{"id":800364,"date":"2019-10-14T15:04:51","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T21:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=372982"},"modified":"2019-10-14T15:04:51","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T21:04:51","slug":"opinion-morgan-liddick-pulling-out-of-syria-a-real-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/opinion-morgan-liddick-pulling-out-of-syria-a-real-error\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Morgan Liddick: Pulling out of Syria a real error"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

OK, this is a real error: Never mind the frustration of never quite getting the job done. Look past the cost, both in blood and treasure. Forget the whole \u201cpromises made, promises kept\u201d thing.  American forces should not have been pulled out of northern Syria so that Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan was freed to send in the Turkish army to butcher Kurds. Kurds, we should remember, who were our allies in the task of dismembering the Islamic State in Syria. Now we have \u2014 there\u2019s no nice way to say this \u2014 left them in the lurch.<\/p>\n

This abandonment will affect our ability to work toward
\nfavorable outcomes throughout the region. It is, from first to last, a bad
\ndecision.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the problem the administration faced in northern Syria was not of its own making. Its modern iteration goes back to the joint decision by the British and French to carve the moribund Ottoman Empire up like a Christmas turkey following its defeat in World War I. In Paris and London, cartographers and politicians got out maps and rulers and went to town creating mandatory territories, protectorates, puppet states and dependencies.<\/p>\n

But some people \u2014 Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians and the like \u2014 got nothing. To the first, this rankled. Kurds had lived in the interior of the region, in the highlands and the Tigris-Euphrates watershed, for a very long time. But as empires washed over them \u2014 the Umayyads and Abbasids, the Seljuks, Persians and Ottomans \u2014 the Kurds never had a state of their own. They requested one, and they had their supporters, but it never happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the wave of national statism washed over the Middle East \u2014
\nmaking Shi\u2019ites, Sunnis, Khawarjis and Druze into Iranians, Iraqis and Turks,
\nOmanis, Lebanese and others \u2014 the Kurds were left to their own devices in
\nstates they didn\u2019t create and in which they were forever minorities. From the
\n1950s forward, they fought with, and were used as proxies by, Syria, Turkey,
\nIraq and Iran. Their relationship with Turkey was particularly fraught, since
\nthey occupied territory on both sides of that country\u2019s border with most of its
\nneighbors.<\/p>\n

Following the collapse of Saddam\u2019s totalitarian state, Iraqi Kurds formed a semi-autonomous republic in the north of the country<\/a> that was, for the region, relatively enlightened, open and Western-oriented. The rise of al-Qaida in Iraq, and eventually of the Islamic State, plunged their region into war \u2014 one reason they were eager to join the anti-Islamic State alliance and to do more than their share of dying in the fighting to eradicate that evil in Iraq. <\/p>\n

Syria\u2019s Kurds
\nwere instrumental to the Islamic State\u2019s defeat<\/a> as well but they were far
\nmore problematic partners. Not only was their leadership authoritarian, it was
\navowedly Communist. It was also affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, a far-left
\ngroup named as a terrorist organization<\/a> by the United States and the European
\nUnion. Since the 1970s, they have been conducting terror operations inside
\nTurkey, which has responded with several armed incursions into Syria.<\/p>\n

A complicating factor in our alliance of convenience with
\nthe Kurds against the Islamic State group was President Barack Obama\u2019s cultivation
\nof Turkey\u2019s president Erdo\u011fan, with whom he had what he called a \u201cbond of
\ntrust.\u201d Erdo\u011fan is a Turkish politician with a soft spot for Islamists and
\nbitter hatred for the Kurds, regardless of their utility in keeping the Islamic
\nState from Turkey\u2019s border. He was willing to bide his time while the Islamic
\nState was a problem, but now he is unrestrained. Which creates serious problems.<\/p>\n

Erdo\u011fan sent
\nthe Turkish army into northern Syria to extirpate the Kurds<\/a> there; evidently,
\nhis plans include settling the newly vacant areas with conservative Arabs loyal
\nto Ankara,a move likely to be appreciated in Turkey, but which is
\nfraught with the danger of creating conditions for a resurgence of the Islamic
\nState. It also presents dangers for us, since it is widely believed that President
\nDonald Trump\u2019s order for U.S. forces in northern Syria to stand down gave the
\n\u201cnod, nod, wink, wink,\u201d which the Turkish president took for an OK to invade
\nhis neighbor.<\/p>\n

It now appears that we have abandoned our ally of convenience in the name of keeping a campaign promise \u2014 not a healthy thing in the world of foreign policy. As the stories of atrocities spread, America will be associated with them. And if fighting heats up enough, Syria\u2019s allies Iran and Russia will be pulled in, pitting a NATO ally against them in a war with Trump\u2019s name on it.<\/p>\n

Morgan Liddick\u2019s column \u201cOn Your Right\u201d publishes Tuesdays in the Summit Daily News. Liddick spent 27 years working for the U.S. Foreign Service, primarily living abroad. He also spent 12 years teaching U.S. history and Western civilization at community colleges in Colorado and Texas. He lived in Summit County as recently as 2015. Contact him at <\/em>mcliddick@hotmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, this is a real error: Never mind the frustration of never quite getting the job done. Look past the cost, both in blood and treasure. Forget the whole \u201cpromises made, promises kept\u201d thing.  American forces should not have been pulled out of northern Syria so that Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan was freed to send in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-800364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-31 18:08:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}