Kurds, turds, and fightin' words

George W was famous for mangling the language. He once accidentally referred to the Kurds as "turds".

For me personally all those turban people look the same. I couldn't tell a Shite from a Paki from a Sikh to save my life. In some of the harder neighborhoods I frequented in my youth the white punks had an entire vocabulary of differentiation to work with; pull-starts, kicks-starts, push-starts... and I'm sure the other guys had an entire vocabulary for us too.

So on to the Kurds. They're one of those sub-groups, sort of like the catholics and the protestants in Ireland. To outsiders they all look the same. They're all Irish. To one another, they can tell the difference, and that's often enough to set off car bombs in one another's neigborhoods. Same with the Kurds. They don't have their own country. There's a bunch of them in Iraq, in Iran, in Turkey, and in Syria.

To an outsider, it's like the Irish deal. We can't tell a Turk from a Kurd from an Iraqi etc. But they sure can, and they're doing a lot more than car bombs. Just yesterday some Kurdish freedom-fighters, or terrorists, depending on your point of view, attacked a Turkish army patrol and took out a couple dozen Turks. So today the Turkish Air Force, generously provisioned by us, flew into Iraq and bombed a bunch of Kurdish militants, also generously provisioned by us.

Here is where it gets interesting. Turkey is an erstwhile NATO ally of ours. But they've grown a little distant from our even more erstwhile ally, the only democracy in the middle east, even more generously provisioned by us.  Now they're picking a fight with our erstwhile allies the Kurds. Meanwhile, we're selling guns and bombs and bullets to absolutely everybody in the most conflict-ridden neighborhood in the world!

This can only be good news for the American economy. When guns and bombs and bullets are your main exports, it's good to own all the dogs in the fight.