Turkey's fight against ISIS serves its own purposes

Since the Islamic State most unfortunately came onto our horizons a year ago, one of the Obama administration's major disappointments has been the hesitation of Turkey to step forward and take on its fellow, though radicalized, prodigal Muslim brothers.

Turkey did not want to get involved in such a quicksand on its borders with Syria and Iraq, it said. Turkey wanted primarily the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey had enough violent chaos on its borders with millions of Syrian refugees pouring across, without asking for more.

Yet, in only the last two weeks, all those excuses disappeared in the enveloping sands of the Middle East. Ankara suddenly agreed to allow the United States to use two of its bases to bomb ISIS targets, and for Turkey itself to bomb ISIS and perhaps take part, with Washington, in establishing a new 60-mile-long zone - alternately called a "safe zone," or a "no-fly zone," or even an "Islamic State-free zone."

It sounds so good, like so much in the Middle East, until you pry into the devilish heart of it. For Turkey - surprising only to those policymakers in Washington who don't believe foreign governments or peoples have normal human natures, and thus normal human impulses - has had its own interests all along.

By Washington's thinking, the Turks (remember what fabled ferocious fighters they were in Korea) should be interested only in wanting to fight ISIS. Good Turks! But the problem is that the Pentagon has found its best anti-ISIS fighters not only in the Peshmerga army of Iraqi Kurdistan, but also in a Syrian Kurdish group within Syria called the YPG or People's Protection Units. And lest you think that all these groups can be efficiently charted, kindly realize that the YPG is an outgrowth of the PKK or Kurdistan Workers' Party, which remains an outlawed group within Turkey. After years of conflict with Ankara, the PKK agreed to a cease-fire two years ago, but that has now been destroyed because the Turks' bombing of ISIS has also hit both the PKK and the American-backed YPG.

"There is still a great deal of ambiguity," Edmund Ghareeb, internationally recognized expert on the Kurdish movements and professor at American University, told me of the new situation. "Who's using whom? So we are entering a new phase. The Turks will make a show of fighting ISIS, but they are also fighting the Kurdish groups. The Turks and Washington are not on the same page."

Then he thought for a moment and added, "There are 13 Kurdish parties in Syria alone!"

There is more - much, much more - on the Turkish part in this "new phase" of this historic conflict, which began when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 with the casualness of a father exploding fireworks for his sons and instead exploded the balance of power in the entire region. But what about the American part?

If we trace the chronology of tragedies in the region, at every step we find the hated American interventions - from arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets and then forgetting them, to invading Iraq and Afghanistan without any plan for the end game, to dismissing the entire Iraqi army, thus freeing its members to become the spine of ISIS. For starters.

But the "Third World," which has lived with cruelty seemingly forever, has a nasty way of biting back. And it is now doing just that.

When most Americans speak, as by rote, of America as an "exceptional" nation or the mythically pure "City on a Hill," many do not know the true source of those beliefs. America's grace was that she was protected by her Founding Fathers' great liberal ideas of the Reformation and the Renaissance, but she was also protected by the arms of two great oceans from the kind of ethnic, clan, tribal, nationalist and border-related hatreds and warfare that most others in the world have faced throughout human history.

We could develop on our beautiful, rich continent without, for the most part, interference from others. Americans became, in all the early writings, "new men." We spoke of the "old world" and the "old country" only with sorrow for those left behind, then went about our business of creation.

But now we have - voluntarily, by our own foolishness and pride - involved ourselves in exactly the worst of those conflicts our forefathers left behind.

Washington will ask: How were WE to know that Turkey would go after the PKK instead of ISIS? To which some of us might ask: How could we NOT know?

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com

2015 Universal