Ben Rhodes

And the U.S.

didn't want to fracture it and would destabilize the region and all these things.

And, oh, we need a central government.

And actually, like, I wondered a bit, though, whether there are lessons to take from Iraq of some of the things that worked.

Because essentially...

Iraq, which went through hell along the way, kind of did arrive at this weird federal-type solution where there is a kind of semi-autonomous Kurdish region with its own government.

But they are a part of Iraq, and there are Iraqi security forces that are the predominant security force in Iraq.

Again, it's not apples to apples and it didn't always go smoothly.

But I do think to take into account your excellent summary, the answer, the best answer would be somewhere in between just swallowing up the Kurds entirely.

There's one security forces, one government, that's it.

Versus I do agree it'd probably be unsustainable to have like a totally, certainly independent Kurdistan that would be like a very hard plane to land.

I don't think the regional powers would go for it.

But, you know, totally autonomous security force and government.

But if you could negotiate – the trick here is how do you negotiate a degree of autonomy so there's a sense that Kurds are relatively self-governing in the territories they control.

In Iraq, there's a combination of national security forces but then kind of like local, almost National Guard-ish type forces.

Right, right.

That's what you want.

That's hard.

The Turks may object to this and that, but the diplomacy should be trying to land the plane there because the worst-case scenario is the Kurds give up all their leverage, and then they end up getting essentially massacred or swallowed up.

Yeah, those are the days.