By Hamma Mirwaisi and Alison Buckley
Before
the Vietnam War began in earnest North Vietnam's leader Ho Chi Minh asked for
American help to build a new nation modeled on the US Constitution. But due to
the unwise response of some key advisors, the US Government did not answer his
call. Consequently, the US fought the Vietnam War so bitterly and expensively
that it almost caused the destruction of its empire. President Obama was too
young to understand what happened then, but his current
Secretary of State John Kerry was involved in that war and worked very hard
with other Americans to eventually end it.
Smart governments learn from others' mistakes but unfortunately the less astute have to learn from their own mistakes. While many US technologies serve the people well and help maintain its world dominance, by favoring the wealthy supporters who fund their election campaigns, many US politicians are not serving the American peoples' interests, or its role as defender of the free world.
Recently, as one of the few democratically based political organisations in the Arab dictatorship dominated Middle East, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) has called on the US and Western countries to support their response to terrorist attacks by arming them in their fight against the self-declared Islamic State (IS) of Iraq and Syria (1).
After the American and British forces invaded Iraq in 2003, corruption ran rife in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) as its leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani used the Kurdish peoples' oil and budget moneys to buy the support of avaricious American and European politicians. Both families still control the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq, and its 400,000 Peshmerga troops. But a recent Kurdish media report revealed that only 60,000 of them showed up to fight after Massoud Barzani betrayed more than one million non-Muslim Yezidi Kurds, Christians and Shi'a Muslims in a deal between Turkey and the KRG designed to eliminate the PKK's forces in Turkey, Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan.
However, the plan backfired when PKK forces rescued a large number of Yezidi Kurds in the Sinjar region of Iraq and protected Barzani's Erbil capital from IS Islamic terrorist fighters by successfully engaging them in the Makhmur District. After President Obama authorized airstrikes in Iraq to ensure the safety of the embattled Barzani capital and American diplomats in Erbil, the U.S. military was forced to target areas within 30 miles of the southwest of the city to halt the advance of IS terrorist' forces.
It soon became clear to Kurdish Iraqis that the reasoning behind the US air force attacks included more than just protecting Americans. Strategically, the addition of the district of Makhmur and the town of Gwer to the large swathes of land and significant Iraqi populations captured by the Sunni Islamic terrorist groups threatens the security of the fraudulent Erbil based Barzani and Talabani families and their associates in the KRG. Not only are these towns on the main north-south transit route through the country but they are also situated amongst its richest oil fields.
Currently the oil pipelines from Kirkuk to Iraq's refineries at Baiji and ports in Iraq and Turkey, and from Massoud Barzani's oil wells to Turkey's refineries and the Mediterranean Sea ports are controlled by PKK forces. Afraid of losing significant oil revenues to their rightful owners, the Kurdish people, Barzani, Talabani and Western officials are now urging the Obama administration to fight the PKK as a terrorist organization along with the real enemy Islamic State (IS) of Iraq and Syria (2). However, the PKK's rescue of more than 100, 000 people betrayed by Massoud Barzani's withdrawal of over 10,000 Peshmerga troops before they even fired a shot suggests that if adequately aided, it could become a force for peace and security to the Middle East.
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