By Kim Petersen
October 16, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" - The Kurds in Northern
Syria have been abandoned by the United States
military and left to the mercy/mercilessness of the
invading Turks.
Is it a surprise?
Tibet expert Thomas
Laird tells of an old Tibetan guerrilla who
had supplied intelligence about Chinese atomic
testing that was, according to CIA sources, “dollar
for dollar, some of the most valuable intelligence
of the Cold War.” [1] Yet, according to Laird, the
guerrilla cum-invaluable intelligence asset was
subsequently left to languish in poverty and
anonymity.
In the 1960s, the CIA promised the Tibetan
guerrillas that the United States wanted to help
expel the Chinese from Tibet. However, in the 1970s,
support to the Tibetan guerrillas was suddenly cut
off. [2]
The result was hundreds of guerrillas killed,
left-behind American ordnance killed children, and
former allies were left in poverty.
It is not an unusual story of the US abandoning an
ally. South Vietnam was quickly left to fend for
itself as Americans scurried to rooftops and
clambered onto helicopters to escape. [3]
There is also the little known history of Korea
which shared an enemy with the US during WWII:
imperialist Japan. At the war’s end, the general of
the defeated Japanese, Abe Endo, surrendered the
reins of self-government to Yo Un Hyung, a
politician well regarded in both the south and north
of Korea. Yo participated in the forming of People’s
Committees in all Korean provinces and the Korean
People’s Republic arose. However, Japanese general
Kozuki Yoshio convinced his American counterpart,
general John Hodge, that the new government in Korea
was communist. Consequently, the communist-phobic US
abolished the government of the Korean People’s
Republic, and the United States Army Military
Government was installed in the south of a truncated
Korea. [4]
The abandonment of the Kurds is not a phenomenon
attributable solely to president
Donald Trump.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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The US should never have been there in
Syria in the first place. The Syrian
government never granted the US
permission to enter sovereign Syrian
territory. Syrian president
Bashar
al-Assad had
made it known,
“Any foreign troops coming to Syria without our
invitation or consultation or permission, they
are invaders, whether they are American,
Turkish, or any other one.”
The Kurds — vulnerable, desperate, and longing as
they may be for sovereignty over claimed lands —
decided to align with the US. Still, this begs the
question: given the history of the US abandoning
erstwhile allies, why would anyone trust the US to
uphold its end of an alliance?
Consider whence Americans came to be. Were they not
originally Europeans, for the most part ex-pat
Brits, who fought against their mother country for
greater control over their own affairs in the 13
colonies? And how was it that the 13 colonies
transformed into a continent-wide 50 states? Wars of
extermination against the Indigenous peoples, broken
treaties, war with Mexico, the annexation of
Hawai’i, the enslavement of Africans — what sort of
national psyche would be expected to emerge from
such a historiography? [5] The US Establishment
seeks to depict the US as a beacon on the hill, an
indispensable nation, and the land of the free. Yet
the beacon’s light illuminates an undeniable history
of genocide, [6] unremitting racism, unremitting
wars, and class war on its own citizenry.
Now, the Kurds have set aside any possible concerns
about losing face and asked the
Syrian government to intervene.
The lesson: beware of forging alliances with dubious
allies.
Kim Petersen is a
former co-editor of the
Dissident Voice
newsletter. He can be reached at:
kimohp@gmail.com.
Twitter:
@kimpetersen.
Do you agree or disagree? Post
your comment here
ENDNOTES
-
Thomas Laird,
Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His
Secret Expedition to Lhasa, location 160.
-
Laird, loc. 163.
-
See Earl Tilford, “Abandoning
Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost
Its War (Book Review),”
HistoryNet.
-
Young Park, Korea
and the Imperialists: In Search of a National
Identity, (AuthorHouse, 2009): 188-192.
-
The historical list of US acquired “possessions”
is much longer and includes Puerto Rico, Guam,
and Philippines from the US-Spanish War, the
Canal Zone in Panama, and several Pacific Ocean
islands, and the military occupation of the
ethnically cleansed Chagos archipelago.
-
“Somehow, even
‘genocide’ seems an inadequate description for
what happened, yet rather than viewing it with
horror, most Americans have conceived of it as
their country’s manifest destiny.” Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz, An
Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,
(Beacon Press, 2014): 79.
Review.
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