell Mead concurring in the Wall Street Journal — this doesn’t mean Trump has no Middle East strategy. Doran notes that Trump is trying to forge a Sunni–Turkish–Israeli coalition as a realpolitikcounterbalance to Iranian power in the region, rather than leaving a vacuum for jihadists to fill, and argues that this is the right strategy.

But there’s a problem with getting too close with Turkey, one that the strategy’s advocates acknowledge but have done too little to address: the country’s treatment of our allies the Kurds. It is a matter of national honor not to abandon our allies to slaughter, as we abandoned the Montagnards after Vietnam and our translators and spies in Iraq. It is disgraceful that, as Henry Kissinger has said, while it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, to be its friend is fatal.

Certainly we ought to do something to try to protect them from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Doran writes, but he doesn’t specify what this is. Both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Trump himself, meanwhile, have issued categorical demands to Erdogan for specific protections for the Kurds.

You can see from Erdogan’s ferocious outrage over these demands — he wouldn’t even see Bolton when he came to Turkey recently — the fatal flaw in the Doran-Mead argument: Turkey is not our friend. Erdogan, as Mead quotes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as charging, is an anti-Semitic dictator. In fact, to my mind, the speed and determination with which he has dismantled Ataturk’s secular state and turned it into a Muslim sharia regime shows that admitting Turkey into NATO was as foolish a miscalculation of the striped-pants liberal globalists as letting China into the World Trade Organization. Admitting power-hungry dictators into the global club does not transform them into rule-abiding, contract-respecting, peace-and-freedom-loving liberals. It just opens the door to subversion of the West.

There is a better realpolitik strategy here, an old-fashioned balance-of-power one. We shouldn’t merely be protecting the Kurds, which will require at least some U.S. troops. We should clandestinely continue arming them, training them, and encouraging and supporting their aspirations to be a semi-autonomous region and, ultimately, the full-blown state of Kurdistan, extending from somewhere in Turkey — from Elazig in the northwest is ideal but a pipe dream — through the northeastern corner of Syria and Irbil in Iraq and as far east to Mahabad and Bakhtaran in Iran. These Sunnis will no more become democratic republicans than the rest of the Muslim world will — and as Mead points out, getting Sunni states to cooperate is like herding cats — but the Kurds are warlike, fierce in their devotion to independence, and bound to be a thorn in the sides of their neighbors, at least two of whom are our enemies, especially Iran. Perhaps we can enlist the clandestine help of the Israelis, particularly since the Kurds helped rescue the Iraqi Jews more than half a century ago (albeit for money, not love), and particularly since realpolitik in the face of Iranian expansionism and Russian opportunism in the region is making strange bedfellows.

January 18, 2019 | 3 Comments »

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  1. This, from Debka file, is a significant clue as to Trump’s intentions if Turkey attempts a major military offensive against the Kurds:

    Trump: Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds

    US President Donald Trump marks the onset of the US troop withdrawal from Syria with a Twitter marking the high points. “Starting the long overdue pullout from Syria while hitting the little remaining ISIS territorial caliphate hard, and from many directions. Will attack again from existing nearby base if it reforms. Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20-mile safe zone.” This is the first time on NATO has threatened another with economic warfare.

    Apparently he has decided he cannot abandon the Kurds. He may still be hoping that Erdogan will agree to negotiate some sort of deal with them.

  2. Magnet’s analysis and policy recommendations seem reasonable to me. He credits Trump with having a thought-out and consistent strategy for U.S. involvement in the Middle East, but thinks that his attempt to preserve the alliance with Turkey, and to rely on Turkey to counterbalance Iranian and Russian influence in Syria, to be a mistake. I agree. I also think an independent Kurdistan, if it could somehow be achieved, would be desirable. However, with all four states controlling Kurdish territory absolutely opposed to Kurdish independence, I don’t think it it is feasible.

  3. An important follow-up on this story in the Wall Street Journal, following the killing of four U.S. military personnel in Manbij, Syria, a few days ago:

    Islamic State Returns to Guerrilla Tactics as It Loses Territory
    Deadly suicide attack that the terror group claimed this week in northern Syria comes as it stands to lose its last sliver of land

    Raja AbdulrahimUpdated Jan. 17, 2019 5:02 p.m. ET
    A member of Manbij’s security forces on Jan. 17 patrols the site of a suicide attack targeting U.S.-led coalition forces in the northern Syrian city.
    Islamic State is reverting to the guerrilla-style tactics it employed in its early days to strike targets, including a suicide bombing it claimed in northern Syria this week, as it stands to lose the last sliver of territory it controls.

    U.S.-backed forces in Syria on Thursday vowed to escalate military operations against Islamic State and root out its sleeper cells, a day after the attack that killed more than a dozen people, including four Americans.

