It's actually quite amazing that in this thread, there has not been any mention nor discussion of anything relevant to the politics of the modern Middle East, let alone the history involving the Kurds and the aftermath of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
It really kind of exemplifies Atlas at its worst, which is quite likely while I typically tend to avoid such threads.
So: History 101----- Ottoman Empire that had dominated a huge region collapses as a direct result of various ongoing rebellions within various parts of the empire, combined with European Colonial powers with historic interests (French & British) competing to carve out pockets of territory.....
WW I ends, but already the French and British had basically divided up parts of the former Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Sevres in 1916....
Roots of the Israeli-Palestinian issue directly associated.
French get Trans-Syria (Lebanon & Syria)---- Roots of all sorts of other long term issues directly associated.
UK--- gets Iraq and Jordan---- puts puppet Kings on the throne to advance British imperial interests.... roots of long term issues directly associated.
Iran---- Not part of the mix, but weird overlap between Russian and British imperialism. Not good.
Egypt--- Brits get to keep, but crap they already suppressed massive uprisings in the 1880s by pounding many parts of Cairo and Alexandria (Anti-Ottoman rebels) with large battleships, so was logical they would get to keep the Canal, after they bought off the French Investors in a bottom bargain auction back in the 1860s.... Roots of the Arab Nationalist Movement (Free Officer Movement) and Nasser.... Hmmmm
Kurdistan--- gets royally screwed. Promised their own nation under the French and British colonialists in exchange for playing a major combat role against the Ottoman Empire, and instead, guess what? The colonizers lied and traded off Kurdistan to all of the various new colonial empires that they were trying to create.... who would have imagined that coming?
Fast forward past WW II, and guess what? Suddenly you have an explosion of latent Kurdish Nationalism against the various attempted puppet colonies that the French and British created in the Middle East???
Where was FDR when we needed him when he twisted the arms of Churchill and De Gaulle and said that Americans would not die on the battlefields of Europe nor Asia to maintain the French and British Empires??? Unfortunately, FDR was deceased and the rise of Real Politiks of the Cold War meant that what happened in Kurdistan was considered irrelevant....
Roll into the 1960s/1970s.... Iraqi occupied Kurdistan and Iranian occupied Kurdistan were being played by both sides in the Cold War power game, with shifting alliances within those "two" Kurdish communities with various guns and dollars flowing in courtesy of the USA and USSR and regional powers to try to impact a strategic balance of power.
Syrian Kurds were much more quiescent, considering they were a much smaller population, and did not have the easy strategic advantage of retreating to mountain hide outs and villages, as opposed to their Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish relatives.
The Kurdish Intifada (Serhildan) in Turkey changed the entire equation back in 1990....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SerhildanThe genocide that the Turkish government had been practicing against the Turkish Kurds & Turkish Left under multiple military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s hit a critical mass in the early/mid 1980s, that directly created the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that claimed to represent the 25% of the population of Turkey that is Kurdish, that began the armed struggle for autonomy and self-determination.
So---- Why should the Kurds trust any American political leader, let alone any other foreign leader, considering the history of Kissinger promising weapons to support a Kurdish uprising against the Baathists in Iraq (Never happened), Saadam Hussein using chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds when the Ronald Reagan administration believed the Iranians were the existential evil, the George Bush Sr administration that called on Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Hussein after Gulf War # 1 and then allowed helicopter gunships to massacre the rebels?
Meanwhile the interests of the United States in the eyes of the Kurds appear to have more sympathy for dictators and authoritarian governments than they do for the most oppressed minority in the Modern Middle East.
I see nothing wrong whatsoever wrong with McCain going to Kurdistan, but however I do believe that he is being an opportunistic pr*ck, that is likely being perceived as yet another grandstanding American that wants to use the Kurds for "our" own geopolitical interests, while meanwhile Turkish armored brigades will likely annex much of the Kurdish regions of Northern Syria as part of a "Peacekeeping Force"
Meanwhile.... the cities of Turkish Occupied Kurdistan are still brewing
