Trump: Mideast a bloody sandbox

WASHINGTON — President Trump is surfacing cultural stereotypes as he depicts the Middle East as a bloodsoaked sandbox where people “play” violently because that’s “what they do” in that part of the world.

“It’s unnatural for us, but it’s sort of natural for them — to fight,” he said.

This from the president of a nation born in revolution, ruptured by civil war, tested by world wars, bogged in Vietnam and now trying to extricate itself from the longest war in its history, in Afghanistan.

“It’s a lot of sand,” he said Wednesday of the Syrian areas of TurkishKurdish conflict from which he is pulling back U.S. troops. “They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.”

The area, for the record, is certainly not known for being sandy. It’s the fertile breadbasket of Syria.

Trump’s dismissive words were the latest iteration of a world view that typecasts foreign cultures or countries as alien ones: the Africans from countries he compared to excrement; the foreign Muslims he wanted banned from the United States; the wily Chinese mercantilists outsmarting lesser U.S. presidents; the other countries of the Americas sending their ne’erdowell “hombres” here.

Now that world view is subjecting the Kurds, the U.S. military allies who helped diminish the Islamic State as a territorial force and are being left vulnerable by a U.S. withdrawal, to revisionist history.

“They’re not angels, if you take a look,” Trump said.