Why the Yazidis?

There are those in the policy community who seem a little out of sorts because the President has (after great delay, but with positive public support) intervened in a limited way on behalf of the Yazidis in Iraq, when a more robust intervention has been denied in Syria. One piece expressed a belief that the West “would not lift a finger” to help mainstream Muslim, either Sunni or Shia, suffering.

This is particularly ironic, since it ignores the intervention in Libya, where we assisted rebels- including those with ties to Al Qaeda- with overthrowing Qaddafi.  Further it ignores the lesson which large swathes of the American public took away from the Libyan intervention, which was that the present American leadership remains pathologically incapable of making a distinction between Islamist groups with ties to terrorism and secular rebels worthy of support. And this failing ultimately results in a slide into chaos which gets Americans killed (Exhibit A: Benghazi).

Of course, It’s worth pointing out that had the supporters of President Obama’s request to intervene in Syria not placed all of their eggs in the basket of a certain young Syrian analyst with a tendency to inflate both the level of moderation among the Syrian rebels and her own credentials, we’d almost certainly have intervened in that civil war as well, to the advantage of Sunni Islamist groups who have far more in common with ISIS then they do with the desperate Yazidis.

It is the false hope of the perpetually “Free Syrian Army”, a hypothetically moderate secular force which does not exist outside the minds of journalists and a few Syrian interventionists, that has kept any consideration of a third option, such as helping the Kurds in Syria carve out an autonomous area where they, and other minorities might be safe, from being discussed by any but a tiny minority of analysts (Dr. Walid Phares comes to mind.)

It is not surprising that a long history of dealing with the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq- all the way back to the original Gulf War- has left American military veterans impressed with both the nationalism, and fighting ability of the Kurds, and that the broader American public takes it cues from this support.

To say that we have failed to support Sunni or Shia in Syria or Iraq because we can’t distinguish “whose who” is flippant.  The reality is that the pro-interventionist crowd has egregiously  squandered the good nature of the American people by repeatedly invoking moderation on behalf of ultimately bad actors. Because of this it was only in a case as cut and dried as the Yazidis, and on behalf of a group as historically respected by Americans as the Kurds, that the public demanded an intervention, forcing the same administration which was so eager to support the Al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Fighting Group, or the Syrian Islamic Front, to act.