Steve Sailer has a post up on this piece in the NYTimes about Syria. The Kurds are looking like the one population group in the Arab world with a chance to escape the entropy of Islam. In Iraq, Saddam tried to exterminate them, but they hung on. Today, the Kurdish areas of Iraq are the only civilized portion of the country. Business is booming, they have a reasonably sane government and they have avoided the sectarian terrorism that still plagues the rest of the country. This with no help from the Americans.

Now we see they are quietly taking control of their areas in Syria. The Turks are naturally nervous about this, but there’s not much they can do about it. For the Turks, all of the options in Syria are bad options. Their bigger concern is the fact the Kurds will outnumber the Turks in twenty years. The future belongs to those who show up and in Turkey, the Kurds will showing up in big numbers. They have a TFR three times that of the Turrks.

Between the three countries, the Kurds number 30 million. They sit on loads of oil and gas and they practice a mild form of Islam. This allows them to be favorably disposed to western capitalism, without swallowing the degenerate Western culture. That sounds like the makings of a pretty good country, at leats by the standards of the region. Maybe the West should start looking at the Kurds as potential partners instead of the crazy Arabs.