The Turkey-Syria situation would seem like the perfect case for our vaunted international organizations. Turkey levels a serious charge of terrorism against Syrian Kurdish militia, which they deny. Why are there no fact-finding missions, no investigations, no rulings?
In all the stories written about Turkey-Syria, including the frenzied media coverage over the past two days, do you recall reading anything about whether Turkey's allegations against the Syrian Kurds have any merit at all?
That seems like an important detail, doesn't it? A NATO member is talking about invading another country to counter a terrorist threat, but no one in the international diplomatic community or media seems to be working very hard on finding out if Turkey's complaint is valid.
Mostly what we get is a little mumbling about how Turkey has legitimate security concerns, which is interesting. You don't see any firm declarations that the Turks are paranoid lunatics who invented the terrorism issue out of thin air as an excuse to attack the Syrian Kurds.
Turkey indisputably does have a Kurdish terrorist organization within its borders, the PKK party. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., EU, and NATO. They are responsible for a good deal of violence.
Turkish President Erdogan is, to put it mildly, a problematic authoritarian leader whose agenda merits close scrutiny. He's not a man whose word should be taken at face value, especially anything pertaining to his political adversaries.
But the PKK *is* a terrorist threat to Turkey, and if they really are receiving support from parties outside Turkey's borders, that is a legitimate security concern, no matter how much of a tyrannical nutjob Turkey's current leader happens to be.
And that's the rub - in all of the current hysteria over Turkey-Syria, nobody is standing up to call Erdogan a lunatic and dismiss his complaints about the PKK getting support from Syria. Nobody at the UN, NATO, EU, or anywhere else is acting like he fabricated all this.
And if he is, they should be, shouldn't they? The halls of our august international institutions should be ringing with powerful denunciations of Erdogan for using phony security concerns as a pretext for ethnic cleansing. UN blue helmets should be popping up along the border.
The Kurds are not a single homogeneous group. The best of them would probably do a better job of running an independent state than most groups in the Middle East, and if they had one, its government could be held accountable for everything happening inside its borders.
But they don't have their own state. If they declared one, it would absorb territory from several other nations, none of which want to see that happen. Kurdish bids for autonomy have not worked out. The region would probably be better off in the long term if one of them had.
In the absence of such a central authority, it's not easy to keep tabs on what every single Kurdish group is doing. It's not easy to get unbiased, trustworthy information about ANYONE in the Middle East. Everyone there knows how to manipulate Western media and diplomats.
It is, therefore, not beyond the bounds of belief that Kurdish groups aligned with the PKK have been operating under the umbrella of a U.S. security guarantee, perhaps with the tacit complicity of other Kurdish groups that don't agree with them but don't want to blow the whistle.
No one at any level of any international organization involved in Syria is standing up to declare unambiguously that this is NOT happening. No one is calling B.S. on Turkey's claims. No one is suggesting a multinational effort to investigate and protect Turkey's border if needed.
Everyone is happy to just leave the U.S. holding the bag and keeping the Turkish border region in an uneasy stasis, while the Kurds are left holding all the ISIS prisoners, and millions of Syrian refugees sit in Turkey forever. It's a total failure of multilateralism.
Meanwhile, Russia and Iran get what they want out of their client state in Damascus, whose blood-spattered gas-spewing dictator gets to shirk all responsibility for what happens in the northeastern part of his country.
This was all predictable. The Obama administration went utterly mad on a years-long quest to find reliable "white hat" allies in Syria it could support against Assad. It NEVER FOUND ANY, at least not any group with significant fighting power.
We ended up ignoring the security concerns of Turkey, a NATO ally, without ever investigating those concerns or seeking to alleviate them so unilateral action by Turkey would be unnecessary, while we cultivated relations with non-state actors in a savage and futile civil war.
Maybe no one wants to tell Turkey to put up or shut up because they're afraid to drive it out of NATO and the European orbit by insulting it. Maybe no one wants to admit Turkey has legitimate concerns because it's important to portray the Kurds as nothing but white hats.
But if the chaos surrounding Trump's intention to pull out of Syria proves anything, it's that the time for murky assertions and mumbles is over. If the U.S. is solely responsible for the Syrian side of the Turkey-Syria border, the American people deserve absolute clarity.
Why is the international community, which we support and provide the lion's share of funding for, so completely incapable of determining if Turkey really does face a security threat from Kurdish groups in Syria? Shouldn't we demand the U.N. get to the bottom of this immediately?
If they can't, then WE need to. The American people need to know exactly what's going on in northeastern Syria so we can judge whether President Trump is making the right call. We have an election coming up. Isn't keeping us in the dark a form of "election interference?"
If Turkey is completely fabricating its charges of Syrian Kurdish assistance for the PKK, then we need to know RIGHT NOW. And then we should expect the ENTIRE CIVILIZED WORLD to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with U.S. troops to stop a lying dictator from committing ethnic cleansing.
There should be helicopters ferrying British, French, and German troops into the Kurdish territories immediately. U.N. blue helmets should be everywhere. The lying dictator Erdogan wound't dare attack them and risk starting a war with the entire Western world, right?
And this should be accompanied by ringing denunciations of Erdogan as a liar from every Western nation in every international forum. Fabricating a terrorist threat to justify ethnic cleansing would be one of the ultimate international crimes, wouldn't it? Just shy of genocide!
And if Erdogan isn't all wet - if Turkey really does face a security threat from any Syrian Kurdish group - then why the hell would we protect them with American troops, no matter how the battle against ISIS went? We're not obliged to protect terrorists attacking a NATO ally.
If the good Kurdish groups who were stalwart allies against ISIS are turning a blind eye to the activities of PKK supporters, that needs to stop immediately. It won't stop if they think the U.S. will protect them in perpetuity, no questions asked.
If our good Kurdish allies are incapable of shutting down PKK supporters operating from their territory, they should say as much, and the international community - EU, UN, NATO, all of us, not just the U.S. - should help them. We can defuse the situation by resolving it.
That covers just about all the possibilities. I don't have any super-secret intel that tells me which one is true. I'm a longtime supporter of the Kurds in general who thinks they should have a state of their own. I've watched them long enough to know they're not homogeneous.
I think the U.S. should support its allies, but it should be the whole civilized world, not just us. The Kurds who fought ISIS were the champions of civilization against savagery, not just U.S. allies. That doesn't automatically make them perfect and flawless.
I don't care much for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and I don't trust him. He's taken Turkey in a dangerous, deeply regrettable direction. But he definitely is not hallucinating the PKK. Turkey is a NATO ally with a real security concern. Unlike the Kurds, it is a state actor.
Instead of making this a big U.S. political freak-out story about Trump, or even a story about whether a handful of U.S. soldiers stays in a volatile part of Syria, this should be about whether Turkey has a legit complaint and what NATO and the West are ready to do about it. /end