    The terror group, which said the latest suicide attack targeted the U.S.-led coalition, is trying to cause chaos and horror throughout the country as it faces the loss of its remaining territory in eastern Syria, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces said.

    An initial U.S. military assessment concluded the Islamic State was behind the attack, in which two U.S. military service members, a civilian Defense Department employee and a Pentagon contractor were killed, adding that the terror group targeted Americans.

    Islamic State claimed responsibility for a deadly explosion that killed four Americans on Wednesday. WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explains three reasons why the tragic event is so ominous. Photo: AP
    Those tracking the group say Islamic State is still capable of carrying out sophisticated strikes far from its shrinking pocket of control in Deir Ezzour province in eastern Syria. Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate is nearly wiped out, including the city of Raqqa, which it lost more than a year ago. The group is in its final battle against a U.S.-backed offensive made up of Kurdish and Arab fighters.

    “[Islamic State] will come to an end militarily and geographically, but its sleeper cells will continue operating,” said Nuri Mahmud, a spokesman with the Kurdish YPG militia, the SDF’s main component. “There are lots of sleeper cells.”

    Syrians check the site of the Jan. 16 suicide attack.
    Syrians check the site of the Jan. 16 suicide attack. Photo: delil souleiman/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
    On Thursday, the U.S.-led coalition and its allied forces with the SDF stepped up artillery assaults and airstrikes on the last pocket of Islamic State control, an area encompassing 10 square miles of small villages in Deir Ezzour province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

    The U.S. has more than 2,000 troops in the country and maintains bases throughout parts of northern and eastern Syria. One of those bases operated by the U.S. military is on the outskirts of Manbij, the site of Wednesday’s suicide bombing.

    The U.S.-backed forces also have continued to advance on the ground, the observatory said, with 180 Islamic State militants surrendering this week. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of the group’s militants have fled the collapsing self-declared caliphate, with many hiding out in the eastern Syrian desert where they are difficult to track down. Others, including high-level commanders, have hired smugglers to ferry them out of Syria and into Turkey or Europe.

    The stepped-up offensive comes during a period of heightened uncertainty in the war against the extremist group. President Trump in December announced a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, claiming to have defeated Islamic State. He has since walked back that statement and said the U.S. would begin the pullout “while hitting the little remaining ISIS territorial caliphate hard.”

    But even as that has shrunk to less than 1% of what the group held before, Islamic State has counterattacked through IED explosions or suicide bombings.

    Targets have included armed forces on all sides of Syria’s complicated conflict, as well as civilians who were displaced from their homes by the battles against Islamic State.

    “The attacks that we have been seeing, and especially the attack that we saw yesterday in Manbij indicates that Islamic State has the reach to carry out quite sophisticated attacks,” said Columb Strack, an analyst at Conflict Monitor by IHS Markit, an intelligence-collection and analysis company. “And they have the intelligence structure in place to identify targets.”

    The coalition has said its battle against Islamic State isn’t just about capturing territory. The campaign aims to disable the group’s ability to spread propaganda and inspire and conduct acts of violence. Islamic State’s once-robust propaganda abilities have been degraded but it is still quick to claim responsibility for attacks around the world, including ones unrelated to the group.

    The coalition is “aware of the enemy’s capabilities and they still present a very real threat to the long-term stability in this region,” said spokesman Army Col. Sean Ryan. He added that Wednesday’s attack was still being investigated.

    The full scale of the group’s long-term threat remains unknown, with estimates of the number of militants left varying widely.

    A year ago, the U.S.-led coalition said there were less than 3,000 Islamic State militants. But a United Nations report released in August estimated the group’s membership still numbered between 20,000 and 30,000 in Syria and Iraq.

    Even if the U.S. fully pulls out of Syria within months, other foreign members of the coalition have said they would keep ground troops in the country, including France.

    The Syrian regime has waged its own battles against Islamic State, but the government’s main focus has often been mainstream antigovernment rebels. If the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad does pick up the fight, Islamic State is likely to reorient the insurgency to target the regime.

    “They’re targeting the U.S. and Kurdish forces now and eventually the target will become the Syrian government,” said Mr. Strack of IHS. “Whomever happens to be the dominant power controlling their territory…they will become the prime target.”

    —Nazih Osseiran and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

    Write to Raja Abdulrahim at raja.abdulrahim@wsj.com

    It is interesting that the attack occurred in Manbij–which just happens to be the town that Erdgan has been pressuring the Americans and the Kurds to evacuate, to enable Turkish forces to begin their invasion of Syria. There is some evidence of past collusion between IS and the Erdogan regime. Maybe that collusion has been resumed now, to allow Erdogan to attack U.S. soldiers in Syria while blaming the attacks on someone else.