Well, I guess the Kurds get screwed once more! I doubt my paratroop kid will return to northeast Syria anytime soon to see if some of the Kurdish folks who delivered their food and water or ran the little market nearby where they bought stuff are still around. His old unit was there in 2020 for 7 months playing bummer cars with the Russians and doing other various things. World leaders (term used loosely) like to play RISK but in this game real people die...

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/11/syria-another-turkish-invasion-is-imminent.html#more

Reckon for the first time lol, I'll say publicly, I will hang in Washington's camp and focus on here.

I agree with you Catch22, we should let foreign people settle their foreign stuff but it seems we can't help "ourselves" (or the power elites, not you and me). The British and the other European powers but globally mostly the British used to draw lines on maps and decide who got what. The U.S. government sort of ended up with that mantle after the British went bankrupt, both money and manpower wise, after WWII, accelerated by having to fight the communists on a global scale. Or so it seemed and probably was at the time.

In the Kurds case, the British after WWI and the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, drew lots of lines in that part of the world, especially in creating a country called Iraq. The Kurds are a land locked people, the largest ethnic group without their own country (ok, they sort of have one now in northern Iraq by default). The have sizable presence in 4 countries; Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They have fought various governments of those four countries over time. If countries outside of those 4 would allow just those 4 duke it out on their own without any outside interference, the Kurds would probably carve out their own niche of territory and would be willing to be left alone. But as wildfights mentioned, it doesn't happen because the greater geopolitical game gets scaled up it becomes how does Turkey sit vis-a-via NATO and Russia, or Iran vis-a-via the United States or Iran/Russia/NATO or whatever power game the people in control want to play.

George Washington when he left office said don't get involved in alliances, especially with the Europeans, it generally doesn't end well. He was a smart man...

Your like that kid that shot his mother-turning on your European Forebearers.
Whether you like it or not America is the son of Europe..