Mister President, What Is Your National Security Team Doing to the Iraqi Kurds?

One of the anomalies of the fight against ISIS is that our strategic monomania on suppressing one of the frequent millennia cults that arise in Islam (Christianity has them too, they just don’t kill people–at least on the industrial scale–and tend sit on empty hilltops awaiting the Second Coming) is that we found ourselves allied with a state sponsor of terror: Iran. Today, the Iranian militias we trained and equipped rolled over an ostensible US ally, the Kurdistan Regional Government, began what looks like a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk and topped it all off with the beheading of captured Kurdish peshmerga.

This is the background…or at least as best as I can sort it out.

Tony Badran, who is one of two or three absolute “must follow” folks on Twitter to understand what is happening in the Middle East, has two prescient pieces here on Iran’s warnings to the KRG on the dangers of seeking independence. See my post from yesterday for details on the various Kurd factions, their alliances and rivalries.

What is notable in this is that the PUK, the Patriotic Party of Kurdistan, one of the minority parties in the KRG, has sided with Iraq.

All we can say to the KRG and peshmerga, who have been our most loyal Middle East ally after Israel for the past two decades is

In all fairness, this strategy was developed by the Obama administration and it was developed without any real complaints out of CENTCOM. And the monomaniacal focus on the destruction of ISIS made partnering with the IRGC inevitable, never mind their track record of blowing up American installations. This policy has continued under the current Defense Secretary and National Security Adviser because they were pretty much co-opted by the status quo when they came on board. We’ve kept on staff Brett McGurk–the nimrod who screwed up Iraqi SOFA negotiations while sleeping with a Wall Street Journal reporter (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) and getting blow jobs from a State Department staffer (FEMALE, THANK HEAVEN!!) on the roof to the US embassy in Baghdad–who has seen this plan through to its unfortunate, though logical and foreseeable, consequences.

ISIS is gone. This romance we have with Iranian proxies, be they the PMF in Iraq or the Lebanese Armed Forces, which are a thinly disguised adjunct of Hezbollah and Iran, has to cease. We need to keep our eye on the main objective in the region which is crushing Iranian hegemony. To do that, we need allies. And this is not how to treat them.

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