What should have happened in Syria

by Richard Schulman

President Trump is meritoriously fulfilling a campaign pledge to exit the US from Mideast engagements in Syria, but he could perhaps have done this in a way that was protective of our Kurdish allies, acceptable to our Turkish allies, and beneficial to US honor and reputation. The US would have come out of the messy Syrian situation adorned with the golden halo of regional peacemaker, instead of widespread condemnation abroad and at home.

“How so?” you ask

The Syrians and Russians want the US to leave the Mideast. In this respect, they are aligned, for their own reasons, with the US president. The Kurds do not have unfriendly relations with the Syrian government. The US could have sat down quietly with the Kurds, Russians, and Syrians and worked out an arrangement whereby the Kurds withdrew an agreed number of miles from the Turkish border and reintegrated themselves in the Syrian state with guarantees of local rule in matters of culture and language use. The Erdogan government would have been told by the US to stay on their side of the border until the negotiations had been concluded and the Kurds had had time to withdraw.

Without war and violating Syria’s border, this would have provided Turkey with the buffer it seeks to insulate itself from the danger of Syrian Kurdish assistance to its PKK comrades in Turkey. The PKK is regarded by both Turkey and the US as terrorists of Marxist-Leninist inspiration.

This by the way highlights a problem of Kurdish nationalism in the four countries where it constitutes a significant minority presence: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. If the Kurds wish to make progress on their national aspirations, they will need to first overcome their severe factionalization. There is no unified Kurdish national movement. In the case of the Kurds in Syria and Turkey, they will also need to develop a more sensible political outlook than Marxism-Leninism.

Had the US insisted that an acceptable Russian-Syrian guarantee of Kurdish safety be negotiated before the US exited the border region or allowed Turkey to cross it, the US reputation for standing by its allies would have remained intact, and it could have taken a significant step toward re-establishing good relations with Turkey.

The US could also address another sore point of US-Turkish relations by inquiring whether Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan, as a favor to the US, could provide an alternate home in exile for Pennsylvania resident and Erdogen opponent Fethullah Gülen.

As for Turkey’s adoption of the Russian S-400 ABM system rather than the US and NATO compatible Patriot system, Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran and Princeton’s Michael A. Reynolds (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 2019) argue that Turkey did so because the US under President Obama did not adequately support it when it downed a Russian plane, forcing Erdogan to switch to a quasi-alliance with Russia.

As for the problem of what to do with the ISIS prisoners that the Syrian Kurds have been holding, these should not become a Turkish responsibility. This would provide Turkey with too tempting a weapon to threaten Europe with — say, by releasing terrorist prisoners to return to their European former domiciles. We suggest instead that the ISIS prisoners be relocated to work camps in Siberia. The Russians have many years of experience in this form of prisoner management. The bracing Siberian climate should have a calming influence on the prisoners’ desert passions for beheading captives and burning them alive in cages. In their free time, when not studying the Koran, the prisoners could read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.