Ben Rhodes

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.

A blue checkmark and undressing teenage girls.

Yeah, I mean, just to start on that and then go back to the grotesque, if we somehow get to 2029 and there's a Democratic president, there's a lot of bumps along that road.

I've always been worried that they're going to like basically subcontract out the entire DOD budget to like Grok and Palantir.

You're going to have to rip out a lot of stuff because you trust Grok with like the U.S.

military.

No.

So that's something to watch.