A Good First Step

The Obama administration is considering providing an emergency aid package to the cash-strapped Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq after concluding that the KRG’s inability to pay Peshmerga fighters their salaries poses a threat to the US-led campaign against Islamic State, US officials said.

But we need to do two things more: we need actually to send the aid package (money for wages, food, and fuel for the soldiers)—money—rather than just consider it, and we need to ship them arms and provide the training and logistics with which to use them.  We also need to just do it.  Nominally, we’d need Baghdad’s permission for this, but they’re too slow and too much anti-Kurds for this sort of thing to be forced through the Iraqi government.

We also need to help them learn fiscal discipline; although maybe this administration isn’t capable of that.

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