By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | October 18, 2019
The controversy over President Trump’s pullout on the Turkish–Syrian border will settle down quickly. It is another useful debunking of ancient shibboleths and decrepit truisms, like the long-impregnable encrustation of false wisdom that moving the U.S embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would unleash hell upon the whole Middle East.
There are about 35 million Kurds, approximately half of them in Turkey, where they make up about a fifth of Turkey’s population. A century ago almost all the Kurds had been in the Ottoman Empire, which the Allied powers broke up after World War I, a foolish decision that is on all fours with the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The result was the creation of four patched-together artificial states that have all now disintegrated: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria. They are not alike in other respects, of course. The Czechs and Slovenians (Yugoslavia) have flourished; the Slovaks and Croatians, and more recently the Serbs, have got by adequately well; and the rest of the remnants of Yugoslavia are struggling, but they are all living paradisiacal monuments to the foresight of western statesmen compared to the current fate of the populations of Syria and Iraq.
No American adult needs an update on what a debacle post-Saddam Iraq has become. The Iranians are the principal influence in the 60% of the population that is Shiite, precisely the opposite of what was intended when the United States invaded Iraq under President George W. Bush. The dispossessed Sunni 20% of Iraqis around Baghdad are being thoroughly misgoverned, even by Saddam’s standards, and the Kurds in the north, where most of the oil is, should be building a modern and autonomous Kurdistan that could attract and accommodate mistreated Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Syria — an authentic Kurdish homeland.
Instead, the Kurdish government in northern Iraq has been a sinkhole of corruption and misrule, anything but a Mecca for this bellicose, scattered, nomadic people.
The Kurds in northern Syria have undoubtedly been a source of considerable provocation to Turkey, and the Kurds in Turkey have also undoubtedly been a frequently oppressed minority. There is no room for anyone but the parties involved to sort this out.
The Turkish part of it is an internal matter for Turkey, and no one will ever know the rights and wrongs of who began or escalated the reciprocal antagonism of the Turkish central government and the Kurdish minority, which is effectively segregated in some parts of Turkey but thoroughly and distinguishedly integrated in others. It is, in any case, nobody’s business but the Turks’, including the Kurdish Turks.
The Syrian Kurds sometimes overlap with the PKK, an internationally recognized terrorist organization that is associated with the Syrian and Turkish Communist parties. PKK is not supported by all the Kurds in Syria, but they have substantially infiltrated that body of Kurds that made common cause with the West in destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
They were doubtless useful allies in that conflict, but they also destabilized as best they could all the surrounding governments, and the picture being painted by both the Left and the neoconservative Right in Washington of the Trump administration deserting gallant and constant allies is bunk. The Kurds were constantly threatening to release all the ISIS prisoners (and their families) that they were holding, and they always drew the Turks out in hot pursuit of them after border outrages.
The president has been much criticized for seeming to take this move peremptorily, and for departing from talking points in a telephone conversation with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The facts appear to be that the Turkish president announced that PKK outrages at the border required a Turkish response and that he intended to retaliate, whatever the U.S. thought of it, and that he also intended to begin the process of moving a million Syrian refugees back into Syria humanely.
As the U.S forces involved were 400 highly trained specialists, very competent soldiers but scarcely numerous enough to restrain the movement of main units of the Turkish army, President Trump salvaged a good arrangement from the conversation: Mr. Erdogan would avoid civilian casualties as much as possible and clear the Kurdish military back 20 miles from the border, with the understanding that if Turkey was negligent about civilians, the United States would apply heavy economic sanctions against Turkey.
The entry of the Turks brought forward the Syrian army, supplied by Russia, and tele-spectators may have the spectacle of Turkey, which has been the superpower of the region since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, pouring fire on Assad’s Syrian army. Mr. Assad will not be able to maintain such an exchange for more than a few days, regardless of the volume of Russian assistance he receives.
There were serious limits to what the U.S. could do with 400 servicemen trying to sort out a large guerrilla force on one side and a large professional national army on the other. In the broader context, American sanctions will be much more of a lever on Turkey than 400 soldiers could have been, and U.S. goodwill generally will weigh more heavily on Erdogan than any other factor in these considerations.
Because Europe rebuffed Turkey, the latter turned to the Middle East to focus its foreign policy, where it had been somewhat displaced by the Great Powers’ preoccupation with the area during and after World War II, stemming from the strategic value of Arabian oil and the American interest in the success of Israel as a Jewish state. The hostility to the West of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria was more than compensated for by the benevolence of Turkey and Iran.
Between 1973 and 1978 there was a golden window, created by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, when Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the Shah of Iran both were friendly with the West. This was the time of the Camp David agreement, hosted by President Carter, who succumbed to the American weakness for promoting democracy in infertile soil, and who bears considerable blame for the fall of the Shah, a strategic disaster for the United States after the Nixon-Kissinger triumph of bringing Egypt into the western camp.
