“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — James Joyce, “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”

With the presidency of Donald Trump, crises develop and change so quickly, it is hard to keep up, or even compete. The withdrawal of American troops from Northern Syria along the Turkish border, however, does raise some disturbing questions. Democrats and Republicans criticized the president for abandoning our allies, the Kurds, who helped America destroy ISIS, an enemy considered barbaric even by Al Qaeda standards. The Kurds suffered grave losses. It was a Kurd embedded in the inner circle of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who, at great risk to himself, led Special Forces to al-Baghdadi’s compound where he was eliminated.

President Trump turned the welcome news into a victory-lap press conference, unlike President Barack Obama’s direct announcement that Navy Seals had killed Osama Bin Laden.

With the American Army now retreating from the border area where the Kurds had established a potential homeland, there is a strong possibility that the Turks will launch a genocidal war against the Kurds. President Trump’s abdication of leadership in Northern Syria has also left an opening for Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Putin and Recep Erdogan of Turkey will decide the Kurds’ future.

What would legendary generals like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur think watching American forces retreating from a vulnerable ally?

To President Trump’s credit, he did carry out a promise to withdraw American troops from Syria and stop fighting “endless wars.” No one wants to fight an endless war, but leaving an ally behind is a dangerous and even immoral policy.

President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump — wife of Eric Trump — came to the president’s defense, and like many Trump supporters, either missed the point or blindly defended Trump’s actions with blanket statements.

When asked by Shannon Bream of Fox News about President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Northern Syria, Lara Trump said, “I think we should start with the fact that if you ask the average American out there, I think they would have to Google ‘Who are the Kurds?’ and why is America even over there fighting this war? I think the president, though, has always been very direct about this. He said from the very beginning that he wanted to pull out of Syria, now he is almost three years into his presidency and he’s doing it now, so it shouldn’t be a surprise, and I don’t think the people should be hesitant to partner with the United States in any way as result of this.”

Jimmy Kimmel on his ABC late-night show called Lara Trump “a heartless imbecile with lip injections.” I know little about lip injections, but I agree with Kimmel’s additional assessment that Lara Trump missed the point of the Kurds helping to defeat ISIS. Lara Trump’s selfish attitude suggests that any ethnic group that is relatively unknown is somehow insignificant.

The Kurds are similar to the Palestinians in the sense that they are a people without an actual nation. If anyone Googles “Who are the Kurds?,” they will find this report by Siobhán O’ Grady and Miriam Berger:

“The Kurds are members of a large, predominantly Muslim ethnic group. They have their own cultural and linguistic traditions, and most speak one of two major dialects of the Kurdish language. After World War I, Western powers promised Kurds their own homeland in the agreement known as the Treaty of Sèvres. But a later agreement instead divided them among Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Today, there are about 30 million Kurds living across the region, with about half of them in Turkey. Iraq is the only country in the region to have established an autonomous Kurdish region, known as Iraqi Kurdistan.”

“The Kurds have been suppressed in all sorts of ways, often very violently,” said Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They have really suffered at the hands of the four states.”

On March 16, 1988, as many as 5,000 Iraqi Kurds, mostly women and children were killed when poison gas was released on the northern town of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces, according to Wikipedia.

The Syrian Kurds should be known to Americans since they spent the last five years fighting with American forces against ISIS and lost 11,000 troops, men and women, in the conflict. I also think Lara Trump is very wrong about whether or not future allies will trust America to remain loyal partners. Why should they after President Trump’s order to withdraw from Northern Syria leaving behind an ally caught between two powerful forces?