Mini-Cast #9 - A Brief History of the Kurds - New Beginning

It's much too soon to know anything definitive about the atrocities transpiring between Turkey and the Kurds, except that it's most definitely an atrocity, and one for whose blood stains America's hands because of Trump's withdrawal of all forces from Northern Syria, and all it took for unfathomable atrocities to happen is a day or two!

There are all kinds of rabbit holes I could jump us down into, dear listener, rabbit holes about the unfortunate and continued necessity of American military involvement in a number of overseas conflicts, about mismanagement of the Northern Middle East from both Republican and Democratic administrations: both the horrific fallout from Operation Desert Storm and the almost direct responsibility of George H. W. Bush  for one of the worst genocides in recent decades when he invited the Kurdish people to rise up against Saddam Hussein yet looked on from the sidelines while Saddam butchered anywhere from 90,000-230,000 Kurds without moving so much a finger in support of this ethnicity so key to the success of Operation Desert Storm; or about how the incompetence, of George W. Bush's Iraqi invasion, or perhaps even its very existence, now obscures the historical fact that Saddam Hussein was one of the bloodiest despots of modern times with a million dead for whom there is hopefully an afterlife where he must answer for it; or about how even Obama may bare enormous culpability for our new conundrums. How Obama may or may not have ruined the only opportunity we'll ever get to rid Turkey and the world of the perhaps now genocide-stained President Erdogan when Obama publicly opposed the Turkish military's coup d'etat in July, 2016, or about how Obama put the final nail in the Arab Spring's coffin by not taking Syrian rebels seriously, or that by not doing so he may have propelled the Syrian refugee crisis from a likelihood to an eventuality, or that his non-interference in Syria emboldened Vladimir Putin to make a successful gamble that Obama would similarly not interfere directly if Russia meddled in American affairs as it meddled in Syria.

None of these notions about the Obama presidency, even Obama's downplaying Putin's threat, can be pronounced with anything like complete certainty. But if we truly mean to examine our own role in the world, we have to entertain the possibility that the truth will never stop shocking us.

I'm not jumping us down any of those rabbitholes today, and the longer I can put off facing these questions, some of which are uncomfortable in the extreme for both listener and podcaster, the better off both I will be and my few listeners whom I don't want to alienate by chasing the most controversial subjects right away. The difference between being gifted at understanding politics and being incompetent at it is the difference between people whose predictions come true three out of ten times, and people whose predictions come true two out of ten times, and the same goes for the private sector.

Today, we should only talk about who's dying right now, and give some history to the almost faceless people that we read are dying in today's news. Here, with grotesquely truncated brevity, is a history of the Kurds: