What a mess. What is the right thing to do here? The United States does seem to bear some responsibility for the current state of Iraq, not to mention that we helped fund and arm some of the Syrian rebels, and that our allies are allegedly helping to fund ISIS. I've read that the Kurds are perhaps more friendly to our interests. If we help defend the Kurdish north and they spit off from the rest of Iraq, I'm not sure Turkey would like that. I think they fear the Kurdish parts of their territory attempting to join an independent Kurdish state. I know these borders are arbitrary products of a bygone era; is the best course to allow the people who live there to draw their own borders along sectarian lines, or will that just destabilize the region even more? Mr. Askeri accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”