Trump’s action in Syria was morally reprehensible and strategically blunderous
For years I’ve been saying and believing that Trump is just rough around the edges and gives the Liberals a hard time with his tactics such as saying that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii or that Trump had the biggest crowd size at his inauguration. These things are con games but on a relatively benign level. Of course the Left was totally wrong with Charlottesville when they revise history to say that he didn’t condemn Nazis and White Nationalists, because he clearly did. The Left went apoplectic when Trump wouldn’t admonish Putin in public due to the “meddling” in the 2016 election. If meddling is creating dopey facebook campaigns and tricking the DNC to give up their passwords then we have only ourselves to blame for this meddling. When the Left says that our country was attacked with Russia’s meddling my mind has a hard time matching it up with a real attack such as Pearl Harbor or 911.
However, what Trump did in Syria by pulling out a meager force of 50 troops that were not in combat but merely keeping a peace
between Turkey and the Kurds and thereby allowing a massacre of hundreds of Kurds including civilians, is deeply disturbing. In all of the fight against ISIS in Syria, the US lost a mere 8 troops. The Kurds lost 11,000 men/women because they did the ground game fighting with ISIS while the US supplied them with arms and gave them air cover.
Turkey has had a long standing fight with the PKK, the Turkish Kurds in their own country that has lasted decades. Even though
20 years ago there were ties between the PKK and the YPG’s, the Syrian Kurdish fighting force, it has not manifested for 2 decades. Turkey is just associating the PKK, admittedly a terrorist group in Turkey with the fighting Kurds in Syria who were so able and and with dedication, to ally with the US to deliver such a stunning defeat to the ISIS fighters.
The US has troops stationed around the world and in the Middle East alone 60,000 to 70,000 and 800 military bases around the world. Conventional wisdom is that Turkey would not have attacked the US troops standing between them and the Syrian Kurds. If Turkey was really poised to attack our troops wouldn’t it behoove our President to call an emergency meeting of Nato countries and call an emergency meeting of the UN to draw attention to this alarming situation? Why did Trump say that it’s good when groups fight a little bit comparing the slaughter by Turkish bombing of hundreds of Kurds to a fight in a playground when you let kids fight a little bit and then you separate them. How would Trump have felt if his family was bombed, G-d forbid, in such a “playground” skirmish. What about the 170,000 Kurds who fled the “safe zone” and are now in refugee camps? Is that also a good byproduct of a playground type skirmish? Who will help us with ISIS if or shall I say when they become a problem again? It’s been reported that hundreds of ISIS fighters or sympathizers have fled from prisons that were were bombed by Turkey. The Kurds are now engaged and preoccupied with Turkey and can not be dedicated to fighting or containing ISIS and why would they want to help us again anyway?
It could very well be that all of the attacks of the Left has driven Trump to lose his humanity but if that’s what happened then there’s no excuse for that either. His latest scandal of holding back military aide to Ukraine until they say that they will investigate the 2016 meddling or the corruption of Biden’s son’s dealing in a gas company is also very morally indefensible in that Ukraine was relying on that military aid to protect themselves from the attacking Russian forces.
The Syrian Kurds had no civil rights under Bashar al-assad and now they are being ethnically cleansed by Turkey to it’s North. To say that the Syrian Kurds are terrorists is factually wrong and bigoted by connecting them to the actions of their neighboring tribesmen. This is comparable to saying that if some Muslims are terrorists that all Muslims are terrorists, that if some Jews are involved with white collar crime that all Jews are that way, that if some African-Americans are criminals then they are all criminals. Nowhere in civilized society do we allow such guilt by association yet the animal leader from Turkey is allowed to act on such bigotry and Trump is getting out of his way to enable him to commit war crimes with a band of terrorist fighters of his own.
I was a strong Trump supporter but I agree with Warren Hecht. If Trump did this to the Kurds who were such a loyal and instrumental fighting force against ISIS and yet Trump says that HE defeated ISIS and won’t acknowledge what the Kurds did, who is to say that if Saudi Arabia and Iran finally come to some peace agreement but said that Trump has to sacrifice his allegiance with Israel, that he wouldn’t do that?
It hurts me to say this but after seeing this type of sociopathy from Trump both from the Ukrainian scandal but especially from this morally reprehensible act in Syria that I am now poised to vote for Joe Biden if he is the nominee from the Democrat party.
Comments