The Garden of Forever: What Trump's Betrayal of the Kurds and the American Troops Who Fought Beside Them in Syria Will Mean for His Afterlife

Kurdish protesters hold photos of Kurdish political leaders killed by Turkish-backed militias in Syria.

            There's a warm place in Forever for People Who Betray Their Allies. 

            Trump’s next stop, after we impeach him, has got to be The Hague. That’s where the International Criminal Court prosecutes war criminals.

            Because what he’s done to the Kurds in Syria, and to the American soldiers who fought with them, is nothing less than criminal on a breath-taking scale. He makes Benedict Arnold look like a scofflaw. He’s moving straight into Hitler and Stalin territory.

           And if he somehow escapes human justice for condemning thousands of human beings to death for fighting for a cause he pompously espoused throughout his campaign and directly after being sworn into office  — the defeat of ISIS — we can be sure that divine justice has its eyes on him. Eternity has a place for people just like him.

            Do you know what the Ninth Circle of Hell is for?

Traitors.

            Those who have committed the sin of treachery.

Trump’s decision to do a ’favor’ for fellow-tyrant Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president-for-life who regards all Kurds, one of his own country’s largest minorities, as ‘terrorists’ — because doing so is a convenient distraction from all that is wrong with his own anti-democratic governance — is a classic example of those acts that send what Republican politicians used to call “evil doers” (before they embraced one) to the deepest level of Hell.

            And of all the people to betray — not that the abomination-in-chief would have difficulty throwing anyone and everyone under the bus if he believes it will give him some advantage… Can we recall what the Kurdish armed forces were doing in northern Syria?

Defeating ISIS.

              Remember ISIS? Remember when the whole world was scared stiff of ISIS?

              What was the first thing out of Mister Bluster’s mouth after he was inaugurated in 2017? “I’m going to destroy ISIS.”

Destroying ISIS was a major campaign pledge for Trump. At a campaign rally in South Carolina he bragged, “We are going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS. We have no choice.”

            ISIS’s political state in Syria was by then already well on the way to being defeated — not by Trump, but by a plan put together by the Obama administration, which found that America’s best and only consistently reliable regional ally was the Kurds. Under our leadership, Kurdish armed forces fought ISIS on the ground, while the US supplied air cover and a mere 1,000 ground troops.

            In close-quarters combat with the fanatic resistance of ISIS’s converts, Kurdish troops suffered 11,000 casualties. They died so that American soldiers did not have to fight that street-to-street and house-to- house battle and suffer the kind of casualties we experienced in Iraq.

            Shortly before the Abomination in the White House decided to make a fellow autocrat’s day by giving him free reign to score points at home through destroying some of his country’s favored scapegoats — the independent-minded Kurds — Kurdish forces dismantled defensive positions along the Turkey-Syria border under assurances from the US that we would never permit a Turkish assault on them.

            And then the Bumbler, for no particular reason besides earning a reciprocal kickback from a fellow would-be dictator, said, “OK, I’ll get our guys out of your way. Knock yourself out.”

While White House apologists said they were shocked that Turkey began bombing homes and hospitals in the very region of Syria that had been liberated by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the army that took down ISIS rightly called Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops a “stab in the back” and made clear it felt betrayed by the US.

            The Boston Globe this week quoted a local Kurdish resident, born in Turkey, calling the Turkish attack on northern Syria “a genocide… As we speak, bombs are being dropped in front of houses.” [ See https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/10/15/kurds-veterans-denounce-trump-decision-withdraw-troops-from-northern-syria/S5HImWDBYPYkD9jjO8MGiI/story.html ]

            The abandonment of the Kurdish forces who defeated ISIS has also outraged American military veterans. A Congressman who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Seth Moulton (D-MA) termed the Turkish attack on both military and civilian facilities a “barbarity…. “ He called it “disheartening” for American soldiers on the ground “to have a commander in chief that you can’t trust and who doesn’t live up to our values and is ordering us to retreat.”

            A commander we can’t trust? Who betrays allies? What can we call this conduct? Treachery, perhaps?

            And it has practical consequences. ISIS prisoners guarded by Kurdish forces who now find themselves under attack by Turkey’s American-supplied air force are now escaping.

            And once Turkey launched the assault on the Kurdish positions that everybody in the world knew was coming if the US withdrew its troops — everybody, that is, except the bumbler-in-chief, who boasted, baselessly, that he would destroy Turkey’s economy if Erdogan were to launched the invasion that he has in fact launched — news organizations on the ground in northern Syria began publishing photos of Kurdish officials, both men and women, who have been captured and promptly executed by Turkish forces. [See the photo above.]

