By Finian Cunningham

October 09, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  US President Donald Trump is being roundly condemned by bi-partisan voices in Washington for “selling out” the Kurds in Syria. But the histrionics declaring that America’s honour has been sullied by Trump are, in many ways, absurd, given the long history of US double-crossing the Kurds.

Trump’s apparent green light for Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to launch military operations against Kurdish militants in northeast Syria provoked a US political firestorm this week.

Republican and Democrat lawmakers lined up to rebuke the president for throwing Kurdish allies to the mercy of a Turkish military assault. Even close political supporters of Trump, such as Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, denounced his seeming lack of principle in abandoning the Kurds.

Former Trump acolyte, Nikki Haley, who was formerly the US ambassador to the UN, deplored how the president’s decision to withdraw American troops from the path of a Turkish incursion into Syria was “leaving the Kurds to die”. She and other politicians and media pundits hailed the Kurdish forces as crucial American allies in the fight against jihadist terror groups in Syria.

Trump’s announcement was a fiendish betrayal and a blot on America’s honourable image, so the consensus in Washington would have us believe.

What is rather laughable about the sanctimonious uproar in Washington is the astounding denial, or seeming lack of awareness, among American politicians and media about how the ethnic Kurdish people have been habitually abused and shafted over many decades for US imperialist interests.