I'm strongly pro-Kurd and have long thought an independent Kurdish state might be the best thing that could happen to the Middle East right now. I also know that several major powers would absolutely go to war to prevent that from happening.
There are earlier points in recent history where we could have gone all-in on helping the Kurds achieve independence and solid, defensible borders. It would have required a staggering investment in money, diplomatic capital, and almost certainly military force.
It might still have been worth doing, even with all of the consequences - a bold gamble to create a new state in the Middle East that would be better, and a more reliable ally, than any of the states it absorbed territory from.
Needless to say, none of the states contributing territory would have seen it that way. The chain reaction of hostilities could conceivably have sparked a regional all-out war and possibly a world war. At the very least, it would have meant a hair-raising decade.
But that time is past, and with the current web of interest at play and the forces currently on the board, I don't see any way to get there from here. I don't think the Kurds do either. Syrian Kurds fight ISIS fiercely but long ago ceased to be a "rebel" force in any real sense.
What the Syrian Kurds are mostly looking for is security and stability for their area. At this point, the only way they're going to get that is to reach an accommodation with Damascus, and Damascus/Moscow will want that too. Assad is a monster but he plays coalition politics.
Does the small presence of support/training/special ops American forces in Syria meaningfully change this strategic calculation for the Kurds? I doubt it. They will miss the help fighting ISIS remnants and have said so, but we can still help them deal with Damascus long-term.
Of course, the urgent question is Turkey. The theory is that American troops were a tripwire (and, as the Russians learned to their sorrow, a very effective fighting force despite their small numbers) that checkmated Erdogan's plans to push the Kurds back from his border.
You don't have to like Erdogan at all (I sure don't) to see his logical strategic interest in doing so. But he also wants to push that logical demand for border security as an excuse to kill Syrian Kurds, weaken their infrastructure, and pump up his popularity at home.
The checkmate theory assumes Turkey, a NATO member, will not take any action that might involve violence against U.S. troops. That assumption may no longer be valid. Erdogan emits a lot of hot air, but he also seems very serious about pushing the Kurds out of key Syrian cities.
And if you look at how Turkey operates in Syria, you'll see that conflict with that tripwire U.S. force would not mean Turkish regular military units rolling up and challenging the Americans to a jousting match. The vanguard is Turkey's mad-dog Islamist Syrian militia allies.
What you'd get, if Erdogan really means business, is local militia swarming Kurdish-US positions, then maybe some Turkish artillery support - so sorry your people were killed, we were shooting at the Kurdish "terrorists" and protecting our noble Syrian allies.
It could escalate into bloody chaos very quickly. We'd bring in massive airpower to support our people. And then hello, Russia enters the fray. There would be much screaming and yelling at the U.N. I wouldn't place any bets on who gets blamed for the escalation.
Does Erdogan want what he wants badly enough to risk that madness? All signs are that he does. Our ability to prevent it cannot depend entirely on ground forces if they have lost their inviolable status as a protective umbrella for the Kurds.
Conversely, that continued ground presence might give the Kurds and other allied forces unreasonable expectations of how much we can passively protect them by simply being there. The Kurds have miscalculated before.
Everything depends right now on a deal with Turkey that resolves their dispute with the Kurds without military action. Removing our troops MIGHT make that harder, or it MIGHT help us work something out with Ankara. It's a gamble, but so is everything in the Middle East.
Mattis made his views clear and they should not be dismissed out of hand. I think I have about the same opinion of both Erdogan and the Kurds as he does. But there might be a way to do this that avoids bloodshed and creates a more stable situation than a permanent U.S. garrison.
Belligerent rhetoric is one of Turkey's major exports. Some of Erdogan's people are talking up a Kurdish massacre. He wants that talk in the air, but he also has goals that require a relationship with the U.S. and Europe that goes away forever if he attempts genocide.
It would be nice if our political elite could project something other than blind panic, dogmatic fury, and partisan frenzy as we try to fit the pieces of the Syrian puzzle together, but I suppose that's too much to ask. /end
