If ever there were a war with observers and combatants alike needing a scorecard to know who’s on which side, and when, it is the Syrian civil war.
The US thought: Turkey and Kurds oppose ISIS above all; Turkey because ISIS sends millions of refugees over her borders, and Kurds because ISIS grabs their land.
Russia thought: The US was naive in thinking Syria would ever be stable without its dictator, Assad.
The US thought: Russia considered ISIS a larger menace than a destabilized Syria.
The Kurds thought: The US, by arming them, and they, by fighting effectively to defeat ISIS, earned eternal American support.
It turns out, however, that Turkey — supposedly an American and NATOally — is as upset with the Kurds as it is with ISIS, and has turned on the Kurds, the American ally, thereby turning on the US.
So much for NATO allies coming to each other’s defense.
It is easy to peg Turkey as an ungrateful, even disloyal ally of the United States. It is easy to dislike Turkey altogether for a number of reasons: It denies the Armenian genocide; it is increasingly authoritarian; it is increasingly Islamic as a matter of state policy; it favors Hamas terrorists over Israel.
All this notwithstanding, Turkey’s pivot against the Kurds is an understandable, if counterproductive, move. Turkey, once a staunch ally of the US, took President Obama at his word in 2011 when Obama said, at the beginning of the Syrian civil war, that the dictator Assad must go. Yet, this administration did nothing to make that happen. Turkey took President Obama at his word when he laid down a “red line” against Syria’s use of WMD, yet did nothing when Syria crossed that line. Partially as a consequence of the American failure to live up to its self-defined, international commitments in Syria, Turkey bore an influx of some two millions Syrian refugees. The American support of the Kurds, which threatened the integrity of Turkey’s border with Syria, was, for Turkey, the straw that broke the camel’s back. The battle against ISIS would have to wait, or, at least, be deemed second priority.
It is not in Turkey’s best interest to slow the battle against ISIS, which represents a much larger, long-term threat than an informal, rather small, independent Kurdish region. Of course, the Kurds in Turkey have always craved independence and reunification with Kurds over the border in Syria and Iraq. But for sheer cruelty, destabilization of populations and potential ideological (jihadist) influence on Turkey’s Muslim majority, ISIS is the far larger threat.
For the US to earn back Turkey’s unequivocal support in the battle against ISIS, the US will have to provide far greater support to Assad’s enemies, far greater support to the refugees in Turkey and, above all, a far more muscular oppositon to ISIS.
The tragedy is that none of this needed to happen. Rather than pretending that Assad would somehow go away just because the US declared itself in favor of regime change in Syria, the US could have provided genuine military support to Syria’s pro-democracy forces back in 2011 — when there was no Islamic State in Syria (or Iraq), no flood of Syrian refugees in Turkey (or elsewhere) and no realistic Kurdish designs on Syria or Turkey. The price of overreaction is known. The price of underreaction is becoming more clear and dangerous by the day.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
