Bring the Syrian Kurds With You, America
They have been loyal allies and need an exit strategy too

America is war-weary, and so President Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria was the right call, no matter what the foreign policy hawks say. But that doesn't mean that America can simply walk away, I argue in my morning column at The Week: We don't want to leave the Syrian Kurds, who aided our efforts against ISIS, more vulnerable than when we intervened. The best way of arranging their security, I suggest, is by letting all those who want to flee to come to America.
Go here to read the piece.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
America must defend itself and do what is best for its people! We're not the babysitter of the world...
It is best for us to champion human rights. It's what makes us different and stronger than China and Russia.
You and your prog ilk don't give a shit about human rights. Only when an atrocity can be weaponized to wield against your ideological opponents in the West does the left talk about it, and as soon the issue loses political usefulness you drop it like it never happened.
You never heard shit from the left about the plight of the Kurds until now, and as soon as their political expedience wanes they'll never be mentioned again by your lot.
Vile hypocrites.
Then who's going to fight our next proxy war if they're all over here? Use your head.
How about the Gurkhas? Haven't heard much from them lately.
The people who make pickles?
The pickles will go well with all the cottage cheese we've acquired from helping the Curds.
There's a headline for you:
The Kurds Are On The Way
I predict this column will be enthusiastically embraced by the commentariat.
Invade the World; Invite the World!
Excellent idea. It's unconscionable that Drumpf is even considering withdrawing from Syria. President Hillary Clinton would obviously not be making this strategic error, which is one of the many reasons I voted for her.
However if this cowardly retreat absolutely must happen, we might as well try to get something positive out of it. If a Syria withdrawal can end up helping the Koch / Reason open borders agenda, maybe it wouldn't be the clear-cut Putin victory I had been expecting.
Invite as many as you'd like to stay in your home.
I like the Kurds and all, but I find it discomfiting that we have authors who feel entirely comfortable (self righteous) calling for out and out reverse colonialism.
Bring them over and settle them along the U.S./Mexico border.
Heh. 😀
How are they at building things? Walls... for instance?
Let the Kurds fall where they may
Just leave them all of our hardware when we exit. Should be good to go at that point. Turkish Air Force vs: US SAMs.
"letting all those who want to flee to come to America"
Well that's going to cause the Trumploompas' heads to asplode!
Bring the Afghanis with you
Bring the Iraqis with you
Bring the Pakistanis with you
Bring the Somalians with you
Bring the Libyans with you
Bring the Ugandans with you
Bring the Syrians with you
Bring the Yemenis with you
Why do you hate the people of Chad and Uzbekistan?
The Chad's and Beki's can come too!
Although when I say it like that I make them sound white, which would probably reduce their chances
Hasn't that been precisely the MO since Day 1?
So this is the new angle from left-wingers like Dalmia now.
They don't bother to acknowledge the previous administration prosecuted an illegal war in Syria and that they subsequently bungled that involvement to the point of confusion.
In any other normal setting, the pulling out of a war is to be welcomed but yet here we are. The problem they have, and its laughably and painfully obvious, is their arguments' starting point is 'because Tump'.
Like Dalmia and her progressive cohorts gave a shit about Kurds all these years.
No, I will not read your article because I've already seen the narrative. We'll see how it's applied when a leader other than Trump does the exact same thing at some point in the future.
To her credit, she still doesn't give a shit about Christians being persecuted and murdered in Sudan.
The article does actually discuss the long history of America using the Kurds to do their dirty work for them in the region, and then neglecting them when the Kurds deign to ask for anything in return.
Yeah, Bush Sr. fucked them hard. But hey, they fucked up, they trusted us. Let that be a lesson to other native populations. If you don't want to be massacred in retaliation when we pull out, don't ally with us against a psychopathic dictator.
Yes, but at the time no one cared outside conservative circles if I remember correctly.
So excuse me if I'm skeptical when progressives - and their long record of unprincipled stances and TDS nonsense - suddenly feign concern for the Kurds.
