the flaw in your reply is what else could we have done? impose sanctions on a NATO Ally? get the useless UN to issue some useless security council edict? that Turkey would have ignored anyway? might have looked better in the press but useless.
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
This should be a dilemma for Libertarians and three-quarters Libertarians like WTF and me. You don't want the USA involved in unnecessary foreign wars, and you don't want to spend money foolishly on military adventures. The Turks, our NATO ally, fought side by side with us in Korea, and housed our nuclear weapons during the cold war. The Kurds fought side by side with us in Iraq. They did the brunt of the fighting in Syria, with casualties in the tens of the thousands, while we only suffered 12 fatalities, according to what General Mattis said this morning.
Trump didn't try hard enough. Apparently he went off script and impulsively decided to fold to Erdogan during a conversation a few days ago. We probably could have pushed the Kurds and the Turks to come to an accommodation that wouldn't require bloodshed, perhaps forcing the Kurdish soldiers to move out of the corridor Turkey wants along the border.
I've been thinking about analogies, of what this will look like to history if the Kurds die fighting to the last man. Masada and the Alamo come to mind. But the Hebrews and the Texans weren't betrayed by their allies. Maybe the movie Platoon. Sargent Elias was killed by North Vietnamese soldiers, but it was because Barnes betrayed him. We betrayed the Kurds. Trump's going to go down on the wrong side of history in this.