War: Is it worth it?

[devonin]

Originally Posted by purebloodtexan

I haven't heard much of the Kurdish people at all, as crazy as it seems. Could you give me a brief overview of their involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East?

The Kurds are the other main ethnic group in the middle east after Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. They're found primarily in the area you'd get drawing a circle around the overlap of the borders of large parts of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and smaller parts of northern Syria and Armenia.

They represent as much as 20% of the population of some of these countries, but are incredibly underrepresented in any kind of political control or positions of authority. In places like Turkey, speaking Kurdish was actually illegal for a lot of years, and pretty much all the middle eastern governments are very repressive of their kurdish populations, because it is widely feared that all of these people (somewhere around 30 MILLION of them) might one day get it in their heads to band together and declare themselves an independant state. That's mostly troubling because Kurds religiously are a lot more tolerant than most branches of Islam. They have less harsh strictures for women etc.

Chances are very good that a large-scale internal civil war in Iraq would basically result in the creation of three seperate countries, a Sunni, a Shi'a and a Kurdish state. If that happened, it would be very likely that Turkish Kurds would start agitating to join the new country, and there would be some pretty far-reaching political consequences for the area.

What about the Israel/Palestine conflict? Perfect example of war going nowhere.

The Israel/Palestine conflict is also pretty unique in the annals of war, so I'm not sure it should be used as a case example of anything.

Israel and Palestine were created by writ by the UN after the second world war, and basically said "We're making a two-state system in this country, one state is jewish, and the other is muslim" Pretty much as soon as this went through, Israel declared its independance from Palestine, and the arab league declared war and attacked Israel.

Israel managed to get the US on board helping them out and they won that war, and then later invaded and annexed a bunch of land that was Palestine's.

The entire conflict at this point centres around for one, whether the UN actually had a mandate to just plop down national lines like that, and two, if they did, how to resolve their mutual claims to Jerusalem, and how to resolve the issue of the large number of palestinian refugees living in areas that Israel took over and are now expanding into.

The fact that if at any point the US withdrew their support from Israel, they would probably get flattened like a mack truck certainly doesn't help anything, though teh US has been supplying and training them for so long now that it would take a while for things to wind down.

It is a really dirty and ugly conflict because both of these people are fighting in what they consider to be defense of their homeland. It isn't something that could ever have been ended easily, because there's no possible win/win compromise in their minds.