Ross Douthat, "Who Failed Aylan Kurdi?"; Nicholas Kristof, "Refugees Who Could Be Us": The Kurds Must Have Their Own Country

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Both Ross Douthat and Nicholas Kristof address the drowning of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in their latest New York Times columns. Douthat, in a Times op-ed entitled "Who Failed Aylan Kurdi?," writes:

"[M]ilitary intervention is not the only way that the Kurdis might have been protected. They could also have been granted the opportunity so many Syrians are desperately seeking, to be airlifted to another country, and welcomed as refugees."

Kristof, in a Times op-ed entitled "Refugees Who Could Be Us," takes a different view of the toddler's death:

"WATCHING the horrific images of Syrian refugees struggling toward safety — or in the case of Aylan Kurdi, 3, drowning on that journey — I think of other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama.

And my dad.

. . . .

We Americans may be tempted to pat ourselves on the back. But the U.S. has accepted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees since the war began, and the Obama administration has dropped the ball on Syria — whether doing something hard like using the threat of missiles to create a safe zone, or something easy like supporting more schools for Syrian refugee children in neighboring countries."

Both Douthat and Kristof fail to mention that Aylan Kurdi and his dead brother and mother were Syrian Kurds. There are 30 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, all persecuted, all desperate for independence. Although the Kurds in Iraq today have some measure of autonomy, Turkish President Erdogan is again bombing the Kurds in that country in a calculated effort to gain votes from Turkish nationalists.

Needless to say, Erdogan is unmoved by the fact that the Kurds are fighting tooth and nail against the Islamic State.

Yes, it's time to grant the Kurds their own country. However, whereas Obama is determined to allow Iran to create an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs within a maximum of 15 years, thereby establishing Iran as a "successful regional power," he also couldn't care less about the long-oppressed Kurds.