"Turkey has blocked Kurdish reinforcements from crossing south to help in the desperate fight." (Too bad the Kurds don't speak Spanish-that would at least get the Republicans interested).
10/10/14, "U.S. is complicit as it blames Turkey for the catastrophe in Kobane," Washington Post Editorial Board
"THE OBAMA administration seems to have settled
on a blame-Turkey defense for a possible humanitarian catastrophe in the
Syrian city of Kobane. It’s convenient and not entirely wrong. But it
leaves out a big chunk of the story.
There’s
nothing admirable in Turkey’s response to the fighting between the
Islamic State and Syrian Kurds on the Syria-Turkey border. Set aside
Turkey’s reluctance to put boots on the ground, something American
politicians should understand. Turkey has blocked Kurdish reinforcements
from crossing south to help in the desperate fight. Kurdish refugees
from Kobane are not being made to feel welcome in Turkey,
as the U.N. refugee agency has reported. If the Islamic State takes
control of Kobane, the predictable result will be massacres of captured
men and enslavement of captured women.
But
the United States is poorly placed to pass judgment, having stood aside
for more than three years while 200,000 Syrians died, most at the hands
of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Another 3 million have become
refugees, including 1 million who have alighted in Turkey — which,
adjusting for population, would be the equivalent for the United States
of more than 4 million Mexicans streaming across the border.
Unlike
with the conflict in Kobane, there is little television footage of
children being shredded by the “barrel bombs” that Mr. Assad’s forces
drop on apartment buildings, schools and bakeries. It has become too
dangerous for journalists to cover the war. But the horror of the
carnage — these are bombs filled with screws, nails and metal shards
intended to maim and painfully kill — is no less.
The administration strategy of targeting the
Islamic State while giving Mr. Assad a pass has actually worsened the
conditions for his victims in towns held by moderate rebels who, in
theory, enjoy U.S. backing. As the New York Times reported Wednesday,
the Assad regime, freed of the need to go after the Islamic State, has
returned “with new intensity to its longstanding and systematic attacks
on rebellious towns and neighborhoods.”
And
the strategy is incoherent as well as morally questionable. The United
States expects these same moderate rebels to become its foot soldiers in
the war against the more extreme Islamic State. Yet it refuses to
target the Assad regime, which the moderates see as their chief enemy —
and which is doing everything it can to wipe them out while the United
States calls for patience and restraint.
This
lies at the heart of President Obama’s disagreement with Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is urging the United States to
create a no-fly zone over northern Syria. Such a move would not
interfere with the campaign against the Islamic State, but it would give
moderate rebels some respite from attacks and some territory in which
to regroup. In other words, it would serve the interests of what
Mr. Obama in the past has claimed as U.S. objectives: helping the
moderates and unseating Mr. Assad. That may be why Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the proposal was “worth looking at very, very closely.”
But the White House seems as uninterested as ever in truly helping the moderates. Easier just to blame the Turks." via Lucianne
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