by David Stockman, Lew Rockwell:

Just when you think the Donald has lost his marbles completely, he pulls a rabbit of rationality out of the hat of Imperial Washington’s Forever Wars madness.

We are referring, of course, to his sensible decision to decline the opportunity to put American soldiers in harms’ way in an impending showdown between Turks and Kurds on the northern border of Syria. To our recollection, that particular tribal enmity has been going on for centuries and needs no help from Washington to fester on for years to come.

But already he is being monkey-hammered by the bipartisan War Party because by standing down and removing US forces from the contested towns along the border Trump is basically sounding the death knell for the neocons’ failed, bloody, illegal and demented regime change project in Syria.

Now – and very soon – the Kurds will have to make a deal with Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies to counter Turkey’s incursion, including the creation of a “safe zone” along the Turkish border that would be off-limits to armed Kurdish forces.

But so what!

Here in the map below is the narrow strip (shaded red) of historic Kurdistan that hugs close to the northern and northeastern Syrian/Turkey border. There is absolutely nothing that implicates America’s homeland security in what happens in these inconsequential towns and villages.

Indeed, the Donald found himself uncomfortably squeezed between two alleged allies only because they had been allies of convenience in a Washington conducted regime change war against Assad that never should have happened in the first place.

In essence, Washington armed and trained a Kurdish militia to turn-back the pestilence of the ISIS caliphate which had overrun their historic towns and territories, terrorizing their populations with its demented form of Sunni jihadism.

But where did the short-lived caliphate come from if not out of the wreckage of western Sunni-dominated Iraq left by Washington’s destruction of the Iraqi state? So doing, Washington opened the gates of hell by shitcaning the fraught but workable modus vivendi that Saddam Hussein had stitched together between Sunni, Shiite and Kurds with a brutal sword and the bountiful spoils of Iraq huge oil production.

Moreover, where did the ragtag army of the ISIS caliphate get the means to terrorize and occupy large swaths of the dusty towns of northern Syria east of he Euphrates?

Why from the massive stores of tanks, artillery, military vehicles, guns and ammo left behind by the US Army when it vacated Anbar province and Mosul; and which lethal capacities were augmented by Washington’s massive CIA-supplied weapons flow to the so-called moderate rebels, who more often than not sold them to ISIS or left them behind as they retreated from the battlefield.

In short, the radical leftwing Kurdish YPG and its military adjuncts, including the Marxist-terrorist International Freedom Battalion, became Washington’s ally. But this gambit of strange bedfellow opportunism arose only after Washington had unleashed upon these historic Kurdish communities a plague that never would have existed save for the neocon regime change projects first in Iraq and then in Syria.

Needless to say, one stupidity in the regime change business always generates a train of more. In this case, Turkey pursued its historic quarrels with the Assad family by permitting its territory to be used as a supply line, training and basing camp for the Free Syrian Army, which was also sponsored, trained and armed by Washington.

Needless to say, in this ethnically and religiously complex corner of the Middle East, the Arab-Sunni Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Kurd-Sunni Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were on the same side – but only in the sense that all of them had their hands out deep and wide for Washington’s largesse, weapons and sponsorship.

In fact, however, Turkey always saw the FSA as an instrument to contain the SDF, as much as it was ostensibly a fighting force against ISIS. That’s because a Kurdish military armed and trained by Washington’s finest is about the worst nightmare that the Turkish nationalists in Ankara could have possible imagined.

One of the enduring frictions in that woebegone neighborhood of the world is the 30 million strong nation of Kurdistan which doesn’t have a state, but is spread among Turkey (12 million), Iran (6 million), Iraq (6 million) and a small sliver of population (2 million)and territory in northeastern Syria.

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