What's Kurdish for "under the bus"?

The Turkish Army appears to be preparing to throw some additional complexity into the already-eleventh-dimension-chess-game that is post-IS Syria by threatening portions of northwest Syria currently controlled by the Kurdish PYD Party "People's Protection Units" (YPG) armed forces.

The Erdogan government, much like the governments preceding it, sees the YPG as functionally indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, and clearly now that the Islamic State is off the table and the endgame for Syria appears to be closing has decided to take action against the perennial bogeymen of the states of the Anatolian and the Fertile Crescent, the Kurds. Or, at least, one faction of that beleaguered people.

The YPG was central to the US drive to reduce the physical "state" of the Islamic State, providing the only really effective infantry for that campaign. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the "US-led anti-ISIS coalition" tossed the YPG in the Afrin region under the Turkish bus, noting that the YPG in northwest Syria were not within the coalition AO.

I'm not sure how this will work, given that the same article linked above claims that the Trump Administration's cunning Syria plan includes supporting some 30,000 "Syrian Democratic Forces" along the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly to continue to hunt IS fugitives but strategically to interdict Iraqi and Iranian support for proxies inside Syria such as Hizbullah.

The SDF, however, is pretty much the YPG with ash-and-trash. The YPG fielded something like 50,000 troops, while the Arab portions of the SDF consist of two main groups, the Jaysh al-Thuwar that includes some Turkmen and Kurds but seldom put together more than 2-3,000 fighters, and the Jaysh al-Sanadid militia of the Shammar tribe centered in northeastern Syria and Anbar province in western Iraq. The Shammar could assemble 8-10,000 troops. If the YPG decide to grab their A-bags and beat cheeks there won't be enough "SDF" to provide an interior guard on a porta-potty.

And this is beside the whole "The Kurds get screwed again" meme which seems to be a Middle Eastern thing and one in which the U.S. plays it's own shameful part.

Leaving the YPG units in the northwest to be smashed by Turkish tanks after coopting them to help fight for U.S. political objectives would be in the great tradition of American expeditionary war; maybe the Kurds can find some surviving Vietnamese mountain tribe Mike Force guys who can teach them the Nung term for "buddyfucker".

Once again we're reminded, not so much of Trump Administration incompetence (although that certainly plays a role here), but of the fact that describing the United States' Middle Eastern policy as an actual "policy" - that is, as something developed with a thoughtful consideration of regional realities and American national interests - remains somewhere between risible and tragic.

Or, as the Kurds themselves might observe; "Bikime te, Yankee! Ezê kuza dayika te sor bikim!"

Fruit of the Poison Tree, Continued

I really don't like writing about Iraq. That pooch has been so thoroughly screwed - and the possibility that the United States can do anything to UNscrew it at this point being about as likely as Donald Trump recommending a national holiday for Cesar Chavez's birthday - that there's really nothing of value I can say.

But when I read this I felt almost physically sickened.

One of the stupidest of the many, many stupid things that the Bushies believed about Iraq is that there really was an "Iraq"; that is, that short of the capability for murderously violent force (and the willingness to use it) that the former Ottoman and British colonial provinces of Kurdistan, Iraqi Sunnistan, and Iraqi Shiastan could be forced together into some sort of pathetic facsimile of a Westphalian nation-state.

And that there was truly a significant political faction that stretched across those three polities that was interested in some sort of coalition of shared power.

Instead the fucking morons invaded and the fucking inevitable happened. Iraq fractured along regional and tribal lines as ambitious and ruthless men concluded that it was better to rule in Sunni (or Shia, or Kurdish, or Basran, or Tikriti...) Hell than serve in someone else's heaven.

Of the Iraqi factions my personal sympathies have always been with the Kurds. No real particular reason, just my own sense that of the groups in What-Used-To-Be-Iraq the Kurds in general - though the linked article makes good points that "Kurds" is a pretty broad blanket for the congeries of political groups fighting for Iraqi Kurdistan - seem the most "reasonable" in Western terms, the least susceptible to the sort of ethnic and religious monomania that has made the modern Middle East such a goddamn sewer of lethal grudges and yes, I'm looking at you, too, Israel.

One of the things that pissed me off most about Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure was the need to pretend that there was an "Iraq" and that that "state" was something that was run through whoever sat on the gaddi in Baghdad. That weapons-grade idiocy prevented the sensible accommodations that the U.S. might have made with the varying factions to gently dismember the undead thing that was "Iraq" to cater to the fears and fantasies of the rulers of OTHER Frankensteinian sinkholes such as Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

This sensibility to the tender fee-fees of the Saud dynasty and whoever-the-fuck is currently tending the various North African dumpster fires was, of course, rewarded with the same sort of cheerful cooperation that our Middle Eastern "allies" are known for. And that cooperation appears to be just as wanting as it ever was.

I cannot understand anyone who would advocate the the United States needed more direct involvement in the Middle East's current Wars of Religion. As Lord Chesterfield said once, the pleasure would be transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.

But if any of the benighted denizens of this dangerous and incomprehensible place deserved tangible, physical help from the United States to defend themselves from the rapacious bastards all around them it is the people of Kurdistan, and the fact that the powers that be in this country cannot openly acknowledge and act on that is just another weight to the burden of grievous guilt borne by this nation and the mendacious, conscienceless scum infesting the Bush Administration that opened this Hope-less Pandora's Box in hopes of finding the glory their childish fantasy had convinced them was hidden within.