Dumb comment. Kurds only care about America about as much as we can fund them and supply them with guns. They would abandon us in a heartbeat if they had a better suitor but no one else besides us is dumb enough to start open ended, pointless conflicts in the Middle East.
We owe Kurds collectively nothing. We already have done more for them than we ever received in return.
"Illegal war" tell us more about it Mr. Assad. I swear to God you motherfuckers might as well be Russian trolls the way you parrot the propaganda. You think Assad is in power because of adherence to law? Tyrants like Putin and Assad appealing to the rule of law is a fucking joke.
There's plenty of merc opportunities for you to grab a rifle and go fight with them, shitlib.
The US Congress has the power to make war. Alone. Not the President, Congress.
They have long abandoned such responsibility, much easier to not get sucked into a messy vote and just roll everything into a never ending war on terror and let the President decide everything.
Quick google search shows 2 million Syrian Kurds. We allow appx 1 million people to immigrate here per year. So let them immigrate but no one else gets in for two years. Good luck making it happen.
Old Beaners fifth cousins get ferked?
The other thing is the Kurds don't really need help. Sure, they can use it, but from I can see (and I may be wrong) they've learned to fight without outright American aid.
The Kurds want their country and they'll fight for it with or without America.
How about actual Kurdish fighters targeted for reprisals? That's not the same as the entire Kurdish population, surely?
The Trumpists will just say "they're furriners, screw 'em!"
The progressives will just say "they're diverse, bring them all over!"
So someone has to be the adult in the room and apply some sort of moral reasoning to the situation.
It seems to me, that the US government owes *some* type of obligation to the Kurdish people, for using them when it was convenient to do so, and then abandoning them when they were no longer convenient.
I don't know what the precise answer is, but I don't think the answer is "zero".
Perhaps but except here it's not about a deep-rooted concern for the Kurds.
It's about sticking it to Trump. He's 'not well'.
Also, Trumpists, or at least Trump (likely), won't say "They're furriners, screw 'em!" They'll say "We can't just let anybody who whimsically claims to have been a freedom fighter and/or victim of reprisal into the country, we'll have to vet them somehow." and that will get tarred over with "They hate furriners!" the way "fleeing hardship/poverty" is now a valid justification for granting asylum.
America has spent damn near almost 30 years protecting the Kurds, and God only knows how many billions (trillions?) of dollars in the process!
I would argue that we have already done more than enough for them and don't "owe" them shit.
"It seems to me, that the US government owes *some* type of obligation to the Kurdish people, for using them when it was convenient to do so, and then abandoning them when they were no longer convenient."
They already got their pound of flesh from us. Thousands of US dead and billions in aid and military hardware.
Preach your moral claptrap to people with less sense.
So don't leave like we did in Vietnam? This whole anti-war thing is hella confusing to me.
No kidding. They shift like mad with their principles.
There are two million Syrian Kurds, does Dalmia really think the US can absorb those kind of numbers? If they do not all come, what kind of situation will the remainder be in as an even smaller minority?
I'm pretty sure that the Kurds want an independent Kurdistan, rather than taxi driver jobs in New York city.
But hey, that won't fit Shikha's agenda so let's expel the entire population to the US. Clean the area of Kurds entirely.
The Iranian Mullahs will be happy, Erdogan will be happy, and Shikha will be happy.
God, I wish instead that we could deport Currytwat's sorry ass to the Kurdish Autonomous Zone.
Free the Curds! Let them have their own ethnic homeland, separate from the Whey.
You know who else wanted to clear out entire ethnic populations and move them elsewhere?
But not if it hurts our country...
https://aladyofreason.wordpress.com/
I did not bother reading the comments. Trumptards are having a bad day, because their orange fascist has just guaranteed his own impeachment conviction! How many Republican Senators needed to convict?
Or close enough for Mueller to finish the job.
But that leaves us with a Christian Taliban leader as President.
These are dangerous times for lovers of liberty
if you need abest home job see this site.................... http://www.mesalary.com