One can rarely say of an entire people, without qualifiers: “They are an admirable people.” But it can be said of Kurds. They have shown incredible bravery in the face of fire, which I witnessed while making my two documentaries, Peshmerga and The Battle of Mosul, and great persistence in the face of adversity. They have suffered repeated betrayals, recurrent persecution, sequential attempts at genocide. And yet they are still standing. They yield neither in their spirit of resistance nor in their values.
I have often said of the English that they are an admirable people. I grew up, I was raised, with the conviction that the RAF flyers, and Winston Churchill, had saved Europe’s honour when everyone else had crumpled. Well, I feel the same about the Iraqi Peshmerga and the Syrian YPG (People’s Protection Units) fighters.
They have values and principles and an idea of Islam that is exemplary. In the West, everyone is searching for a democratic, secular Islam that believes in human rights, recognises and practises the strict equality of men and women, protects minorities and is a friend to Jews and Christians. Well there it is, right before our eyes. That’s the Kurds. Because these principles make up the cultural superstructure, the spiritual and political spinal column, of the Kurdish people. And that’s what makes it all the more absurd and appalling that we treat them the way we do.
Donald Trump’s desertion of the Kurds is an act of infamy for which I can cite no equal. We used the Kurds. We pushed them to the front line. They fought for us and often without us. And once the work was done, we threw them away. It is morally unjustifiable. It is intellectually abject.
This stain will not soon disappear from the foreheads of Trump and those who helped him make his decision. In war it is a terrible thing to have the blood of your enemies on your hands; but, as my friend Tom Kaplan, co-founder with me of Justice for Kurds, says, it is so much worse to have them stained with the blood of your friends. It is, I repeat, an indelible stain.
Why did he do it? One might say out of ignorance. Look at his asinine phrase about the Kurds not being at our sides at Normandy. One might say it is because he cannot conceive of any sort of diplomacy that is not based on “good deals” and mercantilism. That’s what he gave us to understand in that embarrassing statement he made at a rally in which he said the Saudis bought a lot from the United States — and paid cash.
In reality the only explanation that seems plausible to me is that he has an overall agreement with the Russians that cedes to them the management, control and, if I dare say so, the policing of that entire part of the world.
Now where are we? We are pushing the Kurds into the arms of the Russians. Trump, and Europe, sold them to the Russians. And the Kurds, out of necessity, like any other suffering people with their backs to the wall, are accepting the hand extended to them. That, too, is very sad. Very sad for us westerners, who are letting an ally, one of the most reliable we have, turn towards our adversaries. And, of course, very sad for the Kurds.
I have one concrete and simple proposal. Turkey should be evicted from Nato. The eternal appeasers will say, “If you do that, Turkey will turn towards Russia, change sides,” and so on. But that holds no water for two reasons. First, Turkey has already switched its allegiance; it has sidled up to Russia; it is buying Russian ground-to-air missiles; and it is a dialogue partner of the Chinese and Russian-dominated Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, formed in part as a counterbalance to Nato.
Second, we find ourselves today in the worst possible situation in strategic terms: how can we permit an ally to play a double game like Turkey’s? How can we continue to give it access to intelligence that it may then pass to the enemy? How can we allow it simultaneously to buy American aircraft and Russian anti- aircraft missile batteries capable of neutralising those same aircraft?
Also, Nato’s Incirlik airbase houses 50 nuclear warheads. Is it reasonable for this arsenal to be on Turkish territory? What if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were to gain control of it? We have already seen him, in recent years, limit American soldiers’ access to the base. Who is to say that he might not use the arsenal as an instrument of blackmail?
The main impact of this disaster on the Middle East is that the word of the United States — and possibly of the West as a whole — is no longer worth a kopek in this region. Middle Easterners believe in honouring one’s word, on staying loyal to one’s friends. From that point of view it’s game over. And it will be a very, very long time before America recovers its squandered credibility. To every other ally of the US this should be a source of great concern.
To those who say we should not get involved in conflicts that do not concern us directly, I would say: what is an event that does not “concern us directly”? The essential principle of geopolitics is that everything concerns everybody. In a world of adversities, even hostilities, any strengthening of those who do not wish us well (the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians, let’s say) weakens us.
This has been true since the dawn of time. Economics is a win-win domain. There are systems, contexts, that allow everyone to gain from a given set of actions. But in geopolitics the ratio of force is everything; what is won by one is necessarily lost by the other.
That’s why the idea of allowing Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Erdogan or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to appear as peacemakers or the saviours of this or that people is not only immoral but one that is strategically disastrous.
In the case of the Kurds the least one can say is that this concerns us directly for a simple reason. They had the keys to the prisons that held the jihadists captured in the war against Isis. Who, in Syria, holds the keys today? Muslim Brother Erdogan, that’s who.
Remember how, at the time of the battle for Kobane, he let through truckloads of arms headed for Isis? The same is true of Assad, the new keyholder No 2. Do not forget that one of Assad’s first acts at the outset of his war against his own civilians was to open his prisons and release jihadists that he later had to deal with.
We are in the same situation today. And it is terrifying.