We have US friends (Kurds) teaming up with a regime the US wants gone (Assad) to stop a US ally (Turkey) from killing US friends (Kurds) while the Russians accuse the US of messing things up in the Middle East.The much-hated, thoroughly illiberal Assad semi-successfully ran a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state in the Middle East, a region not known for tolerance of difference, until we opposed him. Now the country is the proverbial Hobbesian “state of nature” where all make war on all.
Meanwhile the U.S. seems unwilling to accept that long-time NATO ally Turkey is, under Erdogan, rapidly morphing into an Islamist enemy. Governing a restive minority Islamic population of his own, Russia’s Putin with some justice views the region as more his problem than ours.
