Okay, so, supporting a general policy of troop draw-down is one thing. Asserting that the U.S. military role in the Middle East over the last two decades has been immensely destructive is, to be sure, the only rational view of the evidence. I of all people certainly believe in diminishing the U.S. military boot-print around the world. But suddenly throwing a long-standing U.S. ally to the wolves, as Trump has done today... that is something else entirely.
Here we have a tribal people, the Kurds, fighting a decades-long struggle to achieve independence from the autocratic governments that surround them. We have an authoritarian regime in Erdogan's Turkey with an appalling record of committing human rights violations in Kurdish territory. And we have the United States (up to now at least) tacitly encouraging Kurdish national aspirations along the way, overthrowing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and allying with Kurdish fighters in its conflict with ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
And now, after tendering all this hope and encouragement to the Kurdish desire for autonomy, the U.S. government is effectively green-lighting a Turkish invasion of the Kurds' territory... with God knows what humanitarian consequences to follow.
We can see in this the latest of many U.S. betrayals of vulnerable tribal minorities of the sort that Akbar Ahmed charts in his book The Thistle and the Drone. Once again, the United States gave the appearance of support to a tribal group seeking independence. And once again -- when it really counted - we pulled the plug, leaving them to fend for themselves against an overpowering centralized authoritarian government that has been repressing them for decades.
Trump's ghastly decision today is almost certain to pave the way for war crimes or other atrocities, as the Turkish military moves into Kurdistan (plus Turkey plans to use the appropriated space as an open-air detention center for Syrian refugees - oh joy). As these brutalities unfold, neoconservatives and liberal hawks are sure to draw the wrong lesson once again, and to hoot disapproval at the President's "isolationist" foreign policy agenda.
Trump, though, is no isolationist. He is more than happy to drop restrictions on drone strikes and further inflate the military budget when it suits him to do so. Trump is quite simply a person with no integrity, no sense of loyalty, and with a love of autocrats and dictators the world over, in whom he can see reflected his own tinpot fantasies of total power. That, rather than any kind of discernible foreign policy doctrine, is what explains his decision today.
Reading the news this morning that we are now abandoning the Kurdish fighters to their fate, I was immediately put in mind of E.E. Cummings' poem "Thanksgiving (1956)." Here, he was writing about another, similar, chapter of history, in which the United States first egged on a struggle for independence, and then refused to offer life-saving support when it mattered -- that is, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
The U.S. in that moment was confronted with a foreign policy decision that was perhaps a lot less straightforward than Cummings' poem acknowledges. After all, to aid Hungary in 1956 would have risked all-out war with a nuclear-armed rival great power, with untold consequences for the future of humanity.
By contrast, nothing compelled us to simply up and leave Kurdish territory one day, all but waving the Turkish tanks in on our way out. This travesty is wholly our own doing, and all for no discernible purpose - a completely gratuitous cruelty and betrayal of a group of people who basically won the war against ISIS for us, at unimaginable sacrifice.
Whatever merit Cummings' words may have had as related to the events of 1956, therefore, they seem even more relevant today. He wrote:
but the voice-with-a-smile of democracy
announces night & day
"all poor little peoples that want to be free
just trust in the u s a"
suddenly uprose hungary
and she gave a terrible cry
"no slave's unlife shall murder me
for i will freely die"
she cried so high thermopylae
heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN
"be quiet little hungary
and do as you are bid
a good kind bear is angary
we fear for the quo pro quid" [..]
so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be as thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)
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