            The blood of those murders is on Trump’s hands.

            The blood of all the deaths now taking place in the corner of Syria liberated from ISIS by the American-Kurdish alliance is on Trump’s hands.

            And on America’s hands, because in a democratic political system, we are all responsible for our government’s actions. In a democratic system, our leaders act in our name.

            Let’s remember how we got here. We allowed Trump to become President — many of us by voting for a conman whose moral and intellectual shortcomings were pretty well exposed during the campaign. We allowed him to occupy the most dangerous (because most powerful) office in the world even though he lost a popular vote, and even though our electoral system was hacked and influenced by a foreign government (Russia's) that fully intended to do us harm by placing its stooge in the White House. And whose conduct Russia correctly predicted could be influenced to favor their best interests rather than ours.

            We allowed our antiquated, undemocratic “electoral vote” — a system unfairly weighted in favor of voters from less populous, more rural — and more white — voters, and against more pluralistic and more populous regions, to choose the loser over the winner of the popular vote. And we permitted this losing candidate to win by allowing these one-party Republican-controlled states to employ suppress various dodges and bureaucratic strategies to suppress the vote of their non-white and poorer citizens.

            That is to say that the American people, and its government, allowed a deeply flawed, hacked, manipulated electoral process to enable an illegitimately chosen, dishonest sicko to take the reins of power at the head of the nation’s government.

            We have allowed the voter suppression outrage to go on for years. We continue to allow it today.

            That’s on us. I’m not sure which circle of hell prepares a warm welcome for those who permit evil to be done by the betrayers, the worst of the worst of the world’s sinners, but that’s where we belong. Because that’s what we’ve allowed to happen.

            I speak these disconcerting truths as one of the privileged, self-loving American majority unwilling to risk blowing up his contented life in order to confront our current illegitimate administration with massive and ceaseless acts of civil disobedience.

            And if the survivors of the terrorist ISIS state -- freed by the attack on the Kurds -- somehow make their way into this country to blow up ‘innocent people,’ we deserve it. Because we’re not innocent.

            Trump supporters, especially those who continue to support him, whether he is caging children, destroying the environment, enriching himself, his family and his criminal cronies, or (as in the present instance) betraying allies to their death in full view of the entire world — can step forward and take a special bow.

            Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have pleaded with the US and its NATO allies to establish a no-fly zone in the north of Syria and “carry out their responsibilities to avoid a possible impending humanitarian disaster.”

            “This attack will spill the blood of thousands of innocent civilians because our border areas are overcrowded,” the SDF’s official Twitter account said.

            Guess what our response was? No dice.

            Then, in a continuation of a long-running media farce — call it “Trump’s Way: Government by Morons and Liars” — news media could not help but devote much of its reporting to the absurd, inaccurate, and morally repugnant rationales offer by our Lying Leader for his disgraceful abandonment of a brave ally.

            The looniest moment came when the Bonehead in Chief defended his abandonment of an ally by pointing out that the Kurds “didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy.”

            Somebody, it seems, has explained to Little Trumpy that once upon a time a big, bad something called World War II happened — despite the sufferings of those with sore feet — and they even dragged his bloated bod to a place called Normandy, where many people who are, admittedly, not Kurds are buried.

            Putting two and two together and totaling up 48 percent, Trump reasoned that the Kurds could not possibly be called our ‘allies.’

            Little Trumpy was quickly hauled into the corridor, crowned with a dunce cap, and instructed in everything wrong with that piece on nonsensical irrationality by anyone who knew anything. In fact, while only four countries contributed soldiers to the Normandy invasion, the Kurds — who did not even possess a country then; and still don’t, according to the Turks — did fight alongside the Allies in their part of the world.

            OK, we get it. Trump doesn’t know anything about WWII, or history — or anything else that ever happened outside of his limited sphere of personal interests. But while it’s one thing to be ignorant of something, not shutting up about it is just plain STUPID!

            Yet while the Unimpeached One has a clear leg up on the title of Laughing Stock of the 21st Century, he may also go down in history as the man responsible for destroying anything still good in the American political system.

            Yes, stupidity can be criminal — when you’re the President of a powerful country.

            But as for treachery — the betrayal of one’s family or close associates; one’s community or guests; or one’s bonded allies — that’s a high crime in the court of eternity.

            And the deserved torments of the Ninth Circle of Hell endure forever.

            The consequences of your crimes, however, as America’s suffering allies now well know, take place in the here and now.