The violence that is being inflicted upon the Kurdish people of Syria is tragic. The role played by the Kurdish bourgeois nationalist leadership, however, has been shortsighted and criminal. Once again, they hitched their wagon to imperialism, hoping to gain its support for the carving out of an ethnic Kurdish state. The results were entirely predictable. As Henry Kissinger infamously stated after betraying the Kurds following a 1975 deal brokered between the Shah of Iran and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
In its most despicable passage, the New York Times editorial places Trump’s action within the context of a US history that is “littered with instances of one-time allies abandoned to their fate—the Bay of Pigs invasion; the fall of South Vietnam …”
For the Times to cast the Bay of Pigs or the fall of Saigon as an example of Washington’s “betrayals” testifies to the drastic rightward shift in the ex-liberal media.