American Shame: Selling Out The Kurds

One, an Angelica Jolie look-alike who believed herself an ally of America, died fighting ISIS. Another, a young couple, both living, could be young boho artists from Soho. Another pair of ladies, grinning slyly, look like BFFs out for a night on the town. But for their combat fatigues and assault rifles, they could hail from New York City, Los Angeles or New Orleans.

They are brave Kurdish freedom fighters, a vulnerable minority whom Donald Trump has thrown under the bus. Within a day of his announcement of withdrawal from Kurdish-held parts of Syria, a reported 15,000 Turkish troops invaded with a single objective: exterminate.

Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been seeking the murder of the Kurds for years. And with Trump in the White House, he knew his chance had come. Like Russia’s Vladamir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iran’s Ali Khameni, or any of the dictators who are asceding around the globe (and with whom Trump identifies), Erdogan knows that Trump is an isolationist whose ultimate game plan is to establish a dictatorship in America– which he is doing quite successfuly– while using the office of the presidency to expand his personal business empire globally.

Trump understands that in the new world order, oligarchal economic expansion for personal gain is the name of the game, establishing Trump hotels and such, while defending American foreign policy is an impediment to the limitless deployment of personal power, and so, consequently, Trump has used his office either to undermine his own country’s national security establishment, weakening the departments that defend us, or else used such offices as springboards to personal, private economic or political deals.

In the case of the Kurds, two things have happened, I suspect. One is that Trump wants to establish Trump Hotels and resorts in Turkey and so gave Erdogan the green light to invade northern Syria and destroy the Kurds. The second is that in light of UkraineGate and growing calls for Trump’s impeachment, Erdogan intuits that Trump’s days may be numbered and so has decided to invade and destroy the Kurds while the beleaguered President is yet in office, and regardless of what Trump thinks of it.

Erdogan knows that no other incoming American administration will stand for holding open the door to genocide. Trump will. And genocide is what we’re talking about. The Turk’s who, to this day, deny their horrific mass murder of the Armenian people and whose human rights track record is atrocious, will have no problem with slaughtering the Kurds.

The problem in trying to grasp the motives and methods of such as Trump or Erdogan in sane foreign policy terms is that it can’t be done. Not even the coldest Realpolitik analysis can do justice to the lunatic greed that drives such men. One must, instead, see them in terms of political gangsters like Hitler or even traditional ones like Al Capone, to grasp the corrupt logic behind their brutality.

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Alan Kaufman’s novel, The Berlin Woman, has just been published by Mandel Vilar Press.