Eight months prior to General Schoomaker finalizing the Soldier’s Creed, the United States illegally invaded Iraq after lying to the world about the presence of weapons of mass destruction and using the unrelated terrorist attacks on 9/11 as a pretext. So unpopular was the decision to invade Iraq that major world powers — including France, Germany, and Russia — refused to endorse it, let alone participate. Among the list of announced coalition partners — which was much criticized for seeming to emphasize the number of countries versus their relative size and military strength — were Kurdish rebels in the region, whose freedom and right to live essentially were tied to the objectives of the United States. Even if they had privately objected, it didn’t matter. America was the only thing standing between them and continued death and oppression. We promised them a continued and enduring partnership — protection — in exchange for their allyship.

"We're going to win so much, you're going to be so sick and tired of winning."

Before the Iraq War in 2003, pundits such as Christopher Hitchens said we had to do it to help the Kurds. By contrast, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had this dour exchange with neoconservative William Kristol on C-SPAN just as the war started:

Ellsberg: The Kurds have every reason to believe they will be betrayed again by the United States, as so often in the past. The spectacle of our inviting Turks into this war … could not have been reassuring to the Kurds …

Kristol: I’m against betraying the Kurds. Surely your point isn’t that because we betrayed them in the past, we should betray them this time?

Ellsberg: Not that we should, just that we will.

Kristol: We will not. We will not.

Ellsberg, of course, was correct. The post-war independence of Iraqi Kurds made Turkey extremely nervous. In 2007, the U.S. allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds inside Iraq. By this point, Kristol’s magazine the Weekly Standard was declaring that this betrayal was exactly what America should be doing.

With Trump’s thumbs-up for another slaughter of the Kurds, America is now on betrayal No. 8. Whatever you want to say about U.S. actions, no one can deny that we’re consistent.

The Kurds have an old, famous adage that they “have no friends but the mountains.” Now more than ever, it’s hard to argue that that’s wrong.