De jongen met zijn vinger in de dijk

Illustration from Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates

I would assume – hopefully not without grounds – that my gentle readers are familiar with the old saw from Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates about the nameless but heroic kid from Haarlem who sees a leaky dike and sticks his finger in the crack to keep his city from being flooded. He saves his city by staying there night and day with his finger holding back the waters, despite the nighttime cold. After the adults notice him, they send for craftsmen to repair the dike to give him reprieve, and he is hailed as a national hero for his persistence and powers of observation.

Now let us do a brief thought-experiment, and change a couple of aspects in this story. Suppose this little boy was not so innocent, but in fact naughty and malicious. Suppose that instead of merely noticing the leak in the dike and holding his finger there, the boy had in fact spent long hours poking at the leaky crack and making it bigger and more likely to break. Only when he sees the extent of the damage he’s done and the danger he’s placed his town in, does he plug up the hole with his finger. Now let’s change another aspect of this story. Suppose that the adults in the story had no intention of calling the craftsmen in to fix the dike, but instead began arguing over whether the boy should or shouldn’t remain there to hold back the flood indefinitely. The readers, being sensible, might take both the boy and the adults in this story to be quite irresponsible, no? It’s quite cruel to the boy, not to mention the residents of the town, either to ask him to remain there indefinitely, or to ask him to pull out his finger with the dike still broken.

It should be fairly obvious by now that this little thought-experiment is meant to draw parallels to a certain series of current events in the Middle East. The dike is the northern border of Syria; and the flood-waters on the other side are the Turkish state and its Islâmist Wahhâbi proxies. The naughty little boy who has been poking holes in the dike for the last eight years, of course, are the American military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies. And now that Trump has precipitously removed the boy’s finger from the hole, of course the flood-waters are breaking in. Genocidal Turkish violence is now rampaging over not only Kurdish but also Assyrian, Ezidi and Armenian communities in Northern Syria.

It’s impossible to overstate how much of a disaster this is, whether from a humanitarian perspective or from one which values the immense and ancient historical heritage of this region of Syria. The threatened communities described, narrated and explored at length in William Dalrymple’s book From the Holy Mountain (and in his hero Saint John Moschos’s earlier travelogue, The Spiritual Meadow) were already in the day he wrote it under grave threat from the Turkish army and state. And now, despite the fear that has hung over them these past eight years of being destroyed, they are in as great a peril as they have ever been of being wiped off the map by the puritanical, philistine brand of fanatical Wahhâbi hatred, this time with Turkey’s direct military backing. Anyone who has even casually perused my blog will understand that there is no love lost whatsoever between me and these vile génocidaires, these head-loppers and organ-eaters. The sooner they are gone, along with their Turkish masters, the better.

Going back to my finger-in-the-dike analogy, though. The American military has been poking holes in the northern Syrian border for over half a decade now, and unfortunately we’ve done as much to undermine the security of the Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian, Ezidi and, of course, Arabic residents of the area as we have to help them. Our forces were not placed in Syria legally, for good purposes or with good cause (unless it was to defeat Dâ‘iš, which is doubtful). Our proxies, such as they are, have always been considered expendable – even under Obama. What Trump has done in pulling the finger out of the dike without the border being secured (irony of ironies!), and even without exiting Syria, is utterly and completely irresponsible and reprehensible. Let me repeat that, just so there is no confusion on this point. Pulling out American troops from the northern border of Syria and allowing the Turks to sweep in remains utterly wrong: not only wretchedly craven but also strategically cretinous. Here I am in full agreement with the administration’s opponents.

But to pretend, whether explicitly or by elision, that the only other option available is to keep the finger in the leaky dike forever, is almost equally reprehensible. This is one thing that galls me most about the crocodile tears currently being shed over the Kurds, but tellingly not over the region’s divers other residents, by American armchair critics from The Nation to National Review. (Sadly, only a handful of mostly Christian-aligned media outlets and pressure groups have even bothered to mention the vulnerable Assyrians or Arab Christians.) First of all, the fact that no diplomatic option involving the legitimate government in Syria – which alone can fix the dike – is being discussed, is something of an obscenity, especially when the Syrian government has offered state protection for the Kurds in return for recognition of legitimacy. Al-’Asad may not be our ‘friend’, and he may not be ‘nice’ according to the ever-vague and selective Beltway standard, but he can fix the dike. In fact, that’s his proper job. Arguing about whether the boy’s finger should be pulled out of the dike or stay in the dike forever, does nothing to help the people of the town, whom we supposedly want to help.

And yet, even suggesting that a diplomatic solution involving actors other than the American military might be the best and most prudent option, will apparently get you tagged as cruel, callous and lacking in all proper feeling. Such is the vulgar vainglory and mawkish sentimentality of the ‘do-something’ blob mentality in American foreign policy thinking. It’s no more attractive on the centre-left wing of the blob than on the right.