There is a legend in foreign policy circles concerning the way in which the borders of Jordan and Saudi Arabia came to be. The eastern border of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan – which is ruled over by, supposedly, a really-for-real descendant of Islam’s so-called “prophet” – with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has this really weird-looking triangular “kink” in it, which gives a bit more of absolutely sod-all to the Saudis and a bit less to the Jordanians. Why it is so, nobody really knows.

The legend centres around Sir, and then Lord, Winston Churchill. This one man’s historical legacy may well be one of the most complicated and misunderstood cases of a man who failed repeatedly and with truly catastrophic consequences for millions of people and yet somehow managed to turn himself into a hero.

The way that old Winston himself told things, he was drawing up the borders of what was at the time the British protectorate of the Transjordan, and he’d had a particularly boozy lunch – a habit of his that would, unfortunately, become increasingly common over the next twenty years. As he was drawing up the eastern borders of the Transjordan, he “burped” or “hiccuped”, and the lines that he drew ended up as a border.

That kink in the border is now known today as, variously, “Churchill’s hiccup” or “Winston’s burp”. I prefer to think of it as “Winston’s cock-up”, because that epitomises quite a lot of what Lord Churchill managed to do with much of his career and many of his decisions.

That story is almost certainly not a true accounting of events. The tribal realities on the ground were, in fact, taken into account when Churchill was shifting lines around on his maps. And, so far, thank God, few if any conflicts have ever erupted as a result of that particular bit of happenstance.

That cannot be said of all of the borders drawn by Churchill, to be sure.

One of the worst wars ever fought in modern history was the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Parts of it were fought right along one of those little lines in the sand that Churchill drew.

The reason why I bring all of this up is because of all of this recent hoo-roo about a decision made by His Most Benevolent and Legendary Astral Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus, the First of His Name, to pull American troops out of Syria and leave the Turks to do whatever they want to do with the Kurds on their southern border.

If you pay any attention whatsoever to the mainstream (((media))) – which these days is basically nothing more than a propaganda arm for the very same globalist elites that want to see you and me deplatformed, fired, stripped of all possessions, and thrown out onto the streets to starve – then you will have gained the impression over the past few days that the God-Emperor has basically committed an atrocity worthy of an investigation and conviction on the scale of the Nuremberg Trials.

Apparently he has committed a truly appalling war-crime by hanging a totally innocent group of American allies who wouldn’t hurt a fly and who paid a tremendous cost to defeat ISIS, and his withdrawal of American forces from one of the world’s worst conflict zones is a terrible and awful and cowardly betrayal of a staunch American ally, and we need to risk yet more American lives for the CHILLLLDREEEEEEENNNNN!!!! over in Kurdistan, and… well… and Donald Trump probably hates fluffy kittens and kicks little puppies too, and… umm… er… ORANGE MAN BAD!!!

If anything, I have underplayed the sheer level of childish tantrum-throwing of the (((media))), the neoclowns, and the progressive globalist elites.

Once you take a moment to disconnect yourself from the daily clown car crash that is the modren (((media))) and political commentary cycle, and take a step back to analyse things in a slightly more level-headed and historically aware fashion, you will realise that the reality on the ground is rather different.

The “Kurds” are not one unified people. They are a federation of different tribes and groups, and exhibit an impressive diversity of religious views, geographical locations, and cultural traditions. There are Iranian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, Syrian Kurds, and Turkish Kurds. There are quite a few different splinter factions of these peoples all over the region.

They are regarded as anything from pests to terrorists by the Sunni and Shi’ite majorities of the various countries in which they are found.

They have outlasted empires throughout their long history. That history largely consists of them being a major pain in the ass for any empire that sets itself up in that part of the world, which tries very hard to conquer them, and finds it an impossible task. The empire then inevitably ends up hiring the Kurds, or at least incorporating them as fighters in their ranks. The empire invariably withers, collapses, and dies, and the Kurds end up being a bugbear for the next bunch of characters that come along.

They are tough SOBs, no question about it. They’ve proven to be resilient and capable fighters throughout the centuries.

The guy who stopped Richard Coeur de Lion cold during the Third Crusade? That would be a chap named – depending on who you ask – Salahadin, Sala-ud-din, Saladin, or Suleiman. A Kurd, who knew how to fight against the Crusaders and fought them to a standstill.

Going back to an even earlier example – by about 1,500 years – you know who caused no end of headaches for the Greek warriors under the command of Xenophon in the mountains west of Persia during the March of the Ten Thousand? Those, again, would be Kurds.

It is probably fair and accurate to say that some large numbers of the Kurds are tough, reliable, dependable, and decent allies to American forces operating in the region.

That does not make them natural American allies.

Their culture is totally different from that of the USA. They treat their women as badly as, and in many cases worse than, all but the most hardcore Islamist societies. While they are a loose confederation of tribes, several of their splinter groups are outright terrorist organisations and some of their political factions are Marxist in nature.

Most importantly, as far as the powers-that-be in the region are concerned, some of those very same Kurdish groups represent a serious security threat to their own nations. Turkey has long warned the Kurds within their own borders to behave, but that has never stopped several Kurdish militia and terrorist organisation groups from causing serious trouble within Turkey.

