"Kurdish hopes are often vested in predictions articulated by former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden that “Iraq no longer exists, Syria no longer exists”[v][5] as well as the disintegration of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the wake of the demise of communist rule. That remains a possibility but more realistic is the fact, at least in the immediate future, the Syrian and Iraqi states as they existed in the past are more likely to change rather than dissolve. The lesson of the 2017 Iraqi Kurdish referendum and the fact that the Iraqi state has already demonstrated resilience in surviving and its Syrian counterpart may well do so too, means that Kurds will have to strive for some autonomous accommodation within a federal structure." Dorsey

------------

Dorsey's main points are that the Kurds of Iraq and Syria have been taught valuable even if painful lessons:

1. The United States has been and remains committed to the existence of the post World War One geographical constructs that are the Iraqi and Syrian states. In the heady atmosphere that accompanied the "Arab Spring," revolts which were largely supported by the Obama Administration, and the decades long flirtation of the US Borg (foreign policy establishment) with the Kurds, the Kurdish people conceived the idea after 9/11 that the US would support them in resistance to non-Kurdish governments in Iraq and Syria even unto support for Kurdish independence and full Kurdish control of petroleum resources in their parts of these countries.

2. They have been shown to be wrong in that hope. The devotion and reverence of the US Borg for the supposed sanctity of international borders and the existence of what is conceived by the Borg to be to an international order in which those borders cannot ever be changed has proven to be much stronger than any other factors including the lure of concessionary contracts in oil and gas from new Kurdish states.

3. The United States is not a reliable ally in any cause not generally thought to be a struggle against a possibly fatal threat to the US as a country. The citizenry of the US simply have no interest in less than total wars waged against what is conceived of as great evil. The Borg understands this disinterest by the public in what the Borg thinks of as a desirable set of tools in the "game of nations." Because of that phenomenon great efforts have been made in IO to sell the Borg Wars as existential for the US. The American people now see through that deception and Trump has acted on this conviction that he shares with the people. In that context betrayal of the Kurds has become a necessary evil.

4. Neither the Kurds not any other hapless minority people will ever have the grip on the collective imagination of the American People and the Congress that Israel has. pl

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/whither-the-kurds/