President George W. Bush was mercilessly attacked by the same democratic bug when he inadvertently promoted Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Brotherhood, a process in which President Barack Obama, Senator Lindsey Graham, and the late Senator John McCain were not blameless.
The promise of the new arrangement is that the U.S. withdraws manpower from an area where its forces were extremely vulnerable but of insufficient number to be decisive, as candidate Trump promised. This removes all obstacles to good relations with Turkey, the region’s premier force and a NATO ally. Mr. Erdogan is an unreliable, Islamist ally, but as long as the U.S. isn’t protecting Kurdish terrorists, there is no reason that Turkish and American interests could not be reasonably aligned.
And Mr. Erdogan’s grandiose nationalist ambitions could be usefully satisfied by urging him to extend his influence over the Sunni Muslims of Iraq and Syria, leaving an autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq. With Hezbollah thus starved and discouraged in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, a Palestinian settlement and a stable Lebanon could finally be possible, and a solid coalition of aligned interests between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel, with U.S. backing, could expel Iran from its terrorist meddling around the region and relieve the United States of most of the defense burden it has carried in the region for seven decades.
Establishing sustainable local balances of power with comparatively modest contributions to maintain them has been the U.S. foreign-policy goal since shortly after World War II. It has been achieved in Western and Central Europe and is close at hand in the Far East and now, perhaps, in the Middle East as well. It is from this perspective that the president’s actions with the Kurds should be seen, not with shamed and breathless hand-wringing every time there is a casualty on the Syrian–Turkish border.
@ Frank Adam: Well, you just answered your own question, didn’t you?
The Allies did NOT break up the Austro – Hungarian Empire. It broke up of itself in October 1918. As the Allies recognised the new states that emerged they tried with at least three local plebiscites to sort out local inconsistencies in the majority population settlement patterns. They also had Poland, Yugoslavia and the others sign treaties of recognition and inheritance of international obligations which were commonly referred to between the World Wars as Minority Treaties as they were intended to guarantee Jews, Romanian Szecklers, Yugoslav Moslems etc a share of local taxes for their own schools and hospitals. These treaties had no enforcement agency and were dead letter. After 1945 they were caduque – obsolete as all minorities had been killed or deported.
Second the Poles had been partitioned in about 1776 – 1792 – mostly by Russia (Prussia and Austria) and took advantage of the defeat of those monarchies by the Allies and the Revolutionaries of 1918 and justification from Wilson’s 14 points to re-establish themselves. The Hungarians and Bohemians (Czechs) had fallen to the Habsburgs , Dukes of Austria by a series of royal marriages in the 15th century. As long as the old admin lasted that was fine but when the American and French Revolutions unleashed ideas of popular sovereignty ie nationalism and also rationalised uniform government, it was not; so there were revolts through the 19th century which could have been bought off with local autonomy – as Hungary – but not enough before the non system collapsed in WWI.
The Ottoman Empire was simply war booty in 1918 and it was the Turks who resorted to nationalism to recover under Ataturk and chucked the Greeks out of
Ionia.
The Arab World is so disparate geographically tribally and sectarianly that the real question is why despite Arabic and Islam could they NOT federate themselves after the French and British left in their post 1945 bankruptcy??
Hopefully our PREZ knows what he is doing. Will peaceniks now depart the warmongering Dems and vote for Trump. The big tent Republican Party contains Bolton and Paul. As the PREZ says we will see what happens.
The Allies did not break up the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It broke up of itself in October 1918. My late Father was a teenager in Budapest at the time and saw it happen.
First the Poles whom the Russians, Prussians and Austrians partitioned in about 1776 – 92 shook themselves free in the shadow of the defeat of those monarchies both by the Allies and the internal revolutions that deposed the monarchs.
Second the Habsburgs – Dukes of Austria were also kings of Hungary and of Bohemia as a result of 15th century royal marriages and as long as the separate feudal administrations remained and remained minimal the peoples were willing enough to put up with it. After the Americans and French Revolutions unleashed nationalism and rational uniform government the Bohemia and especially Hungary wanted out and rebelled consistently in 1848 and after like the Poles against the Russians in 1830’s and 1860’s. The only way they can come together again is by consent as did the 13 original colonies become states, whence the importance of the €U…which Trump does not like.
Third the Arab World is highly disparate by geography, tribe and sect which is how and why the Ottomans and Franco – British Empires could impose themselves. The real question to ask about the Arab World is why 60 to 70 years after the French an British left has it not managed to weave itself together and make a real federation ie with integrated economies and common policies of the Arab League. As if to prove the point it was the departing British who created the Arab League but the Arab states being states and NOT nations have not made as much of it as the could have.
So he thinks it’s enough to “discourage” Hamas and Hezbollah to have a “stable Palestinian settlement?” (And why would Turkey do that? Anybody remember the
Mavi Marmara? ) And other than sighing over the loss of Iran under Carter, it’s not mentioned? The only statement that makes any sense in this article is its title. Somebody, doesn’t 5 times 1 = 5? This captcha is always making me do it over and over for no reason.