So, essentially, the globalist and neoclown elites want the God-Emperor to put American lives and American treasure in the middle of a four-way shooting war between Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and Russians, all while trying to maintain the peace and turn whatever remains of ISIS into bloody red goo.

And these are the people that we, and the God-Emperor, are supposed to take seriously?!?

The reason why the Kurds are in this mess in the first place – the reason why that entire region of the world is in such a mess – is because the then-superpower of the time, the British Empire, couldn’t resist being too clever by half and drawing lines in places that didn’t actually make a whole lot of sense on the ground, and gave power to minority groups in the region that had very little real legitimacy over the peoples that they ruled.

If the borders of that entire region were re-drawn, it would be far more realistic to have the Shi’ite-majority nations of Iraq and Iran merged together into, oh, I dunno, “one mongo country” called, perhaps, the Persian Union.

And then you could redraw things to give the Kurds all of the various mountainous bits that the Turks, Syrians, Iranians, and Iraqis are all fighting over.

And you could perhaps tell the Sunni minorities that keep trying to impose Ba’athist rule in Iraq to take a flying leap, all the way back to Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

If all of this sounds a bit too much like the background of a John Ringo novel, well, it is. But the fact is that Crazy John had, and has, a lot of sensible ideas about the reality of the Middle East.

And that brings us to another reality of the Middle East:

This is a part of the world where alliances and allies shift around all the time.

Remember back when a certain Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States of America? You wouldn’t know it now, because the (((media))) and the neoclowns keep trying very hard to memory-hole the fact, but there was a time when Iraq was seen by the USA as a key bulwark against the Islamist and Soviet-friendly Iranians, right after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The ayatollahs had just captured a whole bunch of military equipment that the USA had given the Shah of Iran, including F-14 Tomcats, and there was a real danger that the Persians would make kissy-face with what was at the time a still very powerful Soviet Union, back before the days when President BAMF, a.k.a. Ronald Reagan, showed them to be the paper tiger that they really were.

Even now, you don’t have to look very hard to find pictures of a certain Secretary of Defence under the George H. W. Bush Administration shaking hands with the Iraqi dictator. There was a time when the USA was very friendly with certain powers in the region that eventually turned into mortal enemies.

Right now, the Saudis are allied with Israel and one of the factions involved in the civil war in Yemen against rebel groups armed with Iranian-supplied weapons, and the Iranians and Syrians are allied with the Russians, who are in the region at the specific request of the Syrian President, and that same Syrian President has just agreed to help the Kurds fight the Turks because his capital of Aleppo is not too far away from the Turkish advance into Syria.

This is all just a simple way of saying that the MIddle East is a giant clusterf**k.

The absolute last thing that the USA needs is to get drawn into the regional, sectarian, and humanitarian crises that keep popping up there. The Arabs have repeatedly shown themselves to be utterly useless at sorting out their own messes. The Persians actually have a functional civilisation and way of life, but they have a lot of problems of their own. The Kurds have outlasted everyone and everything else that has ever tried to destroy them – including chemical gas attacks by the Iraqis – and will do so again against Turkish forces.

Never let it be forgotten that the root cause of many of these conflicts and problems is in fact the overly ambitious and too-clever-by-half attempts by global powers to redraw borders and redefine national boundaries in places that they simply did not, and do not, understand.

The fact is that the God-Emperor’s decision to pull out of Syria is the wisest course of action available. The United States military is the world’s most expensive paper tiger. It is clear to anyone paying attention that while the men and women who serve in its ranks are the best and most capable warfighters anywhere in the world, they are fighting for a corrupted and broken set of institutions that are incapable of fighting and winning real wars.

It is probably accurate to argue at this point that the USA has not conclusively won one single war that it has fought since WWII. Gulf War I is about the closest that America has ever come, and that was not a purely American war – and, it can be argued that America didn’t finish the job. I’ve seen good arguments both ways on the subject.

But the fact is that, against an enemy that has the capability and the will to sink American aircraft carriers and shoot down those giant flying turkeys known as the B-2 and the F-35, the USA simply has no answer.

The American military isn’t even capable of defending America’s own southern border. Are we seriously supposed to believe that it is going to be able to stop a modern and capable military, like the one that Turkey possesses, from imposing its will on the Anatolian and Syrian Kurds?

So by all means, let America withdraw its troops. Let the voices who want more American blood and treasure to be spilled in vainglorious pursuits of overseas empire and Pax Americana bleat in vain. Let the troops come home. Let them get some well-deserved rest and comfort in the arms of their loved ones.

And let others beat themselves silly trying to sort out conflicts created by intemperate and injudicious borders drawn up by statesmen of ages past, drunk on power and liquor.

America has enough of its own problems to solve – too many, at this point, to be solved successfully while keeping the American empire intact. It is simply no longer possible.

Let the Turks and Syrians and Arabs and Persians figure out what to do with the Middle East. America needs to be made great again – and kept that way.

The God-Emperor is right. The Kurds can take care of themselves, the Turks have their own problems (I know – I was there last year), and the Syrians don’t need any help making a mess of their own lands. Foreign interventions in Syria have led to one terrible crisis after another; a little less meddling, and a little more statesmanship, might be in order for a change.

Take up the White Man’s burden —

The savage wars of peace —

Fill full the mouth of famine,

And bid the sickness cease.

And when your goal is nearest,

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought.

— From “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling